My Body in Nine Parts (5 page)

I know that there is a grammatical error in what I just said. I know that each cannot take a plural verb. But when I tell a story I ignore the rules of grammar. Grammar slows me down. It handicaps me.

So, I was saying, I discovered that my toes have an individual personality. A peculiar physiognomy, to use an anatomical term metaphorically.

I know, I know, okay, you're going to say, Federman stop messing around with obscure anatomical terms, and go on with your toes.

Alright. No more messing around. I concentrate, and describe each toe separately.

The pinkie, the little toe of my left foot, is very timid. He always blushes when I touch him.

Oh yes, my toes are masculine. They are not neutral. That's why I always refer to them in the masculine third person, and not the neutral person.

That pinkie wiggles when I hold him with two fingers to cut his nail. He tries to escape. He curls in. He hides under the toe next to him. I like that little toe. I always try not to hurt him when I cut his nail, and I never cut the nail too closely. I think he appreciates that.

The next one, the second from the left has a bad temper. He always complains. He always argues, groans, yells, struggles when I approach him with my nail-clippers, but I ignore him and cut his nail very short.

I don't spend much time with this one. That toe is so recalcitrant.
Têtu comme une mule
, my mother would say.

Whereas, the next one, the third starting from the left, that one, on the contrary, is very docile. Ticklish too. But he gives himself willingly to my nail-clippers, without resistance, though I can feel him squirming between my fingers. That toe knows that it is for his own good that I cut his nail. He is so sensual. He likes the things I do to him, even though he is always apprehensive.

The fourth toe gives me trouble because his nail is so hard. I don't know why that nail is so hard. Hard as rock. All my other toe-nails are soft enough that I don't have to struggle with them, except for the nail of the big toe of my right foot, which I will discuss in a moment.

There is something unnatural about that fourth toe. He's insensitive. Always Crabby.
Revêche
, is the best way I can put it. I have to fight with him when I do his nail. And the nail itself is like an impregnable fortress because it is so hard. I would say that this toe with its surly nail is an anarchist. He's constantly in revolt.

As for the big toe, well that's another story. That one is tough. Tough and arrogant. He's a loner. He thinks he is superior just because he is bigger than the others. Not because he's more beautiful, or has a better shape, on the contrary, he's ugly like hell, deformed and puffy. Bigness is his thing. So, he bitches all the time when I cut his nail, which always grows longer than the other nails. That big toe irritates me. He mocks me. He curses me, uses obscene language, when I hold him tight with two fingers to clip his ugly nail. That big toe has a nail as ugly as the toe. Impossible to describe the ugliness of that nail. It has no definite shape or texture. The only thing one can say about it is that it has an obnoxious color, yellowish like a rotten egg. Last night, as I was approaching that big toe with my favorite nail-clippers, he said to me, in a very sneering argumentative tone of voice,
Federman why the fuck don't you buy yourself a better Bistoquet? The piece of shit you're using hurts me
.

That's exactly what he said. And he used the French word,
Bistoquet
.

By the way, all my toes are bilingual, like me.

I know you're going to tell me, Federman, this time you exaggerate. You're making this up. Toes don't talk.

No, I'm not inventing. That's exactly what my left big toe said. My toes talk to me. And I understand that is true of all human toes, they talk, they tell you when they hurt, or when they are feeling good, or when they're just fed up with everything, but most people don't listen to their toes. In any case, that's what my big toe said. And he used the French word
Bistoquet
.

Bistoquet?
I didn't even know that word. I had to look it up in my French/English dictionary, and this is what it said,
Bistoquet: Wire nail cutting machine
. I have no idea what that means, what kind of wire machine that is, and I have no idea how my big toe learned such a rare fancy word, but that shows you how learned he is, and such a snob too.

Alright, let's say that I am paraphrasing a little here, but that's the way my big left toe talks to me. And yet, when I cut his nail, I know it gives him pleasure. I can tell. I know he appreciates that I am making him more handsome. That toe is so conceited. So self-centered.

So, that's the story of the toes and toe-nails of my left foot.

Would you like to hear the story of the toes of my right foot? It'll only take a few minutes.

These five toes are totally different. A totally different clique of toes. They are not as comfortable with each other as the toes of my left foot.

The toes of my left foot have compassion for one another. They suffer collectively. They're like a family. On the opposite side, my toes are like a gathering of foreigners in exile. They never talk to each other. Never do anything together. They always hurt. They seem unhappy to be my toes. I think they would like to be elsewhere. They feel out of place.

I don't know if this has to do with the fact that I was born left-handed, and became right-handed when I broke my left arm at the age of eight, but these toes feel alien to me.

They claim I don't pay as much attention to them as I do the toes of my left foot. Except the third one, with whom I have a very good relation. An artistic relation. You'll see why in a moment.

As I told you, I always begin with the left foot when cutting my toe-nails. It's a custom. I always lean towards the left. Even my body leans to the left. Like the Tower of Pisa. Too bad I had to become right-handed, I could have been such a straight-up guy. But because of the bad break of my left wrist when I fell off a cherry tree, I became right-handed. That does not mean I can do everything with my right hand. There are certain things I can do, and do better, with my left hand. But I'm digressing. I think I was eight years old when I broke my left wrist. It happened in Le Poitou where my sisters and I were sent on
colonies de vacances
.

[Concerning
les colonies de vacances
consult
The Farm.
]

You may not believe this, but the doctor who fixed my arm was Michel Foucault's father. Foucault himself confirmed this to me when I told him how and where I broke my left wrist when I was on vacation in Le Poitou. He confirmed this during a dinner at my house in his honor when he was a visiting professor at the university where I was writer-in-residence.

During the dinner someone remarked that I seem to be ambidextrous in the way I used my fork and knife to cut the meat on my plate. So I told the story of how I fell off a cherry tree and broke my left wrist during vacation in Le Poitou, and when I specified the place, Foucault exclaimed,
The only doctor in the region who could fix your arm was my father. I know exactly where you broke your arm
. Foucault didn't say that in English. I am translating here for the commodity of the story. But Foucault said it in such an assured and positive way that everyone present was convinced, as I was too, that my broken arm had definitely been repaired by Michel Foucault's father, so that indirectly, Michel Foucault was responsible for my having become right-handed in spite of myself. Thus betraying my mother's decision to make me left-handed.

I apologize for this detour. I didn't mean to digress into the politics of my toes. It's just that I thought it would be appropriate to mention at this time that I was born left-handed, and that the accident that caused me to become right-handed may be the reason for the difference of character and personality between my left toes and my right toes.

One could say that my left toes are congenial, even though they often argue with one another. Whereas the right toes are more independent one from the other. They act like strangers towards each other. But they each have certain qualities, and certain deficiencies.

The little one on the right is always playful. He bounces. He wanders. He even laughs when I cut its nail. But his laughter is full of sadness because of his shape. He's like a little hill. A mound. A rounded
monticule. Une colline
. In other words, it's all crooked. The nail seems happy on this little crooked toe. Though I think it fakes it. Actually, there is barely a nail on that toe. The nail is almost non-existent. I have to search for it when I have to cut it. The toe itself never touches the ground. He is permanently elevated.

Suspended above the other toes.

Yes, I know, what you're going to tell me, I can see it coming, Federman you're not going to tell us again why your little toes are atrophied. We heard that story so many times before.

Your claim that you are a mutant simply because both your left and right little toes have only one phalange each, and are so curled up and crooked, that they don't even touch the ground any more when you walk. And the reason for that, according to you, is because we humans walk less and less, therefore our feet are in the process of evolving towards total flatness, and eventually toes will disappear. Soon our feet will become toeless. And of course, nails will become obsolete. Unless one single large nail covers the entire front flatness of the foot. But one cannot speculate at this point. Feet evolution can take decades.

That's why you believe yourself to be a mutant. Because your little toes have only one phalange, and never touch the ground.

Well, if you don't believe me, all you have to do is examine my little toes, and you'll be convinced that I am absolutely correct with this theory.

On with my toes. The next one, the second on the right, he's always leaning to one side. He's sort of oblique. I think of him as being pensive. Not melancholic, but romantically self-reflexive. Self-absorbed. He is so independent. It's the most distant of my toes. When I approach him to cut its nail, he seems to be absent between my fingers. Or rather, my fingers feel as though they hold nothing. He is agonizingly indifferent.

I know, you're going to say, Federman, sometimes you make us laugh with your decadent lyricism. So what!

The next one, the third from the right, is the scholar. Pedantic like you wouldn't believe. You should hear him bullshit me about intellectual matters when I clip his nail. He talks to me about structuralism and deconstruction and the Russian Formalists. He quotes Plato and Aristotle, Kant & Hegel, St. Augustine, Descartes, Geulincx, Bergson, and all kinds of other thinkers like that. Even Jean-Paul Sartre.

I don't know where he got all that stuff, but he's so boring and so endless when he lectures me that I usually try to spend as little time as possible cutting his nail. A couple of clippings, and I move on to the next toe. But he shouts at me to come back because he was not finished.

Last night, that toe talked to me about Freud and Hitler. He was trying to make a rapprochement, as he put it, between the hypocrisy of psychoanalysis and the idiocy of Nazism. I told him that I was not interested, that all this is old stuff. Dépassé. Forgotten. So he got pissed, he twitched and twitched, and didn't even let me finish cutting his nail.

But
revenons à nos moutons
, or rather
à nos onglons
, to play on an old French saying. I was talking about the third one. The pseudo-intellectual. I always try to cut his nail as quickly as possible so as not to listen to what he has to say. It's as though he spends his life in an ivory tower.

Now the next one is special. He is the poet. I adore that one, even if it belongs to the wrong clan. I wish he were on my left foot. He would get along well with my left pinkie. One of these days you must come and listen to him recite his poetry.
Des vers onglons
.

Last night, it sounded just like Rimbaud's poetry. He recited an autobiographical poem.

Here, I'll quote it for you.

[turn the page]

 

So you see how pleased I am to be able to give pleasure to my toes by cutting their nails, even if some of them do not enjoy it as much as I do.

But, let's not forget the last one. The one that obsessed me the most. The big toe of my right foot. That one is terribly neurotic. He makes me sad every time I have to cut his nail. It's the nail that causes the toe to be neurotic and me to be sad when I have to cut it. There is a good reason for this condition. That big toe had a traumatic accident when I was working on a farm. That goes way back when I was a boy. A displaced person. During the great war. No need to go into that sordid story again. Enough to say that somehow I found myself working on a farm at the age of 13, and on that farm my feet hurt all the time, even more than the rest of my body.

One day, while working in the barn, fixing the wheel of a cart, an anvil fell on the big toe of my right foot. Right on the nail. It was the heavy anvil we used to fix tools and other agricultural instruments. The nail of my big toe was totally smashed. Pulverized. And the toe bled and ached for weeks. He got all infected, and there was puss oozing from under the debris of that crushed nail. That poor toe never recovered from that blow. Even today he suffers from it. And he reminds me of that accident every time I cut his nail. Blames me for being what it is today. The ruins of a glorious nail.

Bon
, I know what you're going to say, Federman, stop bugging us with your pathetic past and your suffering on the farm. Especially since there is no way to verify what you say happened. Maybe your toe-nail got like that because you stuck it into some polluted place.