Self (13 page)

MINOR CHARACTER
(interposing himself):
You guys should cut it out.

(
Exeunt omnes
.)

CURTAIN

I couldn’t hit him. For all my fury, against all my expectations, I could not hit him. Placing my hand on his chest and pushing him against the wall, which was only a foot or so behind him, was as far as I could go. I stepped down the stairs — moved away from him — because I was so confused. Even when he punched me in the face — and to be struck in the face is to be struck in the soul; it’s an attack not against a provincial stomach or leg, but against your very capital — even then I could not hit him. I thought, “I can hit him now, I have the right.” But all I could do was bring him down to the ground. Not throw him down, not push him down — bring him down, with the guiding help of my arms. Once on the ground I noticed that his head was near a radiator and I thought, “If I hit him in the face with my knee, his head will strike the radiator.” But I could not. As he was getting up I thought, “I can easily kick him now.” But I could not. When he was standing I thought, “I can hit him now, he’s standing, it’s fair play.” But I could not. Then it was over.

I went to sit in the chapel alone. I was both dazed and elated.
I couldn’t hit him
. What an amazing discovery! How incredibly unexpected! Suddenly I no longer resented Fenton. I thought of him carefully, went over my worst moments with him, encounters that had left me seething, that had launched me on sessions where I tortured him elaborately. I glided over these moments without feeling even a ripple of annoyance.

In the days that followed I was careful to avoid him, but within a week he no longer perturbed me in the least. I said goodbye to him on the last day of school.

That night after our confrontation, just before lights-out, I took a shower and indulged in my secret pleasure. That’s when I noticed it. I was certain that the motion of my hand had greater amplitude before. But then the thought slipped my mind — my orgasm was such that I thought I would faint. My legs wobbled and only by leaning against the shower wall was I able to stay on my feet. By the time I had recovered, my penis was losing its stiffness and I was ready for bed.

Graduation day came, at last and so soon. I watched all the parents. I walked about the whole school to have a last look at everything. I
was
sick of the place. A slippage in my marks right at the end of the school year reflected this. I nearly failed physics. And I did not participate in the usual festivities of a high-school graduation.

But after Mount Athos, what? For all its flaws, for all the misery, it was the only organized home I had. I sat quietly in my room, bare now. I took in the washrooms: the long row of sinks, the toilet cubicles, the showers down whose drain so much water, soap and sperm had flowed. I looked at the classrooms, the gyms old and new, the various playing-fields, the decrepit pool, the squash courts, the dining-hall, the chapel. I stood near the stone cross and took it all in. Memory is a glue: it attaches you to everything, even to what you don’t like.

My choice of university, ironically, had come down to the one closest to Mount Athos, half an hour away, but where the fewest of its new Old Boys were heading: small, congenial Ellis University. So my September was certain, and I was looking forward to it. But on that graduation day it gave me little
comfort. The intervening summer opened up at my feet like a chasm. What to do with it reminded me of the question of what to do with my life.

I stepped into my aunt’s car and saw Mount Athos School disappear in the rear window.

I felt totally ill-prepared for life.

My aunt lived in a Portuguese neighbourhood of Montreal, with Portuguese restaurants, stores and travel agencies. A few days after arriving, I happened to stop and look at one such agency. It was much like every other one I had seen: it looked run down and cluttered, the back wall was a kitsch stucco composition meant to convey the spirit of Portugal, the furniture and promotional posters seemed to date from the sixties, and the three people at the desks had that overworked appearance the underemployed sometimes have. In the window was displayed a large, colourful map of Portugal, with photos and drawings of attractions linked by black lines to their geographical locations.

What I think decided me was the rectangularity of Portugal. I like rectangular countries, where human will imposes itself on topography. I imagine that if I had been looking at a map of Spain, France or Australia, I would have spent the summer in Montreal. As it was, not needing to work, not wanting to stay with my aunt, without any notion of “finding” myself but simply because of pleasing geometry, a week later I was on a TAP flight to Lisbon.

At first I hated it. Travelling; and alone. In every new town there was a pit of anxiety in my stomach until I found a place
to stay, especially if the day was ending (that is, as soon as it was past noon). The idea of arriving in a strange town at night terrified me. It happened once, in Tomar. I walked tensely and quickly, as if I were breaking curfew. After some searching I found what looked like a cheap hotel. I thought that from the desperate expression on my face the manager would charge me a king’s ransom, but he surprised me with a reasonable price, and the room was fine. I discovered shortly that the corridor went fully around it, a square corridor around a square room, and that all the room’s windows gave on to it; the stuffiness was hot and permanent. But it was shelter. I was safe at last.

In time I became more adept at handling the inevitable practical details of travelling. The pleasures of the day began to push back the anxieties of the night. Portugal is a magnificent little country, the north especially. I have nothing but fond memories of it. As on subsequent trips to other countries, I brought back a rich, redolent knowledge of the place, a masala mix of sights, sounds and tastes, literature, history and politics, personal and public experiences, that I would slowly forget, though talking of it now, it comes back to me — the strange Pessoa, the Alfama, Coimbra, Nazaré, Henry the Navigator, Sagres, Camoens — like a savoury aftertaste. Travelling alone is like an extended daydream. You catch the sights, you watch the people, you admire the scenery, all the while inventing your own company and your own scenarios, on your own time and at your own pace. It’s the only way to travel, if you can stand the regular loneliness, which often I couldn’t. But thank God there were the easy friendships of fellow travellers, friendships that lasted an hour or three days, a meal or a train ride, that were a gold-mine of travel lore and
useful information, that always started with “Where are you from?” and ended, when you felt like turning left, not right, with a simple, honest “Bye.”

Then she was looking at me with an intent, open expression. There were no words, but the situation was all the clearer for it. Inexplicably our heads moved towards each other and our mouths collided. Lips adjusted themselves in a somewhat graceless way, tongues sallied forth and touched, then she pulled away and I ran to catch my bus.

Contact had been made. It was my first kiss. Between two buses … a walk … a small, deserted public garden … a girl who smiled at me from a second-floor window … who came down … a conversation more smiles and charades than words … then.…

Extraordinary. Like a meteorite.

The smaller my erect penis, the more intense my pleasure. Every morning my chest was itchy. When I scratched it, hairs cascaded onto the bed-sheet.

In Batalha there is a magnificent Dominican abbey founded in 1388 by King João I to commemorate his victory over the Spanish at the Battle of Aljubarrota, which secured Portugal’s independence. Nearly in its shadow, I got a room. I had entered a restaurant to ask for directions and the girl at the counter had asked me if I was looking for a room. We crossed the street to a two-storey whitewashed building. The room she showed me was on the second floor at the very end of a corridor and, though it was small and didn’t have a view of the abbey, its proportions were pleasing and it was neat and clean
and nicely furnished. I also seemed to have the building to myself. I was spared the discomfort of bargaining, for right away her price was good.

I stayed in that room for three weeks, longer than I stayed anywhere else in Portugal.

The room was soothing in its monastic simplicity. It was rectangular, like the country. The door and the window faced each other on the narrow sides of the rectangle, the door dead centre, the window a little to the left. There were precisely four salient features to the room: to the left as one entered, a narrow metal-frame bed with a bearably lumpy mattress that did not shelter a colony of bedbugs; farther along, in the corner, a sink single-minded in its supply of very cold water, from which one could look out the window as one washed; facing the sink, on the opposite side of the room, a creaky cupboard with a speckled mirror whose ripples distorted one’s reflection; and lastly, facing the bed and diagonally opposite the sink, a drawerless table with a plain chair. The walls were of such an austerity that I can’t even remember what they looked like. The stone floor was cold except for the small faded patch of carpet, which I moved around depending on where and what I was doing.

I loved this bare room. I would have been perfectly content to live there for the rest of my life.

I spent a good part of my days in quiet domesticity, dividing my hours between the bed, on which I read, slept and masturbated; the desk, on which I wrote in my diary (the only time I kept a travel diary. I would throw it out within the year — can’t keep track of every moment); the sink, in which I brushed my teeth and splashed water on my face; and the cupboard, on whose shelves I carefully arranged the too many clothes I had brought and in front of whose mirror I stood
naked and gazed. My only expeditions beyond my room were to use the toilet; to relish the very little hot water that the shower mustered every morning; to eat; and to visit the abbey, which I did every day. I spent my afternoons in its beautiful cloister, walking around the arcade or sitting under one of the arches, alternately reading my book (Camoens’
Lusiads)
or resting my eyes on the quadrangle with its neatly wild assortment of flowers, shrubs and small trees. Bumblebees buzzed about in the golden light with the serenity of monks. The hours passed, marked out by the shifting lines of shadow — free-floating, intangible clock hands that changed the nature of the cloister with each silent tick.

If I had to think back in terms of
symptoms
, if that’s the right word, as if it were an illness, four stand out in my mind:

(1) The creeping up of my voice.

(2) A slight ache in my hips. Walking around the cloister and stretching made it better.

(3) The clearing up of my acne. It got very bad, worse than it had ever been — I got a headache from all the pustules on my forehead, and my throat looked like a turkey’s — and then, in a day or two, it vanished completely. Acne, that cursed disease, and its attendant oiliness, disappeared from my life while I was in Portugal, leaving me with a normal, satiny skin. I remember looking in the mirror and gliding my fingers over my new face. Hell was over, hell was over. I could finally look people in the eye. I could finally smile. I was doubly a new person.

(4) A passion for sweet potatoes. Funny how the great transformations of life come with dietary quirks. The restaurant across the street was a small place of no pretence, with a staff of two: the girl who had showed me my room, who acted
as waitress and bartender; and her father, who was the cook. Sometimes I saw the mother, but I believe she worked elsewhere. On the menu was whatever the father found at the market that day and felt like cooking. I quickly fell into the habit of having my meals there, and the three of us developed a friendship of smiles and sign language. I peppered my gesticulations with Spanish. When he found out that I was Canadian, the father decided to have a try at what he thought was North American cuisine.

It was an evening or two after this, as a mere garnish — only for the colour, really — that the sweet potato came. It lay there in a corner of my plate, soft and orange, beside the neat slabs of pork with their dark sauce and the white mounds of mashed potatoes. Had it not been for the friendly, expectant attentions of the two, I might even have left the sweet potato untouched. I had eaten the vegetable before, but I couldn’t remember when, and I assumed this was because I hadn’t liked it — and wouldn’t like it now. But not at all. As soon as I tasted a tiny helping, I burst forth with a loud, spontaneous and wide-eyed “Hmmmmmmmm!” In an instant the sweet potato on my plate had vanished. I had
never
tasted anything so good in my life. I still think of this explosion of savour in my mouth as the apogee in the career of my taste-buds. I complimented the father effusively, emphasizing his deft treatment of the sweet potato. I asked for more the next day, for lunch. I spent the evening dwelling on this darling potato, its bright orange, its creamy texture, its divine taste. I regretted not having asked for it for breakfast. The noontime tolling of the cathedral bell the following day had me salivating like Pavlov’s dogs. I asked to have it again for dinner, in greater quantity, please. And then for breakfast.

I ate Batalha out of sweet potatoes. No hors-d’oeuvres, no entrées, no side dishes, no sauces, no desserts — for close to two weeks they were all I had. The locals thought I was bonkers, of course. But I was a foreigner and therefore bemusedly indulged. Some of the most significant, enduring myths — and problems — of this late twentieth century are the misconceptions people have of foreigners and their countries. In this case, I contributed significantly to the misrepresentation of my country. In the minds of Messiao Do Campo and his daughter, Gabriele, Canada and the sweet potato will be for ever linked.