Self (3 page)

It was perhaps a month or two after I first became acquainted with television. To watch it was still a decision that I took with deliberation. “I will watch the television,” I would say, still using the article. I would gather up my favourite blanket (a towel, actually), I would move the rocking chair into position and I would slowly pull on the plastic button, which resisted until it jumped out at me with a loud click, always surprising me. Instantly there would be sound, sound travelling faster than light; then, in succession on the glass screen, a point of light, a line of light, a shudder of light, and finally an expanding rectangle of colourless reality. I would sit and rock myself and do what I had said I would do: watch the television, watch human beings deal with other human beings, indoors and outdoors, in a language (Spanish) I had not as yet absorbed. It bored me completely. When I realized that I could change the beast’s mind with the help of the difficult wheel-like knob, watching became more interesting, a little, but even so I don’t think I ever did it for more than two bored-children hours — that is, ten minutes. Only a full year later, upon discovering the plastic, elastic world of cartoons and having mastered enough Spanish, did I start to watch television regularly.

But at the moment I am talking about, the first time television mesmerized me as a child, when I still watched it out of a sense of technological obligation, one minute was sufficient. Less. I turned the set on, watched for a few seconds, was marked for life, turned it off.

I was alone and in a quiet good mood, receptive to new ideas. The first thing I saw was a fixed image: a simple anatomical drawing of the cross-section of an eye. Next came the fluid images of hundreds of silvery fish swimming as a school. They were like bricks in a magic wall, alternately showing me their long sides, blocking my view, then, with an instant turn, their narrow sides, allowing me to see through them.

I was thunderstruck. Eyes … tears … saltiness … seawater … fish.

I walked to the garden and sat under a tree, my senses bloated, my head racing with the thoughts that come from a sudden understanding of things.

The clear liquid in our eyes is seawater and therefore there are fish in our eyes, seawater being the natural medium of fish. Since blue and green are the colours of the richest seawater, blue and green eyes are the fishiest. Dark eyes are somewhat less fecund and albino eyes are nearly fishless, sadly so. But the quantity of fish in an eye means nothing. A single tigerfish can be as beautiful, as powerful, as an entire school of seafaring tuna. That science has never observed ocular fish does nothing to refute my theory; on the contrary, it emphasizes the key hypothesis, which is: love is the food of eye fish and only love will bring them out. So to look closely into someone’s eyes with cold, empirical interest is like the rude tap-tap of a finger on an aquarium, which only makes the fish flee. In a similar vein,
when I took to looking at myself closely in mirrors during the turmoil of adolescence, the fact that I saw nothing in my eyes, not even the smallest guppy or tadpole, said something about my unhappiness and lack of faith in myself at the time.

This theory has accompanied me all my life, like a small friend perched on my shoulder, like a pocket-sized god. I expose it at length here, but under that tree in the garden, aged five, after that epiphanous moment of television, I only sensed its rudimentary elements. It developed as I gained insights and knowledge. For example, a joke I overheard one day among teenage boys as I was hurrying by — I didn’t understand the joke, I was afraid of the boys, but it linked girls with the smell of fish — made me see that the fishiness of love goes beyond the eyes. Over the years the theory became enormously complex, a system, really, with countless ramifications, the sort of scientific arcana likely to be fully understood only by children and Albert Einstein.

I no longer believe in eye fish in
fact
, but still do in metaphor. In the passion of an embrace, when breath, the wind, is at its loudest and skin at its saltiest, I still nearly think that I could stop things and hear, feel, the rolling of the sea. I am still nearly convinced that, when my love and I kiss, we will be blessed with the sight of angelfish and sea-horses rising to the surface of our eyes, these fish being the surest proof of our love. In spite of everything, I still profoundly believe that love is something oceanic.

My time as a rabbit was closely related to that strange condition called sleep. I would lie in bed, looking up at the ceiling, thinking, “This is ridiculous. I am lying here, wide awake, waiting. But what am I waiting for?” I would look to my left
and right. “There’s no one here except me! There’s nothing to do. I should get up.”

But I wouldn’t. There was something inexpressibly comfortable about this lying in horizontal softness, cosily blanketed, in well-lit darkness. I would continue waiting, passively impatient, for
it
(no antecedent). Then I would casually look down and see that my hand was a furry white paw. “Heavens! I’m asleep,” I would realize, and in so doing I would wake up. I remember this nightly transformation in Costa Rica with absolute lucidity. Not the process — the shrinking in size or the stretching of my ears and legs, although, if I close my eyes and concentrate, I can nearly feel the growing of my soft, thick fur — not the process, but the result: a medium-sized rabbit, brown and white except for the tips of my ears, which were black. I would immediately leap out of bed. I would hop to great heights on my powerful hind legs, jump from my bed to the chest and back. I would stand and do one, two, three somersaults in a row. I would dance, pounding the carpeted floor with gleeful mania. There was nothing I couldn’t do, for though I was small and thin my body was (and always has been) faithful to me. It did my bidding. Only the fridge frustrated me, when I attempted to open it to get a carrot, and even this was not for lack of strength, but for lack of height. (Reach was also a problem the time I slipped a carrot beneath my mattress before going to bed. I placed it beyond my bunny grasp and subsequently forgot about it. It was discovered three years later, quite green.)

We had pet rabbits in the garden, real permanent ones that my parents had bought to my delight. But I never ventured out to play with them when I myself was a rabbit. Once I did go to the glass doors at the back of the living-room to look out
into the garden, and Salt, Pepper, Boot and Butterfly came up to the doors and we stood forepaw to glass to forepaw, staring at each other. But I realized then, looking into their dark eyes, that these rabbits were strangers to me, and children do not seek the company of strangers. I was glad for the glass between us.

My clearest memory of my time as a rabbit is of a gesture I made with my forepaws to scratch my ears. No, not scratch. It was more like a stretching, a stretching of the ears. I would stand them very erect, lower my head and then run my forepaws over them, flattening them against my head, first the right ear, then the left, then both at the same time. It was a quick, round motion which I repeated several times. Afterwards my ears felt alert and tingly. I could twitch and hone them to the smallest, most distant sounds — a curtain rustling in the dining-room, a floorboard cracking arthritically in the living-room, a sudden respiration from my sleeping father, why, even the stars blinking. There’s nothing to make you more aware of the roaring pulse of life than minute, nearly inaudible sounds.

I started my formal education in 1968 at Jiminy Cricket Kindergarten. It operated in English, but my parents had no choice. At the time it was the only quality kindergarten in San José.

So it was that, by a mere whim of geography, I went to school in English, played outside in Spanish and told all about it at home in French. Each tongue came naturally to me and
each had its natural interlocutors. I no more thought of addressing my parents in English than I did of doing arithmetic in my head in French. English became the language of my exact expression, but it expressed thoughts that somehow have always remained Latin.

The earliest incidence of violence in my life occurred at Jiminy Cricket. A maladjusted boy attacked me for no reason. He pulled my hair and bit me on the neck. I was too young then to be a coward and we clashed in a fierce fight. The teacher separated us and I vaguely remember the two of us hanging in mid-air at the end of her arms, swinging like pendulums. We were put to bed for enforced naps. I peed in my sleep and the teacher called the embassy and my father came to get me.

The boy who attacked me remained not only in the same school as me for the next three years, but in the very same class. We were together the rest of that year at Jiminy Cricket, and in grades 1 and 2 at Abraham Lincoln Academy. But he never got so close to me again. With blond hair that was long and dishevelled one week, crew-cut the next, and staring brown eyes, he was a sullen boy who kept to himself and had no friends. But from the other side of the bars of his imaginary cage he watched me, watched me intently all the time, for three years, especially when I was with Noah. Sometimes our eyes met, but even now I’m not sure I could read those eyes. He would be the first to look down, after a second or two, but only, I know, to look back as soon as I had turned. Perhaps he loved me.

My parents were early feminists and they did not use the word “opposite” when speaking of the sexes. Indeed, why should
they be considered opposite? The word is aggressive, defines by negation, says very little. The sexes are complementary, said my parents — a more complicated word which they explained to me by analogy. Male and female were like rain and soil. Except that whereas they were speaking of sex, of impersonal details of biology, I understood them to be speaking of love, elaborating on what I already knew. The universe struck me then as amazingly well engineered. Imagine: somewhere out there, totally separate, of independent origin, was a sexual organ tailored to suit mine, to suit me. I set out to find my complementary sexual organ, my true love.

There is no greater mystery than this, the mystery of cathexis. Why do some people make the fish crowd our eyes, and others leave them utterly fishless? Is love some unique food that will feed only our fish? Or is it whatever food happens to be nearby when our fish get hungry? I have no idea why I fell in love with Noah Rabinovitch. It was too long ago. Memory is sometimes a distant spectator which can name emotions but not convey them, and this is the case here. To be sure, in some way Noah was my complement. When I was alone I was happy and whole, but when we were together the whole was greater. There was an added brightness to things, a greater and deeper perspective. But I could say the same thing, to only a slightly lesser degree, of other people, even of animals and objects. There was more to it than that. Only I don’t know what. I think I remember that I liked the way Noah walked. He walked, therefore I loved him.

One day, as my mother arrived at the kindergarten to pick me up, I informed her that I had found my future wife and I proudly pointed to Noah, who was new at Jiminy Cricket.
His father was an Israeli diplomat and they had just arrived in Costa Rica, mid-year. Noah came up to my mother, extended his hand and said he was pleased to meet his future mother-in-law. (Noah was sickeningly polite.) But then he had the effrontery to add that
I
would be
his
wife, and the two of us started again on the same tiresome argument we had had all morning, which I thought was settled. For some reason, neither of us wanted to be the wife.

My mother interrupted us by asking me why I thought Noah would be my wife. There are some circumstances where one cannot blurt out, “Parce que je l’aime!” “Because I love him!” “¡Porque le amo!” I was more concrete: Noah had the sexual organ complementary to mine. Did he, she replied, an uncontrollable smile running across her face, my first clue that I had missed something. She took my hand, said goodbye to Noah in English and we headed for the car. I clearly remember turning as we were walking off and bleating, with infinite sadness in my voice, “Bye, Noah,” for in a vague way I realized that I had just lost my husband. Before opening the car door for me, my mother bent down and gave me an unwanted hug and a kiss. On the way home she gave me the first facts of my sexual persona. Things were far more limited than my open mind had imagined. There were in fact only
two
sexes, not infinite numbers. And those little bums and little fingers that I had seen in the various I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours exercises I had conducted were the complementary sexual organs in question, all two of them, one little bum for one little finger. I was amazed. This question of complementarity referred merely to a vulgar point of
biology
, an anatomical whim? The menu for ocular fish had only two items on it? And it was decided in advance which they could select,
either little bum or little finger, steak or chicken? What kind of a restaurant is that, Mother? I had indeed noticed only little bums and little fingers so far, but I thought this was simply a reflection of the small size of my sample. (In a similar vein, though most of my coevals at Jiminy Cricket were white, on the basis of the skin colour of a few of them, reinforced by things I had seen on television and in magazines, I was quite confident that there existed people who were black, brown, yellow, red, blue, orange, perhaps even striped.) But no, there were only two, my mother insisted. Even more astonishing, she said that little bums were to be found exclusively in girls and little fingers exclusively in boys. Girls,
by definition
, were females with little bums who could only be wives. Boys,
by definition
, were males with little fingers who could only be husbands. I should remember these permutations for there were no others. No, husbands could not be girls. No, a wife could not marry another wife. No, no, no.