Self (33 page)

My Christmas present came in a box with holes in it. The box grunted. A puppy bulldog. Spotted brown and white, and hideous in its beauty. I shrieked. “I got it from a breeder in Sherbrooke,” said Tito. “The ugliest one in the litter, I assure you. Uglier than this and you’re in the realm of science fiction.” The alien hopped towards me, grunting like a mezzo-soprano pig. I couldn’t stop smiling. Its name came to me right away. “Fig Leaf. We’ll call him Fig Leaf.”

“Fig Leaf?”

“Yes, Fig Leaf. Come here, Fig Leaf.”

Fig Leaf piddled on the floor.

The first time we walked Fig Leaf, a couple stopped by us. “What an adorable dog!” said the woman. She bent down. So did I. Fig Leaf went wild. The man looked unimpressed. “It’s in fact quite a nice dog. You’d be surprised how much you get to like it, especially when it gets bigger,” said Tito.

“Oh, I’m sure,” replied the man, politely.

He was a big hit with the Hungarian community too. An explosion of gibberish. He even distracted Imre from his usual focus of attention.

Fig Leaf was so inarticulate, by which I mean that he seemed to have so few articulations, that I suspect his skeleton was composed of a single bone. I worried when he went down
stairs. He rarely went down two legs on one step, two legs on the next, like most dogs. His usual way, on steps that were deep enough, was to set himself parallel to the first step, with a crab’s sense of direction, and then hop sideways, a motion which had the slight amplitude and dramatic ease of a suicide jump. Having landed safely on all fours on the step below, he would bounce off to the next one without a moment’s delay, suicide-jumping the whole way down. He did it incredibly quickly, even down staircases that curved. He never had an accident, but I was always afraid that he would miscalculate his hop or bounce too self-confidently and that I would see him somersault out of control and fracture his undivided bone structure into three or four pieces.

Unfortunately, his Evel Knievel approach to going down stairs was not matched by his approach to coming up stairs. Fig Leaf didn’t come
up
stairs. It was obviously an effort for him, but the universe has stairs in it and you can’t always be going down them and that’s life. But Tito and I made the mistake, when Fig Leaf was small and cute, of wafting him up in our arms whenever he was confronted by even a single step. This early conditioning took for life, no matter what counter-conditioning we attempted when he was big and cute: verbal encouragement, tender morsels of food just three steps up, threats, you name it. More than once I flew into a rage and shouted, “WELL THEN STAY DOWN THERE AND STARVE, YOU PORKER!” and promised myself that I wouldn’t fetch him under any circumstances. Which would set him off on his guerrilla-warfare grunting. It wasn’t loud or furious, though it did go on non-stop; it was a single porcine grunt emitted precisely every six seconds — I measured it once — that could be heard everywhere in the apartment, even in the
closet. The fainter it was, the more maddening. “We’ll have that dog for dinner tonight, with applesauce,” I would mutter to myself. And I would apply myself with even deafer determination to what I was doing.

But he would wear me down, like any good guerrilla. I would think of my late Polish neighbour, who also used to wait at the bottom of stairs. And what can you do if you were born without joints? I would peer down the staircase, my anger wavering. There he would be, looking up at me, still and quiet, probably very cold, probably very hungry. Guilt would overcome me. I would go down and pick him up and bring him upstairs. He would eat noisily, for the sole purpose of making me feel worse, I’m sure, and then he would settle at my feet, happy to be reunited with me, as I was with him.

For all his eccentricities about vertical movement, Fig Leaf had none where horizontal movement was concerned. He was a great walker. Montrealers who lived in the Plateau west of St-Denis between Roy and Rachel at the time may recall a letter carrier who stepped out of invisibility by always going around with a bulldog. When a dog had the effrontery to bark at his master, Fig Leaf would burst into an indignant grunting rage worthy of Our Lord of the Flies.

I started work on a new novel. One day I spilled a cup of tea on my thesaurus, my New Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, in Dictionary Form, Revised Edition, over six million copies sold — a cheap paperback I had bought at the beginning of my first year at Ellis which was much the worse for wear by the time I doused it with Irish Breakfast. Oh well, I thought, the book was falling apart anyway. An occasion to buy a new one.

A few days later I was standing in a second-hand bookshop looking at two thesauri. One, for seventy-five cents, was the exact edition I had had. The other was a fat hardcover. I flipped through it. It was a different sort of thesaurus, unfamiliar to me. Instead of the words and their synonyms being listed in alphabetical order, as would seem logical, in this thesaurus they were divided into numbered categories, each category ending with a list of numerical cross-references. The categories weren’t in alphabetical order either. There was an order of a kind page by page; curiously, for a book of synonyms, it was an antonymous order: Elevation was followed by Depression, Hearing by Deafness, Hope by Hopelessness. But there was no perceptible order on a grander scale, or none that I could grasp at a glance. At the back of the book, taking up over four hundred pages, was an index, clearly the entry point into the maze.

I asked the man who ran the bookshop about this thesaurus. “It’s an older edition. The original format. The words are grouped into categories; you look in the index to see which category you want. It’s a bit cumbersome to consult but it’s more complete.”

I bought it, so I can say that the genesis of my novel cost me eight dollars.

I read the introduction to my new old Roget’s Thesaurus, in Cumbersome Form, Older Edition, surely not many copies sold. It was the reprinted introduction to the original edition of 1852, written by one Peter Mark Roget in an English cheerful, exquisite and oh so Victorian, with sentences that go on like rivers, at length and with meanders, with commas like sluice-gates, semicolons like dams, and a confidence similar to a river’s, secure that it is irrigating a needy world — why, here
comes a fisherman on his skiff, there some labourers are tilling a field, isn’t the future bright? Roget ends his introduction with the hope that his endeavour will assist in bringing about that greatest good of communication: a universal language — and thence world peace, “a golden age of union and harmony among the several nations and races,” as he puts it in his farewell sentence.

Until then I had never given much thought to the thesaurus. It was a reference book frowned upon by some, who swore only by their dictionaries, but which I occasionally found useful. On the whole, a minor tool of the trade, an eager-to-please list of synonyms, that’s all. The hope that it would be of help in bringing about world confraternity struck me as quixotic even by the high-octane rosy standards of the day.

I flipped to the biographical note on Peter Mark Roget, to see who this fantastical pedant had been.

He was one of those Victorians with an impossibly full life. Born in 1779, died in 1869. A medical doctor. Founder of a charity clinic in London to which he contributed his services gratis for eighteen years. One of the founders of the University of London, where he was professor of physiology. An eminent lecturer on medical and other subjects. Head of a commission on London’s water supply, which denounced the simultaneous use of the Thames as sewer and source of drinking water. Fellow of the Royal Society, of which he was secretary for over twenty years, and of the Medical and Chirurgical Society. Contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, Ree’s Cyclopaedia and the Cyclopaedia of Popular Medicine. Co-founder of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Author of a definitive
On
Animal and Vegetable Physiology considered with reference to Natural Theology
, of a two-volume work on phrenology, of articles published here, there, everywhere. Inventor of a special kind of slide-rule. An avid chess-player who published chess problems in
The Illustrated London News
and designed the first pocket chessboard.

And — as if that weren’t enough — author of his thesaurus, a word which till then simply meant a treasury or storehouse of knowledge, and therefore included in its purview dictionaries and encyclopedias, but to which Roget securely anchored his name, thus assuring his English-language immortality. He started the task at the ripe age of seventy-one, and he was ninety-one when he died. John Lewis Roget took charge of subsequent editions of his father’s thesaurus, as did in time Peter’s grandson, Samuel Romilly Roget.

Roget & Family, Do-Gooders Inc.

I put the volume down, chuckling to myself.

A week later, Peter Mark Roget — even his name is bright and untragic — was still in my mind. His Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge reminded me, antonymously, of Kurtz and his scrawled “Exterminate the brutes!”

I returned to the thesaurus and considered it carefully. Though Roget states it clearly in his introduction, it was only then that I was struck by the obvious: that his book was a list of words and phrases grouped not by their spelling, as in a dictionary, but according to the ideas they express. To list by spelling you merely need an alphabet, but to list by meaning you must find the equivalent of an alphabet for ideas — which feat Roget had pulled off. In just over a thousand categories, from (1) Existence to (1042) Religious Buildings, he
had mapped out the verbal universe, the totality of concepts expressible by the human mind. No matter what the entity, solid or intangible, Sausage or Sadness, it fitted into one of his categories. Language was a village of a thousand extended families, each family peopled by siblings, true synonyms, and cousins and in-laws of one degree or another.

I was astonished. I suddenly marvelled at this book, previously so lacklustre to me. Roget’s accomplishment struck me as equal to God’s at Babel, but in reverse. Where
He
had divided and confused,
he
had classified and harmonized. Nor were his efforts confined to one language. In his proposed “Polyglot Lexicon”, a multilingual super-thesaurus (with English and French as the first two languages, “the columns of each being placed in parallel juxtaposition”), he wanted to show how each language was not only itself a weave of kith and kin, but a twin, a synonym, of the language next to it. From this twinship of languages could emerge that international tongue which would conduce, he hoped, to the aforementioned world peace.

This boundless, ethnocentric optimism would wreck itself against the shores of the Congo River, against Kurtz’s hoarse “The horror! The horror!” Nonetheless, I was taken by his vision. What secular nobility it had!

I imagined Roget in the street observing a couple, turning to a row of houses, glancing into the display window of a bookshop, looking up at the sun and sky, running and looking down at his feet and laughing, greeting his wife and children, settling down to write — all the while, at every moment, thinking, “Synonyms!”

I would write a novel about Peter Mark Roget. It would be called
Thesaurus
, and it would take place on that same boat on
the river Thames as
Heart of Darkness
— the cruising yawl
Nellie
. It would be a short novel. An evening in the life of a man of good cheer, convinced of the unity of life.

We travelled. To Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. To India and Pakistan. To Egypt. To New York. By plane, by train, by boat, by bus, by car, on foot. For six months, for three months, for one month, for one week. Each time Fig Leaf packed off to Hungarian boarding school.

The stories I could tell! The Inca trail and the slow rise to the epiphany of Machu Picchu. Arduous, heavenly trekking around Nanga Parbat. A dawn walk around the immensity of the Kheops pyramid. Matisse at the MOMA. The cows of India’s cities, urban bovines as jaded and streetwise as Big Apple drug peddlers. The giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands, their shells like the dome of St. Peter’s, their haughty faces like those of cardinals’. Life on a train in India. Life on a bus in South America. Life on a felucca on the Nile. Early mornings in Varanasi, in La Paz. The organic rot that is Calcutta, that is the Amazon. The walls of Sacsayhuaman. The fields of stupas of Ladakh. The temple of Karnak. Tito’s voice and look when he said to me, “Are you seriously suggesting that I take another language course?” when I mentioned one of the good ways of preparing for Latin America. His Spanish nearly as good as mine by the end of our trip.

And these, but a handful of memories, a quarter-turn in the kaleidoscope, a mere glimpse at inexhaustible riches, like Howard Carter replying to Lord Carnarvon, “Yes, wonderful things.”

If I had to remember only one place, treasure only one vision, it would be that room lit up by the single bare lightbulb
hanging from the ceiling or that stretch of awful road with the dramatic backdrop or that green village fleetingly seen from the train or that bend of river with the water buffalo wallowing in it or that tumbledown restaurant with the welcome hot tea — if you asked me for the one destination of which I could say, “Go there — and you will have travelled,” if you wanted to know where El Dorado was, I would say it was that place ubiquitous among travellers: the middle of nowhere.

I would return there any time. With my veteran blue backpack and with Tito, my fellow eyes, my fellow skin, my fellow thirst.

We fell into the habit of presenting ourselves as husband and wife, took on this traditional garb to make things easier in places where the concepts of girlfriendship and boyfriendship might not go down well. At first it was the strangest thing for me to refer to Tito as “my husband”. It felt so old-fashioned. I would tell fellow travellers, “He’s not actually my husband,” and they would nod. But then it started coming easily. I liked it that our relationship gave us titles. It felt mature, enduring. After being called “Señora Imilac” over and over, I even began to play with this, the most reprehensible of marital practices. I began to see identity in it, an important part of who I was.