My Body in Nine Parts (3 page)

First thing I did after having undressed for a shower, I looked at myself in the mirror, and as I passed my hand through my hair feeling my skull to see if I was still bleeding, I noticed how my hair felt thinner, less ample, less voluminous.

It was just a sensation. A vague sensation. But my hair did not feel as full as before. And that's when I screamed:
Federman tu te déplumes!

That night I did not witness any hair falling from my head. If some did, I assume there were 4, since that's the number of hairs we have agreed upon that fell after each shower.

Do you realize, that for the past 35 years, since 1968, I probably lost 4 hairs after each shower. For 35 years, each year 2060 hairs fell from my head.

Today is May 15, 2003. What a coincidence. Perhaps I should say, what a tragic coincidence that it is on my birthday again that I witness my hair falling, exactly 35 years since the original vexing sensation.

Back to our calculations. 35 times 2060 give us … Where did I put my calculator? …. Oh there it is.

2060 × 35 = 72100. What! How depressing. Since my 40th birthday I have lost 72100 hairs. It's frightening.

Even more frightening is the thought that perhaps this loss of hair,
ce déplumage
, started long before I turned 40, as Erica claimed, even if I never felt it before.

I don't think I felt any loss of hair when I turned 30. And certainly not when I turned 20. I was too concerned then with my literary future, too involved romantically then, to waste time contemplating my future baldness.

No, better not think about that, otherwise it's suicide for sure. I refuse to fall into the great void totally bald.

The repeated fall of 4 hairs after each shower does not indicate that I will be completely bald when I die, because it is impossible to estimate the total fall. In the whole drama of my future baldness, there remains the incalculable.

The incalculable: what cannot be counted at this time. The number of hairs I had on my head when my
chevelure
, my crop reached its maturity. It's fullness.

Nice English word, Fullness. In French one is forced to rely on two words to express fullness –
Expansion Totale
. The word
Plein
does not sound right for hair. But fullness, yes like Sam's
Lessness
, sounds just right.

The incalculable: the impossibility of ever being able to know exactly how many hairs I had on my head when my crop of hair reached its total expansion. That is to say before I lost a single hair, whenever that may have occurred.

That day, I would have had to count how many hairs I had on my head. But who thinks of doing that. And besides how can I determine on what day I had the most hair on my head?

Let's forget the hairs I have on other parts of my body. I am not concerned with these, except my pubic hair, which I like very much, and which I enjoy scratching when it itches. My concern today is with the hair on my head.

So let us return to the question of the incalculable. That is to say, how many hairs I had on my head at the moment of its fullness?

What renders this question hopeless and futile is the fact that it is impossible to determine the exact date when my hair reached fullness.

Could it have been on one of my birthdays? We'll never know, since I was never aware of that fullness. Or rather, since I always assumed that my hair was at its fullness, until that sad evening of May 1968.

What makes the incalculable even more mystifying is the impossibility of determining how long my hair remained in a state of fullness, before beginning to diminish.

If one could determine that state, one could perhaps calculate how many hairs have been lost by counting how many hairs are left on my head today.

So here we are. Since it is impossible to know how many hairs I had on my head when it reached fullness, it is then equally impossible to determine whether or not I will be bald when I change tense.

I could, of course, start counting how many hairs I have on my head now, but that would lead nowhere since I don't know the number of hairs I had at its maturity in order to calculate the number of hairs that have been lost.

So why should I worry about the 4 wretched hairs that left my head today? As long as I still have hair on my head, I should be happy with what is left. After that we'll see. Perhaps I can find another way of calculating whether or not I will eventually be completely bald.

Oh! But what if in the dark of night new hair starts growing surreptitiously on my head? That would totally destroy all my calculations. And all this anxiety would have been for naught. In vain.

Ah did my nose make me suffer since that sublime and mysterious moment when it was designed in my mother's womb by her ancestry!

And did my nose get assaulted and insulted with direct and indirect blows since I became conscious of it.

People often remark that my nose is crooked. That it leans to one side. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see it straight. Okay, I admit that I have a big nose, but that was unavoidable. It's historical. Even my mother's love couldn't do anything about that. It was pre-determined, predesigned by centuries and centuries of insults and humiliations that my ancestors had to endure because of their noses. A Jewish nose is like a little tragedy.

It's possible that my nose is big and crooked, prominent as it is, in order to protect the rest of my body. My nose suffers for the rest of me. It's my nose who takes it in the nose. But my nose doesn't really care that people insult it by calling it all kinds of derogatory names like
schnaze
or
snoze
or
nase
or
snozzola
or
pif
or
blair
or
Piment
or
Tarin
or
Tarbouif
or
Bourrin
. As you can see, my nose has been insulted in many languages.

But my nose is strong. It can take it. My nose is courageous and outrageous. I think of it as a topological monument to the memory of those who were exterminated because of the shape of their noses.

I also think of my nose as being masculine. After all, in French
le nez
is masculine. And since my nose first appeared in the world in France, I've always considered it to be masculine. And I've often been told that it is sexy. Mostly women say that. Men usually mock my nose because it's big and crooked.

One day when I was still in grade school, we were studying human anatomy, and the lady teacher said to the class while pointing to me,
Raymond a un piment rouge
.

The teacher was trying to explain the different coloration of human flesh pigmentation.

She took me as an example of someone whose pigmentation is red, not realizing, I suppose, or perhaps doing it deliberately because of my ethnicity, that in French slang,
piment
means nose. All the boys in the class burst into laughter. It was an all boy's school. And they started chanting,
Raymond a le piment rouge! Raymond a le piment rouge!
I wanted to crawl under my desk and disappear that day. Sometimes in my dreams I can still hear far away voices chanting,
Raymond a le piment rouge
.

After all, it's not my fault if my nose is always a bit reddish. Not to say that I am ashamed of it. That's its natural color.

Personally, I prefer red noses to white noses. Red noses have more character. They look stronger, more virile, and more real. White noses seem fake and shrunken. They don't look natural. They look like they've been surgically manipulated.

One must be proud of one's nose. One must take care of it. Personally I often massage my nose. I make it breathe deeply. I twist it gently with two fingers to make it more flexible. I examine it carefully in the mirror. I cut the hair that grows inside my nostrils when it tickles, preferably when no one is watching. I put cream on it so it doesn't get sunburned. I push it a little to one side of my face when I shave so that I can shave closely underneath, and make the skin nice and smooth at the corners of my nose. Then I push it to the other side of my face to shave there. I stick my finger inside to take out the bad stuff stuck in it. Yes, I confess, I often pick my nose, even though I know it's not nice to do that in public.

I always try to pick my nose when I am alone. But sometimes you have to do it even if there are other people around because the bad stuff in it prevents you from breathing properly, and it itches the inside of your nose.

The French say,
Je le décrotte
when
le nez
needs to be cleaned inside.
Décrotter
is so much more descriptive, so much more precise, than the English expression, to pick your nose.
Décrotter
. Even the sound of the word, makes you hear and feel the action of
décrottage
.

Sometimes I set eyeglasses on my nose. Not that it needs it. But this way it feels useful. And it helps me see better. If we didn't have noses, all the big eyeglass manufacturers in the world would go broke. We would have to find another way to sustain glasses in front of our eyes. We should be grateful that our nose has been placed exactly where it is by whatever divine power or supernatural mechanism, on our faces where it is. Imagine how useless our nose would be if it were placed on the side of our face. Let's say below the ear. Then there would be people in the world who would breathe on the left, and others on the right, depending on which side of their faces their mother placed the nose of her infant-to-be.

When people ask me why my nose is crooked, I tell them all kinds of stories. I love to tell the misadventures my nose endured over the years. My nose has become a subject of conversation. It seems to attract attention.

Here are some of the stories I tell about my nose.

Sometimes I explain that my nose was deviated when I was a boxer. That it happened about the same time that Marcel Cerdan was middle-weight champion of the world. It was in 1948. I even met Cerdan that year. In Detroit when he came to fight Jack La Motta.

I'm not going to go into the long story of how I happened to be in Detroit when Cerdan fought La Motta. But that day Cerdan lost the fight, even though he was out-boxing La Motta, and the fight was in the bag for sure, until the eighth round when La Motta's head hit Cerdan's nose so hard during a wild exchange of punches and head butts, that Cerdan's nose was broken, and the fight had to be stopped, and poor Marcel was declared the loser by TKO. It was unfair. When we were introduced after the fight, I told him so.

I won't go into intricate details of how I managed to go to the fight. Even though in 1948, I must have been broke.

What is sad about this story is that the following year, and what I'm saying here is true, when Cerdan was flying back to the States from France for a rematch with La Motta, and this time for sure he would have demolished him, so pissed was he to have been declared TKO because of his broken nose, his plane crashed, and Cerdan and his entourage disappeared into the Ocean. The rematch was canceled of course. Some other contender fought La Motta and lost. But I understand that in memory of Marcel Cerdan, before the fight began, a famous movie star sang
La Marseillaise
in French. People had tears in their eyes.

I had already left Detroit by then. So I didn't witnessed that touching moment, but the facts of this story can be verified in the archives of American and French newspapers of that year. 1948.

I don't know why I told this story about Marcel Cerdan in the middle of my nose story. Probably, by some kind of free association the story of my crooked nose got connected with the broken nose of Marcel Cerdan. But it's not Marcel Cerdan who punched me in the nose and made it deviate to one side. Cerdan and I never boxed together. It was some other guy. Not a world champion. Just some other guy. Probably a lightweight, since in those days I boxed lightweight.

Another story I tell about how my nose got crooked is what happened when I was in the paratroopers, and one day, during maneuvers, I landed on my face rather than on my ass. Squarely on my nose.

Yes, it's known that I used to jump out of airplanes when I was with the 82nd Airborne Division. [See
Take It or Leave It
for details of that accident.]

Wow, was my nose bleeding that day when I landed on it. I don't think it was broken, but it certainly took a mean blow, and that could have caused the deviation.

A doctor once asked me during a medical visit if my crooked nose caused me difficulty to breathe. I told him not at all. That on the contrary, it helps me breathe more efficiently when I swim. He looked puzzled. So I explained to the doctor that the reason my nose leans to one side of my face is because I do a lot of swimming. Competitive swimming. I train everyday. I swim five miles a day to prepare for the Olympics. I don't remember which Olympic year it was.

I went on explaining to the doctor, that I specialized in the backstroke, but that I also compete in the free style, the Australian crawl events. The 200 and 400 meters. And, as you know, when you swim the crawl you breathe to the side. But you must not lift your head out of the water too much, otherwise it slows you down. So each time you turn your head sideways you quickly inhale air with your nose, which you then exhale with your mouth in the water, while your feet and arms beat the water furiously. Because I always breathe on the left side when I swim the crawl, that's probably why my nose leans a little toward that side of my face. The repeated efforts my nose makes to inhale air must have caused the deviation. I don't know if the doctor understood what I was trying to explain. Maybe he didn't know much about
natation
. But in any case, I passed the medical examination.