My Body in Nine Parts (6 page)

Believe what you want, but if you were to examine the nail of my big right toe you would understand that this toe and its nail underwent a rather traumatic experience.

But let me get to the end of this unfortunate toe. Since that catastrophic day on the farm, the nail has things growing underneath that stick to it. I say things because I don't know what else to call that hard calcareous matter that grows under the nail like some alien matter. It feels like cement when I try to cut it, or rather try to extricate it from underneath the nail with a little tweezer, with a knife, with a scraper. That stuff sticks to the nail obstinately. So that cutting the nail of that toe becomes a real battle. Afterwards, I'm exhausted. And my leg is all stiff from having stayed up that long off the ground on the edge of the sink in the bathroom.

Well, that's the discovery I made last night about my toes which I wanted to share with you. If you wish, next time, I can tell you about my fingers and their nails. They too have very interesting original personalities.

What one hears in a work of art [whether literature, music, or painting, because music and painting speak to us as much as literature] is a voice – always a voice – and this voice that speaks our origin [the nothingness whence we came before we uttered our first word], speaks at the same time our end [the nothingness towards which we are crawling].

In this sense, the voice is at the same time birth [or resurrection] and death [or transfiguration]. The voice is what resists the nothingness that precedes us and the nothingness that confronts us. Or to put it more poetically: The breath whose domestication in the throat of the human animal created the voice that engendered the conscious and moral [or immoral] mystical beast that we are tells the whole human adventure.

Therefore, my voice, in this sense, is my human adventure. I don't remember how and when it was domesticated, but it was. Perhaps, as an error of nature.

When I speak, whether I say something true or false, or something intelligent or stupid, I am telling myself.

That's about all I can say about my voice. Except that when I speak English I have a pronounced French accent. An accent, I confess, carefully cultivated for social and sentimental reasons. I have domesticated my French accent.

Bilingual as I am, I have often been told that when I speak French it sounds English, and when I speak English it sounds French. Especially in the way I construct my sentences. My syntax seems foreign in both languages. I suppose it's because of the uneven rhythm I give to the words and the phrases I articulate. And it is true that I have a rather unorthodox way of arranging the invisible words that come out of my mouth, and the visible words I scribble on paper.

The somewhat incoherent cadence of my voice certainly corresponds to the cadence of my life, since my voice speaks my life. And to make it worse, I often speak myself in two languages at the same time without making any distinction between the two. Except that, I think my English voice is deeper, graver than my French voice. More serious also. Whereas my French voice, I've been told, sounds joyful, playful, more free, typically Parisian.

To conclude, all I can say: I speak therefore I am. But one day, as my old friend Sam used to say, I'll manage to shut up, barring an accident.

No, maybe I should say more about my voice. After all without my voice I'd be nothing. I would have no story.

I have often been told, by those who read me, that what they hear when they read my books, is my voice, even if they read me silently. Go explain that. And the people who have read me and then meet me in person, are amazed to discover that the fictitious voice they heard in my writing was exactly the same as my real voice. Your books, they say to me, sound exactly like you.

So, when someone tells me that, I ask: When you read me in English, did you hear my French accent? And if you read me in French, did you detect an English accent?

Recently, this was in Cannes, of all places, I gave a reading in the splendid garden of La Comtesse Remy Kirby's mansion. Don't ask me how I got invited to such a swanky and elite place, I don't even remember myself, but was it swanky and elitist. About hundred literati gathered in the garden for my reading. The entire literary aristocracy of Cannes. It was quite an affair.

I was reading from the new revised expanded post-modernized edition of
Amer Eldorado
[originally published in 1974, by les éditions Stock, but now retitled Amer Eldorado 200/1, to indicate that this edition had been totally rewritten, totally reinvented].

AE2, as friends call this book, was published in 2001 by Les Éditions Al Dante, so it must have been during the summer of 2001, that I read in the garden of La Comtesse Remy Kirby in Cannes. Now I remember. It was in July.

Anyway. After the reading, while we were all sipping le champagne and munching les petits fours de La Comtesse Remy Kirby, a poet, that's how he introduced himself,
I am a poet, my name is Jean-Louis Laplume
, he even said it in English to prove to me that he knew English, told me that he loved my reading, he just adored it, especially the risqué passages, but noticed that I speak French with a slight English accent. What an asshole. What a miserable minor poet. I could bury him with my genuine proletarian Parisian accent.
Quel petit con! Qu'il aille se faire cuire un oeuf au lieu de faire de la poez. I should have told him
.

I may have a thick French accent when I speak English, an incurable accent, but I definitely not have an English accent when I speak French. And even if I do, I cannot hear it. On the contrary, when I listen to my voice speak French in the interior monologue that mumbles in me incessantly, I hear pure French, classical French uncorrupted by my Anglo-Saxon voice.

Well, I wanted to clarify this about my voice.

I could, of course, tell you much about this part of my body. But that might shock those who claim it is in bad taste to talk openly about one's sexual organ.

Therefore, I think it is preferable in this case not to speak of it directly, but to let you, indirectly imagine the adventures and misadventures of this rather private part of my body, commonly called by the French,
Le Sexe
.

Concerning my sex, it would be indecent to relate what it did and endured since I first discovered it, at a young age, as an integral part of my body.

I can, however, tell you this: I have always treated it kindly, gently, even when it was in a bad mood, or when it withdrew into itself, and became depressed.

I can also tell you, hoping not to embarrass you, that it gave me much pleasure in my life. And let's hope it will continue to do so.

Micturating has never been a problem for my sexual organ. He takes that function very calmly. Always there ready to piss. He enjoys it fully. Except when I have an attack of kidney stones. Then he suffers for me.

My sexual organ found pleasure in many strange places and unusual situations. Situations that sometimes required a certain acrobatic dexterity.

No, don't ask me for details. Don't ask me for a list. I have already said too much. But let me just add that some of these acrobatic situations where not always in beds, or on tables or even on floors.

It seems that my sexual organ during our relationship, how else can I say that, our commerce, got us into some very awkward situations.

But do not conclude immediately that he is perverse or vicious or anything like that. He just likes good fun.

He's not obsessed with himself. No, my sexual organ sometimes even goes dormant for long periods of time. But it does not take much to awaken him. The scent of feminine perfume. A smile on a beautiful face. A pair of long svelte legs in silk. A lovely derrière.

Of course when I was younger, I mean before matrimony, I admit that I sometimes let him lead me into wild places. Especially in Tokyo, when I was a soldier serving with the occupying forces. We had a great time over there in Shimbashi my sexual organ and I. He amazed me with his endurance, though he was always careful not to cause any accidents.

Then came the middle-age crisis, and for a while he was literally on strike against my desires. He refused to perform. He even embarrassed me at very tempting moments. Try as I would, all was lost for a time. But then slowly, kindly, gradually he became more responsive again. And now we have this understanding which allows us a certain freedom and ease, without too much coaching.

But to describe him physically, in person, would be, it seems to me, in bad taste. The French would say,
de mauvais séant
.

Therefore, again I can only leave it to you to imagine the adventures and misadventures of my sexual organ, to imagine that part of my body, which is as essential to me as the other parts whose story I have already told.

Today I went to the dentist because of my broken molar. The one that broke last week when I was biting on a piece of chocolate. Hard chocolate.

It's one of the upper molars on the left. The third one counting from the back of my jaw. How can I make this clear so that you will know which one I'm talking about.

←Yes, that one. The third one on the left, counting from the back. I think it's a molar. To make sure, maybe I should consult the dictionary to see what it says about molars.

Molar tooth:
a tooth adapted for grinding by having a broad wounded or flattened though often ridged or tuberculated surface.
Specif
: one of the cheek teeth in mammals behind the incisors and canines
.

That describes exactly the tooth that broke. So it's definitely a molar.

Those guys who write dictionaries are so good with words. They must have a certain intimate experience of what they describe.

In the case of a tooth, the writer must first spend time examining the inside of a mammal's mouth. And then he has to find the right words to describe what he has examined. To come up with a word
tuberculated
takes some thinking and some research. The choice of words makes it clear to the rest of us, uneducated in the subject of teeth, how molars function.