Self (2 page)

So while my mother sat at home pondering over hammers, perhaps my father sat in his office pondering over screwdrivers.
Anyway, this state, this dichotomy, was temporary; a few years later my mother also joined External Affairs.

In other ways, too, my parents were indistinguishable from each other. Housework was shared, as far as I could tell, but I’m not a reliable witness since I fled at the least sign of domesticity, for fear of being asked to do something. Both my parents were so-so cooks. To be fair, my mother did handle some dishes well, and she displayed more imagination than my father, who overcooked eggs throughout my childhood. But he made delicious tacos and a superb
tortilla de papas
, potato omelette. In later years it was he, I think, who did most of the cooking. In their postings in Mexico and Cuba, they were delighted (and I when I visited) to have a live-in cook.

On the question of punishment: only when I had committed the most heinous of offences was I spanked, and this mildly, more tapping than whacking. I screamed blue murder anyway, because I knew this was the ultimate punishment and therefore called for the ultimate wailing. I believe I was spanked three times in my life. Other than that, my parents never raised a hand to me. At most, when he was exceptionally angry and was chastising me, my father would hold me just above the elbow to ensure that he had my full attention, and sometimes he would squeeze and it would hurt a little. It was rare that my mother got truly angry at me, though when she did, when she narrowed her eyes and fixed me with them and hissed through her clamped jaw, it was a source of real terror. I knew then that in shaving Luna’s mother’s dog bald with a hair-clipper or in burning down a neighbour’s hedgerow I had gone too far, and I would hurt inside and I would do everything to make things better. Mercifully, it was only a few times that I provoked her to such anger.

My parents got along very well. In fact, I have never seen such a harmonious, complementary couple. She was highly articulate. He was a published poet. She had a disciplined mind that could work with great intensity, a mind that was always open to the world. He had lost his father when he was ten and was a rather moody, brittle man, prone to melancholy, yet he had a capacity to marvel at things. She had a naturally optimistic bent and she loved the arts. They nourished her soul and her wisdom. Her emotions were never wrong. He and I discovered writers together — the wonderful Dino Buzzati, for example — and we both had a fondness for golf, a game we hardly ever played. There is a long-ago black and white photo of the two of us on a beach in France: he surrounds me and our four hands are holding a golf club which he is showing me how to swing. The camera catches me just as I am looking at it, a smile on my face, one eye peeking through wind-blown strands of my long hair. It was she who was appointed Canada’s ambassador to Cuba. She was more prudent, more apt to find the fruitful, pragmatic compromise. He sometimes had a daring, a willingness to seize the day.

I remember fantasies I had as a child of having to choose between my parents. They were on crosses being tortured and I had to decide which one to let live. Or was I being tortured to force me to choose? If I ever settled on one, I can’t remember who it was.

At the last minute my father, by then a translator, editor and desktop publisher, decided to accompany my mother to Mexico City, where she was going for a regional conference of Canadian heads of missions. Not fifteen minutes after leaving Havana the plane was a ball of fire crashing into the Gulf of
Mexico. Such is the intrusion of the tragic, when one becomes aware of the turning wheels of life. But I am getting ahead of myself. I must first deal with carrots and washing machines and many other things.

Though there are notable exceptions, it often happens that we do not remember the first time we did something, or even any one particular time, but remember only the repetition, the idea that we did the thing over and over. This is the case with me and the boiling of carrots. I spent entire afternoons watching carrots boil in water. Our rented house in Ottawa was so arranged that, from the chair on which I stood near the stove, I could turn and see my mother working at her desk (or rather, our rented house in Ottawa was so arranged that, from the chair on which she sat at her desk, my mother could turn and see me staring into my pot). When the carrots were terminally mushy, which I would determine with a long fondue fork, I would call out and she would come to the kitchen. She would empty the pot into the sink, fill it with fresh cold water and set it on the stove again. Then she would get back to work, giving me a peck on the cheek on her way. I was old enough and more than careful enough — there were never any accidents — to be left with the thrilling task of selecting from a large plastic bag the hardy specimens, thick and orange, that I would drop into the water so that the spectacle could start again. During those afternoons my imagination boiled and bubbled like that exuberant water. I explored, made deep connections. It was the transformation from hard to soft that fascinated me, my mother said later. Indeed, from my earliest years the idea of transformation has been central to my life. Naturally so, I suppose, being the child of diplomats.
I changed schools, languages, countries and continents a number of times during my childhood. At each change I had the opportunity to re-create myself, to present a new façade, to bury past errors and misrepresentations. Once, secretly, I boiled the hammer, wondering if its fundamental nature, its
being
(her word), could change. When I started to lose my baby teeth and was told that larger, more durable teeth would grow in their stead, I took this as my first tangible proof of human metamorphosis. I had already gathered evidence on the metamorphosis of day and night, of weather, of the seasons, of food and excrement, even of life and death, to name but a few, but these teeth were something closer to home, something clear and incontrovertible. I envisioned life as a series of metamorphic changes, one after another, to no end.

I abandoned the boiling of carrots when I discovered the washing of laundry. Staring down into the toss and turmoil of clothes being cleaned mechanically is the closest I have come to belonging to a church, and was my introduction to museums. I followed every step of the absolution of laundry, these stations of the cross from filth to salvation, this lineup at the Museum of Modern Art. It would start with my mother fooling the washing machine’s safety stop by jamming a coin at the back of the machine’s lid — the price of admission to the exhibit, the alms dropped into the alms box. I would hurry to my pew atop the dryer. The laundry was pushed into the machine like so many wicked souls into hell. The powder detergent settled like snow, at places as thick as on a plain, at others as sparse as on an escarpment, my first glimpse at landscape painting. The hot water rose slowly, a gentle immersion into grace — something I felt intimately since this was exactly how
I took my baths, sitting shivering cold in the empty tub while the hot water crept up, submerging goose-pimple after goose-pimple, the comfort of warmth all the greater for the misery of cold. The water would stop rising, there would be a moment’s pause to collect ourselves, a click, and then high mass would start in earnest. I took an evangelical pleasure in the to-and-fro motion of laundry being sermonized. It was a tempest-tossed sea in which my small ship, my soul, was braving the frothy waves. It was Davy Jones’s locker in which I, a spat-out Jonah, frolicked alongside a school of socks. And then it was a painting — abstract expressionism in its purest, most ephemeral form. For entire cycles I would watch this kinder, broader-stroked Jackson Pollock feverishly at work in his studio. Dashes of red succeeded swaths of green. Eruptions of white overwhelmed spots of purple. Five intertwined colours danced together before vanishing to blue. The drama was generous and open, truly ecumenical. When the washing cycle was over, the holy water would retreat through the pores of the washing machine’s barrel. I would behold a cavernous sculpture, hell empty. The laundry would begin to spin. I could feel the water seeping away, oozing out of me. Suddenly a torrential tropical storm would whip at me. Was this temptation? And after that another storm! But this one too I would weather. A final click and it would be over. I would call my mother. Shirts, skirts, blouses, underwear, pants, socks and I came out of the machine renewed, remitted of our sins, damp with vitality, shimmering like Christ rising on the third day. And the coin at the back of the lid was mine!

Do children look into mirrors? Do they look at themselves, beyond checking that their unruly hair has that degree of
tidiness demanded by a parent? I didn’t. Of what interest was a mirror to me? It reflected me, a child — so what? I was not in the least bit self-conscious. The world was far too vast a playground to waste any time looking at part of it reflected, except perhaps to make funny faces, two fingers pulling down the lower eyelids, one pushing up the nose.

Childhood, like wisdom, is an emotion. Feelings are what register deeply of one’s early years. What the eye catches, the visual aspects of these feelings, is secondary. So it is that I have no memories of mirrors, no memories of clothes, of skin, of limbs, of body, of my own physical self as a child. As if, paradoxically, I were then nothing but a huge eager eye, an emotional eye, looking out, always looking out, unaware of itself.

It would be impossible to talk of my childhood without mentioning television (religion never played an important role in my life and here, early on, is as good a spot as any to deal with it. I first met the notion of God in a song, a
comptine
, my parents sang to me. It went:

Thus ended the song. When I came to understand it, when I actually listened to it, it was not the cheery chorus of cannibal sailors that took me aback, but the inexplicable and suspended plea at the end. To whom was it addressed? Who was this holy patron? And was the plea answered? Was the young sailor savioured or savoured? Before religion came to mean nothing to me, this is what it meant: a possibility of salvation at a crucial moment. When the course of experience made me see that there is no saviour and no special grace, no remission beyond the human, that pain is to be endured and fades, if it fades, only with time, then God became nothing to me but a dyslexic dog, with neither bark nor bite. I am a natural atheist); indeed, I think it would be impossible to talk of my
generation
without mentioning television.

I met the beast shortly after we moved to Costa Rica. I believe I had just turned five. It was not my parents’ set, but one lent to them by the embassy. It was a piece of furniture unto
itself: large, heavy, wooden, loud, unavoidable. It took as its lair a full third of the den, a space which had previously been my favourite corner. The first time I saw it, it was awake. I had just strode into the den, unaware of the usurper, and the cur, sensing my presence, turned towards me. I stood frozen, staring at its broad, flat, animated face. I would have run away except that my parents, fresh from installing the thing, were sitting side by side in front of it, passive and unafraid. They looked at me, smiled and said words that were not heard. I took the television to be another sort of four-legged animal. A huge, squat dog with pointy ears and a very long thin tail (it was still my understanding that motion, animation, entailed life. I treated the vacuum cleaner — a distant cousin of the elephant — and the washing machine — a relative of the raccoon — with the greatest respect. My mother’s cold and unceremonious manner with them filled me with private offence. Upon her departure I would pet and kiss them and whisper words of appreciation). But though I liked most animals, I warmed to the beast television only with time and misgiving. There was something about its size and behaviour that did not sit well with me. Unlike the washing machine, I felt the television was selfish and uncaring. With only two exceptions — at which times it mesmerized me — it would be years before I felt close to television. I much preferred to rock in the rocking chair, listening to music and day-dreaming. I did this for hours at a stretch, a pet rabbit cradled in my hands.

THE FIRST TIME TELEVISION MESMERIZED ME AS A CHILD:

(1) I can’t remember when the idea of love came to me, when I first consciously became aware of this force in human
affairs. Clearly I received love before I started returning it, and I returned it before I knew it had a name. But at what moment these emotions I felt —
oh, there you are! I am happy; if you smile, I’ll smile; I want to touch you, I want to be with you, don’t let go
— lost their cloak of anonymity and entered the dictionary of my mind, I don’t recall. What I do recall is that it was television that formalized my notions of love, that brought together into a unified theory my disparate ideas about it.