Self (14 page)

This happened on a special night. I got up in the morning, stood naked in front of the mirror looking at myself and thought, “I’m a Canadian, a woman — and a voter.”

It was my birthday. I was now eighteen years old. A full citizen.

LAST MEMORIES OF PORTUGAL:

(1) Fatima. On May 13, 1917, three children, shepherds, claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. She would come back to speak to them the next month on the same day, she told them. They returned to the spot on the appointed day. She appeared again, spoke to them and told them to come again the following month. This went on for four more months. On October 13, the day of her last apparition, the children were accompanied
by seventy thousand people, who witnessed a “miraculous solar phenomenon”. A Marian cult became established. Fatima is a major Catholic pilgrimage site, like Lourdes, like Saint James of Compostela. In its essential part, at the centre of the circles of stores selling religious kitsch, Fatima is an unappealing white basilica on the edge of the largest expanse of asphalt I have ever seen. This vast carpet lies unmarked by lines, arrows or directions of any sort. It glistens in the sun, pure and charcoal-black. I found it strikingly beautiful (and if I were a modern artist of means, I would use asphalt as my medium, exploiting its rich blackness, its beguiling friction, its interplay with the sun. Imagine in a rolling plain of Saskatchewan a splendid circle of asphalt. Not a blight of civilization, not nihilism, but the dot of an exclamation point, the other part of which, the upright stroke, would be whoever is standing on the dot — you). The shape is concave, so that there is a rise to the salvation of the white basilica. Into this enormous bowl of asphalt come those who are wanting in a Catholic way. They walk, they shuffle, they hobble, they wheel themselves, they crawl. I saw one aged woman crawl towards the basilica from the very lip of the bowl at the other end, a distance of a good three hundred metres, with two distressed-looking children — her grandchildren, I presume — on her back and the rest of her family walking along beside her. With her gloves and knee-pads she looked like a mountain climber, which, in a way, is what she was — a Catholic mountain climber scaling a summit that my atheist senses couldn’t even perceive. As she inched along, she begged and prayed aloud. When she collapsed, which she did at regular intervals, the children toppled over and burst into hysterics and the family fell to their knees in prayer. After a few minutes’
rest, declining all offers of help, turning down all requests to desist, she carried on.

Below the basilica, to the left, is a small chapel, the supposed site of the Virgin Mary’s apparition. The chapel has a crematorium of sorts into which the devout throw life-size wax effigies of those parts of their loved ones that are a source of suffering. What you see is a gleaming mountain of yellowish body parts of all sizes, all ages, sharply delineated, down to details of wrinkles and hairs, slowly melting and, in melting, moving. A head tumbles and melds at the neck with a leg to form a freakish creature, until the leg buckles. A young boy’s chest has three ears. A knee bends to smell a footed hand. Breasts lactate to oblivion. Two male heads are approaching, perhaps for a kiss, until one is crushed by the stamp of a foot. An entire baby lands face down with a loud plop and vanishes in moments, except for his small bum with its cleft, which floats for the longest time. A serious head stands upright and alone and seems to say, “What is happening here will not happen to me,” until fate forces itself upon it and it weeps to death. Everything turns to river.

Facing this scene is a discordant choir of true believers, most of them dressed in black, most of them women, who wail, supplicate, cry, pray, harangue, whisper, whimper, sing and move their lips as they continually toss in fresh body parts. Meanwhile, the overseers of the place, the priests, mill about with expressions of comatose impassivity. The last thing I remember before I pulled myself away was a kneeling woman who produced a minuscule ear from her corset, whispered into it and then tossed it into the crematorium, bursting into loud sobs as she did so. Had her baby died of an ear infection? It was Fellini in hell.

(2) Jack, a friendly Californian I met at the Coimbra Youth Hostel and spent three days with. He was a few years older than I, twenty or twenty-one, and bright and shy. He was studying violin and composition somewhere very famous in California, Berkeley or Stanford or something. That’s what he wanted to be, that’s what he was: a composer. We talked about music. At the train station — he was heading south to Lisbon to fly back home, I north to Porto — he was more bashful than usual. Goodbyes sometimes compress emotions until they burst out in uncontrolled ways, like juice from a squashed orange: Jack hugged me and then made an awkward, halted attempt to kiss me.

(3) Lisbon again, before my return home. I hated arriving in Portugal, I hated leaving it. In the meantime nearly three months had passed. Travelling is like an acceleration: it’s hard to stop, you don’t want to stop. Change becomes a habit and habits are hard to change. I walked about, exploring the ordinary neighbourhoods of an old European capital. I bought new clothes, figuring that they would be cheaper in Portugal than in Canada. I tanned myself lobster-red on the endless beach across the Tagus. I got a new passport, which turned out to be an easy matter thanks to a not-too-punctilious, locally engaged consular officer, all smiles and befuddlement (“They made a mistake. Do I look like a man to you?” Thank God for my androgynous name. Would that my hair would grow faster). As I climbed the metal gangway of the TAP plane, I turned for a last look at the Portuguese blue sky and I thought, “I’ll be back, though not here, somewhere else. China? India? South America?”

Roetown’s Ellis University is one of the smallest universities in Canada, with fewer than 2,500 full-time students when I
started. At the time, its reputation was somewhat lacklustre. “Easy to get into,” was said of the place. “C+ is all you need.” It was known for welcoming the huddled masses of poor, mediocre high-school graduates, those who hadn’t made the grade of the more illustrious, career-track universities. It was precisely this lack of elitism that attracted me to Ellis. After Mount Athos, I was ready for the Open Air University of Albania. But easy as it was to get into the place, it wasn’t easy to get out — with a piece of paper, at any rate — as I would find out through personal experience. Ellis turned out to be a firstrate liberal arts university.

It was arranged on the college system, with three of the colleges on the modern main campus a few miles out of town, and the other two in Roetown itself, two separate mini-campuses in an old (by Canadian standards — 1850) central Ontarian town of sixty thousand.

It was on the doorstep, so to speak, of one of these downtown colleges that I presented myself, tanned and Portuguese-swept, in the fall of 1981. I had chosen Strathcona-Milne (S-M to everyone) because it was the smallest of Ellis’s colleges and seemed the most informal and alternative (and perhaps the closest to a family that I could find), which turned out to mean that it was a tossed salad of lit-crit types, theatre types, poet types, budding artist types, earth-lover types, gays and lesbians, and would-be revolutionaries of one colour or another, with a light vinaigrette of marijuana and late nights. The place was a haven of tolerance, exploration and intellectual obfuscation. I loved it.

The college was a mix of constructions ranging from the main building, a stately nineteenth-century mansion that housed the small library, the dining-hall and various offices
and classrooms, to five or six 1920s houses that retained the cosy feel of homes despite being converted into classrooms and professors’ offices, to a few modernish buildings, mainly residences, including an insignificant, squat yellow thing, a sad tribute to 1950s architecture, that turned out to be my residence — but no matter. Whether I was amidst the flights of concrete of the main campus, in the quaint, oldish, bourgeois constructs of S-M, in the wordless mediocrity of my room, or somewhere in between — on the shuttle bus looking out at the Wade River, for example — I was happy to be here. The constraints of Mount Athos were gone. I was free to be myself, to be what I wanted. I believe this was a common feeling among us zeros, this exhilaration at discovering that we could now be somebodies.

And let me not forget Roetown, to which I hadn’t given a thought when I applied to Ellis. It was an unexpected gem, a diamond I stumbled upon on my way to higher learning. With trees, lots of trees, houses built
around
trees, not over their uprooted stumps; and rolling hills for the sake of vistas; and a river which opened up to a beautiful lake while still within the confines of the town; and clear, broad streets; and gabled stone and wood houses, and red-brick factories — architectures varied in purpose and style but always pleasing to the eye, and without the cosmetic fakery of too much money; and weather — crazy to celebrate a town for its weather, but weather that fully participated in the life of the town, like a prominent citizen, like a councillor with visions of civic grandeur, sometimes so savage and cold that you only wanted to peer out at it from the warm side of windows, sometimes so crisp and clear that you felt the landscape was made of glass, sometimes so hot, green and humid, so Babylonian, that you wanted to be naked
— weather in which, for every degree Celsius, there was a light, a colour, a wind, a cloud, a scent, an emotion.

Roetown, of mixed economy, neither boom nor bust, just ordinary times — that is, hard — had a slightly run-down aspect, I suppose. But in a pleasing way, like a man you love who has buttoned his coat up wrong.

I decided to major in anthropology. I enrolled in the department’s first-year course and in a second-year introduction to archaeology that was open to first-years.

Psychology’s appeal was immediate. Of course I was interested in the workings of the mind.

English literature (The modern period and its roots: Browning, Hopkins, Dickens, Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Yeats, Pound, Eliot) was a natural choice also.

For my fifth and last course, I hesitated. I went to several introductory lectures during intro week. It came down to philosophy, history or political studies. Curiously, for one who thought herself so political, I struck the politics course from my list first. I listened to the professor attentively, I leafed through the heavy textbook at the Ellis bookstore — but it didn’t grab me. Not the macro approach, not the word “system”. I preferred staying with the individual.

It was the memory of my mother’s hammer that brought me to philosophy (Introduction to: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, J.S. Mill, Nietzsche).

All these courses, except for the archaeology course, had the same number, nearly proverbial, the starting-point of all knowledge, it seemed: 101.

Residence fees included a complete meal plan — three meals a day for six days and a Sunday brunch, every week.

Ancillary fees covered a pass to use not only the Ellis shuttle bus but the entire Roetown bus system, and open access to the excellent sports centre.

My room was one of the largest in the Yellow Squat Thing Building. One window, one door, one closet, one chest of drawers, one desk and chair, one bed — it was nearly Portuguese. There was a sweet housekeeper, Mrs. Pokrovski, who changed our sheets once a week.

I had pocket money to spare (but remember where it came from. Every movie ticket, every little extravagance, was a reminder of this blood money).

Roetown had a thriving cultural scene, animated not only by the university but by the citizens of the town. Between the two, there was always something happening — a lecture on American cultural imperialism or an American movie at the Imperial, modern dance at Artspace or a minor-league hockey game, Reverend Ken and the Lost Followers or Handel’s
Messiah
, Peter Handke or Noël Coward, a Take Back the Night march or a Walking Tour of Historical Roetown, etc. or etc. I say “or”; in most cases I tried to make it “and”.

That was the setting, those were the courses, those were the distractions — my student life could begin. I threw myself into it. It was like that of most students, I suppose, only in some ways more active, in some ways more isolated. I usually got up fairly early, by student standards at any rate, and rarely missed breakfast. I never missed lectures or seminars, even morning ones after late nights, for I was a serious student, which didn’t mean that I was a good student (I wasn’t; I was an intelligent not-good student) or that I started my essays any earlier than the night before they were due, but meant that
what I considered, I considered seriously. I quickly became involved in student politics: I was elected first-year representative to the S-M student cabinet and in second year I was elected to the university senate. I joined the swim team and the cross-country ski team, though I was neither a fast swimmer nor a fast skier; I was a slow, graceful swimmer and a slow, graceless skier. I joined more for the fun of being part of a team, and the satisfaction of being fit (the one enduring legacy of my university years is probably my discovery of the most pleasurable part of exercise: the deep breath. To be swimming length after length, non-stop, sometimes not even counting how many, only aware of the incantation of my breathing and the splashing rhythm of motion, was a kinetic form of meditation). And I had many friends. They were mostly friends of circumstance, true — I haven’t kept up with many of them — but the circumstances were good.

Despite this activity, I often felt lonely, more so as time went by. My life was a busy kind of solitude, much motion with little emotion. Elena played a major part in this feeling, but there was more: the beginning of a certain
mal-de-vivre
. Hardly had my university career started than it began to go awry. “Existential crisis” would be the name of the syndrome, but I will not dwell on it. Angst is not much of a peg to hang things on. We all go through it, we all cope with it, or try, so why talk about it? I say this though I think my case was bad enough, a befuddlement such that no degree of reasonableness could assuage it; or no more than whispering reassurances would calm a freshly captured, terrified monkey. I saw a documentary at Ellis once in which scientists — I believe that’s what they were called — played the recorded sounds of a fire burning and then of river water rising to a
caged monkey, to test its instinctive fear of both. The recordings started very low, barely audible (but already the monkey was looking alarmed), and ended at full volume. It struck me as fairly self-evident that turning down options like being burned to a crisp or having only water to breathe didn’t require much more than a slug’s intellect let alone the nimble wits of a monkey. Indeed, when the sounds were at their loudest — a roaring forest fire, a roaring torrent of water — I have never seen such an incarnation of pure fear. It was not the cowering in a corner, the trembling paralysis, the rapid panting, the sudden release of urine and excrement — it was the look on the animal’s face, its silent, open mouth, the rolling of its eyes. When my academic career was derailed, when my nebulous but ambitious future dissolved, when I clutched for any sense of meaning in my life, I thought of this monkey. But it doesn’t make for interesting reading, I’ll be the first to admit it.