Free Self by Yann Martel Page B

adjustment in dress and deportment. A tidy act of conformism. What prevented me from fitting in so nicely was that none of the symbols or attributes of this loathsome bent seemed original. They all derived from a single source. Long hair, gentleness, an eye for beauty, a longing for boys — these were plainly terms that described girls . So except for the fact that they were female, girls looked and behaved far more homosexual than I. Yet they were not condemned for it, seemingly, while I was. He — Jim — would taunt me, shove me, terrify me over my long hair and putative desire for boys — “You faggot! You faggot!” he would hiss — while next to me sat one who had long hair and would soon desire a boy. She — Sonya — would always come to my rescue, hurling shrieks and taunts at Jim.
    I sought guidance where I could. At one point I turned to the French language, which gave me the gender of all things. But to no satisfaction. I would readily agree that trucks and murders were masculine while bicycles and life were feminine. But how odd that a breast was masculine. And it made little sense that garbage was feminine while perfume was masculine — and no sense at all that television, which I would have deemed repellently masculine, was in fact feminine. When I walked the corridors of Parliament Hill, passing the portraits of my future predecessors, I would say to myself, “ C’est le parlement , masculine. Power, it’s le pouvoir.” I would return home to la maison , feminine where, as likely as not, I would go to my room, la chambre , where I would settle to read un livre masculine, until supper. During the masculine meal, feminine food would be eaten. After my hard, productive masculine day, I would rest during the feminine night. At one time, for a few days, I even took an affected aversion to being in the kitchen, la cuisine . As I entered it I would put on a disdainful expression and say to myself,
 
 
 
     “Les femmes font la cuisine ici, mais pour moi, une cuisine, c’est un endroit où Robert Kennedy se fait tuer.”
      
     “Women cook here, but a kitchen, to me, is a place where Robert Kennedy gets killed.”
    But this is nonsense. I write it to be truthful to the moment, but it is nonsense. Not far from my house in Ottawa there was a large field, a vast, rolling expanse of grass. Often I would go there alone and lie down, angel-like. I would look up at the male yellow sun and the male blue sky. I would turn and smell and feel the female green grass. Then I would roll over and over and over down the incline till I was dizzy, mixing up the colours and the genders. I felt neither masculinity nor femininity, I only felt desire, I only felt humid with life. Sometimes — no, more often than that — often, I would crawl to the edge of the field, not like a soldier at war but because I liked the feel of the grass rubbing against my body, and I would lie on my side and masturbate onto the bushes, delighting in the shooting arc of my sperm and the way it splattered against the dark green leaves and dripped heavily while I wiped myself ineffectively with soft green shoots.
    A word about Jim. Adults are so confident in the authority of the law and the power of its enforcers that they tend to forget that criminal jurisprudence does not apply to children. Suchlegal niceties as “libel”, “theft”, “assault and battery” are no comfort to a thirteen-year-old boy scared witless of another thirteen-year-old boy.
    I doubt I can fully convey the degree of fear that Jim inspired in me. No one made my heart stop and then beat at triple speed, no one made my blood freeze, the way he did. I avoided him at all costs. If that meant eating lunch in hiding, if that meant running home — running, I say — right after school, so be it. I realize now that one shocking punch would have tilted the balance of power, but I was a physical coward. It wasn’t anything reasonable that made me so