Free My Body in Nine Parts by Raymond Federman Page B

will last forever.
    Of course, your soul knows very well that the body will not last, and that is why it always tries to escape.
    Often at night, restless in my bed, unable to sleep, in and out of bad dreams, I visit my scars. Especially the four favorites because they are so charged with souvenirs and pain.
    The five others are small and insignificant, without much importance, almost invisible, their stories forgotten, no doubt because they caused me less pain than the four principal ones, as I like to call them. These four really made me suffer, but I still like to listen when they tell their stories.
    Do you care to hear about the circumstances surrounding these four principal scars?
    So that they are correctly situated in the span of my life, I will relate them in chronological order, even though chronology always handicaps me when I tell a story.
    The first one, the most ancient, is on the back of my head. Right in the middle of the skull. Because my hair is still thick in that spot it cannot be seen. Of course, if I were to become totally bald, then it would be visible, and would probably reveal itself to be ugly. That’s how I visualize her. Ugly.
    Of course, my scars are all feminine.
    I have never been able to see this scar, even when I hold a mirror behind my head and try to part the hair with my fingers. I can feel her, but I cannot see her.
    I once asked my wife to look for that scar and describe it to me. But even though she was able to locate her with her finger, she could not see her even when she pulled my hair apart.
    She said that she could feel a bump there, but couldn’t see anything. That’s why I cannot tell you if she’s ugly or beautiful.
    Some scars are beautiful. Others ugly. That depends on how the soul was sewn back in. Few surgeons have sartorial talent. Most of them perform the sewing of the wound as if they were grave diggers burying the soul back into the body.
    But even if I never see this scar, I am fond of her. I call her Eurydice because she’s so mysterious. So evasive. Semi-absent one might say. I know it is there. I can feel her with my finger, but I have never seen her.
    Yes, I have given a name to all my scars. Mythological names.
    Eurydice tells me her story every time I shampoo my hair. She never forgets. She says to me, as the water drips over me, Federman do you remember how, long ago, when you were a little clumsy boy on vacation in le Poitou [my scars always call me Federman, and when they speak French to me, some of them do speak French because they happened in France, then they use the familiar tu form], remember she says, as I rub the soap out of my eyes, you were 7 years old, you climbed up a tree, I think it was a cherry tree, but I cannot really say because when you climbed up this tree I did not exit yet. I became your first scar, and I am proud of that, when you fell off the tree.
    It must have been a cherry tree, because when you fell tu n’es pas tombé dans les pommes . That much I am certain. No, you did not pass out. But did you ever scream. You see, you were so greedy, you climbed all the way to the top of the tree to pluck the biggest and most succulent. But then the branch on which you were sitting broke and you fell backward all the way down, and your head landed on top of a big rock. As you sat on the ground, whimpering dizzily, you reached for the back of your skull, and your hand came back full of blood.
    OK, I’ll skip the details [it’s still Eurydice speaking] of how you were taken to the village doctor in a horse buggy and how he rubbed some liquid medicine that burned on the back of your head and then stitched your wound, and that’s how I became your first scar.
    That’s what Eurydice tells me every time I wash my hair. And that’s exactly how it happened.
    I was 7 year old, on vacation in les colonies de vacances dans le Poitou , when I fell off a cherry tree and landed on a rock right on the back of my head.