Read Online Self by Yann Martel - Free Book Online

were a circle of boys washing and rubbing each others’ backs. Though we never talked about it, this shower was one of the high points of our skiing holiday. It resulted in a raucousness of laughter that Iremember to this day. High-pitched squeals of mirth. Faces contorted with guffawing.
    We were leaving Paris for Ottawa after a stay of nearly four years. As I climbed the steps of the plane and turned and looked at the people on the open terrace of the airport, I didn’t know that it was not only Europe that was waving its hand good-bye to me, but my childhood. I was twelve years old.
    It is difficult to describe the metamorphosis that begins at puberty. There are so many different strands. At first, puberty was a physical phenomenon for me. It was a new hairiness, an awkward physical growth, a skin disease, the discovery of a secret pleasure. Only dimly did I realize that it was also a mental phenomenon. I barely noticed that a new universe slipped itself in front of my eyes. One where the most paralysing anxiety could run alongside the greatest elation. One where the idea of choice, real, personal choice, was introduced. One where knowledge and confusion increased exponentially. One where notions such as success and failure, will and sloth, appearance and reality, freedom and responsibility, the public and the private, the moral and the immoral, the mental and the physical, replaced the simpler guiding notion of fun. At the centre of these changes was a new ache, that of sexual need, and a new loneliness — deep, bottomless it seemed, pure torture. Puberty for me was a path unmarked by signposts or sudden illuminations. I thought I was the same as always, absolutely the same, until I realized that I no longer enjoyed playing with toys quite so much, or being with my parents all the time.
    I wonder, for example, when I took my last shower with my father. When was that precise last time that we alternatedbeing beneath the showerhead? That we passed each other the soap and the shampoo? That we stepped out together and dried ourselves? All without thinking about it. The progression from nudity to nakedness was slow and imperceptible — but there must have been that last shower, that border that would not be crossed again.
    The direction of my gaze changed. Questions no longer sprung from me like arrows from a bow — Why is the sky blue? Who wrote the Bible? Why do elephants have long noses? There were mysteries on the inside, too. I began to look into mirrors. At first I would busy myself with the unavoidable externals: the clogged pores of my nose, the pustules on my forehead, the curls and waves of my hair. Then I would truly look at myself; that is, I would look at my eyes, those repositories of the soul. Behind those little black holes — who? So much flux. Was it like this for everyone?
    I discovered my body. Till then my mental and physical selves had been in such harmony that I had never considered them separately, or as separable. The two were as integrated as they are in Rodin’s The Thinker or in Roger Bannister and John Landy’s Miracle Mile. But now my mind’s vessel began to show signs of waywardness, to reveal that it could deliver unexpected pains and pleasures of its own making. The result was a more complicated, multifaceted “I”, with more mouths to feed, more needs to tend to.
    Solitude became a pleasure. There are certain moments of adolescence that are beyond the grasp of words. You are quiet, you are looking at a field, say, or a row of books in a library, when suddenly things appear sharp and precise, and there is a tinkle. That’s not the right word. What I mean is, because of your youth and overarching vitality you have tricked life intooverlooking you, and you have crept up on it from behind and you are near its heart and you can hear its heartbeat. It’s not a roaring throb you hear but something very quiet, a gentle quiver to the field, to the row of books, something so quiet that it is