Three - Me(2)

  One afternoon, as I was threatening my bear in the usual way but also feeding him with a strange compassion, the door opened, and my father caught me with my underpants down. He closed the door just a bit more softly than he had opened it, and (even I could tell) with some respect. Until then, when he came home for lunch and a brief rest, hw had been in the habit of coming in to give me a jiss before returning to work. I worried that I had done something wrong or, even worse, that I had done so for pleasure: It was then that the very idea of pleasure became poisoned.

  This sense was confirmed just after one of my parents' more prolonged quarrels, when my mother had left the house and the nanny who had come to look after us was giving me a bath. In a voice devoid of compassion, she scolded me for being "like a dog."

  I could not control my body's response; to make things worse, it was fully six or seven years, when I found myself in an all-boys junior school, until I discovered they were not unique.

  During the long years when I thought myself the only one to possess this depraved and mysterious talent, it was normal yo keep it hidden in my other world, where both my pleasure and the evil inside me had free reign. This was the world I would enter when, out of pure boredom, I pretended to be someone else and somewhere else. It was a very easy to escape into this other world I concealed from everyone. In my grandmother's sitting room, I'd pretended to be inside a submarine. I'd just had my first trip to the movies to see an adaptation of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand League Under the Sea, and as I sat watching it in the dusty Palace Cinema, what terrified me most were the film's silence. In it's frantic, claustrophobic camerawork, its shadowy black-and-white submarine interiors, I could not help but recognize something of our house. I was too young to read the subtitles, but my imagination filled in the blanks. (Even later, when I could read a book prefectly well, what mattered most was not to "understand" it but to supplement the meaning with the right fantasies.)

  I would stop swinging my legs, but in my daydream an airplane was still banking in and out ouf the smoke rising from the Gelincik cigarette she was raising to her lips, and soon I would enter hte forest inhabited by many rabbits, leaves, snakes, and lions I had previously identified among the geometric shapes on the carpets. Involving myself in an adventure from one of my comics, I'd mount a horse, start a fire, kill a few people. With one ear always alert for external sounds, I would hear the door of the elevator slam shut and, before returning my thoughts to half-naked redskins, note that Ismail the caretaker had gone up to our floor. I enjoyed setting houses on fire, spraying burning houses with bullets, escaping from burning houses through tunnels I had dug with my own hands, and slowly killing flies I had caught between the windowpane and the tulle curtains, which stank of cigarettes; when they fell to the pertforated board over the radiator, the flies were gangsters who were finally paying the price for their crimes. Until the age of forty-five, it was my habit, whenever I was drifting in that sweet cloud between sleep and wakefulness, to cheer myself by imagining I was killing people. I would like to apologize to my close relatives--some, like my brother, very close indeed--as well as to the many politicians, literary luminaries, tradesmen, and mostly imaginary characters among my victims. Another frequent crime: I'd lavish affections on a cat, only to strike it cruelly in a  moment of despair, from which I would emerge with a bout of laughter that made me so ashamed I would shower the poor cat with even more love than before. one afternoon twenty-five years later, when I was doing my military service, watching an entire company linger in the canteen after lunch for a chat and a smoke, I survey these 750 almost identical soldiers and imagined that their heads were separated from their bodies. As I contemplated their bloody esophagi through the cigarette smoke that bathed the cvernous canteen in a sweet transparent-blue haze, one of my soldier friends said, "Stop swinging your legs, son. I'm tired and I've had enough."