The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios. Yann Martel
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read anymore; I would stare for hours at the same paragraph of Kant or Heidegger, trying to understand what it was saying, trying to focus, without any success. At the same time, I developed a loathing for my country. Canada reeked of insipidity, comfort and insularity. Canadians were up to their necks in materialism and above the neck it was all American television. Nowhere could I see idealism or rigour. There was nothing but deadening mediocrity. Canada’s policy on Central America, on Native issues, on the environment, on Reagan’s America, on everything, made my stomach turn. There was nothing about this country that I liked, nothing. I couldn’t wait to escape.
One day in a philosophy seminar—that was my major—I was doing a presentation on Hegel’s philosophy of history. The professor, an intelligent and considerate man, interrupted me and asked me to elucidate a point he hadn’t understood. I fell silent. I looked about the cosy, book-filled office where we were sitting. I remember that moment of silence very clearly because it was precisely then, rising through my confusion with unstoppable force, that I boiled over with anger and cynicism. I screamed, I got up, I projected the hefty Hegel book through the closed window, and I stormed out of the office, slamming the door as hard as I could and kicking in one of its nicely sculptured panels for good measure.
I tried to withdraw from Ellis, but I missed the deadline. I appealed and appeared in front of a committee, the Committee on Undergraduate Standings and Petitions, CUSP they call it. My grounds for withdrawing were Paul, but when the chairman of CUSP prodded me and asked me in a glib little voice what exactly I meant by “emotional distress”, I looked at him and I decided that Paul’s agony wasn’t an orange I was going to peel and quarter and present to him. This time, however, I didn’t make a scene. I just said, “I’ve changed my mind. I would like to withdraw my petition. Thank you for your attention,” and I walked out.
As a result I failed my year. But I didn’t care and I don’t care. I hung around Roetown, a nice place to hang around.
But what I really want to tell you about, the purpose of this story, is the Roccamatio family of Helsinki. That’s not Paul’s family; his last name was Atsee. Nor is it my family.
You see, Paul spent months in the hospital. When his condition was stable he came home, but mostly I remember him at the hospital. The course of his illnesses, tests and treatments became the course of his life. Against my will I became familiar with words like azidothymidine, alpha interferon, domipramine, nitrazepam. (When you’re with people who are really sick, you discover what an illusion science can be.) I visited Paul. I was making the trip to Toronto to see him once or twice during the week, and often on weekends too, and I was calling him every day. When I was there, if he was strong enough, we would go for a walk or see a movie or a play. Mostly, though, we just sat around. But when you’re between four walls and neither of you wants to watch television anymore, and the papers have been read and you’re sick of playing cards, chess, Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit, and you can’t always be talking about it and its progress, you run out of ways to whittle away the time. Which was fine. Neither Paul nor I minded just sitting there, listening to music, lost in our own thoughts.
Except that I started feeling we should do something with that time. I don’t mean put on togas and ruminate philosophically about life, death, God and the meaning of it all. We had done that in first term, before we even knew he was sick. That’s the staple of undergraduate life, isn’t it? What else is there to talk about when you’ve stayed up all night till sunrise? Or when you’ve just read Descartes or Berkeley or T.S. Eliot for the first time? And anyway, Paul was nineteen. What are you at nineteen? You’re a blank page. You’re all hopes and dreams and uncertainties. You’re all future and little philosophy. What I meant was that between the two of us we had to do something constructive, something that would make something out of nothing, sense out of nonsense, something that would go beyond talking about life, death, God and the meaning of it all and actually be those things.
I gave it a good thinking. I had plenty of time to think: in the spring I got a job as a gardener for the city of Roetown. I spent my days tending flowerbeds, clipping shrubbery and mowing lawns, work that kept my hands busy but left my mind free.
The idea came to me one day as I was pushing a gas mower across an endless expanse of municipal lawn, my ears muffled by industrial ear protectors. Two words stopped me dead in my tracks: Boccaccio’s Decameron. I had read a beaten-up copy of the Italian classic when I was in India. Such a simple idea: an isolated villa outside of Florence; the world dying of the Black Death; ten people gathered together hoping to survive; telling each other stories to pass the time.
That was it. The transformative wizardry of the imagination. Boccaccio had done it in the fourteenth century, we would do it in the twentieth: we would tell each other stories. But we would be the sick this time, not the world, and we wouldn’t be fleeing it, either. On the contrary: with our stories we would be remembering the world, re-creating it, embracing it. Yes, to meet as storytellers to embrace the world—there, that was how Paul and I would destroy void.
The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. Paul and I would create a story about a family, a large family, to allow diverse yet related stories, to ensure continuity and development. The family would be Canadian and the setting would be contemporary, to make the historical and cultural references easy. But I would have to be a firm guide and not let the stories slide into mere autobiography. And I would have to be well prepared so that I could carry the story all by myself when Paul was too weak or depressed. I would also have to convince him that he had no choice, that this storytelling wasn’t a game or something on the same level as watching a movie or talking about politics. He would have to see that everything besides the story was useless, even his desperate existential thoughts that did nothing but frighten him. Only the imaginary must count.
But the imaginary doesn’t spring from nothing. If our story was to have any stamina, any breadth and depth, if it was to avoid both literal reality and irrelevant fantasy, it would need a structure, a guideline of sorts, some curb along which we blind could tap our white canes. I racked my brains trying to find just such a structure. We needed something firm yet loose, that would both restrict us and inspire us.
I hit upon it while picking weeds: we would use the history of the twentieth century. Not that the story would start in 1901 and progress up to 1986—that wouldn’t be much of a blueprint. Rather, the twentieth century would be our mould; we would use one event from each year as a metaphorical guideline. It would be a story in eighty-six episodes, each episode echoing one event from one year of the unfolding century.
To have figured out what to make of my time with Paul electrified me. I was bursting with ideas. Nothing struck me as more worthwhile than making the trip from Roetown to Toronto—commuting, imagine; that dull, work-related chore—to invent stories with Paul.
I explained it to him carefully. It was at the hospital. He was undergoing tests.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “What do you mean by ‘metaphorical guideline’? And when does the story take place?”
“Nowadays. The family exists right now. And the historical events we choose will be a parallel, something to guide us in making up our stories about the family. Like Homer’s Odyssey was a parallel for Joyce when he was writing Ulysses.”
“I’ve never read Ulysses.”
“That doesn’t matter. The point is, the novel takes place in Dublin on a single day in 1904, but it’s named after an ancient Greek epic. Joyce used the ten years’ wandering of Ulysses after the Trojan War as a parallel for his story in Dublin. His story is a metaphorical transformation of the Odyssey.”
“Why don’t we just read the book aloud since I’ve never read it?”
“Because we don’t want to be spectators, Paul.”
“Oh.”
“To start with, we have to decide where the family lives.”
He was looking at me blankly. He was sceptical and tired—but I insisted. I even got a touch annoyed. I didn’t use any of the D words, but they were in the air. His face crumpled