My Body in Nine Parts (8 page)

My left ear, on the contrary, loves when I clean her inside. She gives herself completely to my Q-tip. She abandons herself to it. And so my Q-tip rubs her inside gently, caresses her in slow circular motions, but being very careful not to go too deep and burst the tympan.

Some people have commented that my ears were well placed on my head. Symmetrically placed. Squarely in line with my eyes.

One person, a musician, even compared the placement of my ears on each side of my face with the perfect placement of speakers in a living room in order to obtain the best sound from the pick-up.

Others have noted that I have nice ears because the lobes are not too big and not overly twisted, and do not stick out too much on either side of my head.

And it's true that my ears do not extend beyond a reasonable distance from my face, and as such make my face more harmonious than it really is.

My ears bring a certain balance to the incongruous other parts that make up my face, whose story I have already told.

Though lately, with age, and the efforts one makes to hear more clearly, it seems that my ears have gotten bigger. Almost as large as my nose, and that's saying a lot.

Yet, a few people even told me that I had sexy ears. Well, mostly women told me that when the envy takes them to kiss one of my ears, and even lick it. Which I sort of like, but not when the tongue of the one who is kissing my ear makes it all wet. My ears don't like to be wet inside. Especially the right ear. The insensitive one.

The other thing I also noticed about my ears, besides their difference of character, is that my left ear is much more sensitive to music than the right one. Much more responsive too.

I didn't notice this the same day I noticed how different my ears were one from the other. I discovered that sensitivity to music after I became conscious of their different personalities.

Erica and I had gone to our first concert together. So that goes way back. Just before we were married. It was a Mahler concert. The Fifth Symphony. That day, during the concert, I noticed that I heard music better, more distinctly, more clearly from my left side.

From my right side the music sounded more distant, more faint, indistinct, even when the percussion blasted.

This is how I found out. At one point during the concert, in the middle of the second movement, when the music reaches a sublime moment that crescendos to a bombastic percussion roll, I turned my head toward Erica who was sitting on my right, in very good seats by the way, ninth row center, a great view of Boulez conducting, I turned my head towards Erica to see if she too was enjoying that musical moment as much as I was, and that's when I noticed that I was hearing the music better with my left ear facing the orchestra, than when listening facing the orchestra. This was confirmed when I turned my head all the way to the other side to listen to the music with my right ear. From that side, the music was not as clear, the notes not as precise. The sound was fuzzy.

Now, you are going to tell me that perhaps I was going deaf in one ear and that's the reason why I heard the music better with the other ear which was still normal. To this I will answer, that the day I heard Mahler's Fifth more clearly with my left ear than with my right, I was still too young to be losing my sense of hearing, and besides, I had just had my ears checked a couple of days before the concert. If you don't believe me I can show you the calendar in which I wrote all my appointments that year. I still have it. I keep all my appointment calendars for future reference. Every year I get a new one. The year in which I noted in my little book the appointment for my ears to be checked was 1958.

So you see.

Incidentally, that's the year I met Erica, and we discovered we both loved Mahler's music.

But to come back to my ears. That day at that concert, I heard the music more clearly, more precisely, more harmoniously with my left ear. And not as clearly, not as precisely, not as harmoniously with my right ear.

I know, you're going to say, it was simply that when I turned my head to the right, the orchestra played a louder part of the music, and a softer part when I turned my head back the other way, and that's why I was under the impression that my left ear heard music better than my right ear.

Well, I will tell you that I repeated the experiment several times during the Mahler symphony, and each time I could tell the difference, and it had nothing to do with the music getting louder or softer.

I would try the experiment when the music was constant for a long moment, several bars. For instance during a long violin solo
tremolo
.

And I will also tell you that since then I have experimented this way many times while listening to music, at other concerts, or on a disk at home on my pick-up, or in night-clubs. I am certain that my left ear is more sensitive to music than my right ear. More open to it.

Now there is another consideration which has come into play. Erica tells me that I hear selectively. For instance, she claims, that when she calls me from the kitchen to come and take out the garbage, I don't hear. Or seem not to have heard her call. And yet, when she calls me for dinner, I have no trouble at all hearing her, and respond instantly. So she claims.

That's really all I wanted to tell you about my ears.

Of course, more could be said about this curious part of the human body, but one would soon tumble into the banality of the universality of ears among the various species on this planet, human as well as animal, and one could insist that an ear is just as good as another ear, as long as it performs what it is supposed to do, hear. One could lament that the one who created us could have adorned our face with something a bit more aesthetic than ears. Something less visible.

Though knowing how malicious our creator can be, imagine if he had placed two noses on our face, one on each side.

I think I'd better stop here.

Today I would like to tell you about my eyes. To try and describe them, and how they see the world.

The women who love me say that I have beautiful eyes. Deep sexy eyes.

Perhaps you do not know this, but some eyes are flat, superficial, impenetrable, cold. And others are deep, soft, warm, affable,
accueillants
.

I have often been told that I have soft, warm eyes. Women, especially, tell me that. Those who love me, and those who loved me in the past.

I am not bragging. I am simply reporting how women see my eyes.

Me, when I look at my eyes in the mirror, I see them differently. I see them small. Small and oval. I have small squinty eyes surrounded by crow's feet wrinkles.

I would have liked to have big eyes, but it was not for me to decide. It's my mother who made them as they are.

My mother had such beautiful big black eyes. Deeply set black eyes always full of sadness. Ah, how my mother's eyes wept in her life.

I do not see sadness in my small eyes when I look at them. Rather, I see mischievousness. A kind of joyful malice. Or if you prefer, I see laughter in my eyes. I think I have laughing eyes.

My eyes may be small, but they look at the world intensely. When I look at something, let's say a painting or a landscape, my eyes penetrate what I am looking at.

And this is how I look at a beautiful woman. Intensely, with a penetrating gaze. I like to observe a woman even before I speak to her. Just to get a feel of her personality. I trust my eyes.

A Frenchman once told me that I had
des yeux strabiques
.

I didn't know that word. So I looked it up in the dictionary.

Strabique:
Affecté de strabisme
.

Strabisme:
Défaut de parallélisme des axes optiques des yeux, entraînant un trouble de la vision binoculaire
.

Can you believe that? The guy was all wrong. There is nothing strabismic about my eyes. I don't have
un oeil qui dit zut à l'autre
. No, one of my eyes does not say hello to the other.

I am definitely not cross-eyed as was Jean-Paul Sartre. Now I remember how Céline once referred to Sartre as
un poisson rouge strabique
. I thought it was perfect.

It's possible that I have a shifty gaze. Shifty in the sense that it is difficult to decipher what I say with my eyes. So, one could say that I have an oblique gaze, but certainly not a
strabique
look.

My eyes have cried a lot in my life. And not because I am sentimental. I know that a man is not supposed to admit that he cries easily. In our time, when a man cries, it's a sign of weakness. It's not masculine, we are told.

In the 18th Century men cried freely in public. That's why they always had a lace handkerchief tucked into the sleeve of their coat.

Onions make me cry. I see an onion, I smell it, and immediately I start crying like a little child. When my wife is peeling onions in the kitchen, I am forced to leave the house until the onions are cooked.

A little nothing can make me cry. A burst of wind in the eye, and here come the tears. I am not ashamed to cry. Let's say that in general I have humid eyes.

Some people have dry eyes. Others wet eyes.

It is said that dry eyes and humid eyes mark the difference between good and bad people. A dry gaze is a sign of meanness, hardness, indifference. A humid gaze shows kindness, tenderness, graciousness.

Therefore, one can determine if a person is kind or hard, tender or mean simply by looking at that person's eyes.

So it can be said that because I have humid eyes, I am a kind person. A person who is not afraid to weep to express his emotions.

Not that I think of myself better than another, or more emotional.

But it's especially at the movies that I cry the most. When there is a sad scene.

For instance, the other day I went to see the Italian movie called,
Sorrisi a Plaza San Marco
freely adapted from my novel
Smiles on Washington Square
. The director, Luigi Fratenelli, decided to transpose the action, the love story of Moinous and Sucette to Venice. He even changed the name of the lovers. In the film Moinous is called Romeo, and Sucette Guillieta. A little too obvious, but I was not consulted. I don't know the actors who play the part of the lovers who exchange smiles without ever talking to each other, but I must admit that they play their roles with a great deal of talent and passion. And it is in fact in the finale scene, when Guillieta gets up to leave with Roberto and drops the poor Romeo there in that trattoria, where they were having an espresso, and he tumbles back into the mud of despair and loneliness, as it is said at the end of the novel, that I started crying quietly. I remained in my seat until everyone had left the theater. Not that I was ashamed of my tears. Others next to me also cried softly. I heard them. No, I stayed there simply to enjoy my tears.

Excuse this detour to the movies, but I wanted to show you why crying is very natural for me.

I cannot prevent myself from crying. Certain persons can hold back their tears. Can sob in their throat without tears in their eyes. Not me. With me the tears have to flow. That's why I always have a handkerchief in my pocket, like the gentlemen of old. Though I have replaced the lace handkerchief with paper tissues.

One never knows when the occasion will arise for me to cry.

I cry especially when I see starving children. Starving African children for instance that are shown on the television news to make us feel guilty because of our good life.

I knew hunger when I was a child, and often saw my mother with tears in her eyes because she could not give us enough to eat, to my sisters and I, because we were so poor. My father, who was an artist, couldn't earn enough money from his work to feed his family, and there were times when we stood in line at the soup kitchen. So today I cry for starving children.

But that's not what I wanted to tell you. I wanted to tell you about my eyes, and not those of my mother.

Still, I can't help myself from telling you how beautiful my mother's big black eyes were. Eyes always full of tears because she was so unhappy before her eyes were brutally closed. But that's another story.

I should tell you the color of my eyes. They are brown. But when I look at them closely in the mirror I can see a blue-gray circle around the pupils. My wife says that they are hazel.

My father's eyes were blue-gray. Even more gray than blue. Could it be that I also have my father's eyes?

I don't remember when exactly my eyes began to see less clearly, less precisely, and I had to get glasses. Especially for reading and writing.

It would now be impossible for me to write what I am in the process of telling you without my reading glasses.

This does not mean that I am losing my sight. On the contrary, I think I apprehend the world better without my glasses, even if what I see seems blurred.

One can see things clearly by instinct. One can even see better with one's eyes closed. It's a matter of concentration. When I close my eyes, I see the beautiful big black eyes of my mother.