Then a solution occurred to me. If the city could give off artificial light, then why couldn’t I? And from up close. So I turned on my flashlight. I pointed the light at the line of tiny carapaces and then out toward the sea. Over and over again. Nothing happened at first, but a few seconds later the little creatures began following the path of my flashlight, which I was guiding toward that body of liquid that had perpetuated their species from the first instant to the first day, from the day to the year, from the year to an era. I waded into the water up to my knees and watched as they crawled to the shore. They all reached the water safely. From the first turtle that would have been the last to reach the highway, to the last turtle that would have been the first.
I sat back down again to contemplate the sea. But this time I imagined myself crawling toward the highway, drying out, losing all my moisture along the way. I saw myself creeping along hideously, on that beach where nobody would lend a hand, nobody would point a light over my body and tell a man undressing me what I didn’t want to explain, what I couldn’t explain, who entered me not for an explanation, because I had none to give, but to swim in the sea, which is the same as thinking about nothing.
Of course this experience didn’t help N whatsoever. She asked me to please be less allegorical, and said if I really wanted her help, I had to show her what these men were running away from. But that was impossible for me at that time. I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t even want to see it for myself. We said our goodbyes.
For a long time, allegory was the only level I could use to explain what was happening to me. Now, seen from a distance, I’m glad because I think the way I expressed myself then corresponded with a kind of naiveté, or perhaps modesty or bashfulness. I like to remember that I did go through that stage, same as everyone else, surely, and I’m glad in light of things that happened later, because the cruelty would come, and events would rip away the delicacy I used to have when telling my story. I learned to express things blatantly, in literal terms, direct, harsh, and painful. No sea. No water to alleviate the fever.
Jim often used to say that there is no relationship more intimate among men than that of war. Not love or friendship, no other relationship acknowledges like conflict the stuff that binds men together: knowledge. In war, survival is contingent upon knowing the enemy. The better you know him, the greater your chances for survival. You learn the most intimate things about people in war: what a man is capable of doing to his enemy, what he’s capable of doing to his own people, his father, his son, out of the pain inflicted by the adversary. The outer war always seeps into the inner war, into the home, the heart. Jim once mentioned a prisoner who had hidden a flute in the Burmese jungle when he was interned there. At night they would ask him to camouflage the howling of the people being tortured or the moans of the sick when they grew unbearable. Once one of the girls the camp guards kept to prepare food caught him playing it. Everyone expected her to snitch; it could mean extra rations or an unguent for insect bites. But the girl returned the following night. Silently she approached the flute player and gestured to him to let her touch the flute. She covered the holes with her fingers and blew. With the first sound, she dropped it on the floor and ran away. But she came back the next night and the next. And every time she blew a little longer. It was never melodic, which prompted someone to ask her in her own language what attracted her to the sound. She said she didn’t know, but the flute reminded her of a game her father, now dead, used to oblige her to play, though only wind came out of our friend’s flute. Hearing that, someone snatched the flute from the girl’s mouth and told her not to come back. Some days later she was seen kneeling in the sand, dirtier than usual, hair a mass of tangles, wild and unhinged. She was holding a huge lifeless lizard. Her only action was to hold the lizard’s yawning mouth to her lips and carefully blow.
The story of the flute, together with the description of the voices singing “Silent Night” in Uramaki’s cathedral, ties in with a series of associations and a third musical idea that relates to those years of my search for a sexual identity. This third musical connection took me by surprise a few months ago. One of the few times I was able to connect to the internet from the refugee camp, I watched a film a friend had sent in which one of the characters explains nymphomania using Bach’s concept of polyphony. In the same way polyphony made it possible to play and sing several melodic lines simultaneously, a nymphomaniac views all men as one single man. When I was a child and adolescent, I could only vaguely intuit what it was like to recognize the singularity in multiple voices; I hadn’t lived long enough to experience things that might overwhelm my spiritual tranquility. My doubts were always defined by an enigma, a confusion that never seemed to bother my schoolmates those first years, or even beyond the years of adolescence and youth. Everyone around me seemed so radically sure of his or her sexual identity. That’s why I began looking for links that would connect me with other people as undefined as me. And it was in the shape of Japan’s bridges that I found the closest simile to this idea of discerning the singular within a multiplicity. Not the flat bridges, but the arched ones, whose shape allows people to see the landscape from many different points of view as they cross over. So it’s not just a matter of walking from one side to the other, but of seeing how many landscapes can be found in a single one. I wanted a view from the bridge between man and woman, a bridge in whose curvature all genders are encompassed, the infinity of sexes that exist between either side. I’ve walked a long way, I’ve observed much, I’ve tried to understand.
Third Month:
By the time I met Jim I was already past being uneasy about my sexuality, but for some reason I still felt vulnerable, exposed, fragile even. I made up my mind to write him a letter and explain my issues before we had sex, a letter he kept for the rest of his life and that was returned to me when he died. The following is an excerpt of that letter. I’m skipping the heading, the closing, and a few things that skirt the central issue that prompted me to write it, the fear that Jim might be put off by me. Reading the letter will help you see how from the day I was born I was already saddled with the first of a series of inflictions that would make my life so problematic. What you can’t imagine, though, is how much happiness that infliction brought, which for such a long time I’d considered in a negative light. Even now, as I’m writing this, I’m stunned by something that’s just come to my attention. Something joyful and unexpected. But I’ll leave the details of that for the closing of my testimony, because when I penned this letter to Jim, I hadn’t the slightest inkling that there might be a compensation for all the heartache:
I was born with a sexual differentiation disorder. That’s the clinical term for it anyway. You’re probably more familiar with the layman’s term they use to define us: a hermaphrodite, or an intersexual person. Don’t you think I’ve ever been confused, though; I’ve always been a woman, since I was a little girl, even though I was educated as a boy. At birth, the doctors and my parents decided that I was a boy and so remained indifferent to certain ambiguous features. And my female organ, a half-formed uterus, wasn’t visible on the outside. I was sent to an all-boys school and raised in ignorance of the fact that for the first few weeks of my life, my sexual identity had been a source of confusion for the doctors. Until I turned twelve, my biggest troubles had to do with things like how I combed my hair, how I wore my uniform, how my teachers projected my future as a man.