Manhood: A Journey From Childhood Into the Fierce Order of Virility by Michel Leiris

Author:Michel Leiris [Leiris, Michel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Philosophy, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780226471419
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1992-06-14T23:00:00+00:00

STITCHES

OF THE last episode to be related here, I myself was the hero, and I still bear the scar of it under my left eyebrow. On certain days (particularly when the weather is hot) it is redder and more visible, seemingly recent, so that I am occasionally asked what injury I have just suffered.

I was twelve years old, attending that school run by a priest, where I had made my first Communion; and the incident occurred in the school courtyard, during a recreation period. Running at top speed—in some game or gymnastic contest—I collided with one of my schoolmates coming in the opposite direction, and was dashed against the wall so violently that I split the flesh open to the bone just beneath my left eyebrow. I remained kneeling—or on all fours—on the gravel, head down, bleeding heavily. Apparently I lost consciousness, but I have no recollection of this, and actually supposed, before I was told I had fainted, that I had remained conscious throughout the incident. Since the wall was on my right and my head had been injured on the left side, I did not realize that I must have pivoted around before falling to the position in which I was making these stupefied reflections. At first I thought that the mere encounter of my forehead with that of my fellow pupil had cut my face open; it was only later that I learned that I had torn my flesh against a rough place on the wall, or against a nail stuck on this wall. I felt my blood flowing; I wasn't suffering from the slightest pain, but so violent had the shock been that it seemed as if my wound must be enormous, and that I had been disfigured. The first thing that occurred to me was: "How can I ever make love?" I don't think that I was in love with any particular girl at the time; it was merely a matter of the future, which I envisaged from a purely emotional angle and which seemed to me, because of the wound that was certainly hideous, irremediably spoiled. "How can I ever make love to anybody?" I asked myself, and the question filled me, rising from my heart to my head, and I would certainly have collapsed under its weight if by its very formulation I had not sensed that I had acceded to a certain exalting tragic level which afforded me both the pride of having to play a part and the necessary strength to play it properly. The trousers of my Norfolk suit were bloodstained, and there must also have been blood on the flannel-lined high-button leggings—the ones which, a year or two later, my lycée schoolmates baptized "grandfather's boots"—so long a required article of my winter wardrobe, to my great mortification.

I was picked up and carried to the kitchen, where the woman in charge, sickened by the sight of blood and twice sighing "hélas!" washed my wound before taking me to the pharmacist.

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