JUNE 24. My fourteenth birthday. I hitched a ride to the top of Signal Hill in the back of a pickup truck, in the cab of which rode a man, his wife and their little girl, who kept alternately scowling and smiling at me from the small back window, pulling her mouth into shapes in an effort to look like me. As we passed the site of the picnic my mother, Medina and I had had there, I thought of what we had said and had not spoken as openly of since. That day we had been hemmed in by fog and rock, but this day was cool, clear and windy.
There were many other people on the hill, most of them gazing out to sea on this rare day of perfect visibility, shielding their eyes from the sun with one hand to get a better look and holding their coats together at the throat with the other, their hair and scarves blown back horizontal by the wind. Some children and even a few grown-ups whom I had never set eyes on before said, “Hi Percy,” and I nodded to them.
Even people who live by it are spellbound by the sea, gape at it in the morning as if it wasn’t there the night before. What a curiously urbanized people we were, I thought, gazing in wonder at the sea as if word of it had been spreading since the sun came up, rumours of a great tract of water by which we would henceforth be separated from the main. We stared as, in 1905, our ancestors had stared at the towering iceberg uncannily shaped like the Virgin Mary that had floated by on this very day, the feast day of the Baptist. Late in the season for an iceberg and therefore all the more miraculous. The Ice Queen of Heaven. The Virgin Berg. Our Lady of the Frigid Fjords.
Like me, these people knew nothing of boats, of ocean navigation, of fishing except the kind you could do while standing knee-deep in a pond. They saw the weather as nothing more than an unrelenting nuisance. They didn’t understand the inextricable connectedness of wind and water. In many ways, we were almost as urban as the people of Lower Manhattan. Islanders living right on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean—without at least an hour’s notice they could not have said from which direction the wind was blowing or what the implications of that information would have been for the weather forecast.
Yeats had heard the “sea-wind scream upon the tower.” My mother had several times read to me his “prayer” for his daughter: that she not be granted beauty overmuch … lest she consider beauty a sufficient end … and never find a friend. What was my mother trying to tell me—that it might be for the best that I was “not granted beauty overmuch”? Self-infatuation, the curse of beauty. Not quite the same as that of ugliness. Or that no one knew better than she did what to live with “beauty overmuch” was like? I imagined her waking up one morning to find her face stained, her hands and feet both stained and doubled in size. How much solace would she have found in the poetry of Yeats? A Prayer for Penelope. A Prayer for My Son.
But I wouldn’t have minded the company of a girl who, from having been granted beauty overmuch, was so shallow as to want nothing from others but adulation—it would be fine with me. Throw me your bone and I’ll throw you mine. Does that seem crude and pathetic? Very well, then, I was crude and pathetic, and in that way, if in few others, typical of teenage boys. I’m trying to distinguish between lust and love lust. I have lusted, unrequited, after hundreds, but I have love-lusted after no one but my mother. Would this have been the case but for my FSS? Who knows?
There are many things that, barring apocalypse, will always be taboo: murder, rape, molestation, tyranny and torture. And so on. Of taboos, mine is not the first, much less the last. It is anomalous, not typical, even as taboos go. There’s no point in asking if it’s right or wrong. It happens by the confluence of circumstances, every one of which is unlikely, and that very confluence beggars belief. Just remember, I’m the one who said my mother was a prostitute for sleeping with the man who kept a roof above my head. I am not some sexual iconoclast. My case is just a tad more hopeless than that of the few among us who have truly been in love. My story is not an alibi, not a euphemistic closing argument in defence of breaking what many people call the worst taboo.
Standing on Signal Hill, I found I could look down at the ruins of the old smallpox sanatorium, beyond which the lone and level sea stretched far away. It was easy to imagine that there was no far shore, that all of us had come to the top of the hill as though to the edge of a never-ending universe of water, the origin of all four winds, the realm of Aeolus. Guglielmo Marconi, second only to Ben Franklin among the famed flyers of kites, gave Signal Hill its name when he flew his kite, antenna attached, from the top of the hill, and claimed to hear, in Morse code, the letter S sent by wireless telegraph from Clifden, Ireland—supposedly the first transatlantic telegraph transmission. Marconi’s claim was contested by Thomas Edison, who called him a hoaxster, but Marconi stuck to his story. His credibility was somewhat weakened years later when he became one of Italy’s most decorated pre-war Fascists, honoured by Benito Mussolini agreeing to be the best man at his wedding.
Far down below, I could glimpse the Purity Factory, makers and purveyors for decades of what my mother called “cram,” cheap confections that I loved as much as other children did. In what looked like liquor bottles came alcohol-free, distilled syrup so sweet you had to mix it with four parts water; children added ice cubes to it and strolled about sipping, like grown-ups, from tumblers of what looked like Scotch. There were Purity raisin squares that were more like raisin sandwiches, raisins layered between two goo-soaked slabs of pastry. Red jelly balls—balls of cake with centres of generic jam. Jam-jams and lemon creams. Sweet bread, also called excursion bread, which looked like loaves of hard tack but was not as hard and split into slate-like pieces when you pierced them with a knife. Peppermint knobs that looked like white, pink-striped bumblebees. Candy kisses—peanut butter, rum and butter, butterscotch, coconut, banana. I loved them all.
A silent, blank-faced young man clad in a white T-shirt and blue jeans walked about among us, holding a sign that read:
MOVE ON, MOVE ON
NEWFOUNDLAND IS DEAD AND GONE
CONFEDERATION PUT HER IN THE GRAVE
No one paid him much attention. Nationality. “You speak to me of nationality … and religion.” A net harder for some to fly by than for others. I too could summon up no interest in the cause that he was mourning. Born after confederation with Canada, I had never been what most of these people thought of as a “real Newfoundlander.” But even for the old Newfoundlanders there had been no pledge of allegiance, no exam such as immigrants have to pass these days, no oath to swear. Canadian citizenship required nothing of them. It was conferred upon them while they slept on March 31, 1949. They went to bed Newfoundlanders and woke up Canadians. It must have been like being baptized without giving your consent. Now they sat in mute bewilderment in front of television sets that brought them news from a foreign country. It would have made little difference to most of them if they were told they were citizens of Patagonia. They couldn’t opt out, couldn’t be conscientious objectors. Not unless they left, exiled themselves and lived their lives in unacknowledged protest of defeat.
Most, but not all, parts of “the bay” were outports situated on the coast. To townies, the bay was a nebulous elsewhere in which they didn’t have much interest. “The bay” had always been, would always be, another country. The unconsolidated “bay,” settlements, strung out like Christmas lights on the perimeter of Newfoundland and so widely scattered that each one knew little more of its nearest neighbours than the names of the fabled places they lived in, places never seen by most that existed as much in rumour as in fact, as real to those who lived elsewhere as London was to me. The real bay was the one you could not get to from St. John’s except by boat—hypothetical boat, for demand for such a thing was non-existent.
I looked down at the place from which The Attempt was often made. St. John’s was the starting point, or finishing point, for world record–seeking crossers of the Atlantic. There was a monument somewhere down there to Alcock and Brown, who had taken off from Lester’s Field in their Vickers Vimy bomber and crash-landed safely in a bog in Clifden, Ireland, becoming the first aviators to survive a non-stop transatlantic aircraft flight. There was no monument to the man from Minnesota who tried to water-ski from St. John’s to Clifden, only to die of hypothermia less than a mile from the Narrows when the boat that was towing him broke down. An endless variety of unlikely mariners made The Attempt in unlikely vessels. A man in a one-man submarine was given a rousing send-off to what proved to be the bottom of the ocean, for no trace of him or his craft was ever found. The Attempt was unsuccessfully made by hot-air balloonists, most of whom were kept from freezing to death by their hydrogen-heating flame propellant, which immolated one man in mid-air. He fell, flaming, Icarus-like, into the ocean, thankfully out of range of spectators, his unmanned balloon travelling for seventy miles before ditching on the deck of a cruise ship bound for Greenland. Rowboats, canoes, kayaks, leg-powered bicycle kites, near-weightless gliders and a host of mini dirigibles all failed in The Attempt.
The City of Percy Joyce.
The City of Percy.
I am Percy Joyce, lord of all that I survey. I felt like shouting it out loud. How quickly word would spread that I’d been seen and heard asserting my identity. Anyone who knew me would have been more amused than surprised to hear me claiming suzerainty over all I gazed upon. Percy Joyce, King of Kings. Look, ye Mighty, on my works and despair. Still, I thought, better not to swell the legend in case my compos mentis was ever called into question, as, under certain circumstances, it might one day be.
This is my city, awarded to me by my mother, Penelope, as a birthday present. This is my day and my city, mine and John the Baptist’s.
This is my city, as is whatever can be seen from any part of it: the harbour, buffered from the sea by the south-side hill known as the Brow; the city on the north side of the hill with its almost fully blooming, house-camouflaging trees; the Basilica atop the Mount in the centre of the ridge; the towering Confederation Building to the east, topping yet another hill, affrontingly, undeniably there for every citizen of anti-Canada St. John’s to see.
Omphalos. It is the Greek word for navel, belly button. The centre of the universe, the site of the Delphic Oracle that spoke in fateful riddles. My omphalos was surrounded by a stain, my belly button like the bull’s eye of a target.