My Body in Nine Parts by Raymond Federman Read Free Book Online

from under the debris of that crushed nail. That poor toe never recovered from that blow. Even today he suffers from it. And he reminds me of that accident every time I cut his nail. Blames me for being what it is today. The ruins of a glorious nail.
    Bon , I know what you’re going to say, Federman, stop bugging us with your pathetic past and your suffering on the farm. Especially since there is no way to verify what you say happened. Maybe your toe-nail got like that because you stuck it into some polluted place.
    Believe what you want, but if you were to examine the nail of my big right toe you would understand that this toe and its nail underwent a rather traumatic experience.
    But let me get to the end of this unfortunate toe. Since that catastrophic day on the farm, the nail has things growing underneath that stick to it. I say things because I don’t know what else to call that hard calcareous matter that grows under the nail like some alien matter. It feels like cement when I try to cut it, or rather try to extricate it from underneath the nail with a little tweezer, with a knife, with a scraper. That stuff sticks to the nail obstinately. So that cutting the nail of that toe becomes a real battle. Afterwards, I’m exhausted. And my leg is all stiff from having stayed up that long off the ground on the edge of the sink in the bathroom.
    Well, that’s the discovery I made last night about my toes which I wanted to share with you. If you wish, next time, I can tell you about my fingers and their nails. They too have very interesting original personalities.

 
MY VOICE

    What one hears in a work of art [whether literature, music, or painting, because music and painting speak to us as much as literature] is a voice – always a voice – and this voice that speaks our origin [the nothingness whence we came before we uttered our first word], speaks at the same time our end [the nothingness towards which we are crawling].
    In this sense, the voice is at the same time birth [or resurrection] and death [or transfiguration]. The voice is what resists the nothingness that precedes us and the nothingness that confronts us. Or to put it more poetically: The breath whose domestication in the throat of the human animal created the voice that engendered the conscious and moral [or immoral] mystical beast that we are tells the whole human adventure.
    Therefore, my voice, in this sense, is my human adventure. I don’t remember how and when it was domesticated, but it was. Perhaps, as an error of nature.
    When I speak, whether I say something true or false, or something intelligent or stupid, I am telling myself.
    That’s about all I can say about my voice. Except that when I speak English I have a pronounced French accent. An accent, I confess, carefully cultivated for social and sentimental reasons. I have domesticated my French accent.
    Bilingual as I am, I have often been told that when I speak French it sounds English, and when I speak English it sounds French. Especially in the way I construct my sentences. My syntax seems foreign in both languages. I suppose it’s because of the uneven rhythm I give to the words and the phrases I articulate. And it is true that I have a rather unorthodox way of arranging the invisible words that come out of my mouth, and the visible words I scribble on paper.
    The somewhat incoherent cadence of my voice certainly corresponds to the cadence of my life, since my voice speaks my life. And to make it worse, I often speak myself in two languages at the same time without making any distinction between the two. Except that, I think my English voice is deeper, graver than my French voice. More serious also. Whereas my French voice, I’ve been told, sounds joyful, playful, more free, typically Parisian.
    To conclude, all I can say: I speak therefore I am. But one day, as my old friend Sam used to say, I’ll manage to shut up, barring an accident.
    No, maybe I