The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios. Yann Martel

Seton, author, naturalist and artist, organizes the Boy Scouts of Canada. The aim of the organization, like that of the Girl Guides founded two years later, is to foster good citizenship, decent behaviour, love of nature, and skill in various outdoor activities. The Scouts follow a moral code and are encouraged to perform a daily good deed. They go camping, swimming, sailing and hiking. They undertake community service projects. Their motto is “Be Prepared”, and they shake hands with the left hand.

      I had not envisioned the Roccamatios so ambitiously. Marriages, the runaway daughter, the bitter but liberating divorce, childbirth, entrepreneurial success, romance, community leadership—they are a dynamic family. Paul and I go about them briskly. I meant for us to alternate years, but so far they have been more of a co-operative invention.

      But there are clouds on the horizon. The year 1909 is mine. I see trial and error in the story I make of it. Paul sees trial and fraud. It’s the first time we quibble. And I’m troubled by his story for 1910.

      1909—Commander Robert E. Peary, on his third attempt, claims to reach the North Pole. Though generally accepted, the claim is questioned by many because of the inadequacy of his observations and the incredible timetable of travelling he has submitted.

      1910—Japan, increasingly militaristic and determined to expand its power and influence, annexes Korea and begins to exploit the country’s people and resources entirely for its own benefit. Koreans are denied freedom of speech, of assembly and association, even of going to school in their own language.

      I launch the Roccamatios into the hurly-burly of Helsinki municipal politics!

      1911—A federal election is called in Canada. The dominant issue of the campaign is reciprocity, an agreement to lower tariffs between Canada and the United States. Liberal Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier favours reciprocity. Conservative Opposition leader Robert Borden does not. Eastern Canadian manufacturers cry that such an economic accord will be the first step in a political takeover. Certain statements by influential Americans—“I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions, clear to the North Pole,” says Champ Clark, Speaker of the House of Representatives—seem to justify those fears. Laurier and his Liberals go down to a resounding defeat and Borden becomes prime minister.

      Paul’s moods are changing. I think he’s starting to realize what he’s in for. Initially his pills and injections were a source of delight. Here comes health, they signalled to him. You’ll beat this. But health eludes him, and he’s angry about it. He still takes his medicines religiously, but they taste bitter now, not sweet. In 1912, the Minimum Wage law is passed in England; Roald Amundsen reaches the South Pole; a beautiful bust of Queen Nefertiti is discovered in Egypt by German archaeologists; Edgar Rice Burroughs publishes his first Tarzan stories; Marcel Duchamp shows his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. But Paul will have none of these. His story, about a mugging, is plain, simple and brutal.

      1912—After a siege of five hours in Choisy-le-Roy, a suburb of Paris, anarchist Jules Joseph Bonnot is killed. Bonnot and his gang, la bande à Bonnot as they are known, have been terrorizing French society with the jaunty unconcern with which they shoot tellers, guards, passers-by, policemen, dwellers and drivers during their bare-faced bank robberies, break-ins and car thefts. In the final attack on his holdout, the authorities deploy against a solitary Bonnot three artillery regiments and five police brigades, and they use guns, heavy machine guns and dynamite. Bonnot is found, still alive, wrapped in a mattress. He is finished off. There are more than thirty thousand spectators at the siege.

      Lasting optimism has one essential ally: reason. Any optimism that is unreasonable is bound to be dashed by reality, leading to even more unhappiness. Optimism, therefore, must always be illuminated by the gentle, purging light of reason and be unshakeably grounded in sanity of mind, so that pessimism becomes a foolish, shortsighted attitude. What this means—reasonableness being the tepid, inglorious thing it is—is that optimism can arise only from small but undeniable achievements. In 1913, I put my best foot forward.

       1913—The zipper is patented.

      Paul has been hospitalized. He’s having a relapse of Pneumocystis carinii. He’s put on dapsone and trimethoprim again, but this time he suffers side effects: a fever, and a rash all over his neck and chest. He’s amazingly thin; he hardly eats and his diarrhoea is intractable. He has a tube up his nose. In his story, Marco Roccamatio has a serious fall-out with his brother Orlando.

      1914—In Sarajevo, for the sake of a South Slav nationalist dream, nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip pulls the trigger of his revolver and starts the First World War.

       Austria declares war on Serbia.

       Germany declares war on Russia.

       Germany declares war on France.

       Germany declares war on Belgium.

      Great Britain (and with her Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Newfoundland) declares war on Germany.

       Montenegro declares war on Austria.

       Austria declares war on Russia.

       Serbia declares war on Germany.

       Montenegro declares war on Germany.

       France declares war on Austria.

       Great Britain declares war on Austria.

       Japan declares war on Germany.

       Japan declares war on Austria.

       Austria declares war on Belgium.

       Russia declares war on Turkey.

       Serbia declares war on Turkey.

       Great Britain declares war on Turkey.

       France declares war on Turkey.

       Egypt declares war on Turkey.

      I tell Paul 1914 was the year the Panama Canal was opened and wouldn’t it make for a more pleasant story?

      “Your history is biased,” he replies.

      “So is yours,” I shoot back.

      “But mine is the correct bias.”

      “How do you know?”

      “Because it accounts for the future.”

      I can’t understand it. I have read of people who have AIDS who live for years. Yet week by week Paul is getting thinner and weaker. He is receiving treatments, yes, but they don’t seem to be doing much, except for his pneumonia. Anyway, he doesn’t seem to have any particular illness, just a wasting away. I ask a doctor about it, nearly complain about it. He’s standing in a doorway. He listens to my litany silently—he’s a big, unshaven man and his eyes are red—and then he doesn’t say anything and finally he says in a low, measured voice, “We’re—doing—our—best.”

      It’s my turn. I must be careful. I refuse to invoke the war. I would like the extension of suffrage to women in Denmark. But a story of reconciliation would not please Paul. I consider the publication of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It’s too dark. I must neither give in to Paul, nor ignore him. I must steer between total abstraction and grim reality. I don’t know what to do. I go for the ambiguous.

      1915—Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist and geophysicist, publishes