Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [251]
I didn’t say anything about the Object.
“Okay, in some cultures we’re considered freaks,” she went on. But in others it’s just the opposite. The Navajo have a category of person they call a berdache. What a berdache is, basically, is someone who adopts a gender other than their biological one. Remember, Cal. Sex is biological. Gender is cultural. The Navajo understand this. If a person wants to switch her gender, they let her. And they don’t denigrate that person—they honor her. The berdaches are the shamans of the tribe. They’re the healers, the great weavers, the artists.”
I wasn’t the only one! Listening to Zora, that was mainly what hit home with me. I knew right then that I had to stay in San Francisco for a while. Fate or luck had brought me here and I had to take from it what I needed. It didn’t matter what I might be compelled to do to make money. I just wanted to stay with Zora, to learn from her, and to be less alone in the world. I was already stepping through the charmed door of those druggy, celebratory, youthful days. By that first afternoon the soreness in my ribs was already lessening. Even the air seemed on fire, subtly aflame with energy as it does when you are young, when the synapses are firing wildly and death is far away.
Zora was writing a book. She claimed it was going to be published by a small press in Berkeley. She showed me the publisher’s catalogue. The selections were eclectic, books on Buddhism, on the mystery cult of Mithras, even a strange book (a hybrid itself) mixing genetics, cellular biology, and Hindu mysticism. What Zora was working on would certainly have fit this list. But I was never clear how actual her publishing plans were. In the years since, I’ve looked out for Zora’s book, which was called The Sacred Hermaphrodite. I’ve never found it. If she never finished it, it wasn’t a question of ability. I read most of the book myself. At my age then, I wasn’t much of a judge of literary or academic quality, but Zora’s learning was real. She had gone into her subject and had much of it by heart. Her bookshelves were full of anthropology texts and works by French structuralists and deconstructionists. She wrote nearly every day. She spread her papers and books out on her desk and took notes and typed.
“I’ve got one question,” I asked Zora one day. “Why did you ever tell anybody?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at you. No one would ever know.”
“I want people to know, Cal.”
“How come?”
Zora folded her long legs under herself. With her fairy’s eyes, paisley-shaped, blue and glacial looking into mine, she said, “Because we’re what’s next.”
“Once upon a time in ancient Greece, there was an enchanted pool. This pool was sacred to Salmacis, the water nymph. And one day Hermaphroditus, a beautiful boy, went swimming there.”
Here I lowered my feet into the pool. I lolled them back and forth as the narration continued. “Salmacis looked upon the handsome boy and her lust was kindled. She swam nearer to get a closer look.” Now I began to lower my own body into the water inch by inch: shin, knees, thighs. If I paced it the way Presto had instructed me, the peepholes slid shut at this point. Some customers left, but many dropped more tokens into the slots. The screens lifted from the portholes.
“The water nymph tried to control herself. But the boy’s beauty was too much for her. Looking was not enough. Salmacis swam nearer and nearer. And then, overpowered by desire, she caught the boy from behind, wrapping her arms around him.” I began to kick my legs, churning up water so that it was hard for the customers to see. “Hermaphroditus struggled to free himself from the tenacious grip of the water nymph, ladies and gentlemen. But Salmacis was too strong. So unbridled was her lust that the two became one. Their bodies fused, male