Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (3 page)
I opened my eyes the following morning. The sunlight had chased away the darkness and all the phantoms that prowled in its shadows. I opened the window and the fresh air blew in, chasing away the last clinging traces of the night’s dreams. I smiled scornfully at the cowardly part of me which trembled with fear at the stronger part when I was awake, but then crept into my bed at night and filled the darkness around me with fantasies and illusions.
In my final year at secondary school I came out top of my group… I sat wondering what to do…
I hated my femininity, resented my nature and knew nothing about my body. All that was left for me was to reject, to challenge, to resist! I would reject my femininity, challenge my nature, resist all the desires of my body; prove to my mother and grandmother that I wasn’t a woman like them, that I wouldn’t spend my life in the kitchen peeling onions and garlic, wasting all my days so that my husband could eat and eat.
I was going to show my mother that I was more intelligent than my brother, than the man she’d wanted me to wear the cream dress for, than any man, and that I could do everything my father did and more.
The faculty of medicine? Yes, medicine… The word had a terrifying effect on me. It reminded me of penetrating eyes moving at an amazing speed behind shiny steel-rimmed spectacles, and strong pointed fingers holding a dreadful long sharp needle. I remembered the first time I’d ever seen a doctor: my mother was trembling with fright, looking up at him beseechingly and reverently; my brother was terrified; my father was lying in bed begging for help. Medicine was a terrifying thing. It inspired respect, even veneration, in my mother and brother and father. I would become a doctor then, study medicine, wear shiny steel-rimmed spectacles, make my eyes move at an amazing speed behind them, and make my fingers strong and pointed to hold the dreadful long sharp needle. I’d make my mother tremble with fright and look at me reverently; I’d make my brother terrified and my father beg me for help. I’d prove to nature that I could overcome the disadvantages of the frail body she’d clothed me in, with its shameful parts both inside and out. I would imprison it in the steel cell forged from my will and my intelligence. I wouldn’t give it a single chance to drag me into the ranks of illiterate women.
I stood in the courtyard of the faculty of medicine, looking about me. Hundreds of eyes directed sharp questioning glances at me. I looked squarely back at them. Why should I lower my eyes when they looked at me, bow my head while they were lifting theirs, stumble along while they walked with a proud and confident step? I was the same as them, or better. I drew myself up to my full height. I’d forgotten about my breasts and their weight on my chest had vanished. I felt light, as if I could move as easily and freely as I wanted. I had charted my way in life, the way of the mind. I had carried out the death sentence on my body so that I no longer felt it existed.
I stood at the door of the dissecting room: a surprisingly penetrating smell… naked human corpses on white marble slabs. My feet carried me in fearfully. I went up to one of the naked corpses and stood beside it. It was a man’s body, completely naked. The students were looking at me, smiling slyly and waiting to see what I would do. I almost turned away and ran out, but no, I wasn’t going to do that. On my other side I saw a woman’s naked body surrounded by a cluster of students inspecting it boldly and without shame. I turned my gaze back to the man’s corpse and examined it steadily and unflinchingly, taking the scalpel in my hand.
This was my first encounter with a naked man, and in the course of it men lost their dread power and illusory greatness in my eyes. A man had fallen from his throne and lay on a dissecting table next to a woman. Why had my mother made all these tremendous distinctions between me and my brother, and portrayed man as a god whom I would have to serve in the kitchen all my life? Why had society always tried to convince me that manhood was a distinction and an honour, and womanhood a weakness and a disgrace? Would my mother ever believe that I’d stood with a naked man in front of me and a knife in my hand, and opened up his stomach and his head? Would society believe that I’d examined a man’s body and taken it to pieces without caring that it was a man?
Who was this society anyway? Wasn’t it men like my brother brought up from childhood to think of themselves as gods, and weak, ineffectual women like my mother? How could such people believe that there existed a woman who knew nothing about a man except that he was an assortment of muscles, arteries, nerves and bones?
A man’s body! The terror of mothers and little girls who sweltered in the heat of the kitchen to fill it with food, and carried the spectre of it with them day and night. Here was just such a body spread out before me naked, ugly and in pieces. I hadn’t imagined that life would prove my mother wrong so soon, or give me my revenge in this way over that miserable man who’d looked at my breasts one day and not seen anything else of me besides them. Here I was slinging his arrows straight back into his chest. Here I was looking at his naked body and feeling nauseated, tearing him to shreds with my scalpel.
Was this a man’s body, the outside covered with hair and the inside full of decaying stinking organs, his brain floating in a sticky white fluid and his heart in thick red blood? How ugly man was, both inside and out… as ugly as could be!
I examined the young woman lying under my scalpel on the white marble table. Her long hair was soft and dyed red but it had been washed in formalin. Her teeth were white and shiny, with a gold one at the front, but they were all yellow near the roots; her breasts were drooping and skinny. Those two pieces of flesh which had tormented me in childhood, which determined girls’ futures and inflamed men’s eyes and minds, had come to rest shrivelled and dried up like a piece of old shoe leather. How lacking in substance were girls’ futures, how insignificant that which filled the hearts and eyes of men! And the long shiny hair that my mother had plagued me with — woman’s crowning glory which she carries on her head and wastes half her life arranging, shining and dyeing — fell into the filthy bin along with other unwanted bodily matter and scraps of flesh.
I felt a sour taste in my throat and spat out the piece of meat from my mouth. I tried to chew on a piece of bread but my teeth moved with difficulty. I tried to swallow and felt the bread scraping against the walls of my larynx and down into my stomach. I felt the acid juices secreted by my stomach walls working on the bread and my intestine expanding to receive it. I felt something weighing down on my chest and knew it was my heart pumping, chasing the blood into the arteries. I felt the blood creeping back along my veins and the faint pulsating of the capillaries in my limbs. I felt the air entering my nostrils and passing down my throat to fill my lungs. They expanded like balloons until the air stopped coming into my chest and I seemed to be choking. My lips stopped moving, I couldn’t stretch out my arms, the muscles of my heart weren’t contracting and my veins were no longer throbbing with blood.
Ah, I’d died! I jumped up in fright…
No, I wasn’t going to die! I refused to join all the corpses stretched out in front of me on the tables. I put down my scalpel and raced out of the dissecting room. In the street I looked around me in astonishment as people walked and moved their arms and legs without a moment’s thought, running easily to catch buses, opening their mouths and moving their lips and talking and breathing without the slightest difficulty.
I calmed down. Life went on and I was still alive. I opened my mouth wide and filled my lungs with the air of the street and breathed in deeply. I moved my arms and legs and walked in the midst of the surging mass of humanity. Ah, how simple life is when one takes it as it comes!