Self Read Free Page B

embassy. It was a piece of furniture untoitself: large, heavy, wooden, loud, unavoidable. It took as its lair a full third of the den, a space which had previously been my favourite corner. The first time I saw it, it was awake. I had just strode into the den, unaware of the usurper, and the cur, sensing my presence, turned towards me. I stood frozen, staring at its broad, flat, animated face. I would have run away except that my parents, fresh from installing the thing, were sitting side by side in front of it, passive and unafraid. They looked at me, smiled and said words that were not heard. I took the television to be another sort of four-legged animal. A huge, squat dog with pointy ears and a very long thin tail (it was still my understanding that motion, animation, entailed life. I treated the vacuum cleaner — a distant cousin of the elephant — and the washing machine — a relative of the raccoon — with the greatest respect. My mother’s cold and unceremonious manner with them filled me with private offence. Upon her departure I would pet and kiss them and whisper words of appreciation). But though I liked most animals, I warmed to the beast television only with time and misgiving. There was something about its size and behaviour that did not sit well with me. Unlike the washing machine, I felt the television was selfish and uncaring. With only two exceptions — at which times it mesmerized me — it would be years before I felt close to television. I much preferred to rock in the rocking chair, listening to music and day-dreaming. I did this for hours at a stretch, a pet rabbit cradled in my hands.
    THE FIRST TIME TELEVISION MESMERIZED ME AS A CHILD:
    (1) I can’t remember when the idea of love came to me, when I first consciously became aware of this force in humanaffairs. Clearly I received love before I started returning it, and I returned it before I knew it had a name. But at what moment these emotions I felt — oh, there you are! I am happy; if you smile, I’ll smile; I want to touch you, I want to be with you, don’t let go — lost their cloak of anonymity and entered the dictionary of my mind, I don’t recall. What I do recall is that it was television that formalized my notions of love, that brought together into a unified theory my disparate ideas about it.
    It was perhaps a month or two after I first became acquainted with television. To watch it was still a decision that I took with deliberation. “I will watch the television,” I would say, still using the article. I would gather up my favourite blanket (a towel, actually), I would move the rocking chair into position and I would slowly pull on the plastic button, which resisted until it jumped out at me with a loud click, always surprising me. Instantly there would be sound, sound travelling faster than light; then, in succession on the glass screen, a point of light, a line of light, a shudder of light, and finally an expanding rectangle of colourless reality. I would sit and rock myself and do what I had said I would do: watch the television, watch human beings deal with other human beings, indoors and outdoors, in a language (Spanish) I had not as yet absorbed. It bored me completely. When I realized that I could change the beast’s mind with the help of the difficult wheel-like knob, watching became more interesting, a little, but even so I don’t think I ever did it for more than two bored-children hours — that is, ten minutes. Only a full year later, upon discovering the plastic, elastic world of cartoons and having mastered enough Spanish, did I start to watch television regularly.
    But at the moment I am talking about, the first time television mesmerized me as a child, when I still watched it out of a sense of technological obligation, one minute was sufficient. Less. I turned the set on, watched for a few seconds, was marked for life, turned it off.
    I was alone and in a quiet good mood, receptive to new ideas. The first