Look at the people in those boats, I said to my partner during Pride. You can tell there has been a pandemic. They are all equally emaciated.
If I had to share a household with anyone, I would prefer to be married to myself. I have never known real love, but I have not missed it for a second. A friend recently suggested that my solitude has more to do with my physical size than anything else, but that was simply malicious.
I consider myself to have a superior mind, and that is not something you achieve by spending an hour a day in the gym. My mind is so highly developed that, given a proper magnifying mirror, I could replace my own pacemaker with little more than a pair of nail scissors and some cotton pads.
You’re arrogant, people often say. No, I reply, I practise Mind Positivity. Body positivity, you mean, they counter. No, I was body positive from my very first day at nursery school, when I was given an extra-wide chair because the standard model kept clinging to my backside every time I stood up.
Body Positivity, I invented it. And yes, you have to say that in English, otherwise people with their overtrained minds won’t understand. Preferably in American English, which has a vocabulary of two thousand words and at least a hundred thousand expressions containing the word “fuck.” Dutch is simply too complex for the average Dutch person.
I never go to a doctor. Not because I am never unwell, but because I am tired of the endless nagging about smoking and weight. These days it feels as if you are subletting your body from your health insurance.
Of course, I do have a form of medical assistance. Upstairs lives a deranged Henk who practises roughly every form of healing discouraged by the authorities. A touch of voodoo, a hint of homeopathy, prayer rituals centred on the goddess Isis, and philosophical ideas borrowed from even worse philosophers. It is all so wrong that it can only be good for a decent person like me.
Whether it is chafing between the legs, fungus below deck, or cysts on my forehead, he cures it. Within a certain timeframe, of course. The exact amount of time required for ailments to disappear on their own, as my partner always points out, as malicious as ever.
I am tired of going anywhere at all. Even when I wear the most cheerful summer dress with the most delightful floral print, they still say: “Sir, there is a seat for you at the back.”
That is the downside of Mind Positivity. You cannot see it on the outside. That I am gradually progressing towards Mind Superiority will be a quiet, invisible victory that I can celebrate entirely on my own.
“Why don’t you get a cat,” my partner keeps suggesting. I shudder at the thought. A hairy creature that smells from the mouth and relieves itself in the kitchen, where I bake the finest Sachertorte in the Western Hemisphere. I regularly receive requests from Vienna to give lectures on my baking, but if they are too stingy to pay for a taxi to Vienna, I lose interest. I do not travel by plane or high-speed train. Buying two tickets while being one person is very much a phenomenon of our time. The emaciated empty-headed masses are in power, and they will make you feel it.
Fortunately, my doctor has retired. He was a tactful man, accustomed to Amsterdam patients who speak their minds, and therefore cautious to a fault. Sometimes I thought I could see fear flickering behind his glasses, but he never mentioned my weight. Only my smoking, which I continued in the waiting room despite the assistant’s complaints. Not immediately, of course, but if I had to wait longer than fifteen minutes, I would light one.
“Sir, could you not do that outside?”
Again with the sir.
“Listen, Truus, if I stand outside in the cold to smoke, I’ll be back here within a week with pneumonia. And let’s be honest, you earn the most from me when I stay away.” What were they going to do? Call the police? People are so afraid of second-hand smoke that they leave the room after two puffs. The doctor can use the time to catch up.
I once made him a proposal. “If you quit the gym, I’ll quit smoking.” He would smile sourly. He was the kind of doctor who could have been on the cover of a medical romance novel, and his preferences leaned towards younger patients. He had to stay in shape.
I have a beautiful Rococo armchair by the window, where I like to sit when the weather is good. Occasionally, I see him limping past. I remember how he got that injury. He insisted on skating the alternative Eleven Cities Tour in Finland or Sweden and failed to notice that he could no longer feel his feet. Upon arrival, his colleagues had to amputate three toes. Strange, isn’t it? You think you walk on your feet, but those toes are essential for elegance. Mine comes naturally. Everything on my body moves along with me. It looks as if I am filmed in slow motion. Pure suppleness. All my toes intact, and a mind! That mind never stops, not for a second. I can talk to myself for hours, in four languages if necessary, not even counting the classical ones. It is pure pleasure to be Madame Boissevin.
Madame Boissevin
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