On Elegance While Sleeping

by Emilio Lascano Tegui

SEPTEMBER 26, 18—

  There are intellects notable for their prodigious memory and then others simply inspired by the great chaos of the imagination. My own superiority stems from nothing so much as my own powers of observation. I’m a product of myself. I’ve seen the world through the poor little prism of my eyes. No, I never made use of borrowed eyes. And that’s why it was — through observation, a reflexive way of looking — that I always kept myself at a distance from my friends, kept aloof from my teachers. I deduced, for example, by meticulous observation, that a boy from my village was going to turn out to be a homosexual — nature simply wanted it this way. Nature hadn’t, early on, been able to make up its mind as to whether or not he should have been conceived in the first place. Then he was born a month early. The whole world fawned over him, and his father bounced him on his knee so often as to displace his proper, masculine sense of pleasure, until it came to reside deep in his rectum, silently contributing to his deviance. As a joke, I would caress the nape of his neck, stimulating without meaning to, the activity of his medulla; the girls kissed him as they would another woman and his voice stayed crystalline and his eyes infantile, melancholy, and (why?) loving. His thumbs became deformed like the thumbs of those degenerates who do nothing but abuse themselves day and night. Have you ever seen anything quite so blunt yet unreliable as the thumbs of a sodomite? Next to the rest of their dapper, delicate hands, their thumbs stand out like bastards…

  They should really only have four fingers on each hand.

  OCTOBER 1, 18—

  Why do I like women whose faces have something of the bony facial structure of sheep?

  Is it perhaps because of my distant love for a shepherd, who himself found nothing more beautiful than his animals and the constellation of Aries?

  Or because one of my ancestors died on the top of an ancient wall when that wall succumbed to the continuous assault of Roman battering rams?

  Because Watteau painted one of my grandmothers, who was incredibly beautiful, with a lamb in her arms?

  Because the first religious icon I received was the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist with the Agnus Dei serving as witness?

  Because women with a curled upper lip have something innocent about them?

  Because of all this, perhaps…and because women with long, almond eyes are irremediably sensual.

  OCTOBER 12, 18—

  One of my school friends was named Gaston. He was one of those strange kids who, conditioned by their up-bringing, eventually manage to accomplish something that seems quite extraordinary, given their circumstances — but which is really just the silent culmination of all the lessons they’ve naturally come by. There are some books children read before they’ve learned the alphabet; Gaston was already an old man when he was a boy. Or, better, as his childhood was intense and grim, one might compare it to the years between a man’s twenty-nine and thirty-fifth birthdays — the approach of middle age. While other children slept under cotton sheets, sheltered from the weather under their lace and swaddling clothes, Gaston spent those same hours out in the elements, in the snow, in the sun, in the wind and water. His mother sold flowers. Tied up in a makeshift papoose, he hung from his mother’s back as she put together her many bouquets. Hours passed without her thinking about the boy. He was like a stick doll. He cried at first, but his tears didn’t have the least effect on his mother — though they did attract plenty of customers. Gaston stopped when he realized that crying was not to his benefit. He just stared. Pupils dilated. He learned to read on his own. Sometimes, it was the red and yellow wheels of the passing cabs that entertained him. Other times, it was the iron gate of a garden. Most of the time, it was his mother’s multicolored bunch of flowers in her basket, and then, when she set him down on his stomach, the gutter running level with the line of the sidewalk, dogs, the heels of passersby, the tips of umbrellas, the wooden shoes of municipal street sweepers…

  It seemed as though he would never grow up, trapped in his diapers, constrained within the perverse sling his mother had devised; at last one of his sisters came to liberate him, afraid he might stay tiny, like some miniature apple tree in a Japanese garden. By then all the sap that had been unable to reach his branches, so to speak, had pooled instead into his eyes: His eyes didn’t just observe, they photographed what they saw. Later, at school, he used to entertain us with these images…

  When you’re a child, or a tourist — which is, after all, an infantile mode in which to travel the world — you might on occasion enjoy those tiny novelty kaleidoscopes or telescopes inside of which skillful manufacturers have placed images of the Cologne Cathedral, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or the Roman Coliseum. We had no need of these in our class, because inside of Gaston’s eyes — if we asked — we could see all the dogs, flower baskets, and carriage wheels of his infancy. It was remarkable. But — oh, the logic of nature! — whenever the girls going home from school would pass by, Gaston’s eyes, against his will, would fill with images of nothing but those roses, jasmines, and violets for which his tears, in times past, had served as such persuasive salesmen.

  NOVEMBER 4, 18—

  The French have the impression that only people who are a little wrong in the head, suspect types, ever leave their homelands for other countries. But it’s not true. Quite the opposite.

  I had a friend from Bordeaux, an elegant woman, strikingly tall. I thought all women from Bordeaux would be like her. When I went there, I found there was no one there to equal her. None of the natives even reminded me of her.

  I went into a brothel one afternoon and met a Belgian woman from Ostend. She had such beautiful breasts that I reserved the entire house in their honor. I made them lock the doors and searched through their business records for the voluptuous history of those perfect breasts: from where could they have come? When I traveled then to Ostend — believing all the women there would have breasts of equal beauty — I found with sadness that not even their fourteen-year-olds were possessed of such ideal apparatuses as those I’d discovered in Paris…those I had lost by allowing myself to get caught up with generalizations in a brothel!

  The most beautiful woman I believe I’ve ever met was Danish, but having discovered some white hookworms beneath the skin of her rosy legs, I developed a profound disgust for Denmark and its women. Later, quite by accident, I stood before the naked daughter of a Danish architect, not knowing what part of the planet she was from — she was the second most beautiful woman I think I’ve met, and this one didn’t have worms on any of her important features. It’s never a good idea, you see, to generalize.

  Other examples. As a student, I went to a brothel in the southern slums of Paris. One of the women I frequented was English. An absolute delight.

  What a beautiful little creature!

  They called her “The Star of the South.” She was famous throughout the city and even into the countryside. Peasants traveled to see her. But are all English women like her?

  No, no one in England was the least bit like her.

  And then there was the woman who came out for the last dance at the Tuileries. She seemed to have stepped, at once, out of Balzac and some distant French province. She was a dark-skinned queen. Quite poised. The midday sun had ripened her alongside the fields of oranges. Above all she radiated distinction and nobility — blue blood.

  I discovered her later in a brothel in Seville: her native city. She was the daughter of a cigar maker.

  From this interminable rosary of vexations, I speculate that the best citizens of every country emigrate because they feel slightly superior to their countrymen, able to be quite outstanding individuals without their national context to support them. Each of these, then, are worth as much in themselves as an entire nation. In fact, they are their own nations: nations without geographic roots. They recline upon the clouds, where Zeus set his throne, those clouds that veiled the feet of immortal Hebe.

  NOVEMBER 20, 18—

  And so the old coachman climbed up onto the co
achbox, where I was already installed. It was time to go. I snapped the whip and we were off, me playing coachman and he acting a little out of sorts, as if fallen on hard times, unhappy at now playing the sad role of passenger.

  Crossing a street, I almost hit a skinny old man dressed as a gendarme. Just in time, my friend grabbed the reins from me with all the equanimity of the father confessor he’d once been — back when the hymens of his parishioners were in his personal, pious care. In exchange for the pleasure of the reins, which he didn’t return, he told me the story of my near-victim, now behind us.

  “Back when I was a boy,” the coachman said, “that man we just passed by was the forest warden for the Lord of Croissic, though he never really knew how to take advantage of his job. His conscience was always getting in the way — he was too taken with his responsibilities, and then with the memory of a strange incident from his first years on the job. Making his rounds one day, he saw a buck behind some shrubs. He began to move as quietly as he could manage, as though he was a hunter himself and not the supposed protector of his master’s game. He let himself be tempted by a catch so beautiful that even his boss would have to approve of his taking a shot. He saw all the many kilos of meat and the pelt he could use later to clean the copper saucepans in his kitchen. He aimed and fired. He heard a cry. His bullet had hit the buck, which toppled over.

  “When he went over to retrieve his kill, imagine his surprise when he saw, instead of a buck, a dead poacher. The man’s chestnut-colored pants had tricked him.

  “A tragedy. And he blamed it all on his imagination. The imagination is what ennobles the savage, you know, and turned our Hottentot grandparents into wise men, kings, and priests. In this man, the poetry of his imagination had led him to commit murder. He was always sorry. And his pain was all the greater because he couldn’t now serve as an example to his children of the moral superiority that makes for a happy life. How could he ever be ashamed of their behavior now that he had made himself a criminal?

  “For instance, one of his daughters let it be known that she had a lover. How could he counsel his daughter? How give her the moral direction she seemed to lack? Our man, again trusting to his imagination, decided to put on his old uniform and his two decorations — one from helping with a rescue operation and the other honoring twenty-five years of service — the better at least to make a show of exterior dignity for the benefit of the wandering sheep he hoped to lead back to the path of righteousness…

  “But when his daughter finally remembered to come home, her father’s high seriousness, the two or three words he saw fit to push around his mouth, only made her straighten her shoulders and march right over to her sister, asking when carnival time was coming, so she could get into worse trouble still.

  “With an equal disregard for etiquette,” the coachman said, “you almost ran this man over without even noticing his uniform. And if there’s some small penalty for hitting a tramp, there are certainly numerous penalties for hitting a forest warden — even if it’s only a man dressed as a forest warden. The costumes the world makes us put on aren’t anything to be ashamed of, you know. No. Clothes should spur our imaginations on, until we bow at last before the radiant creation that is our nation’s foremost costume: the king’s!”

  DECEMBER 24, 18—

  Women gradually began to replace men in the factory. This is why the women of Bougival began to look so terrible. Particularly the women from the lower-class neighborhoods, whose hair smelled bitter because they were still too fond of the Jewish custom of rubbing almond oil into their hair…

  It was a factory where they made telephone receivers. At six in the afternoon they closed the shop and the women walked in a line along the Seine. They walked in wooden clogs and sang. They sang, and as they sang they went about in wooden clogs like women from a Greemvaneco, taking great strides.

  And I’m going to tell you why they sang. The first shift was of young women between seventeen and twenty years of age. One of them, a friend to all — they always put her in the middle of the line — seemed so delicate that she might break. She was my age. She’d taken an interest in me, and her friends suspected her secret. I always waited for her at a bend in the road. In those days, they didn’t sing: I would hear their vulgar laughs approaching, their sour shouts, the cheap ironies of those girls who so often picked fights with one another — their cacophony not unlike the clattering of the machines they had to listen to all day. When they saw me, the workers went quiet. They acted innocent, and only Isabel would look directly at me. The sweet look in her green eyes was as bright as the sunlight falling that same instant. A few meters further down the road, in response to an order that she didn’t give, the silence would come to an end, and I’d hear the laughter and jokes once again; then, after some distance…she’d turn her head for a last look.

  One day she wasn’t among her friends, but still feeling the strange power of that fragile girl — destined to die far too early — her friends fell silent as they passed me, same as on all the other days, without the least self-consciousness. Not a single one looked at me. And I knew the truth. Isabel was dying.

  Having decided a few days later to inquire about her health, I installed myself again along the bend in the road, where I soon heard a song coming down the way. The women from the factory of supersensitive telephone receivers had replaced their dead friend with a song.

  DECEMBER 25, 18—

  I shall report to you now a particular moment about which I can be as self-righteous and dishonest as a police informer. The day was sunny and the rumble of a carriage coming along the road hurt my ears. I was thinking about a girl whose enormous eyes, as she blossomed, were the color of green grapes.

  I was losing my virginity. I was about to bend down and pick it back up again when I stopped. The indolence that has always given me the indifference of a man in love, that has always set me apart from others, stopped me from bothering.

  I went home and only then understood — in the faces of my family — the extent of my loss. I couldn’t go back. Who knows where on the path I’d left it; it would be impossible to find. The afternoon was over. A summer storm had blown off the bright canvas of the bohemian circus that had set up shop nearby. A thick, fleeting rain had fallen.

  I preferred to distract myself by going to the circus. To watch the lines of the umbrella and the tightrope walker converge — lines that are never entirely perpendicular. To follow a clown through the square where the picadors gather.

  I arrived early. The circus hadn’t begun its show. As I watched, they lit three lines of gaslights. There were also a few Chinese lanterns at the door and a garland of small oil lamps atop the ticket office.

  The band — a bugle, bass drum, clarinet, violin, and triangle — played a waltz. Later they performed a polka.

  The triangle marked time. And I saw that the drummer boy had recently attached his triangle to the metal frame of his bass drum with a fresh piece of tendon. Was that, perhaps, my virginity?

  DECEMBER 28, 18—

  My military service was negligible. I was shuttled back and forth between the barracks at Tunis, Zaghouan, and Sousse, and spent a memorable year in Kairouan. It’s a holy city for Arabs, in Africa. A great Saracen wall still surrounds it. Past the train station, progress peters out. The last gasps are in the European neighborhood. There, progress is comprised of a post office, a “Hotel de Francia,” and a few brick houses where rent collectors live. Otherwise, the whole neighborhood consists of various isolated multistory houses, which used to remind me — in the shadows of the quick-falling desert dusk — of the wide-mouthed jars in Galard’s barbershop, where he kept the leeches that my father used to use once a week.

  To this smattering of Europeanism along the edge of the Muslim city’s great white wall, we must not forget the local commissary, a town hall, a café with one melancholy pool table, and a brothel — that bastion of order and authority within the world of prostitution.

  Doing my service, I
met Moreau. He was in the infantry like me. Indifferent to the niceties of military life, we were both just killing time, waiting for our return to Tunis, going back and forth between the Corsican Longobardi’s café and Madame Flora’s bordello. We felt entirely at home in both places: we took off our jackets in one and our pants in the other. In the café, we played billiards like two boys passing a dull night. At Flora’s, the game was to see which of us was more of a man.

  My friend Moreau wasn’t as tall or strong as I, but nature had endowed him a little more generously than it had me. Oddly, this distinction tended to put a little lead on the wings of his fantasies…The women he chose weren’t always willing to go with him. They had to get permission from Flora first, who’d come to Africa following in the footsteps of Hercules — she had already presided over a house in Gibraltar. Flora wanted Moreau to herself; he was her private reserve.

  In Flora’s house, accompanying my friend, the very model of masculine crudeness, I gave, by comparison, the impression of being a somewhat delicate individual, a connoisseur of courtesans, with the air of an urbane man who would never pounce upon his female prey the way coarse farmers dig into a pile of grain to be threshed. This characteristic of mine became even more pronounced later on. But my friend Moreau always arrived at Flora’s house of pleasure already drunk. I liked to get drunk while there. The flesh of a woman was a much more intense and penetrating liquor than absinthe. Although I’m ashamed to say it, a beautiful Lorrainese blonde even managed to make me sick with love for her. I wrote poems for her. That is to say, I began constructing my first weapons.

  But my verses didn’t spring from frustrated dreams and desires. They were the flowers of reality, of satisfaction.

  I’ve managed to learn about other things than pleasure without it costing me too much. For instance: the ennui in brothels is as wide as the Sahara, but a prostitute who gets bored isn’t dangerous so long as she loves us — even if her love amounts to nothing more than the fact that she’s stopped charging for her time. If, instead, she gives us money, the risk begins to grow. In such a case, if we stop visiting her, she’s likely not to hesitate to take the opportunity to entertain herself — her solitude and boredom being so great — by writing an anonymous letter and denouncing us to the police. Justice for these women perched on the edge of society’s bed is in itself a voluptuous thing. They adore gestures for their own sake, just like the arrogant, momentous language of Racine’s tragedies. Not because the protagonists of these tragedies complain a lot, but because they challenge authority and stand up to men the way a thief can stand up to a judge…When streetwalkers use irony, it’s always before the law. It’s their way of getting back at authority figures. I remember overhearing this conversation once: