On Elegance While Sleeping

by Emilio Lascano Tegui

  “Why did you smack the officer who tried to detain you? He’d made a formal accusation of robbery.”

  “I was drunk.”

  “That doesn’t justify it.”

  “Look, whenever I end up pregnant or drink a little more than I should, I feel the need to hit a policeman.”

  Yvonne was my first love. As I said, military service wasn’t too heavy a burden. I rarely stayed in the barracks. I don’t remember any of my other compatriots. Moreau is the only other soldier I remember from those days when I wasn’t required to do much of anything. It was precisely because I had so much leisure time I fell in love — I didn’t know what else to do, and that Lorrainese blonde’s white skin didn’t have a pink or blue base to it, as you’ll find in the more commonplace female specimens: a wild salmon, salmon juice was what ran in her veins — so white, with such a white wine inside! Yvonne was a marble cup fit only to be filled by royal slaves and drunk from only by the wealthiest of western tycoons. She soon set up shop in Kairouan on her own; her long-term lover, a brilliant sort of pimp, had put her into business for herself, but she had long since stopped letting him run the show. But, to return to the question of boredom, if a woman who awaits a man in a brothel gets immensely bored, the lover who left her there to do her job in peace will end up dragging the same boredom with him through the streets, plazas, and cafes — as when a gored horse in a bullfight steps on its own intestines. The Lorrainese girl’s lover, a dark-skinned man from Marseille, was condemned as we were — much more than we were, in fact — to remain in Kairouan. He slept, drank, wandered about. He was now a representative of that mysterious fraternity of ex-men who justify and preserve the shadows of great cities. And yet this pimp, friendless and disapproved of by all, was nonetheless a fixture in the European neighborhood — as much a fascinating example of Western civilization as one of the rent collectors or the county commissioner. He was the great hope of the local constabulary: they so rarely got to accuse a foreigner of a crime — the foreigners themselves were usually the accusers. This jobless thug was destined to break the law sooner or later. The commissioner waited for him impatiently, in the sadness of his office with its two chairs and one desk, on top of which was a virgin folder meant to contain reports, and then a rubber stamp with which the chief marked his “Letters from the Orient,” as Marshal von Moltke called them, writing to his sister while he was in Constantinople.

  The Lorrainese girl understood, as a married woman, the delicious risk of our love. For myself, I hoped the commissioner would soon write up a report on this man from Marseille who held my death in his hands…Soon enough, an Arab saved me.

  A girl far too developed for her age, who knows how or why, always has an agent of the secret police on her tail. The girl serves as the bait that attracts the various satyrs scattered about the city. All the clerks know her. Bureaucrats who’ve made eunuchs of themselves over twenty years of expediting papers are the usual victims of these boorish policemen. And it’s the same for a man with nothing to do: he always has someone on his tail trying to reel him into a pay-by-the-hour motel. One afternoon — as my boredom, like the yawns of the camels grazing by Kairouan, whispered thickly along the courtyard of the Great Mosque — an Arab accosted me. He was one of the guides who showed the city to tourists.

  He offered to show me the interior of the Arab world. A Christian can’t live among Muslims, but a Christian can see — without it being too much of a sin — Arab women with their faces unveiled. This was the spectacle he offered me. I accepted. Inside the house in question, women were weaving rugs. One of them, a little long in the tooth, berated me in every way she could think of. The other two women, girls really, smiled. When my curiosity was sated, and I headed back out to the street, my guide was waiting for me.

  “So?” he asked. I gathered in time that he wasn’t curious about my reaction to the interior of the house, which wasn’t all that interesting, but instead about the young girls who had smiled at me.

  “Very nice, both of them,” I told him, without enthusiasm.

  “One franc,” he responded.

  “A franc? What, you want a franc?”

  “Yes,” he said. “For one franc you can be alone with them for a while, if you like.”

  I’d never been offered girls so young or so cheap. “So come and get your franc,” I said…and that’s how I met Grisela. The father — because the Arab who’d made this proposal was the father of the two smiling girls — received one franc per expedition, adding up to the significant sum of seven hundred francs in six months…

  The girl had no time to weave rugs anymore. I hoarded her until the day I returned to Tunis. Grisela’s youth, her Muslim novelty, her lapdog-like affection — in all, the extreme devotion of that thirteen-year-old girl unhinged me. Yvonne tried to get revenge on me by inviting Moreau to comfort her. But this enraged Flora, who shaved her head in reprisal. In retaliation, the man from Marseilles set Flora’s curtains on fire and was caught trying to escape in Sousse. The Kairouan police never got him. And, you know, even Yvonne, deep down, had been hoping to see them put him away!

  JANUARY 3, 18—

  The brothel in Sousse was small. The room where they entertained the soldiers had started to fall apart along the base of the walls, which had started to crumble into the adjoining rooms. The doors to these other rooms could no longer open all the way. It was an exclusive sort of place, in its way. Not too many clients could be allowed in at once. The house was too small, but our patience was philosophical — which only increased the danger: it was a channeled, potent, prodigious force. Fifty, eighty, a hundred men shaking with desire, worn out from jealousy, from fear, and hungry for flesh, all stuck in the same place and waiting for the same thing — this turned us into a single terrible Cyclops that rumbled outside the single bedroom, shifting its weight listlessly. Eighty men perfumed with vinegar, nutmeg, pepper, and cloves, slowly conglomerating into one big slab of meat, one creature, threatening and blind.

  You could hear it knocking its forehead against the walls. The chairs collapsed under its weight, and then the rumor of a longer wait — faint as oil, quick as acid — penetrated into the cracks, ran level with the walls, into the plaza. Sometimes it looked like a stream of water, other times a line of ants, and occasionally the black of barbed wire…

  Have you heard the creaking of a transatlantic ship, surrounded by the ocean? That was the creaking of the walls of Esther the Jew’s room when our little symposium happened to go on and on, and my pleasure monopolized her all through the night. Have you ever heard people talk about the shadows of the departed passing over the roofs of the houses where they died? Well, we saw the restless silhouettes of the satyrs waiting and waiting in the confines of the brothel. The nightmares that disturbed my sleep in Esther’s room were unending. In my dreams, the troops of the Forty-Sixth Infantry would never forgive me. They couldn’t help it. Their desire was hanging out of their flies, camped along the walls of Alexandria, banging on the walls of Esther’s room until the walls felt as though they would collapse at last and suffocate me…But no, little by little desire realized the uselessness of its efforts and astutely took a different tack. It came up to the door but it couldn’t slide open the shutter-bolt. It doesn’t have hands, you see. It leaned on the door and pushed. The door was elastic. It seemed to give way only to become more rigid thereafter. From my bed, I watched this bloody struggle between cedar of Lebanon and stray desire — and admired the door’s triumph in the end.

  Already, the sun was coming in through the cracks of the poorly insulated room and the house eunuch was shaking out the rugs, which now seemed hardened with spit, like the thorny leaves of prickly pears.

  APRIL 24, 18—

  Have I already mentioned that one of my relatives was myopic and an eye doctor and that he fished with a tall reed, looking through opera glasses? His nearsightedness imposed a necessary punctiliousness to his movements and even intentions. As a result, he was meticulous in all th
ings. I inherited his enormous delight in neatness. Seeing is already a pleasure, but clarity makes it a pleasure twice over. Would that I could use microscope lenses as my spectacles. Winter always enticed me to the windows of my room, to watch the sad lives of our townspeople blanketed in snow, and so, in the months beforehand, I always made certain to prepare my observatory: I cleaned the windowpanes with such care that they seemed almost nonexistent in their translucency. Flies, still unaware of the invention of glass, tried to come in from the street, dying from the impact. I’ve watched them dying, in piles, writhing around uselessly, deliciously, trying in vain to prolong their existence. But winter slaughtered them nonetheless in the ambush of my clear glass. And I, behind this glass, watched them die.

  MAY 19, 18—

  After two years away, I found myself returning to Bougival with Raimundo the coachman today. He was much older. His hair had grayed dramatically. “The snow of the years”—such an affected, romantic image. Gray mold instead of hair. Not so much conquered by time as by the elements.

  Should I have asked about his life? No. It’s easy to read a single newspaper from start to finish, but an entire year’s worth is more likely to make you want to run away…And that’s the impression Raimundo gave. An enormous bundle of newspapers, too imposing to dip into, despite the interesting things one might learn…

  “And how have you been?” he asked instead. Next to his life as a coachman-drifter, running to so many volumes, my own adventures would fill only a few measly sentences…“What do you bring us from Africa?”

  “Syphilis,” I replied mechanically.

  Raimundo didn’t seem the least bit surprised. Perhaps he would have found it far stranger had I returned with nothing at all. I was surprised at my honesty, but how could I consider hiding anything from this most supreme confessor — particularly the interior drama I was then experiencing, the impetus to the greatest art that one can dream of attaining: at once the lion and the Christian in the arena of the soul…?

  “And what are you going to do about it?” he asked me sarcastically — the old pachyderm.

  “I’m thinking about writing a book,” I said, “a book that would be a sort of symptomatic journal of my disease that could serve as a source of information for doctors and literary types both. This idea came knocking at my door as twilight fell…I let it seduce me as though I were just another conquest…Even though I know that writing a book is the greatest shame that an original mind can bring upon itself.

  “But — I want to write a book, Raimundo. A book that will make my illness into an iridescent fantasy…”

  “Then there’s only one thing that can be holding you back,” my coachman replied, “and it’s worrying that women won’t want you once they read about your life. But I don’t think that’ll happen in your case. Women love to love degenerates, you know. When you make it public that you’re now what the better wives in town like to refer to oh so poetically as ‘badly indisposed,’ then, only then will you find out what it truly is to be loved! You’ll acquire — oh, conquering hero! — the allure of the dangerous. Till now, the only way to make yourself seem so attractive was to make it known that you’re a libertine with a trail of pregnant, brokenhearted victims in your wake! In future, however, that petty sort of allure will give way to a new form of voluptuousness — the syphilitic! It will be the fourth forbidden form of sensuality to add to your store. You’ve quite exhausted the other three: abortion, menstruation, and the douche…

  “But I digress: a symptomatic journal, you say?”

  “Yes, yes…already the disease snakes through me…the curling tendrils of love and syphilis — one of absolute purity, the other…how to describe it?”

  “Call it the glory of Don Juan!” said Raimundo. “And, look, if you have the courage to give away your secrets in this book, don’t hesitate to make Don Juan your protagonist! Imagine how beautiful it would be…the only thing that’s missing from the story of Don Juan — who’s really nothing more than an artificial phallus, a masturbatory fantasy for Catholic women — is his being syphilitic…”

  “I’ll consider it,” I told him, and got down from the coachbox ready to write my first chapter.

  JUNE 29, 18—

  You’ll never know the true depths of the abyss without first probing the mouth of your own syphilitic chancre. The tiny excavation this silent worker etches into your trusting skin will show you the deep darkness of eternity. Being marked in this way, with a crater on one’s body, a crater that can easily be covered with cotton, is a sign that one has been found worthy of the beauty bestowed by God, who paves some pathways with precious stones and renders others impassable…It’s not my fault I’ve been given such an honor. My son’s nasal septum, which syphilis will erode, will make him look like Socrates: a good subject for future statuary. (Hereditary syphilis, our own wise men say, affects the nasal septum.) That son of an Athenian midwife didn’t leave any written works, after all — he’s known only by his bust. See how the ages have esteemed him. His snub nose was unbreakable — the perfect nose to be sculpted in stone. It lends itself to solidity. What makes for ugliness in life ought to help make one eternal, no? Why bother filling up the libraries with works of genius? All those stone Socratic heads — with no sharp angles, and therefore no structural weaknesses — have stayed intact despite the centuries, despite the iconoclasts, despite rival philosophers. It was enough for Socrates to be syphilitic to be right.

  JULY 4, 18—

  Look, the type of Don Juan you should put in this book you’re threatening us with — well, maybe you could base him on a particular exemplar of the type, whose confession I used to take, and who, today, in my capacity as coachman, I don’t really mind exposing to public scrutiny…

  “I’m not going to say he was the Don Juan known as the Comte de Lauzun, who supposedly slept with Louis XIV’s sister — not at all. He was a tall man, with a majestic stride, brown hair, green eyes. There was no intrigue about him. Nobody would have said he was an exotic sort. His physique wasn’t what you’d call impressive and his clothes weren’t elegant. He was a man — simply a man — neither seductive nor disagreeable. He went home early every night to his bachelor quarters. His nights were long. He was past his prime. No longer chasing after women. But under his exterior calm, the old viper inside him hadn’t grown old in the least. Like some sinister laboratory tucked away at the far end of a vacant lot, or hidden behind the shady trees at the back of a hospital, he was discreet and terrible, having taken refuge in his bachelor’s quarters only to refine and concentrate his art.

  “What could this Don Juan do in the silences of his life? Write and dream alone. He filled his time writing letters. First he would write out multiple drafts that he’d read aloud to himself and of course adore. Then he’d recopy these and pepper them with plenty of adjectives, employing the clumsy style of an un-lettered amateur, but still full of all the requisite poetic imagery, since, he said, ‘Women are birds you must hunt with metaphor.’ This self-deluded magician even had the cleverness to seal his letters with a tear shed in the loneliness of his nights! All this effort no doubt was intended to increase the trivial charm of his epistles — in much the same way as an actor will make himself cry real tears on stage in order to convince you that you are watching an excellent performance.

  “After finishing his latest missive, this old bachelor would open his window to listen to the beating heart of the night. Until this moment his bedroom had been hermetically sealed — he could only write when absolutely isolated at his desk. If outsiders could see him there, his love-missives would’ve been cheapened by this exposure…or he would have lost a little dignity, revealed in all his solitude…but, in any case…he died writing. Each of his letters was like La Peau de chagrin—baring his soul, his great spiritual devotion…His letters were a way of maintaining his persona, you see: he couldn’t bear to see himself as a failure. He liked to say to women, ‘You know, my dear, our souls are just so many little pieces o
f paper,’ and he said this precisely because he hoped that, if anyone gathered up his correspondence, they would find his soul there intact…like the painted scene we reassemble through the reconstruction of an ancient Etruscan vase.”

  JULY 9, 18—

  Did my father intend to make something of me? I don’t know. I was seventeen and only went home to eat or sleep. I spent the rest of the day along the river or at our neighbors’. Not because I was much of a conversationalist, but it’s nice on occasion to return to something resembling civilization.

  Now and then someone died in the next town over, Croissic, where I went sometimes, more or less mechanically, crossing the bridge that leads away from the heart of Bougival. The town crier would announce the death, always trying to end on a cheerful note. Since his trade was an endangered one, the crier did everything he could to get the neighborhood’s sympathy. Whenever he gathered a crowd, following his usual drum roll, the crier would turn to comedy…