I was two steps from the blonde when she leaned down from her seat as if to pick up my shadow now extending over the basket she was reaching into for her potatoes. This woman who’d needed to count up her change so methodically in the market, and had done so with all the innocence of a lamb before an elegant wolf, had now assumed precisely the position I’d imagined for her, and I saw my hand reach for her, independent of my will, the gesture too swift for me to enjoy the knife’s passage through her flesh.
I felt my hand tangled in her damp hair and the next instant a gush of blood surged against it and the edge of my knife.
That was when I let everything go, dropped the weapon and the woman I’d been holding up with the steel depths of my thrust. Her form crumpled, sagging into the potato basket, leaving one hand on the chair where she’d been sitting. Her other arm lay limp under the stove.
I blinked. I wanted to see something more, to feel something new, but that was all there was. I heard a buzzing in my ears, and there was a veil over my eyes. I was a nobleman “bescreen’d in night,” as Shakespeare says. As I left, various chairs and a box got in my way. With great care, I managed to avoid them. I turned to study the scene and saw my victim had taken her hand off the chair and let it fall on the floor.
I lost my footing on the first step twice, and when my head poked back out over the hatch, there was a hiss like a snake’s.
The fellow from a moment before was now up on the railway bridge looking down at the barge. He saw me, and just as I was about to tumble, weak-kneed, back down the stairs, he withdrew from the railing, equally terrified. I felt I’d been saved. I left the barge and climbed up the river bank.
From the lip of the valley, I looked back to commit it all to memory — the place where I’d just hurled myself into hell. On one side, the bridge closed the horizon. Beyond it, the hills above Marly and Mont Valérien. The Seine, like a great mirror, and the dark barge in the middle of the clear river. A bird and a dog passed nearby. The rippling of the water, before and after the barge. From time to time, a dull thud from the drumhead of my heart.
A group of men appeared on the opposite shore. I hid behind the lime trees. I followed them to the railway bridge. Rolling on the parapet, without falling into the water, was a cigarette butt. Someone had just left…
My eyes searched the crime scene. The barge jutted in and out of its waterline, the river toying with it. Nobody went near it. The damp path along the Seine ended there, where the water began. An hour passed. The sun went on its way. Alfredo Chascock parted the curtain of the horizon. I trembled.
Some timid fellow then appeared at the foot of the barge. It was the same one I’d seen on top of the bridge. He seemed to be imitating me. Did he think the barge was deserted? I hid to watch him more closely. He climbed onto the barge, walked across deck. Did he feel a shiver moving over the tar? At last he stopped and climbed down.
Alfredo Chascock was coming along the path near the barge. A man and a woman were following him.
A scream from inside the barge. The vessel heaved in the water as if there was a fight going on inside. The fellow from the bridge appeared again on deck. When they saw him, the man and the girl walking behind Alfredo Chascock started to walk faster. And then run. Alfredo Chascock must have heard some strange comment as they passed him. He perched his opera glasses on his nose.
But the man and the girl were now screaming too. The stranger on the barge ran from one end to the other. He didn’t know what path to take. The open cuffs of his shirt, his hands, were both covered with blood. At last he scrambled down and ran off, and the man arriving with the girl took off after him. Both disappeared. The girl looked this way and that, sobbing hysterically without knowing why. Alfredo Chascock came over and tried to console her. The girl trusted in his soothing voice, which brought out from the depths of his throat the Jewish resignation engendered by so many centuries of massacres, and as if his words weren’t enough, he gave her his opera glasses as well, so the girl could look up through them toward the bridge.
MAY 19, 18—
I could say that, physically, I was a happy man, as the night passed swiftly, profoundly, in my quiet bedroom, the clock on the nearby asylum marking the hours. I knew its chimes well, but had never felt the need to actually look out at the clock, which I imagined to be blind, without numerals.
At midnight yesterday, however, I passed in front of it. The clock let loose its chimes over sleepy Bougival and I lifted my eyes for the first time to the bell tower.
The clock wasn’t a blind thing, an indifferent machine. No — connected to all the pain and misery here, the face of it was the yellowish face of a sickly moon, not an opaque pane covered with cabbalistic symbols.
How could it be that this same clock had marked my existence until last night and made me hear what I believed were notes of jubilation? Had its face really been so dismal since the first night it was illuminated by an oil lamp, giving it the aspect of a dying star?
Can it be that I’ve only ever felt truly understood when the dismal notes of this sick clock consoled my heart? Has everything in me always breathed in reverse? Am I really so different from my fellow men?
NOTES
Montaigne: though it differs in places from Lascano Tegui’s Spanish, we have used the Charles Cotton translation of the appropriate passage.
Greemvaneco: probable Teguian distortion of “Van Eyck.”
lowest third of Dante’s hell: in the Spanish, the narrator appears to be consigning these sadistic Jesuits to the third circle of hell. As Dante reserved this real estate for gluttons, we have taken a more liberal interpretation.
September: this entry appears to be out of order, but we have elected to respect the sequence found in the original edition.
Septeuil: the apocryphal French Revolution story about a noblewoman forced by the mob to drink a glass of blood to save her father from execution in fact concerns the Marquis and Mademoiselle de Sombreuil, not Septeuil. The daughter died childless, years after the supposed incident.
bescreen’d in night: Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2. Translated literally, Tegui has his “nobleman” here “wrapped in a cloud.”
1 Revista de Avance, 2:3, Feb. 15, 1928.
2 Not that the difficulty of obtaining them could ever overcome the desire to do so. Thus, when I presented a paper on Lascano Tegui at a conference called “The Atypicals,” put together by the Institute for Hispanic American Literature, it was revealed that there were a number of secret admirers of Tegui who, until then, had been scattered and isolated among the ranks of professors, researchers, and students at the College of Philosophy and Arts at the University of Buenos Aires. I’m indebted to them for providing me with certain details of which I was previously unaware, and loaning me invaluable materials!
3 Lange, Norah. Discursos. Buenos Aires: Ediciones C.A.Y.D.E., 1942. pp. 43–45.
4 The dedications of those books reveal a circle of friendships and affinities that in 1926 was headed by Ricardo Güiraldes, alongside Girondo and Evar Méndez, and later, in 1936, would include Rogelio Yrurtia, Alfredo Palacios, Nerio Rojas, and Nicolás Coronado — under the spiritual patronage of Domingo French and Antonio Beruti — in a movement that seemed to shy away from the literary realm into a zone characterized by the confluence of art and politics.
* The Editors would like to state their objection to the exploitative tabloid style here employed by Monsieur le Vicomte de Lascano Tegui. (Note in the first edition.)
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
EMILIO LASCANO TEGUI (1887–1966), a self-styled Viscount, is one of the most provocative and singular figures in Argentinian literature, making his way through life as a writer, journalist, curator, painter, decorator, diplomat, mechanic, gentleman, orator (known to make incendiary speeches in perfect rhymed verse), and even a dentist. His position as a translator for the International Post Office brought him to Europe, where he began his literary career.
IDRA NOVEY is a poet and translator. Her
work has appeared in Paris Review, Slate, and the Believer and her debut collection The Next Country was released in 2008. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, and the PEN Translation Fund. She currently directs the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University and teaches at Columbia and NYU.
Table of Contents
VISCOUNT LASCANO TEGUI AND ON ELEGANCE WHILE SLEEPING: THE FRINGES OF A POETICS
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ON ELEGANCE WHILE SLEEPING
NOTES
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
On Elegance While Sleeping Page 10