Leper Tango

by David MacKinnon

  “C’est très simple,” Pascal responded, summarizing all of life in his bland, authoritative response. “All you have to do is guess where the die is.”

  “Sure, it’s simple, why am I trusting you?” Abdul shouted protestingly, performing a splenetic jig, a grimace twisting his features. “Just this once, Allah, guide me through the desert to the promised land!”

  A little girl stood skipping rope in the middle of the street. A Sunday afternoon theatre troupe tr udged through. A jumble of harlequins, worn bass drums completed by a trio of clowns hauling a makeshift box constructed to simulate a royal coach. Abdul was blind to it all, and frantically threw three hundred franc notes on the table and smacked his palm flat onto the middle cup.

  “There! I’m sure of it!”

  Pascal lifted the cup, his granite features immovable.

  “Three hundred francs for the beur.”

  “Allahu akbar, allahu akbar!”

  He stuffed the hundred franc notes recklessly into a

  snotty mouchoir. Despite the whole thing being an utter sham, the same suckers still showed up, with a few new customers lagging around, who had seen the trick performed a thousand times, yet walked up, and after the ritual hesitations, analyses, back and forths, squinting of the eyes and smacking of palms, placed their money.

  I accompanied her as far as the St-Denis post office, let her continue. There was a letter waiting for me in the Poste Restante. No return address, something from Montreal.

  Dear Franck,

  I am writing you from my hospital bed, where I have been prostrate for ten days. I know that means nothing to you, that you have forgotten my very existence. Your daughter asks every day when daddy is coming home. I have told her you are looking for diamonds in South America, and that you will return as a millionaire. You are a real son of a bitch, Franck. I know that nobody has ever meant anything to you, but, if you have any decency, you might send us a cheque once in a while. I don’t have enough money, but when I do, I’m going to hire a contract killer, and do the world a favour.

  I momentarily attempted to conjure up an image of the sender, and failed, despite having lived with her for years, and fathered three of her children. The effect of the letter was similar to what I might have felt upon discovering that I had left a phone bill unpaid at a former address.

  As I completed my reading of the unsigned missive, I found myself in front of a tabac, stepped inside and picked up a box of Danneman cigars and the Friday night race card for the Vincennes track. Alena’s pimp Yannick had given me some inside information on a trotter named Hollywood or Bust, carded on the fourth race, which according to Yannick was going to be thrown. Hollywood or Bust was pegged at 48-1 on the preliminary card. Those types of odds on a quinte win meant enough for six months of whoring and plenty of pocket change for rounds of Ricard. For my new friends.

  Outside of Tranh, a casual relationship at best, with no risk of going anywhere, there was no one in my life. Unless you counted whores. My whole existence was being played out in the mind. There was death to consider, which meant being buried or cremated somewhere, but even that could be outsourced. Or, you could just opt for the default button, and die in the street, and be tossed in a garbage truck with the rest of the waste of St-Denis. Maybe they’d send the invoice to my ex-wife under the Decree of Thermidor Year II, concerning the duty to dispose of the remains of family members.

  The key to the city was picking your arrondissement and sticking with it. Each one of them had a personality and, if you made the wrong pick, sooner or later you would be forced to leave out of apathy, disgust or fear. The second and ninth provided everything you needed if your predilection was vice: bordellos, sex shops, clubs échangistes, S & M, wine caves, and meat shops threaded in and out of the quarter, underlining that we were all just meat at various stages of the coil from breeding ground to slaughterhouse. Which brought me back to a core realisation. If my life had any limited meaning, it was only that I belonged in Paris. It provided me with the one thing I had truly sought out of life. Anonymity. Sheba had been a brief interlude, during which I suffered from the hallucination that she could answer a question which even I didn’t know how to formulate. Or so I thought at the time. I spent most of the following morning hanging a set of erotic sketches drawn by Eisenstein which I had recently purchased. The walls of number 2, rue de Mulhou se, were now covered with paintings, drawings, lithographs, etchings, sketches of women. Kama sutra postures, Munch adolescents, Picabia pastiches of meat grinders titled Voici la femme. Garish harlets, schoolgirls in pleated skirts, nubians covering their cunts with flat palms, as if their uncle had just walked into the boudoir and was preparing to rape them.

  As I stepped into the corridor, I caught sight of the old woman, down on her knees in the communal toilet, vigorously scrubbing the inside of the cracked porcelain bowl with a brush. Skinny as a pole, rigidly balanced on a set of scrawny, doorknob knees. She wore a pink set of thirty year old babydolls. Her stubby backside visible through the meshed layers of her negligée. Inside the W.C., three clothes lines criss-crossing, wall to wall. Panties, hosiery, bras, bustiers, corsets hanging from the lines. A curl of cigarette smoke wafted upwards from the crack bet ween her skeletal buttocks, sending out unspeakable invitations. A cemetery of her past and whatever it contained.

  Her door was a little further down the hall. On the outside, a label, reproducing the name I had seen on her postal box downstairs: C. Ducastin-Chanel. DucastinChanel had taken up the habit of saluting me whenever I passed by her door in the early evening on my way out. “Vous descendez en ville, monsieur Franck?” she squawked. Her head swivelled, revealing a gnarled, crooked mouth and beady eyes.

  “Vous descendez en ville, monsieur Franck?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Sin wasn’t invented yesterday, my friend.” “Get back to your scrubbing, old woman.”

  “You know the last time I cried? Forty-seven years ago. It was a Thurday evening. Standing outside the Bobigny. You know. Just by the Bastille?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  As I descended the stairwell, her squawking voice resonating from the top floor.

  “You ever ask an old lady her first name, monsieur

  Franck?”

  The cit y had been dark and grey for weeks. Two months into spring, and nothing but rain. The Seine had overflowed, and there were no signs of water levels abating. Tainted water seeping out of the sewers, onto the street in a slow, relentless progression. The trains had been on strike for seven days running, emptying Paris of the movers and shakers and the suburban workers.

  The local riverains were back in control, and the tone had changed back to traditional Parisian rude self-contentment.

  Over time, my appetite had been gradually, but progressively increasing, taking up larger and larger parts of the daylight hours. Part of this may have been brought on by my nascent friendship with Tranh, but there were other reasons, ones I explained by the fact that I was getting over Sheba. There was no getting around it. The stronger the addiction, the worst the cold turkey. It was better to return to soft drugs, like wine and food, and the result was more than salutory. By the time evening arrived, I was now at the point where, if on a binge, I could devour a ten course meal.

  I dropped into a butcher shop on the St-Denis exchange operating under the name Charcuterie de l ’Orient.

  The meat on display, particularly the lamb, had a distended appearance, as if the animal had crawled a few last steps across the slaughterhouse floor after the first swing of the axe on its head misfired. I ordered a Merguez sausage sandwich from a grinning, buttery faced ogre sliding a chain of sausages through his thick palms. Two young men, clad in butchers’ aprons, were engaged in casual discussion beside me. They were drinking acrid coffee, smoking Marlboros as they discussed the legs of a young short-skirted client, or more precisely, the cunt perched bare centimetres above its hem, and just exactly how they wouldn’t mind sticking a few me
rguez into the vaginal crevice within.

  One of the two mentioned that earlier that afternoon he had masturbated in the breaded mix for the escalope milanaise. His colleague nodded blandly, adding that he never completed a shift without shooting off at least one wad of jism into one of the mixes for pâté or mousse au canard. I considered for a moment whether this was braggadocio or a case of something else. It was not pleasant to contemplate, but neither was eating eggs, if you thought about it too much. That was the key. Not to think too much about things.

  On the bigger playing field, hoof and mouth disease had swept the continent, but within Paris, a stubborn, well-anchored form of madness had possessed the locals. The restaurants, shunned by fearful tourists, were selling meat at cost, bringing in the lower end of the social spectrum. Every where, but nowhere more than in les Halles, the ragged dregs of the city had temporarily repossessed their chairs and tables from the Japanese and the Americans, and seized the occasion. A large blackboard sign in the terrace area of Aux Tonneaux des Halles advertised Ricard at one franc, over a sign: Have you caught Hoof and Mouth Fever?

  The inside of the bistro was packed to overflowing. A twenty-something, female accordionist, rust-coloured hair in ropy braids to her waist, a pleated sk irt over striped leotards and high-heeled saddle shoes, rouge forming t wo blazing suns on her cheeks. I spotted Rhanya. She was weaving across the floor just behind the accordionist, waltzing very unsteadily with a beur half her age. The beur’s eyes were half-closed, his head pushed against Rhanya’s large head nurse breasts. The regular clientele had been replaced by kitchen staff and dishwashers, six garbage men in Ville de Paris lime-green coveralls, drinking pastis. The employees wolfing down Chinon wines and the cheapest tripe, rognon, giblets, ris de veau and other unidentifiable offal being sold at discount.

  I moved down Montorgueil towards St-Eustache church. The Indian beggar standing at his post at the side entry into the nave. He spotted me, broke into a smile.

  “Once a gentleman, no?”

  I nodded, flipped him a franc.

  “Ever been to Gujarat, my friend? You can have a woman for eight rupees.”

  I moved onwards towards the old commodities exchange, and a few more tripe and pigs foot joints. At the Pied de Cochon, a heav y set, tall, stooped, silver-haired man was gathering himself from the ground. He had a fresh cut on his forehead and a streak of mud on his cheek. Two men, shaved heads, both wearing black pants, white shirt, black tie. Their arms folded.

  “I am chair of philosophy at the University of Chicago. Alistair Needham. You fools, how could you not have heard of me. Alistair Needham!” The taller of the two men shook his head. “Ça ne me dit rien. Et, toi? ”

  His accomplice shook his head. “Que dalle.”

  Alistair Needham tried to push past him. “Désolé. No tourists. For the poor today.” “But, I can pay!”

  “Come back tomorrow. Tomorrow.”

  Inside the Pied de Cochon, two men in waiters’ uniforms were sleeping on the floor, partially blocking the entrance.

  In the centre of the restaurant a table of twenty men, in from the slaughterhouses, still wearing their bloodied aprons, were throwing knives into the walls in a makeshift competition which the owner watched with grim resignation. The rest of the Pied de Cochon filled with derelicts who had briefly abandoned their begging at nearby StEustache church to join in the orgy. For the lower urban classes, hoof and mouth was manna from heaven. It meant they could eat properly, if only for a few days.

  I took a window table, looking out onto Place StEustache and the Commodities Exchange. The taller man who had just refused entry to the American dropped a menu on the table.

  “What’s on special today?”

  “The temptation of St Anthony.”

  “That’ll be fine. With a bottle of Moselle.”

  Two minutes later, the waiter returned with an oversized, shallow soup bowl, filled with a steaming heap of pigs tail, knuckles, museau, dismembered corpses floating in a thick brown gruel. He dropped a large, wooden salad-mixing spoon onto the table.

  “Voilà,” he said. There. You’re served.

  I dug into the food. Food was a solution for everything. If people were worried about getting afts in their mouths, or developing a mutant strain of sclerosis because the cows were mad, that was their problem. This was Europe, and the general genetic balance periodically called for a plague, or a war or a genocide from time to time to bleed the collectivity and keep everyone on their toes. If you didn’t like it, you could move to America where filth was a strict liability offence, and you could keep a weapons arsenal in your kitchen, provided it was cleaned once a week.

  I decided to stop in and see Millie, who operated solo out of a chambre on the sixth floor of the Hotel Clauzel on rue des Martyrs. She had set up a makeshift waiting room out in the hallway, consisting of two chairs and a coffee table near the elevator. She had left a book open on the coffee table, at a page with the following quote underlined in red pencil:

  My soul is a black maelstrom,

  Immense vertigo surrounding emptiness.

  Millie emerged in the corridor, cheerfully, but briskly escorting her previous john, a skinny, bald-headed coot, to the elevator. She had coarse salt and pepper hair braided rasta style, which hung like a bead curtain to her shoulders. She wore a white miniskirt and a long garland which slithered its way down her ankles, drunken Judy Garland style. She walked right past me, escorted the bald eagle to the elevator, watched the doors shut, then turned towards me.

  “So, when’s the last time you had your cock sucked, Franck?”

  Usua l ly, the non-French product I sampled was shipped in from Guadeloupe, Dominican Republic and former French African colonies in the Indian ocean. Millie, however, was from Chicago, and the only onduty American whore I ever met in the city of Paris. She had taken up whoring after being fired as a heavy-duty machine shop operator and had to dig up some cash quickly to have her uterus removed. At least that was the way she stated the case to me, the words blasting out of her Cherokee-Irish mouth like heat from a kiln.

  We returned to her room, She had made little effort to remake the bed, and the sheets were rumpled still from her previous client.

  “So, what is it today, Franck?”

  About t wo or three minutes into humping, I suddenly felt Millie’s vulva grip the base of my cock like a Venus fly-trap. The stem and head of the penis, however, seemed to be stretching out, as if it had embarked on an independent speleological expedition into a cavernous grotto of the Pyrenees. I could only guess what tracts and canals my dick was peering at through sensory devices whose existence I had never suspected prior to now.

  For a moment, I imagined the giant worms of Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy, burrowing through extra-terrestrial sand to locate life-sustaining water. In retrospect, the loss of her lower body had caused me to lose control of my mind. The undertone of rumbling utterances gained slightly in cadence as the rhythm of my own humping increased, which led me to believe it was just one of those parallel mental tam-tam reverberations which knocked the walls out of my brain any time I found myself in a bordello. Nothing special was registering on the mental Richter scale. Millie, right in the middle of fucking, started repeating a phrase:

  “ ... je suis une femme pour qui le monde extérieur est une réalité intérieure.” The simple resonance of the phrase seemed to coagulate with the acrid stench of the room.

  Millie bent over and touched her toes, demonstrating an age-defying, aboriginal suppleness worthy of a contortionist. I stared for a moment at a scar, dead centre of her back, which resembled a paddlesteamer, while I attempted to light a cigarette. A poster on the scarlet wall behind her scrolled upwards and downwards as I moved into a steady hump. Up, down, up, down.

  Conferencia Futurista

  José de Almada-Negreiros

  Teatro Republica

  Sabado, 14 de abril 1917

  52 cts

  While examining the toreador
posture and inflated pleat trousers of the futurist poet of the previous century, I heard another snorting noise, and perceived for the first time that it was coming from Millie herself, who was now rigid. She looked to be in a trance. Although her body was stiff and immobile, her Cherokee straw hair bobbed up and down over a string of black moles strung out in a semi-circle between her shoulder blades. She pointed her ferret-like snout forward, sniffed, wheeled around and stared up at me. Her eyes rolled upwards, briefly exposing a long, pointed, ghoulish set of eyeteeth. Then she regained her focus and smiled, her eyeteeth still visible. I examined my prick, which now hung limp and lifeless, its vitalit y depleted by the clinical squeeze of Millie’s vulva. Fucking Millie was like masturbation. Desecrating a grave.

  “Stick around, Franck. I’ll pour you a drink. Fuck it, I miss talking to Americans.” “I’m Canadian.”

  “You’ll just have to do.”

  She poured me a Kronenbourg.

  “What do you feel when you fuck me?”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Nothing. Nothing personal. My mind’s elsewhere.”

  “Didn’t you even notice? I mean my machinery. It’s gone. I’ve been gutted. Disembowelled.”

  I watched her examine herself in front of a vanity mirror, brushing and rebrushing a straw mane of hair nonchalantly, swinging it over her shoulder as if she were Lady Gueneviere and not a chronically unemployed Illinois heavy-duty machine shop girl who had to become a trans-Atlantic tool operator to earn enough back pay to cover costs to remove her own body parts.

  “You still hung up on la gamine?”

  “Have you heard something?”

  “Forget her, Franck. Do you know how many men

  she’s done her number on?”

  “What number would that be?”

  “Don’t think you’re so goddam special, Franck.”

  “You have no fucking idea what she did or didn’t do.”

  “Oh yes I do. I know exactly what she did. That’s the problem with you men. Even you goddam johns think you’re special cases. But you’re replaceable. Jesus, she’s probably out doing some john who’s got ten times your cash flow.”