On Elegance While Sleeping

by Emilio Lascano Tegui

  MAY 23, 18—

  I still didn’t know what love was. When I approached little girls at school, the natural female scent that emanated from their skin, and which — whenever they noticed it themselves — made them blush, gave me the same vertigo I’d experience later at the nearness of a woman’s breast. The mere aroma of those little girls elevated me to the same delectable heights of emotion that the curves of the bodies of passing women would arouse in me as I matured. For instance, the crisis of sensation when a neighbor named Julia asked me to come up and see her one day. She was a widow. She sat me on her lap and kissed my sex. Julia was my first lover. She took me by the hand with all her thirty-five years of experience. She took a great interest in me.

  A spiritualist, she believed staying in Bougival was a way to stay close to the spirit of her husband, who’d drowned in the Seine. Having found over twenty corpses in the sluice gates of the mill by this time, the whole village saw me as one of its favorite sons. A funeral business gave me a hundred business cards to slip into the pockets of the drowned. The family of the deceased always took the hint. The funeral home gave me ten francs for each new client I secured for them. The widow Julia couldn’t escape the spreading oil slick of my fame. The body of her husband had never been found. Would I be the one to find it? Not yet — and in the meanwhile, she couldn’t remarry. Without a corpse, there was no way to verify her bereavement. Since I couldn’t find him for her, she was obliged to solicit a divorce on the grounds that she’d been abandoned. On the eve of the court’s decision, in the presence of a medium, she called up her wandering husband. The medium declared she saw the man’s spirit just behind me, above my head, and he was holding a poster with the words:

  An eagle eats a banana,

  and all of humanity is golden.

  The medium, who was a mason’s wife, interpreted the enigmatic poster as follows:

  “Eagle: pride. Banana: perfume. Humanity: warm blood. Gold: fleeting happiness.”

  We sat in mournful silence as though we’d understood.

  MAY 25, 18—

  I wanted to live my own life. I was fourteen then, which explains my anxiety. A great desire to get as far away as possible dragged me through the streets until nightfall. How would I get home? The spectacle of the countryside always swept me away with it, without objection. At that age, I read adventure books about distant savage continents. How I loved those islands supposedly towed by the dragons of the Middle Ages. Sadly, those islands no longer existed. How I wanted to go into combat with the ferocious natives and wildlife of unexplored lands! They were incomplete beings, above whom floated the arrogant superiority of a boy from civilization.

  I knew Stanley’s travel diaries by heart. I read and recited them to the other children in Bougival. The majority of those kids are street toughs now. But what is the apache if not a hunter of wild beasts born into the wrong age?

  Having read those books, I saw the world as divided into two hemispheres: the hemisphere of stabbing, and then the far more prestigious hemisphere of shooting.

  And I had a photograph of myself taken with a revolver in my hand.

  JULY 9, 18—

  She was the daughter of an alcoholic. Her father had very white hands, the hands of someone who’d never done a day’s work, and the girl grew up admiring them. At seven years old, she fell in love with a woman who’d touched her hair as she passed. Why? Because the woman had beautiful hands. This was the girl’s only desire. That stranger’s hands had brought her all the sensations of beauty. She was poor and lived alone and never dreamed as a farm-boy does of setting fire to haystacks just to enjoy the magnificence of their burning over the fields at night. But men alone can’t always be the vehicle for all the beauty in one’s life. Pity the woman who gives herself to a man just because he has curly hair or straight!..Thus does she forsake paradise all over again.

  One day, her father called to Gabriela, whom we called Mademoiselle Fifí among ourselves. She watched the luminous trail of her father’s hands as they picked up a pocket knife. This movement made his hands even more beautiful than usual, and, taking hold of his penis, he cut it off in front of her. Blood covered his hands as they deposited his organ on the kitchen table. Gabriela lost her mind after that. Still, she was a generous madwoman. She’d offer herself under bridges, in doorways at dusk, between empty stalls in the market. While I took her, she’d lick my hands. As our union ended, her saliva would get thick and foamy like the spit that collects on the bits of runaway horses.

  JULY 14, 18—

  I’ve watched my family fall the way a leper watches his cold, swollen hands drop off in pieces. My poor parents got old and died.

  My father brought back a crocodile from the Amazon; we kept it in a pool covered with wire netting. The crocodile slept for several months and in that time swarms of horseflies and mosquitoes took up residence on his craggy back. They contracted his sleeping sickness from drinking his blood. When the crocodile showed any signs of life, it was almost always on the same side of his body: he’d open the eye along that coast and watch us sadly. He was still tired. The noise from the street, the vibration of carts loaded with beans and potatoes, simply fueled his nightmares. And then, on one of those days when the crocodile opened its eye, a mosquito managed to escape the general lethargy and bit my younger brother, who liked to run his finger along the extensive teeth of our visitor — and thanks to this chance bite, my brother experienced the inexpressible pleasure of serving as a medical experiment. He died of tiredness.

  My brother was buried in the lowest, dampest part of the cemetery. The Seine flooded it in winter, when the waters rose. Between the mud and mire, we recovered the cross the current had carried some distance away. The grave itself seemed to have tried to follow its marker, dragging itself along the riverbed, as if that pine box with lead handles no longer contained my brother’s fleshless bones, but simply the divine and Egyptian soul of our sacred crocodile.

  AUGUST 2, 18—

  They say the gondoliers of Venice are the most agile men on earth. Anyway, of that part of the earth perpetually in motion. I’ve never seen them, but I imagine them to be like black cats, the most agile animals I can think of. If ever a stranger made a real impression on an hour of my life — those hours that have floated by like reflections of clouds — it was the stokers working the steam barges going down the Seine. I’ve seen those stokers up close, leaning on the rails of their ships, weary as Childe Harold, watching the world pass, unmoved by the gray, protean smoke escaping their stacks. Only their eyes have life to them. Pariahs living so close to fire and under mounds of coal, their red pupils were ringed by halos of black dust caught in their long lashes — lashes made beautiful by this carbon: the almond eyes of fabulous, exotic queens. The beauty of their eyes moved me — as Antinous was struck by the eyes of one of Hadrian’s legionnaires.

  I’ve known the frissons caused by the mysterious, the hermetic, the Oriental. Eyes that seem to contain in themselves the achievement of all the unspeakable aspirations of our latest literary trends. These were travelers to strange lands — romantic eyes. Fixed in the landscape for an hour, they became suggestive, terrifying, and beautiful, like the eyes in paintings along the dark hall of some damp castle; enormous and fascinating, like the painted eyes of mummies, like the elongated eyes of Egyptians…

  I’ve felt those fatal eyes look upon my boyish — perhaps occasionally girlish — soul. Eyes encrusted in the stokers’ faces — Greek statues during the decline had eyes made of agate, emerald, and gold. Those eyes passed by, mirroring me without seeing me, vacant of all sense or sentiment. Eyes the same as the cheap crystal eyes of embalmed animals in provincial museums.

  SEPTEMBER 9, 18—

  Marie Germain changed genders at twenty-two years of age. I established mine when I was only ten, an age when boys flirt with the idea of being female and some are already as sensitive as girls. I had a classmate we all kissed as if he weren’t another boy. And Osvaldo — that
was his name — was thrilled with all of this attention, because he didn’t catch on that we were courting him, and that this was why we all offered him the best of ourselves. We used to invite him to take walks with us, and he gave us the added pleasure of having to lie to his parents in order to come along: he would sneak out of his house to join us. The skin on his face and legs was entirely feminine, and I was so jealous that I ended up having a falling out with him. I almost preferred to abstain from his company entirely than watch him belong equally to all my friends. When we eventually made up, I no longer took any pleasure in him. He repulsed me. Osvaldo, as a result, would do anything to make me like him again. I’d take him to the riverbank and make him trap leeches for me: I’d tell him to go barefoot into the underbrush along the riverbank and he’d come out with leeches fastened to his calves. As he helped me with my leech business (and he’d kiss me ardently as I exploited him — I couldn’t stand it), he got thinner, taller, and his rosy complexion turned sallow. One day they expelled him from the Convent of Saint Francis, and after that I only saw him occasionally, in Paris, powdered like a girl and walking on the balls of his feet, looking back to see if there was anyone following him. When he turned his head, he’d smile. A look, one might say, as though he’d just received some sort of sign.

  I never found any hints in Bougival’s history that the town might once have been a Huguenot stronghold. But where Osvaldo was concerned, my village showed itself to be indignant and Puritan to a fault. It was cruel how the townspeople singled him out. They took great pleasure in offering him up as a sacrifice, making an example of him, imposing a strict, unending policy of droit du seigneur upon him in exchange for a fleeting sensual pleasure…forcing themselves on that poor, sick boy, who was as fit for the sanatorium as he was innocent before the law. After all, what wouldn’t he do for us so long as we went on keeping him company? As a child, Osvaldo had bored peepholes in the doors to his mother’s and sister’s rooms — the former had now married for the second time, the latter was a fifteen-year-old virgin with a luscious Spanish body. The perverts who liked to accompany Osvaldo on his viewings could choose whichever hole they preferred: the one that looked in on Osvaldo’s libertine stepfather, or the one that opened onto the rosy, naked innocence of the young virgin sitting at her mirror, feeling the anxiety common to every lonely woman during the infinite solitude that is night in the provinces.

  SEPTEMBER 10, 18—

  At a certain point in my life, I remember having seen and spoken to people who’d achieved a greater degree of perfection than the people I know now. But I’ve forgotten the details of these encounters…

  I also remember that, at that age, coach-horses would smile at me. Yes, they smiled at me…and leave us not concern ourselves with the incredulity of those men who have never been children, and whose refusal in those days to believe my stories crippled every one of my affirmations with doubt as soon as they left my mouth.

  OCTOBER 14, 18—

  Fish — I refer to the ones in the Seine — are old and tired by the time they arrive in Bougival. They are experts in all the varied methodologies of the art of fishing. When I whistle to myself on the riverbanks, I see fish entertaining themselves by flipping out of the water to enjoy my music. This when they won’t move so much as an inch for a bit of bait on a line. Because fisherman who don’t know how to whistle are boring.

  NOVEMBER 2, 18—

  Raimundo the coachman invited me back up onto his coachbox. Once again came the stories of the neighborhood, one after another, because he still likes to keep a little of the confessional in his life. We were riding around the green bonnet of Mont Valérien when we saw a large cluster of young women watched over by two nuns. Raimundo warned me:

  “Look at the girls, kid, at every one — you need to get used to them. Any man who lets a girl pass unobserved will end up with an enemy at his back. You have to look at them, adore them, value them — some shamelessly, some sadly, but don’t let any woman be an exception. Nature won’t forgive you for it.”

  Raimundo the coachman then looked over at the nuns — as though through an open fly.

  He added: “I know them…I know them! From the Soeurs de la Charite de Jesus! You know, there was a nurse from that order once who fell in love with a patient — he was one those invalids who feel more at home in hospitals than out in the world, and she really was dying of love for what was left of that wretched, suffering bit of humanity…just the sort of thing city men like to hear, since they hope to get the same treatment when their turns come. Hers was a love without limits, you know, spiritual, and watching her patient through the windowed door of his room, the nurse ran her eyes over the sweet line of the man’s profile just as death began to tug at it. A love without words! But death, who’s also a woman, got jealous: it became a battle between two women, you see, and death soon got the upper hand by poisoning the nurse’s drinking water with an aphrodisiac…her love went from purely spiritual to carnal to the point of paroxysm! Alone in her quarters, the nurse descended to the basest depths of earthly love. Death had won. The devout woman died in grand fashion. They buried her with all the pomp reserved for those who die in the line of duty. A tricolor flag covered her coffin. The other nurses, doctors, and convalescents accompanied her remains to their final rest. A carpenter’s apprentice who’d gone to find the hospital door behind which the nurse had expired followed the beautiful procession with the entire doorframe on his shoulder — a new Simon of Cyrene. However, the door he carried had been infected with the late sister’s lust, and thus a new fount of love emerged on the earth…”

  NOVEMBER 17, 18—

  Bougival is full of old women. Their big faces fill the windowpanes. My God, how old they are! Not even death can get their attention. They’ll only die once they finally tire of listening to the ringing of the village bells.

  DECEMBER 25, 18—

  It’s the same story with the hens of Bougival. Unlike our roosters, they never seem to make any progress toward the chopping block. Not even when they change owners. On the contrary: if stolen, the thief simply ends up taking them to market, and they go on living. It’s as though, without admitting it, man and bird have come to an agreement — an agreement that would be much more precise if humans didn’t despise their fellow creatures so much; if, instead of wasting time deciphering ancient Chaldean, we worried a little more about deciphering the language of the animals we actually spend our time with! In any case, I’ve discovered numerous curious cohabitations in my town — intimate, embarrassing dramas. Now that I’ve strayed onto this subject, I might as well record the influence that one of my neighbors exercised over the birds in her poultry yard.

  My neighbor frequently picked up her hens and chastised them, ridiculously, waggling her index finger: “If anyone comes to steal you, you’d better get away! Don’t let yourself be taken away by who-knows-what sort of brute!”

  Then she’d let them go, only to return later and repeat her instructions to them one by one.

  It is believed that the birds understood.

  Her hens were the most anxious chickens I’ve ever seen. The slightest sound would send them scurrying; they’d run, horrified, to take refuge under their owner’s skirts.

  Perhaps this seems charming to you? But statistics show that there’s always an increase in instances of heart disease in populations living under a tyrannical regime. Those hens, under the pressure of their owner’s constant threats, all died young — suffocated by disproportionately small hearts, certainly worth less than the livers of geese from Périgueux…

  JANUARY 14, 18—

  The world,” the coachman told me, “is slowly committing suicide…” He paused to think of a way to illustrate his point, setting aside his whip, and then added: “For example, every single day the semen of our great geniuses — that most vital of fluids — leaks out through an opening that is directly connected to their spinal columns, and so they are gradually reduced to nothing — those same arrogant ge
niuses who, if they were allowed to develop fully, would, admittedly, prove quite a nuisance to humanity…but who are also our only means of moving forward! This is the trade-off we make in the modern age…perhaps solitary vice should be considered the social virtue par excellence! Certainly if people made love on the streets, in front of everyone, health and hygiene levels in the city would be above reproach. Onanism, however, despite putting an end to so much human progress, has the advantage of culling our herd, and of uniting those of us who are left! It’s an elimination test.

  “For ages it’s proven impossible to unite all the strata of mankind. Our geniuses were pretentious and individualist and un-apologetically so. Their destiny was to lead all other men to the slaughter and thus be left alone in their brilliance, solitary and lofty as the mountains. But see, masturbation has put an end to those demigods. They couldn’t survive the modern world without masturbation. In other words, they’ve become “civilized.” Women — in whom, you know, all the capital sins are combined: everywhere to be seen, nowadays, but now not quite so accessible as in the days of kings and tyrants — breezed gently through the eyes of our geniuses and lay down upon the soft cushions of their cerebellums…Yes, masturbation took over, making these geniuses descend to the common territory of all base mortals — tarnished now, despite their greatness! Now they look like gray stone military monuments: tall, and with a primitive, corrupt sort of authority about them — but entirely anti-aesthetic. They lie in wait for us at night, their stony bodies obstructing the paths of all things tender, soft, and beautiful — hoping to trip us up, petrified and perverse! That’s their revenge, you see, upon the rest of us! And that’s precisely what they’ve told me, when I’ve taken their confessions — when I managed at last to work their souls free from their calcified bodies, the same way you peel the hide off a slaughtered cow…brute force.”