On Elegance While Sleeping

by Emilio Lascano Tegui

  JANUARY 16, 18—

  At twenty, she was an artist’s girlfriend. She didn’t deserve the distinction. She lacked enthusiasm. She interrupted his work with the same misplaced solemnity that led her to sleep with him on a rainy day just to avoid getting her feet wet and then move to Bougival and open a flower shop. In Bougival, her shop was considered a useless luxury. As she sat waiting for customers, the hours passed and her daughter grew. The artist sent her eighty francs a month to show he still remembered her. She divided up the francs with myopic delight into four weekly sums. The old florist would go to the post office every Tuesday to cash her money order. Her daughter was in charge when she was out, and so planned Tuesday dates with one boy or another. That’s how we, the boys of the town, found out Anita had a rash on her back. She was saving up for her future by acquiring gifts from admirers who came to see her rash. One gift she liked in particular was an ornamental comb that cost fifteen francs. At last, Anita disappeared without saying good-bye. Her mother only noticed her absence on a Tuesday, when she realized there was no one to watch the store. She became timid and stopped going out. She made the mailman cash her money orders for her and bring by her twenty weekly francs directly to the shop. Without air and sunshine her plants all dried up.

  Novelists overplay their hands when they put an end to their characters with some catastrophe — a terrible fire, a murder, what have you. They don’t trust in the asphyxiating monotony of everyday life. The florist’s was no more fascinating than a piece of dried seaweed. What she owned, where she lived, her days and nights: all were of the same homogenous consistency, bringing to mind the dull, lifeless backgrounds of the sepia landscapes commonly produced by professional photographers.

  JANUARY 26, 18—

  The children of degenerates step into life before other children. They start living centuries earlier. Health means nothing more than living in normal time. A broken watch ticks more often than one in perfect condition. It lives more. The children of the abnormal are mortgages owed by their parents. They’re born old. Born intelligent to the point of insanity. Sensitive to the point of silence. They’ve lived in their mothers’ bellies, their fathers’ blood, for years and years of an exhausting sensuality. They’re born with severe and well-worn faces. Their eyes are already jaded, as if they’ve seen too many Corot landscapes and gray was the only color in their cosmologies. Their hands are worn and they bite at their mothers’ breasts when suckling. They’re premature lovers. The wise children of the great languishing of our spinal fluids!

  This was what made my neighbor’s daughter so strange, and destined her to die long before the other skinny girls in Bougival. At a year old, she could already speak with ease. She was given to hyperbole. Things didn’t interest her because they existed — only because of the sensation they produced in her. She never picked things up; just passed her hands over them.

  Noise bothered her. She listened closely, frightened. She couldn’t help but translate noise, in her mind, into intense emotion (if only sailors could do the same when describing storms at sea in their three-hundred page naval manuals…). The first words she sounded out were adjectives. They remained her primary mode of communication for as long as she lived. She knew things by their qualities. She called water “cold,” she said “sweet” for milk, “hard” for bread — and it was the same with anything pleasant: an apple, her mother, a wooden horse, a silver bucket. For all the things that made her cry, she said “Boo.” “Boo” was the catch-all word for all the bad things that haunted the life of this tiny, sensitive girl destined to die on an autumn afternoon, because life couldn’t possibly give her what her genius demanded.

  She died, incidentally, in my arms the other day, after I took her out onto the balcony and showed her the distant panorama of Paris. On seeing it, the girl, fifteen months old, turned to me and said, as if we were in agreement: “Boo?”

  JANUARY 27, 18—

  When night comes, crowds hit the old neighborhoods like herds of boars escaping the purest of women (Diana) — clerks twisted and gnawed by their desires till they resemble the old files from their offices, the sex maniacs, vampires, and still-ashamed pederasts, all looking for refuge in the slums and suburbs and peeping into the buildings there, unbuttoning their pants and pissing at random against the walls and trees.

  They wait for accomplices who never show up and who they suppose might be disguised as a worker heading home for the day, a bag over his shoulder; a wisp of a girl running errands; or a boy coming home late from school, wrapped in the narrow cape some cheap tailor made as skimpy as possible. The boy’s hands are purple from the cold, and the armies of the perverse see these swollen, miserable hands as exotic fruit, the first fruits of a midday harvest.

  It was a night I couldn’t stay in any chair, felt as restless as an animal driven by instinct, with no fixed destination, wanting the dark alleys and nothing else. I went by the factories that had started to spring up on the boggy Seine flood-lands.

  A smell of hay, of manure, brick ovens, and recently discharged chemicals drifted gradually from the shadows. The sun had fallen into the oblivion of the horizon. In front of me rose a giant factory. The street divided it in two. In the opposite direction, climbing the hill where the factories dumped their waste, a man was approaching leading two large white horses in worn halters.

  The horseman passed and behind him, hurrying to keep up, was a cross-eyed man with a zinc box on his back.

  In a pit, among the garbage heaps, a woman who was really still a girl was poking at the ground. She was burying a biscuit tin containing six playing cards with a pin stuck through them, a piece of lodestone, the hearts of two doves, and a cameo of her seducer.

  In that black landscape, she was a happy and religious creature.

  JANUARY 28, 18—

  Climb on up, kid.”

  The coachman invited me to sit beside him. He was headed to Nanterre. I didn’t feel like talking. So we just rode quietly. Knowing I’d climbed up onto his coachbox for a reason, he said, “Only alcohol contains true happiness. The rest, little boy, isn’t worth a gobbet of spit. It’s pure waste, empty debauchery. Do you know Marie Roger?”

  I nodded like I was trying to remember.

  “Your neighbor Marie, Nicholas the shoemaker’s wife.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “She sent for me this morning. I thought she maybe wanted me to pick up a package for her in Paris.

  “‘Monsieur Raimundo,’ she said, sounding very distressed. ‘Nicholas has gone crazy!’

  “‘Crazy?’

  “‘I sent for you so you could take him to Paris.’

  “To a hospital in Paris is what I thought. And as one has to do on such occasions, I went to get my coach. We barely managed to get Monsieur Nicholas to climb in. He didn’t recognize us. When I told him we were going to Paris to see his brother, though, he agreed to come along.

  “The poor guy was really mad — mad in every possible way.

  “Along the way, Monsieur Nicholas, who didn’t recognize me, got down to say hello to various people we passed…And when I asked Madame María what street we were headed to, she said: ‘Go wherever you want.’

  “I was baffled. So now maybe she’d gone mad as well?

  “‘For example, we could go to the pont de Solférino if you’d like,’ she said. So we went. There were a few benches on the bank. Monsieur Nicholas got down, then Madame María after him and her daughter, who’d come along with us. They put him between them and asked me to wait down the street. When I pulled away, they went over to some gendarmes sleeping against a wall of the Tuilieries Garden. I saw them point to husband and father and make a gesture to explain he was crazy. The gendarmes came over.

  “‘Do you know him?’ one of them asked the two women.

  “‘No,’ they replied in unison. ‘We just happened to pass by and noticed he was out of his mind. It’s dangerous to just leave him here. Whoever he is, he needs to be taken to an asylum.’
>
  “Monsieur Nicholas smiled as if he was grateful for this attention and so the two gendarmes called to a passing cab and took this lunatic — without any known family — to a public asylum…

  “And thus it was that Marie Roger and her daughter rid themselves of a lunatic. The state took custody of him until he died. The family didn’t have to pay a thing. And since Marie Roger couldn’t rid herself of his shoe store with the same ease, it still belongs to her…

  “So, do you see how everything on the earth is just waste and debauchery? Good thing we can rely on a glass of something or other from time to time to help shield our eyes from it all…

  “Now, kid, climb down — and before you say good-bye, I’m going to treat you to a dose of holy water.”

  He filled a glass with absinthe and said a blessing over it with all the unctuousness of an old priest — not to mention the expansive sloppiness of a dockworker. His voice, like that of Saint Julian, had the timber of a bronze bell.

  APRIL 24, 18—

  When the mayor’s son left his house, all of us other boys flocked together the way small dogs scurry around each other whenever a big mastiff goes by. We felt an enormous respect for this boy who went to school in Paris and had already earned, at thirteen years of age, the honor of being called out to from the brothel window…

  MAY 19, 18—

  Nobody, no full-grown woman, has ever affected me, in all her voluptuousness, as much as that eleven-year-old girl who had the forty-year-old eyes of her mother and the voluptuous body movements of an aunt of hers who visited Bougival every Monday and dressed in loud, gaudy colors. How many women have I squeezed out like lemons and tossed away. I’ve spurned even the most intriguing, same as all the rest. Only the memory of that neighbor of mine — a girl who even then was as impalpable as a memory — still persists in the solitude of my ennui and despair. She’s the fairy godmother of my entire sensibility. My imagination can’t help but fly like a sharp, swift arrow toward that moment when her female intuition made her set one of her feet on a cornerstone and show me the length of her other leg. No other woman, no experience with any of my other coy mistresses ever matched the brilliance of that girl’s single movement, that girl who didn’t need to raise her leg but did nonetheless, showing me the creamy rose color of it, knowing somehow — born sensitive to such niceties because of her gender — that she’d thereby made herself the most precious fortune I’d ever possess.

  I would soon have to rejoin my regiment. Yet, how could I leave behind that beauty in flower, that fugitive dove, who added to her beauty and youth the luscious blossom of innocence, brought to bloom by instinct, that tragic gardener?

  We were neighbors. On the eve of my departure, in my bed each morning, I’d hear her leaving for school and my ears would take in the deliciousness of her movements. I could pick out the sound of one of her breasts as it shifted away from its twin, both too large for her tiny frame — a sound that, as Barbey d’Aurevilly said of a virgin in Memling, resolved the question of the immaculate conception for me long before the Church ever would…

  AUGUST 4, 18—

  In families that fall into bankruptcy, there’s usually some foreigner who marries into the family and soon finds himself supporting the entire household. Likewise, it’s always the aunts and uncles who are the legitimate moral foundations of a family, not one’s parents. Generally spinsters and bachelors, these aunts and uncles are the confidants of their nieces and nephews — the true parents of their souls. True, some of these aunts and uncles vegetate like furniture in the recesses of the family home, but it’s the ones who disappear, the adventurers, who seem the most prestigious: Before we, as children, can get a sense of them, they leave. They float in the fog of the past. We grow up admiring them — without admitting it — because these magical figures have the ability to open the gates to a fabulous orchard of fantasy…Some were gallant, others depraved, but still — each possessed of their own peculiar genius, even the ones who were womanizers, syphilitic and suspect, the Don Juans of their times. I had an uncle who disappeared in the troubles of ’48. He was the most beautiful of my grandmother’s six children — and she only spent two thirds of our fortune on him. Sensuous like all first-borns, a love child, he took off for the revolution of ’48 with the confidence of someone heading out on an assignation. A woman came around to see him the night before. That was the last we heard of him.

  SEPTEMBER 4, 18—

  One more twilight. Sadness fills my soul and my thoughts are all of you. It’s seven in the evening. Right now you’re getting on the train. The other travelers are following you with their eyes. Oh, if I could only forget! Will it destroy me? No. You’re just a long shadow that’s crossed my life. I won’t see you again. I know it. The eyes that loved you have lost their quicksilver. So much effort! I’m out of hope and sorry because you remain incomplete. No other chance lover will ever have the same audacity, will ever be able to break through your crystal coffin and touch you, wake you, free you from your spell. But don’t worry. I’m like Pyrrhus after his victory. I’ve understood my defeat.

  As I sink to the depths this evening, like something trapped in an aquarium, there’s nothing in all this blue but the thought of you. Your perfume wafts in and evokes the doves we heard flying over our sunrises, from our shared room in Beautiran. Do you remember how the doves that flew past our window seemed to be fanning us, flapping only one wing?

  This page is inexplicable in the diary of my life. I’ve written it tenderly, as though I was once in love. It seems like sacrilege to include it as part of this intimate experiment, in which we’re testing the consolatory effects of speaking badly about others to ourselves.

  SEPTEMBER 12, 18—

  They called her La Española. I met her when she was already old, tall, clumsy. In the days of the Empress Eugénie, she came all the way to Bougival for an audience with La Española. A vague kinship connected them. La Española was even invited to stay in the Emperor’s home, on occasion.

  She was the one who predicted my mother’s death. She spread her tarot cards across our table, in the shape of the Maltese cross. But she didn’t tell people’s fortunes for money. No; hers was a higher calling. In the south of Spain, where she was born, the locals had apparently inherited numerous ailments from their old Arab conquerors; but, in addition, they’d also inherited various means of curing them — generally by touch. While the university was still claiming that cataracts were incurable, this Señora de Salvadores triumphed as an ophthalmologist — cataracts were her specialty. (You may have heard that there are sixty or so legal classifications for blacks in the United States; in much the same way, there are many subtle distinctions separating one form of blindness from another.) Señora de Salvadores’s hands had a gift for moving gently over one’s eyes without causing the least discomfort or damage. She cured cataracts, dispersing those clouds by rubbing, by sanding them down.

  The only tool she employed, aside from her fingers, was a souvenir from her days of fortune and youth: she had ground down the mother-of-pearl ribs of the decorated fans she’d used to flirt with back in the bullrings of Andalusia, and would dump this abrasive substance over the afflicted corneas, sanding down the opaque layers of cataract until she could simply remove the remnant by touch. Then she’d rub an eyelash under the affected area.

  Each of Señora de Salvadores’s fingernails shone with a black patina, and during her procedures she’d wear fingerless, black lace gloves, their light-pink silk ribbons tied around her wrists.

  SEPTEMBER 25, 18—

  He boarded the train just as it started to depart. He sat in front of me and his initial glance enveloped me in such an atmosphere of confusion that I couldn’t free myself from it until he disembarked.

  Tall, blond, reserved, he was very self-possessed. His every move seemed to slide over an invisible layer of velvet. There was no more of a sound when he moved his arms than when his eyes moved under their lashes. Was I bewitched? The more attractive
he became, the more I suffered. I couldn’t escape his obvious pedigree. Over the course of our trip, his eyes seemed to get closer to mine, his lips begin to unfurl. Did he want to talk to me? This state of continual indecision went on until I felt tied to the spot and restless. I wanted to break free of the threads restraining me. I wanted to yell. But somehow, luckily, I restrained myself…I felt it wouldn’t have made the least difference to shout: my words would have turned out irrelevant, emasculated, and my voice would have come out thin and reedy like a girl’s. The man was perturbing me to the point of anguish. At last, nervous lest someone hear the feminine voice trembling in my throat, I lowered my eyes. I needed to get away from the manly power of that adorable, elegant creature. This was an unsustainable situation. At last I raised my eyes from their atonement and saw him looking at my hands, saw how, from his perspective, they must appear so soft and pink, how my lips were so red as to seem painted, how my clothes were of blue silk and my cuffs and collar made of lace. This was the inexplicable state in which I spent the rest of the trip.

  His lips unfurling, wanting to speak; his eyes moving closer and closer to mine, wanting to understand me. His hands barely moved. The wind hardly ruffled his hair as it whipped through the drafty car. And when he got ready to leave, giving a last lingering look over my person, I watched him pack away the potion, the perfume, the mist that had overpowered me — snatching it up with a jealous flick of his wrist.