On Elegance While Sleeping

by Emilio Lascano Tegui

  The people who died were generally unknown to me. Women who’d spent their lives in the shadows of their own pantries, confining themselves to their rooms or beds in their final years. Raising my eyes toward the peculiar windows of many a small town, I’ve surprised plenty of these lifelong maidservants who never so much as take a little walk down the street to get some sun. Faded old women, the majority of them, who didn’t bother with brushes or combs, keeping their hair in place with ribbons, as was the style in 1830. Some of them were skinny and faded but others had faces that had grown wide and snub-nosed from so much staring — like Sœur Anne, the sister of Bluebeard’s last wife…

  These women generally died between the ages of ninety and ninety-five. The official statistics from the mayor’s office would prove me right. The thought of anyone living for so many years made me a little emotional. I never missed their funerals. I followed their processions as though walking behind an itinerant Peripatetic philosopher, reflecting on the fact that these women now on their way to their graves never experienced a day in their lives that was more intense or important than any other: the years had simply been a continual autumn for their souls, which shed one leaf at a time until they were bare — even the birthdays just another little loss. Those pitiful centenarians, who shriveled like oranges in their miserable skins, acquired something in death that moved me…the way the plaintive notes of a cathedral organ might move me as well.

  Was it the satisfaction of knowing life wouldn’t be sullied by these women any longer? Was it the sense that the earth was somehow taking a belated revenge upon them that made me happy? That the earth that was going to fold these already mysterious old ladies into its subterranean mystery? I don’t know what it was, really. But suspecting that my own end wouldn’t be too long in coming, those old women’s deaths gave me just as much pleasure as the prospect of having to watch my brilliant youth waste away in some moth-eaten chest of drawers in the granaries of my gray village — pulverized by the great cumbersome bulk of time — made me absolutely miserable.

  Their funerals truly moved me. These old women had exhausted life, drinking up even more air than the young. In their homes, bottled up along with their fortunes, rents, retirement money or state pension, they’d retained throughout their lives all the skittish self-interest of those people who never bother to put up a fight, but simply withdraw, preemptively, when there’s any fear of losing ground — sealing themselves in their rooms as if in a fort. Above all, however, these women moved me because they’d been virgins for ninety years — far longer than Joan of Arc had suffered from that affliction. As long as the statues of Joan of Arc.

  JULY 18, 18—

  Generally, the trips that my friend the coachman took me along on were from the stables to Mont Valérien. Happy as the dawn, my charioteer would depart for Paris, estimating his day’s tips. But one winter night I found him along the road from Chatou to Rueil, along the Seine, his coach was tracing a series of Ss like a staggering drunk. Not really wanting to, he accepted my company on the coachbox. He talked to himself. After some time, he decided to explain the cause of his uneasiness — his voice hoarse, croaking with rage, bombastic, as he affirmed the following (letting his reins fall in the process, always the sign of a coachman who’s lost control):

  “Look — when you hear that someone’s snuck into a jeweler’s through the sewers or the municipal water pipes and the walls have been drilled through and the tile floor’s been ripped out, the perpetrator is almost certainly a hunchback.

  “Did you know that by the fourth century, there was a distinct race of hunchbacks flourishing in the Byzantine Empire? Today this race is nearly extinct, though new, atavistic examples occasionally recur. The few specimens still alive come out only at night, under the arch of the railway bridge.

  “When the signal lights go from red to green and, as happens from time to time, two trains collide on the tracks, it’s not unusual for a hunchback in a nearby hovel to step out to entertain himself with the crunching of their vertebrae, the grand horrific spectacle of two mathematical axes meeting in a terrifying geometrical equation, their polygons making nonsense of the imaginary points once delineated by their locomotives, not to mention the impassive parallels of their tracks. It is the hunchback, you see, who’s engineered these astounding and macabre orgies of destruction, walking happily through the carnage thereafter to gather up, where he may, those pulpy bits of brain that, in the ashes of the inferno, look like giant mushrooms that have sprouted from this new lake of blood, upon which float the dining car’s silver serving trays, and from which, in places, one may see the silver handles of drowned sugar bowls reaching into the air. The hunchback amuses himself by fishing out the bowls while the surface of the pool of blood coagulates according to the same fatal law that produces a crust of salt at the edges of the Dead Sea…

  “Rome and Greece exposed such hunchbacks at birth. Medieval kings tied them to the foot of their thrones with heavy chains so that their snarls would remind them of the snarling of the discontented peasantry. The hunchback is a sign of revolution against all things! The hunchback is failure made flesh, and his hate flourishes in inverse proportion to his smallness. His kind revolted the queens of old so much that when a lady from court became pregnant, they covered their royal hunchbacks with tar and started a bonfire for good luck. That’s how they invented fireworks, you know…”

  The coachman went quiet a moment. He seemed more at ease now, like an asthmatic finally able to breathe. He added: “A hunchback just mugged me back there on the corner and because of his size I didn’t even see which way he went! He took off with nine francs…”

  JULY 29, 18—

  Catholic liturgy has conquered women. It’s the same as with skylarks and mirrors. Anyone who adopts religion’s deep and pompous tone can easily win a woman over. This is the reason I’ve always tried my best to be as affected and ceremonious as possible. And there’s another reason too: I take my Latin roots quite seriously — I might speak French, but I count my lovers in Italian. Roots, I might add, with a Saracen sadness just beneath.

  Syphilis is a civilized disease, and I intend to declare my allegiance to its aesthetic. I acquired it in the most charming of ways. Suffice to say, she who bestowed this gift upon me did so with the same ease and elegance as the doves of Aphrodite must alight upon the breasts of sleeping women…

  AUGUST 9, 18—

  My nights have always been fragmentary. I’ve never slept through the night. I have attacks that aren’t quite insomnia. They’re interruptions in the pleasant — literary — death that is sleep, though they are always kind enough to retie the loose ends of my unfinished nightmares when they depart.

  These attacks have their origins in my childhood. In the Jesuit school where I was a student after my mother’s death, a bell would ring at random times in the night, always well after twelve, obliging us to sit up in our beds and recite a creed. Afterward, we were meant to go back to sleep as though there had been no interruption.

  This custom was something like torture for my classmates and myself, particularly at the beginning of the school year. At last I yielded to the routine that has undone my nights ever since. What was the reason behind those bells, I wondered, always pealing at such an inconvenient hour?

  Few Jesuits were able clear up this secret, but eventually one of the Reverend Fathers explained it to me:

  When the honest Society of Jesus possessed its most prosperous missions in the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, the Indians who fell under its guardianship — exhausted by their brutal, crushing workdays — took no pleasure in their marriage beds. Husbands simply slept beside their legal partners every night without fulfilling their conjugal obligations. Thus, in those lands — generally thought of as a fertile paradise — the locals quickly developed a birth-rate problem.

  A priest came up with the idea of the late-night bell as a means of correcting this problem. Once the Indians had been reinvigo-rated by a few hours of re
st — interrupted by the bell — and lay back down having recited their creed, they found their women waiting for them, and soon rediscovered their appetites.

  And so the Jesuit bells continued ringing this strange peal for married couples — rung by celibates who’d taken vows of chastity and always went about with eyes cast down. These insomniacs are truly worthy of the lowest third of Dante’s hell — if they don’t manage to invent an even more terrible place for themselves.

  AUGUST 11, 18—

  I’m waiting for bad news. Everything that passes near seems to bring it. There it is in those footsteps, retreating along the hall of this hotel. Somebody lacking the courage to knock! The rug in the hallway, accomplice to cowards, ends just outside my door, so once-silent footsteps resound there all at once on the floorboards, revealing the presence of a messenger…Who is it? Is he tall and thin like a ghost covered in a sheet? Or maybe he’s more rotund, since I can hear him brushing against the walls. He’s crossed the hall now. Farther off, a child’s crying. He’s scared. Like me, he senses danger; he cries inconsolably. The unknown that lurks in the corridor is pressing down on the fontanel in his skull, which has yet to close, and he understands the ebb and flow of the unfinished brain beneath. This child is breathing the same atmosphere in which I’m suffocating. He has a feeling he shouldn’t drink any more of his mother’s milk. His navel is doing the nervous dance of a cork in water. He feels the knot in his intestines unraveling, as if his interior equilibrium is about to be lost entirely — as though his entire body, that receptacle, were overflowing. Wax is pouring from his ears, and behind the wax is the fifth humor, the quintessence, which is the celestial ether and the honor of families.

  The boy falls silent. A great current of air passes through the hall. Has the intruder departed? Everything shakes. Microbes jump into the air and then meander like sleepwalkers at hand-height. Nobody collects them, so they return to the carpet.

  The ogre has disappeared. He was scared off by the ringing of a bell, a murmuring, a walking grumble wearing an apron and two big shoes — the bellhop, who just walked down the hall.

  SEPTEMBER 6, 18—

  How many kilometers have I traveled in pursuit of a woman’s breast! I’d lose count before I reached a number. And only for a breast! The rest of the body is irrelevant.

  The days seem sad to me, and the nights even more so, if I don’t close my eyes and concentrate on the memory of breasts past. Loose breasts and barely glimpsed breasts, enormous breasts, breasts standing at attention. I’ve followed thousands of women. Two, three a day, interrupting my work, forgetting where I was headed, missing my train, crossing the road, tripping over rough ground, descending into empty basements, spying through keyholes — all for a glimpse of the secret gifts women carry with them. I’ve lived my life dreaming of a pyramid of various breasts — the way Tamerlane dreamed of pyramids of skulls.

  AUGUST 23, 18—

  I’ve asked myself on several occasions who lives in certain houses in Bougival. The houses with the blinds closed, the doors locked. There’s never a servant out on the patio. Maybe one cat or another. Sometimes two or three pigeons climbing up a cornice, like neighbors come for a visit, using their beaks to tidy the great starched folds of their white skirts…

  AUGUST 28, 18—

  Men die centenarians without ever having known a woman. All they know is a braid, an eye, a buttock, a leg, or breast, as I have.

  It’s the fetish we acquire at fourteen, looking through the keyhole in a door, when masturbating like a person cleaning a nozzle simply for the pleasure of seeing it clean. Later, the body searches for relief, and later still, when a woman truly takes hold of us, it’s enough just to remember a single one of her garments, her profile, perfume, presence, or smile…

  Cities are places where love is quite civilized, so when a man finds himself face to face with such a woman, these two beings — who, without admitting it, both long for the satisfaction of their many acquired vices in the most ideal possible setting and circumstances — merely head home and masturbate. Once again, the man has the opportunity to possess this woman’s leg, buttocks, neck, tongue, or breasts — her eyes deep and intense, or else blue and innocent. In this way, indeed, the same woman can serve for a hundred half-men. They don’t get jealous. Each one has his part of her.

  This isn’t conjecture. Man even dies without knowing his own wife. What is it that he loves in her, if not what he loved in the opposite sex back when he was a full-time masturbator? He’s still never experienced the love of an entire woman. Might the fault lie with the clothing that hides her entirety from us? It’s society that only offers her up to us piecemeal and forces us to masturbate until our deaths…If women went about naked, the absence of mystery would make us purer-minded, and it would take quite an effort for us to single out or dwell upon one part of her body alone. Her entire body should give us an aesthetic rather than voluptuous pleasure. For now, however, our world remains stuck at the keyhole, where we saw her for the first time…We only see a leg, an arm, a breast.

  SEPTEMBER 25, 18—

  Cotton mittens bother me when they’re dyed black. They always give me a little shiver of disgust. It’s the dead hand still alive underneath the dyed cotton. I can smell the winding sheets that hang on the walls during wakes and are usually damp and sometimes have silvery gray hairs still stuck in them…

  Joy is in the light-colored glove one puts on in the morning, getting out of bed. Together with a striped sock.

  SEPTEMBER 26, 18—

  We’ve entered a new world. Its geographic limits are unknown. But every moment that transpires within is torture. The round moon tonight is a server’s tray sent up from hell. It’s yellow in color, but it wants to be red, like the sputum of some tubercular titan…

  The calves born tonight all have six legs and glassy eyes. They’ll enter the alcoholic eternity of our museums in due time. Much as a villager’s boy — a seventh son — will end up in the city with a number on his chest, in the lunatic asylum, in the prison, or in the hospital. And then, tonight, there is a villager who will hang himself in the malignant shadow of our fig tree; the moon makes him think long and hard during his last moments alive.

  Water and foamy piss overflow from the urinals. Beyond the star-shaped holes in their drains — in the cotton wads of the diseased — things have gotten clogged: there is emptiness and desperation in our drainpipes.

  The neighborhood roosters get restless too early and, as if passing over row after row of fences, a train whistle scratches the silence.

  Danger prowls around the patio.

  Its eyes stop on the latches and study the bolts.

  Silence like an arid field.

  Silence like a seeded field.

  The childlike scream of the train rages in the ravine of midnight. It’s left the rail yard. It surges on. Filled to the brim with the diseased.

  Heading to the south, it leads little girls by their limp hands…those who had to interrupt their eternal dialogue on the subject of fashion while saying their good-byes on the platform — for fashion reigns even in a sanatorium. It carries diabetic mothers to Vichy. To Venice, Cairo or Bruges, it carries eighteenth-century lovers. The ones who still write love letters, I mean. It carries abbesses and seminarians, trading their convents and monasteries for moral turpitude. It carries bored people in search of the right bridge or lead cathedral roof from which to hurl themselves. Two of the train cars are full of tiny instructional skeletons from Paris classrooms that the municipality is sending to the seaside developments in Berck. Likewise, there’s a mechanic on board who will lose his mind en route and sail past the last station without stopping. And in the boxcar harnessed to this magnificent realization of human progress is a corpse with no next of kin sent as priority cargo to arrive in Bordeaux before ten in the morning. It’s his last appointment.

  Such is the insomniac landscape that roasts me alive at night. It’s that little girl who I kissed in the bushes on the tiny
island north of Bougival who keeps me awake; I’m worried her parents are going to come looking for me. To keep myself busy while I wait, I’ve been shredding the tissue-paper fantasies of children between my fevered fingers — those same fantasies whose wings, deep in that little girl’s soul, I managed to clip that afternoon…that girl on whom I left, for all time, my billy-goat fingerprints.

  OCTOBER 4, 18—

  Could it be that the thing I’m missing is courage? That I simply lack the strength to a stab a stranger without fainting — risking my own life with such dangerous sport? If it seems easy, in theory, to kill, will it prove as easy to elude our consciences, which already begin to gnaw at us and betray us on the eve of our crime, even before the deed is done?

  Courage is the literary vanity of criminals. Rarely is it hereditary, as for example in the Septeuil family.

  I mean the famous young woman of the Septeuil line who drank a glass of human blood on the steps of the guillotine to save her father’s, the Marquis’, life. Now her descendants can stomach anything without fainting. They have the same ferocity in them. Her granddaughter, you know, already poor, unable to maintain the status the Restoration had granted her — a duchesse brisée, so to speak — and preferring to see the family horizontal than sitting in the wrong place, had the courage to take her young daughter, fourteen years old, to a brothel. She did her mother proud. During the Second French Empire, before going to work in the luxury brothels where she eloquently badmouthed Victor Hugo, she used to rush her clients in the brothel run by a second-rate madam, where she wore bright red satin slippers. An uncle of hers — her mother’s brother, thus likewise of the Septeuil family line — soon found out his family name was being used as a doormat by city lowlifes and wealthy merchants both, and so had the courage, at seventy, to marry his niece, snatching her away to the best brothels in town, the very Stations of the Cross of sexual pleasure, at which he worshiped with the delight of a devotee, finally installing her in one of Paris’s most celebrated basilicas of love.