On Elegance While Sleeping

by Emilio Lascano Tegui

  OCTOBER 14, 18—

  I’ve always searched for the love I didn’t possess. I tried to be loved. I did everything I could. That’s all I ever did. Builders risk falling like bricks from their scaffolding. They lose arms and legs. I’ve never lost anything, and yet I’ve lost everything. Just to be wanted.

  There’s nothing more in life than to love someone. To be loved. Such is the happy monotony of my life.

  NOVEMBER 1, 18—

  I don’t know whether to stay or go. Nothing frightens me more than the prospect of failing to live up to the great spiritual responsibility my mother laid upon me. She thought I was a man who would never know failure. She expected so much of me, I worry I’ll leave my job unfinished.

  I am her optimism. I am the player through whom she sought to wreak vengeance on this world in which men forced her to live — because, like all our perfect Spanish mothers, there was no treasure for her in this life, no jewelry to adorn her, save the leaden melancholy that came upon her as her dreams flowed away, like water over river stones in the afternoon.

  NOVEMBER 6, 18—

  If I wrote a book about Don Juan’s syphilis, I’d worry about acquiring that habit or weakness of writers who plot out all their actions as though for a book, writers whose days have become the monotonous pages of a novel. A book is a secret vice. If we could collect all our dandruff as easily as we collect the so-called contents of our heads, it would be just as publishable. Like the eighteenth-century woman who liked lace so much she cut it up and ate it in a tortilla, there are people who worship the fetish object that is a book and want nothing more than to see themselves reflected in it — like Narcissus.

  I’d also like to avoid the mania of writing books to serve as funeral wreaths. I remember some grief-stricken parents who published a book about a daughter of theirs who’d died at the age of eighteen. Now, what could that poor anonymous girl have accomplished at such a young age to warrant such a tribute? Two photographs included in the text gave us the measure of this extinct creature. In one of them the girl is playing croquet. She’d played just once, in a hotel I used to frequent. Hardly a devotee!

  The other photograph showed her on a horse. A few minutes after the picture was taken, the horse bucked the girl off and she broke her leg.

  The seeming pedigree of such images made her parents forget the facts. Writers are the same.

  They publish books for the pleasure of seeing them printed and bound, without remembering that the saddest aspects of their lives will end up contained in those pages.

  But wouldn’t my book be the result of my desire to commit a crime, and thus be a part of it? Wouldn’t every page be a sliver of glass in the daily soup of my fellow citizens?

  A book is the vegetal pulp left behind by man. And now, after countless centuries of digging up and studying palimpsests and engraved tablets, they’re saying that we should just allow all those dead, abandoned cities to become buried again beneath the windblown sediment…

  A book is a slow, unavoidable catastrophe.

  NOVEMBER 28, 18—

  I’ve put my box of calomel aside and now sit, thinking. My eyes wander from the page of the daybook that the wind’s finger has just turned and from there to the valise sitting in the corner like it just got back from a trip. On a loose page, I’ve written: “The days go on…literature and fame both distress me. Neither of them deserves my faith. It’s been a long time since I’ve dreamed of an absolute repose. Death, perhaps. Art has poisoned existence. I’m discouraged. Trying to step beyond the commonplace, all I’ve accomplished is the loss of one of my legs. I should hate literature, feel disgust for it — no matter that it did me the meager favor of growing my wings…”

  I could always forgive my mother having so many lovers singing her praises, but I have no patience for those harlots who spend their lives letting men talk them into sucking their marrow out, so to speak. And then, worse still, there are certain corrupt women who elevate this activity by putting molasses on their lover’s equipment, so as to make the experience sweeter. But even these women, beneath contempt, cannot compete with some of the more impressive sorts of degenerate — like, for instance, literature. Literature does far worse things than those poor whores who, out of hunger, have to turn tricks from street corner to street corner on the outskirts of town. Literature is invited into the family home as easily a maid — but soon is giving one breast to the son and the other to the father, kissing all the daughters with Sappho’s lips, and disheartening the mother by giving her The Little Flowers of St. Francis to read. Me she nursed and later delivered to glory. She was far worse than a whore — she didn’t even wash my private parts. Now I smell her perfume on every road. I’ve deposited all my assets into her account. I’m nothing when I’m far from her. What would I do if I couldn’t set eyes on her from time to time? My mouth is full of consonants. Why don’t I write verse? Because the grief of a poet is even greater than his work, and more worthy of praise. I write simply, never aiming for the start.

  No, no verse! No music! Let us be just as we are: unfinished things without rhythm. Time has gnawed away our hope, and while the dampness inside us ate away at our hearts and livers, literary types entertained us by painting false exits…Others collected human vulgarities and sold them in pill-form…And others still assembled catalogs of souls and wrote informative introductions to accompany them. Nobody has ever honestly shown us, for instance, a man precisely as he was during his transition from the countryside to the city. Authors have merely “discovered” psychology and thus complicated our knowledge of life even further. A psychologist doesn’t understand people: he’s a businessman who sells carnival costumes. There are no costumes, however, for the soul. No, there’s nothing more there than its poor twisted simplicity, turned inside-out by a civilization still terrified of tigers — and hiding from them in cities.

  There will come a day when no more poets will be born. The city, in our fearsome urbanized future, will impede their birth. And so, the government will keep the ones still made ill “by beauty and by the past” in gardens, like greenhouses, on the rooftops of skyscrapers, without demanding anything of them — much the way we now provide for the insane — leaving these geniuses free in their cages believing the lie that they might yet prettify the landscape of the apocalypse with their brilliance.

  DECEMBER 3, 18—

  Raimundo wrinkled the space between his brows and said: “I’ve wanted to write a book many times. It’s just that I’ve restrained myself. Since you’re so determined to ‘commit’ this crime without delay, why don’t you take advantage of this Don Juan story I’d have written in your place? So: Imagine that our Don Juan has a bigger supper than usual. He strokes a magnificent apricot in his palm for minutes at a time. The fruit’s aroma makes the old room smell like springtime.

  “When at last he peels the fruit, he does so on a plate that doesn’t belong to his regular set of dishes. It slipped in among his regular china amid the forced intimacy experienced by delicate crockery and the clay pots all washed in the same kitchen sink. This piece is rose-colored porcelain, and one can read, in gold along its edge, the word ‘Memento.’

  “Later Don Juan goes out to the street, a Sunday in a Catholic city. The women have separated from the men; the men have gathered in groups to watch the city girls strolling by in pairs. The conventions of this puritanical city make the women appear distant and discolored to Don Juan — the way landscapes look through the tiny window of a stagecoach: landscapes of second-hand clothes shops, old abandoned stage sets, the gray halls at the Opera House ball on Ash Wednesday…

  “Among the passersby, our Don spots a young man of about sixteen. An ephebe embodying all the ideal lines and curves of the classical concept of beauty, synthesized in the angels of quattrocento painters. An ephebe who’s adopted a certain posture and yet seems possessed of a fragility — neither quality much in tune with this era. An ephebe who already feels — though still growing out the lower branches o
f his life — a desire for total revolution, real experience — the need to take hold of everything exceptional, a tendency toward a certain me déshabiller de la vie, as the poets say. Well, this ephebe now seems in a precarious sort of position, with Don Juan bearing down on him…

  “Our Don feels an unknown pleasure seeing the beauty of this emissary. He follows the young man, straightening his tie as he goes, and starts a conversation with him. The ephebe does perceive his interlocutor, but does not react. Don Juan feels love, perhaps, for this lovely specimen of androgyny, who reminds him of an excessively beautiful woman, albeit without the same sense of being a living coat rack, which often distinguishes men from women…That is, a woman would have been better dressed.

  “They get in a coach. As a coachman, I can’t conceive of a novel without a coach ride in it. Don Juan points out the starry night sky to the young man, speaking of its hypothetical cartography as though it were nothing more than another city neighborhood, not a distant, magnificent thing. The young man, feeling merely decorative inside the coach, responds by moving the slanted almonds of his eyes. His lips are two pale roses.

  “Now: Will Don Juan be able to refrain from ravishing this creature, who was born with a set of wings fit to take him to the very heights of passion — like all those who have been created expressly for love? He isn’t just another woman, after all. He isn’t even a decisive departure from womankind. He is the white marble statue who won the heart of the black king in the Louvre…The personification of the belated, literary decline of mystic love. Don Juan, after so many years — since his school days, in fact — submits then, in his coach, to the satisfactions of solitary pleasure.

  “A sharp pain in his temples pierces his head as the shudder of pleasure subsides between the flaccid muscles of his thighs. He is tormented now by the specter of a humiliating death. And he says to his silent spectator:

  “‘Get out. I think I’m going to die. You would compromise my death.’

  “But the ephebe responds, ‘No — give me that most voluptuous pleasure for which I’ve been searching so long. What I’ve always wanted is to watch someone die…’

  “Don Juan doesn’t have the strength to object or prolong his conversation with this slender ambassador of carnality…and so dies a magnificent, sumptuous death with an angel at his side — just like the Bishop of Orléans, whose death you’ve already heard all about…”

  MARCH 2, 18—

  When winter arrived, the Seine rose toward the sky, and clouds enveloped the village of Bougival along with the changing light at dawn and dusk. You could feel the cold of the water on your skin. The lighthouses, with their distant oil lamps, languished in a tangle of tulle.

  On one of these nights, as the shimmer of one such light struggled to pierce the gloom, the silhouette of a man cut through the fog on one of the outlying streets of this uninteresting village. The light hit his face, and as soon as he stepped out of this luminous zone, he spotted me and stopped, startled. My path was decisive. I moved without hesitation. And my grim determination must have shocked this anxious passerby. I read the terror in his face. A wordless dread. His throat had gone dry. I looked him over: a poor devil, a wretch, somebody I could have killed without the least caution. He was already half dead. No cry for help would have tarnished his lips; there would be no struggle to impede my crime.

  We lost each other again in the mist. My victim, perhaps, fell to the ground, faint with terror. I continued my march. There wasn’t even a whisper. The winter mist had enveloped the world in its gray velvet.

  I felt very alone. I began talking to myself in a loud voice and confessed the strange desire that this pale, trembling man had just woken in me. A man so frightened, at night, on an empty street…wouldn’t he have been easy to finish off? I don’t mean that I would have killed him right there, necessarily, where the green leaves of the hedge look as though they could have been painted in watercolors right on top of the fog, but perhaps further on, where his blood could have been mistaken for mud, where twelve hours would have to pass before the sun was bright enough to distinguish a corpse from a lump of refuse.

  APRIL 4, 18—

  I’ve sketched out my plans and am ready. I have a new strength in me, taken from the secret core of my life, driving me on, controlling me. It’s health, youth, and optimism combined. Until yesterday, my tentative novel (“The Syphilis of Don Juan”) served as a haven for my imagination. Today, it doesn’t satisfy my thirst — or, better said, can no longer stem the anguish that gnaws at me on the eve of an act that is now quite inevitable. I’m halfway between a comedy and a strange sort of drama, and feel an overbearing need to lower the curtain. No simple curtain: the front curtain of the stage, the grand drape, the great iron and asbestos curtain that drops like a zinc plate from the sixth floor and creaks as it falls. Something like that, flamboyant, coarse, unexpected — something that will impose its tyranny over my life without question. I’m going to kill someone.

  I’m not frightened, I’m not scared, I won’t regret it.

  I’ve resolved in advance all the premises I need to consider.

  MAY 9, 18—

  I’ve chosen my victim. Crossing the market, I passed a woman with blonde hair: thin, with sallow skin and washed-out blue eyes. I’ve seen her before aboard a Belgium-registered barge that was tied up at the end of the railway bridge.

  The English are naturally aristocratic, so there’s nothing more miserable than seeing one fallen on hard times. The need visible in their faces — shining through the miscellaneous grit covering their Apollonian features — pains me. My victim, with her delicate face, has forgotten that she’s a woman and not some floozy. Boat grease clings to her tattered dress. She doesn’t brush her hair anymore, just makes a knot of it at the nape of her neck. Her bodice is fastened with a safety pin — the button’s fallen off. Clearly she isn’t especially happy. If she doesn’t drink in backroom bars, she certainly gives the impression of being an alcoholic; husbandless, discontent, feeling a general hostility toward the world.

  As I passed her in the market, I found her concentrating heavily on some change she’d been thrown. She counted it coin by coin, like a child or a savage. Her slowness in counting, her obvious limited ability, made up my mind. It authorized my act. To unburden humanity of an imperfect being: a weakness.

  MAY 16, 18—

  He was born a Jew and into a career as an eye doctor. His clients went increasingly blind as he grew to adulthood with the grandfather who’d built their house. His grandfather died, and soon Alfredo Chascock invented a solution he claimed was the best remedy for any eye disease. He wouldn’t sell it or give it away. His clients had to let him drip it over their infected eyes at the highest temperature they could bear. This portentous eyewash was simply water.

  Alfredo Chascock had no other hobbies besides fishing, but his naturally dishonest nature had poeticized this activity. He bought salt-water fish from the market and showed them off as if he’d caught them in the river. Chascock was, as I’ve mentioned, myopic. Along with his fishing rod, he brought some opera glasses to better observe the lush, sinuous line of the Seine. When I arrived that afternoon under the railway bridge, I saw Alfredo Chascock in a gully along the bank on the other side. He blended in with the tree trunk he was perched on. My eyes took in every detail, however, and couldn’t help registering his presence there. The iron bridge seemed like a frame put around the sky: it was that immense and high.

  In that valley, a natural avenue through the world, a gray-green landscape the color of grapes, the only dark spot was a barge tied up with various cables to the posts along the bank.

  The barge was empty and without ballast. It bobbed up out of the water like a loose buoy. There were stairs that ran from the riverbank up to the deck where various geranium pots, lined up along the edge, brought to mind the cornices of the houses in Seville.

  The scene was calm and mute. The waters of the Seine unraveled effortlessly, rolling forth like a bal
l of yarn. Every once in a while, a bang came from the barge, the sound multiplied in its empty holds. It was the blonde. I watched for two hours as she came and went from the top of the barge. She was making dinner. A tuft of blue smoke rose from a corrugated iron pipe and moved toward the middle of the river where swallows were flying — the low smoke the only indication that time was passing.

  Chascock put the tilapia he’d just taken from the water into his buckets. I was alone. There were no witnesses and I started up the stairs.

  I felt something in my heart. A thread broken away from its puppet. I looked back toward the bridge and was amazed. There was a person standing in precisely the same spot where I’d been observing my victim and awaiting the right moment to act. There was no doubt he was looking directly at me. Had he followed me here? I made a terrible grimace at him. I don’t think he could’ve seen it from so far away, but my intentions undoubtedly came across, since the man, who knows why, left his vantage point and disappeared. Once again I was alone. I stepped up onto the barge’s deck. It was cold on the tarred surface.

  What was my victim doing? I crouched and looked into the hold that served as her room. She was peeling potatoes, prolifically, slowly. I treaded lightly and slid through the aft hatch. I started down the stairs. The boat tilted sternward. I wanted to reach the woman without being heard and sink my dagger into the nape of her neck the way it’s done with calves at the butcher’s. Every millimeter of this abrupt thrust would be felt in my hand. Her skin, cartilage, bones, maybe even her marrow all offering that delicious resistance which is the assassin’s ultimate pleasure. Marrow? Would it be easy to cut through to it? And I thought of Neolithic caves full of horse bones, our delighted ancestors sucking out the fresh marrow, their spoils still warm, at least according to the deductions of certain paleontologists…