I was elevated to the fourth floor of this six-floor building, which did not seem like such an impressive location until I later realized the apartment had three floors. When the elevator doors opened, I emerged onto a hexagonal landing layered in a thick bright red carpet into which my soles sank. The handrails were a polished dark wood, which I suspected was extracted without anesthesia from a denuded colony. Nothing creaked or exuded mustiness, the charming condition of almost every other Parisian building I had visited. I stabbed the doorbell and a bell cried on the other side. The eschatological muscle opened the door, wearing only a white loincloth wrapped around his hips, an iron collar around his neck, and three Band-Aids: the old ones on his cheek and his temple, a new one at a diagonal on his left breast, three pale landing strips floating on his black skin.
What are you doing here?
Don’t ask, he muttered.
What are you wearing, for God’s sake?
Don’t ask, he muttered again.
Not only was he nearly naked, he gleamed with the luster of a brand-new car, his oiled body shining under the light. From beyond the foyer rose a murmur of voices, the rattling of plates, and the clinking of glasses.
Your costume is in the servants’ quarters, the eschatological muscle said, all the way at the top. When I started to step into the foyer, he shook his head and pointed. Behind you. Go up the back stairs.
Behind me, the main, wide stairs coiled around the glass-walled elevator shaft. On the other side of the shaft, a door led to another set of stairs, narrower and darker. I looked at the stairs, looked at him, and said, So is this the war of maneuver or the war of position we find ourselves in?
He grimaced and closed the door in my face. Up I went to the fifth and sixth floors and then one final set of stairs to the very top, the garrets, guarded by one of the seven dwarfs—the one named Lousy, for reasons I never wanted to ask about. He was dressed in a turban, a red brocade vest over his bare chest, voluptuous white silken pants that bloomed around his knees and ankles, and purple embroidered slippers with curling toes. Don’t you fucking ask, he muttered, opening the door and gesturing me inside. And you better forget what you just saw.
These rooms might be garrets, but unlike the apartment I had shared with Bon the paint was not peeling, the parquet floors were not dull, and the windows were not cracked. The first room revealed a rack of costumes and the Ronin standing in front of a mirror, tying a black tie. He nodded at the outfits.
Tonight you’re in charge of giving out the goods, he said. You get to dress up in real Vietnamese garb.
The Ronin wore colonial casual: white linen suit, white linen shirt, and brown oxfords. My Vietnamese garb was a brown ao dai and black silk pants, topped by a black fedora, the duds of a Cholon gangster of the 1920s, a raffish look I actually liked.
It’s going to be quite a show, baby, the Ronin said, winking and heading toward the next set of rooms. Come on.
Inside the rooms I counted thirteen girls, each 90 percent naked and 100 percent blasé, grooming themselves under the supervision of the expressionist mistress, who wore a shiny, formfitting pantsuit woven from some type of silver space suit fabric. Three black girls, three more who I was fairly sure were Arab or North African, and three girls whose whiteness was so white that they literally looked white: a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. The four others I already knew—Morning Peony, Beautiful Lotus, Crème Brûlée, and Madeleine. The girls glanced up when the Ronin and I walked in, then resumed transforming themselves from naturally attractive girls to female incendiary devices. Chatter and the roar of hair dryers filled the air. Crème Brûlée curled her lip at me but Madeleine winked. I was not at all surprised when my heart beat stronger and my breathing quickened at the sight of all the flawless, gleaming, mostly hairless flesh and the bare, buoyant breasts, the only nod to modesty being lace panties as insubstantial and alluring as television ads. What did surprise me was the roiling uneasiness in my gut, a diarrheic churning of disgust that spoiled all pleasure.
I know, whispered the Ronin, as if he could read at least one of my minds. I know.
By the time the first of the guests arrived, I was in costume. Along with the eschatological muscle, I greeted the guests at the vestibule, on the first level of the triplex apartment. Potted palms lined the room, an Oriental rug lay on the floor, resigned to be trod on by shoes—which would never happen in the actual Orient—and on the wall hung a Chinese painting, a landscape of mountains and mist with one tiny human being climbing a mountain trail, dwarfed by the majestic country around him and by the poem of Chinese characters that I could not read because the Chinese had not colonized my people quite well enough. Further ambiance was created by the slivers of incense burning in every room, as well as by the jazz quartet in the corner of the parlor. A drummer, a bass cellist, an alto saxophonist, a pianist, all in snazzy, shiny suits, a couple with porkpie hats, possessors of American passports and inheritors of the hippest, most authentic jazz pedigree: Chicago, New Orleans, Harlem, Washington, DC. I had chatted with them before the guests came and blew them away with my American English and my grasp of the American idiom and culture, including jazz, a passion of my mentor Professor Hammer, who had a predilection for the West Coast style and bebop. Hence I could name-drop—Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and more. The quartet’s members had nodded at these fabled names. Like me, they were refugees, in their case fleeing from the flabby belly of uncouth white American racism, straight into the bosom of self-satisfied, self-congratulatory Parisian racism. When I tried my French on them, the quartet’s leader had shaken his head and whispered, No, man, we can’t speak French. I mean, we can speak French, but we don’t speak it here. Or when we do, we got to speak it badly, like Americans, get me? If we speak good French, they’ll think we’re Africans. They treat us great when they think we’re Americans, but when they think we’re Africans—
They treat us like shit, the other three said.
The quartet was playing Dexter Gordon when the guests began arriving, all in a good mood, and why not? A genuine black American band was playing jazz, America’s greatest cultural contribution to the world, if by culture we mean something worthy of the greats, rather than the other notable American cultural contributions of the twentieth century that transformed the world: rock ’n’ roll, fast food, the airplane, and the atomic bomb. What else made these guests happy? Why not a sullen, threatening, nearly naked African opening the door, caught and transported from the heart of darkness, and an Indochinese drug dealer taking their coats? Our Afro-Asian duo of manservants offered just the right amount of danger and excitement, handcuffed by servility and enlivened by mystery. No wonder Bon declined this job, as the Ronin told me. Not to mention the spectacle of the nearly naked girls, which would offend his devout Catholicism. I would see him tomorrow night at Fantasia, and there I planned to agree, at last, to Loan’s dinner invitation. I would help him move forward, to acknowledge that he could mourn his dead wife and son and yet also find new love. But tonight, I wanted to regress. As instructed by the Ronin, I bowed and spoke slightly broken French, good enough to be understood and bad enough to be disdained as I figuratively kissed the guests’ asses, a gesture as important for someone like me as the French habit of kissing cheeks. The guests acknowledged my presence only by loading me with coats of the finest quality, befitting men who appeared quite wealthy and quite white, even in their hair. The darkest any of them got was to have brown hair, and there were only a few of those middle-aged types. One was clad in an unimaginative black tuxedo and bow tie, an outfit that promised sexual interaction no more exciting than what a missionary would offer. Another was dressed nostalgically, in a white linen suit like the Ronin’s, but with the swank addition of a pith helmet. Potentially more exciting, or terrifying, was the man wearing a monocle and a purple velvet smoking jacket whose aura of cigar smoke masked any potential body odor
. Then there was the big game hunter in a safari outfit, equipped with a hunting rifle with a scope and an invisible callus on his soul. Two more guests wore military uniforms that were overly tight on their aging, expanding bodies, one with general’s stars and the other sporting the khakis and white kepi hat of the Foreign Legion. A couple had me very concerned with their varieties of Oriental robes and turbans with some kind of Middle Eastern or North African origin. One of them even had his face blackened with what appeared to be shoe polish, so that the whites of his eyes and the red of his lips were even more pronounced. I’m Aladdin, he said proudly to whoever inquired and also to those who did not inquire, me among them. This turbaned Aladdin grinned broadly when he introduced himself, waving his blackened hands and wriggling his blackened fingers, and his white fingernails and white teeth shone even more brightly against the blackness of his skin, although given that he was supposed to be Arab—was Aladdin an Arab? suddenly I was unsure, but he certainly was an Oriental of some kind—perhaps his skin should be called brown, although Aladdin had used a black shoe polish and not a brown one, but since we were in the realm of fantasy, what did it matter whether this mystical rascal was black or brown, or what black or brown really was when discussing varieties of skin tone versus the actualities of shoe polish? The other one who really startled me was the oddball in a priest’s black robes, the skirts down to the ankle, the collar bone white, the head adorned with a little skullcap, and the shoulders under a drape. The crucifix around his neck swung subtly and almost hypnotized me, as did his bottomless gray eyes. I mumbled something inarticulate—was it “Father”?—and when the priest carved the sign of the cross in the air above me, I sensed that he was not actually wearing a costume at all but was, in fact, a priest. Ten gentlemen altogether, the tenth being BFD, who smirked and pretended to accidentally drop his coat on the floor. He was attired like an asshole, which is to say that he wore the long black tails, gray slacks, and top hat of an English gentleman or a nineteenth-century European nobleman, their refined manners and exquisite fashions suiting them perfectly for overseeing genocidal empires that looted nonwhite countries, enslaving and/or massacring their inhabitants, and sanctifying the results with the name “civilization.” If the word of a bastard is not persuasive, then perhaps the word of Sartre, writing on Fanon, is: “With us, to be a man is to be an accomplice of colonialism, since all of us without exception have profited by colonial exploitation.” Or to put it in my own words: Whitewashing the blood-soaked profits of colonization was the only kind of laundering white men did with their own hands.
BFD leaned close as I rose from my ass-kissing position of picking up his garment and said—just loud enough for me and the eschatological muscle to hear—Fuck you.
Thank you, I said, perhaps the only thing that would shut him up—not what I intended, although it was a pleasant side effect to see him frown, grunt, and walk away without so much as a you’re welcome. Perhaps he thought I was being sarcastic, but I was very, very sincere. I was grateful for BFD’s honesty in saying out loud what colonizers always think about the colonized, at least when they come face-to-face with them. Under all the pomp and circumstance and rhetoric of la mission civilisatrice, the reality was that they hated us at worst and thought us inferior at best, with our only hopes for equality being to transform ourselves into imitations of them. I imitated BFD’s walk as I followed him into the parlor where the gentlemen were mingling, served by three of the dwarfs, who trafficked back and forth from the kitchen with trays of manly drinks and ornate hors d’oeuvres that resembled miniature still lifes. These three wore the same ludicrous Oriental outfit as Lousy, except that now I noticed how each of them also had a curved knife tucked into the yellow sash around his waist, and I suspected that it was not just for decoration. Biggie, Angry, and Smelly would carry only real knives.
Our jovial people had a penchant for colorful and accurate nicknames, including calling me the Bastard or, even better, the Crazy Bastard. But who was crazier, me or the unknown owner of this fabulous apartment, a person of most peculiar taste who had hung, above his fireplace, a painting of a Japanese woman of a more classical time, naked and being ravished by . . . an octopus? The woman’s eyes were squeezed shut and her head was flung back as the octopus probed her with his tentacles. Or was it her tentacles? The gender-ambiguous octopus’s bulbous eyes peered from between the woman’s legs, its head in a pose I remembered all too well.
Hokusai, the Ronin murmured, pausing in his social circuit.
I had already smoked quite a bit of hashish, and the colors of the painting and the rise and fall of the jazz stuck to my body and mind, now as sticky as the suckers on the octopus’s tentacles.
Those Japanese are weird fuckers, aren’t they? the Ronin mused. That’s why I love them!
He moved on, assuming that I was trembling because of the perverse painting, when I was really trembling because my second-most erogenous zone, my memory, had been turned on by the recall of that unforgettable one-night stand with that most unlikely of partners, the gutted, defenseless, anonymous squid my mother saved for dinner.
I did my job of ferrying a teak tray with the goods: tobacco cigarettes, hashish cigarettes, and the remedy, its formless white body, as necessary as sugar, resting in a golden bowl. I offered a tiny porcelain spoon to any gentleman who wished to partake, and no one declined. The dwarfs came and went, and the Champagne flowed, and the quartet was hot, hot, hot, and the fusillades of French were fired too fast for me to fully comprehend. At last the Ronin stepped toward the fireplace, stood under the Hokusai painting, and called for attention. The quartet ceased playing, the dwarfs retreated to the alcoves, and everyone turned toward the Ronin.
Gentlemen, welcome! he called. Thank you for honoring us with your presence at this most delightful of parties. You are adventurers, gentlemen, as am I, a Frenchman born on Indochinese soil, as some of you have been born elsewhere—Algeria, Morocco, New Caledonia. We are united here in our love of the foreign and our taste for the exotic. Gentlemen, that taste will be stimulated and satiated in this one night of one thousand and one nights! Now let me introduce to you some of the most stunning girls in Paris, who have come here from the four corners of the world!
With a wave, the Ronin signaled the quartet to resume playing. In the corner of the parlor was a spiral staircase, and one by one, the girls descended. They were clothed now—some of them—and the gathered men murmured, mixing their appreciation with chortles, laughs, and jokes that I mostly did not understand. With each passing second, the sands of dread accumulated in my stomach, pouring down the hourglass of my body from my mind. For the second time in my life—the first time being the horror inflicted on the communist agent—I did not want to look. Not at Morning Peony wearing a floral skirt wrapped around her waist but nothing above it except for the lily tucked over her ear, inspired by Paul Gauguin’s Tahiti, according to the Ronin (even if Morning Peony was Chinese Singaporean). Not at the white girl who appeared to be in her late teens, wearing a lace choker and a tattered white frock, hands bound with rope, introduced by the Ronin as a white slave rescued from barbaric slave traders on the Barbary Coast. Not at a black girl completely naked except for bracelets and a necklace of white beads and shells. Not at another girl whose face I could not see at all because her black veil and hood revealed only her brown eyes, a modesty that clashed with her black minidress and fishnet stockings. The jazz was loud, but even louder was the hubbub from the assorted men, nudging each other and calling out lasciviously. But nothing was louder than the rataplan of my heartbeat in my ears, so loud it could be heard even through the heavy blanket of guilt and shame that smothered any desire.
Gentlemen, said the Ronin, here they come into our garden of delights, in the tradition of the legendary Le Chabanais, which some of your fathers or grandfathers may have visited. Here are some of the finest girls from the whorehouses, fleshpots, and slave markets of the greater Orient and Africa! From Alg
eria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Senegal to the south, and Egypt and Indochina to the east! With side trips to dangerous Palestine and the seductive Pacific paradise of Tahiti! Yes, it’s all a fantastic voyage, gentlemen, but fantasy is better than reality, which has syphilis. [The gentlemen roared with laughter.] Take a look, gentlemen. Have as many lovelies as you can satisfy, like a Turkish pasha. Girls who will die for you, girls who wish to be saved by you—unless you kill yourself first out of mad love for them! You will return to the origins of the world—no, not the Congo or the Nile, but here, and here, and here, between the voluptuous thighs of Princess Tam-Tam, in the Golden Triangle of the Dragon Lady, in the hothouse of this forbidden harem. Here you are the sultan, the despot, the colon, the white man exploring the dark continent with a whip in your hand. There are mysterious ladies to be conquered, from this passionate Viet Cong guerrilla in her black pajamas, fresh from the jungle, to this Palestinian freedom fighter just returned from hijacking a plane. All you can see is her face, but what a face! A real femme fatale! Or how about this cowering Muslim girl wearing the greatest sexual aid ever invented, a veil! Who knows what lurks behind it? Keep it on or take it off, as you wish, but know you are safe even if you choose . . . Madame Butterfly. Take a ride on her magic carpet and don’t worry that in nine months she might return with an unwelcome surprise. Enjoy the forbidden love of the white man and the Oriental woman without fear that there might be forbidden fruit, like him!
And here the Ronin pointed straight at me. I could see the whites of their eyes when everyone turned to look at me, standing between the eschatological muscle and a potted palm tree, holding my tray with the sugar in the golden bowl, unable to move with the accumulating weight of sand in my belly.
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