How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired

by Dany Laferriere

  “All right, you kiss her with your imagination, I go along with you there. But when you kiss her you’ve got this picture of her mouth in your mind, that’s why you wanted to kiss her in the first place. At the moment of the kiss, desire is consummated.”

  “But the mouth in your mind, your ideal mouth, is better than the real mouth, the mouth that belongs to the girl you happened to meet on such-and-such a street at such-and-such a time. At the last minute she could change mouths and you wouldn’t be any wiser.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Bouba. Who’s ever changed mouths?”

  “For the sake of argument, man.”

  “You’re one Cartesian nigger!”

  “You’re the Cartesian, man. I’m a Freudian: a goddamned Freudian nigger.”

  “What have you got against Beauty anyway?”

  Bouba is sitting on the couch now. The debate shakes his entire being. He debates with his body. Seeing him sweat, you smell him. Suddenly his words start pouring out. He’s like a tiger with a whiff of blood in his nostrils. The blood of his next victim. My blood. Nose to the ground, he sniffs his idea back to its source. He pretends he didn’t hear my question. I know him too well. There’s nothing wrong with his hearing. His mind is just as acute. He doesn’t think like other people. He thinks against them. He has a personal vision of things and he expresses it with his long, supple, fragile hands. As he speaks they sketch arabesques as strange and astonishingly complex as ideograms. At first it looks as though he’s shooing flies with those endless hands like dowagers’ fans, but when you look closer and listen to his words, you see the organic link between the idea and the dance of his hands. Slender, sophisticated hands that have never worked. The hands of an old mandarin. Which makes for a rather baroque atmosphere. Two blacks in a filthy apartment on the rue St-Denis, philosophizing their heads off about Beauty in the wee hours. The Repast of the Primitives. The kettle is boiling. We have no radio, no TV, no telephone, no newspapers. Nothing to keep us in touch with this lousy planet. History is not interested in us and we repay the favor. It’s even-steven. All that matters is this grave and gratuitous conversation between me and that crazy ape-man Bouba. The fate of Judeo-Christian civilization is on the line. Two blacks on the dole hold the keys. We are discussing matters of life and death and Bouba, hirsute of head, confers a certain mystique to our confabulation. Bouba is lost in thoughts dangerous to his mental health. He wants to talk me into a verbal pulp. He can argue all night over the sex of angels. (Talking about angels, especially the fallen kind, I haven’t heard from Beelzebub for some time now. I wonder what he’s up to up there.) Nothing can resist Bouba’s manic lucidity. His face becomes distorted with tics, his eyes two round, brilliant marbles. Horizontal on the ancient couch. Just before daybreak, you come to appreciate his terrifying rhetorical machine. Endless argumentation broken by fits of coughing. His monologue can last for hours, flowing uninterrupted, serpentine, snaking, sinuous, Proustian sentences like a long, many-colored ribbon. The Word is his poison. With his narrow, bare chest, his hair in revolt and his beard narrowing to a point, he looks like an Old Testament prophet. (“By the declining star, I swear!” Sura LIII, 1.) I picture him as the last man on this barren planet after the nuclear blast, his words flowing endlessly, considering the decor as no more than a minor annoyance.

  “WHAT DO I have against Beauty?”

  Bouba savors the question. It’s right up his alley. The kind of question that sets off a Boston marathon of words. A question that pushes and tugs, the kind of thing you can change the world with. “What do I have against Beauty?” Bouba scratches his chin. His nervous tic. It signifies, Here is a question you do not answer lightly. Bouba pours himself more tea. He’s in no hurry. He has plenty of time. Eternity is on his side. Outside, people are stirring, awakening, getting their clothes on, gulping down breakfast and rushing off to work. Brainless ants. The world is in terrible need of marginal thinkers, starving philosophers and impenitent sleepers (“The sleeping man reconstructs the world,” said Heraclitus) to keep on spinning. Bouba spends most of his time on the couch reconstructing the world. Today, he will attack one of the Western World’s last bastions: Beauty.

  “Here’s the problem, man: Beauty is shameless.”

  “Great! I’ve got a nigger moralist on my hands now.”

  “It’s thermodynamic, man, not moral. There’s a certain temperature that determines the degree of desire we feel for someone. The heat can go in two directions, inside and out.”

  “All right. Then what?” I still don’t trust Bouba’s demonstration.

  “Beauty’s heat goes only to the outside.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “I prefer implosion to explosion.”

  “I don’t think I get it.”

  “All subtlety is lost on a guy like you.” In a discussion, Bouba acts as if I’m a complete stranger. “All right, take Miz Beauty. She thinks she’s doing you a favor by fucking with you, while with Miz Piggy, you’re doing her the favor, and that makes all the difference in the world.”

  “Altruist!”

  “Not at all. The relation is different—and to my advantage.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Haven’t you ever made love to a big ugly girl who’s half moron and up to her fat neck in complexes? Pure ecstasy, man. Non-stop whispering in your ear, what a great man you are, all that. But try making love to one of these Brooke Shields clones: all she wants is compliments, talk to me, talk to me, the famous talk to me people talk about so much, which boils down to I Demand Compliments. Only Allah is worthy of such praise. The Koran says, ‘Praise Allah morning and night.’ Miz Beauty does not speak. You’ve got to discover her erogenous zones, her favorite subjects of conversation, her sign, all on your own. Meanwhile, Miz Piggy’s coming like an express train. She doesn’t get it every day. And she’s hell-bent to make the most of it. She wants more, more, more. And that, man, is the true foundation of fucking. The rest is representation, pure fashion show, masturbation on a glossy page from Vogue. ”

  “What if you end up with an ugly girl who’s no good?”

  “That could only happen to you, man.”

  If I understand correctly, the couch is one of those fat girls seething with complexes who’s great in bed. When you consider the couch with a minimum of sensitivity, you realize what Bouba’s practiced eye saw all along. The couch is endowed with the open, luxuriant forms of Rubens’s women. Standing before his canvases, who has not dreamed of such fleshly immersion? Such generous smooth bodies?

  Bouba drains his teacup and goes quietly back to bed like a black maharajah in his St. Denis harem. Let the world hurl itself towards nuclear culmination. Bouba is sleeping.

  Must I Tell Her That

  a Slum Is Not a Salon?

  MIZ LITERATURE comes sweeping in with an enormous bouquet of peonies. I’m still in bed with Bukowski. The window is closed. A line of sunlight cuts the page in half lengthwise.

  I read lying down with a pillow between my shoulderblades and my head slightly raised. Stiff neck guaranteed. Unfortunately, it’s my favorite position. Usually I read early in the morning before it gets too hot, when I’m not likely to be disturbed. The building emanates an aura of calm. My neighbors, retired for the most part, are not yet awake. In an hour or two it’ll be the breakfast routine, the whistling of the pipes, the tap of toothbrushes and the smell of bacon.

  I watch Miz Literature move through the shadows. It looks like she’s wearing a yellow dress with a white collar. And ballerina shoes. I picture her dressing with care, putting on perfume (just a soupçon!) and her bra (she has small breasts) so she can go do dishes for a Negro in a filthy apartment on St. Denis near the Carré St. Louis. Skid row. Miz Literature comes from a good family, she has a bright future, upright values, a solid education, perfect mastery of Elizabethan poetry, she belongs to a feminist literary club at McGill—the McGill Witches—whose mission is to restore the reputation of unjustly neglected poetesse
s. This year they are publishing a luxury edition of Emily Dickinson with ink drawings by Valery Miller. So what’s going on here? You could hold a gun to her head and she wouldn’t do the tenth of what she does here for a white guy. Miz Literature is writing her PhD thesis on Christine de Pizan. Which is no mean feat. So what the hell is she doing in this filthy slum? And don’t blame Cupid. If she were madly in love with a McGill guy he’d never ask her to do the tenth of what she does here, spontaneously, freely and graciously.

  “Why do the dishes now?”

  “Am I disturbing you?”

  “Not really.”

  “You’re reading! Oh, I’m sorry.”

  And believe it or not, she really is sorry. Reading is sacred in her book. Besides, a black with a book denotes the triumph of Judeo-Christian civilization! Proof that those bloody crusades really did have some value. True, Europe did pillage Africa but this black is reading a book.

  “There, I finished.”

  She puts the clean dishes away carefully. A real jewel. Her only shortcoming is that she’ll go to any length to make this room pleasant. Confer an Outremont touch to it. Every time she comes she brings something new. Pretty soon, in a few months, we’ll be crushed under the weight of rare vases, engravings, bedside lamps and all that crap you can buy in those snobby boutiques on Laurier Street. McGill people are taught to decorate their environment. Look what I’ve gotten myself into! All right, I can understand that part. But I don’t get why she’s doing it here in this slum. Must I tell her that a slum is not a salon? Maybe it’s part of her double life. By day a WASP princess; by night slave to a Negro. That could be exciting. Suspense guaranteed because with Negroes you never know. Let’s just eat her up right now, yum-yum, with a little salt and pepper. I can see the headlines in La Presse.

  THE TALK OF THE TOWN— “Did you hear? Two blacks ate a McGill co-ed.”

  “How did they discover the crime?”

  “The police found her arm in the refrigerator.”

  “Oh, good lord! Is that the new immigration policy?

  Importing cannibals?”

  “I suppose they raped her first, while they were at it?”

  “We’ll never know. They ate everything.”

  “Oh, good lord.”

  Miz Literature climbs into my bed. I put the book down at the foot of the bed, next to the bottle of wine, then bring her down to my level. Europe has paid her debt to Africa.

  And Now Miz Literature Is Giving

  Me Some Kind of Blow Job

  MIZ LITERATURE pours water into a ceramic vase she brought yesterday, then carefully arranges the flowers. She opens the window and places the vase in the left-hand corner, just above my head.

  Miz Literature is standing on the bed and her long legs, sheathed in mocha stockings, bring visions of the Golden Gate. The sun is with us now. Hot air fills the room. I drop the book to the floor and pull Miz Literature to me.

  Miller says there is nothing better than making love at noon. Miller is right.

  If you think you’re about to be served up a hot slice of Miz Literature’s sexual proclivities, think again. You’ve got your choice of porno novels for that. I recommend the Midnight series. Miz Literature says I make love the way I eat. With the hunger of a man stranded on a desert island. When you think about it, that’s no compliment. Strange, but she says I remind her of an innocent child who has been mistreated too long. She likes making love to me. After the storm has passed, she holds me in her arms. I doze off. On her white breast. I am her child. An untrusting child, so hard sometimes. Her black boy. She strokes my forehead. Happy, gentle, fragile moments. I am more than Black. She is more than White.

  If she had been giving me a blow job, I would have had my cock lopped off. Oof! Cut clean off! This time the ceiling fell in—literally, in a cloud of pink dust. Beelzebub is pulling out all the stops upstairs. A fuck to the death. Miz Literature has never attended one of Beelzebub’s demonstrations. The galloping ghost. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The ceiling opening up. We’re rooted to the spot and in our minds, the terrifying image of a couple fucking crushing a couple in repose. The Koran says, “Tell me, if the scourge of Allah overtook you unawares or openly, would any perish but the transgressors?” (Sura VI, 47.)

  Miz Literature has been staring straight ahead since it began. Hypnotized. Her lips tremble slightly. A contraction at one corner of her mouth.

  Upstairs Beelzebub is going back for second helpings. Miz Literature is as red as a boiled lobster. I’m sure she’s going to drop from a stroke. They’re tearing each other apart upstairs. A super-performance. Shamefully, I must face the fact: I start to get hard again. White, right and proper, Miz Literature glances surreptitiously at my penis. The snaking veins begin to uncoil. A serpent’s head rising. The Koran says, “Men, have fear of your Lord, who created you from a single soul. From that soul He created its mate, and through them He bestrewed the earth with countless men and women. Fear Allah, in whose name you plead with one another, and honor the mothers who bore you. Allah is ever watching over you.” (Sura IV, 1.) I cannot countenance this thing that abases me. No doubt, man is an unnatural animal. The Koran asks, “How many generations have We destroyed before them! Can you find one of them still alive, or hear so much as a whisper from them?” I try to think unpleasant thoughts; I think of The Critique of Pure Reason. Kant becomes porno. The Critique gives me a hard-on. It grows. Miz Literature stares straight ahead. We hear the double gasp of Beelzebub and his accomplice. Like a slow dance. They’re doing it in slow motion. In some movies they show the violent parts in slow motion to increase the effect. Like violence shot into our blood. A hypodermic. In our veins. We sense their movements in a mad modern ballet. Two naked bodies violently intertwined in a pas de deux of death. My sex keeps rising, obeying a secret command beyond my will. Miz Literature turns slightly on her axis, watching it rise with a disconcerting stare. She lowers herself towards me, reducing the angle to fifteen degrees. In the sitting position. Her eyes still staring. I close mine and Miz Literature, in a trance, takes me in her mouth. Between her beautiful pink lips. I’d dreamed of it. I’d licked my chops over it. I didn’t dare ask her. An act so . . . I knew that as long as she hadn’t done it, she wouldn’t be completely mine. That’s the key in sexual relations between black and white: as long as the woman hasn’t done something judged degrading, you can never be sure.

  Because in the scale of Western values, white woman is inferior to white man, but superior to black man. That’s why she can’t get off except with a Negro. It’s obvious why: she can go as far as she wants with him. The only true sexual relation is between unequals. White women must give white men pleasure, as black men must for white women. Hence, the myth of the Black stud. Great in bed, yes, but not with his own woman. For she has to dedicate herself to his pleasure. Upstairs, Beelzebub is back for another go-round. And now Miz Literature is giving me some kind of blow job. I think of the faraway village where I was born. Of all those blacks who traveled to a white man’s land in search of riches and came back empty-handed. I don’t know why—it has nothing to do with what’s going on— but I think of a song I heard years ago. A guy in my village had a Motown record. The song was about a lynching. The lynching in St. Louis of a young black man. He was hanged then castrated. Why castrated? I’ll never stop wondering about that. Why castrated? Can you tell me? Of course no one wants to get involved with a question like that. I’d love to know, I’d like to be one hundred percent sure whether the myth of the animalistic, primitive, barbarous black who thinks only of fucking is true or not. Evidence. Show me evidence. Definitively, once and for all. No one can. The world has grown rotten with ideologies. Who will risk taking a position on a subject like that? As a black, I don’t have enough distance. Are black men sensual pigs? Are white men pale pigs? Yellow men refined pigs? Red men bleeding pigs? Only Pig is Pig. I don’t know why I always imagined the universe like that Matisse painting. Something about it struck me. It’s my essential
vision of things. I’m talking about “Grand Intérieur Rouge” (1948). Primary colors. Strong, alive, violent and loud. Pictures inside a larger canvas. Everywhere flowers in different-sized pots. On two tables. A dark chair. On the wall a painting by the artist (the pineapple one) separated by a black demarcation. Under the table, a calico cat chased by a dog. Stylized, allusive strokes. Splashes of bright color. The skins of two beasts under the curved legs of the table on the right. The painting is primitive, animal, gregarious, fierce, flightly, tribal fantasy. You can feel a playful kind of cannibalism verging on immediate happiness. Right there, before your eyes. With those loud, primary colors and violent sexuality (despite the calm the eye feels) offering a new version of love in this modern jungle. When I ask myself hard questions about the role of color in sexuality, I remember Matisse’s answer. I have been carrying it with me ever since. I didn’t yet know it would not be enough to counter the storms of life, and that I would probably die with the teeth of that problem sunk into my neck.

  Without warning I send a strong stream of come in Miz Literature’s face. She throws her head back and I catch a strange glow in her eyes. She dives down for my penis like a piranha. She sucks. I get hard. She gets on top. This isn’t one of those innocent, naïve, vegetarian fucks she’s used to. We’re two carnivores in bed. Miz Literature issues two or three high-pitched moans. Any minute, the vase of peonies above us is going to fall and split our heads open. I’m making love at the edge of the abyss. Miz Literature squats down in a dirty position and moves slowly up and down the length of my cock. A dusky mast. Her head is completely thrown back. Her breasts pointing to the ceiling and her mouth a painful smile. I caress her hips, her sweaty torso and the titillated tips of her breasts. Suddenly her body is racked by hard, rapid shocks and a low growl issues from her throat.