Emilio Lascano Tegui - On Elegance While Sleeping

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.