Emilio Lascano Tegui - On Elegance While Sleeping

“For instance, one of his daughters let it be known that she had a lover. How could he counsel his daughter? How give her the moral direction she seemed to lack? Our man, again trusting to his imagination, decided to put on his old uniform and his two decorations — one from helping with a rescue operation and the other honoring twenty-five years of service — the better at least to make a show of exterior dignity for the benefit of the wandering sheep he hoped to lead back to the path of righteousness…

“But when his daughter finally remembered to come home, her father’s high seriousness, the two or three words he saw fit to push around his mouth, only made her straighten her shoulders and march right over to her sister, asking when carnival time was coming, so she could get into worse trouble still.

“With an equal disregard for etiquette,” the coachman said, “you almost ran this man over without even noticing his uniform. And if there’s some small penalty for hitting a tramp, there are certainly numerous penalties for hitting a forest warden — even if it’s only a man dressed as a forest warden. The costumes the world makes us put on aren’t anything to be ashamed of, you know. No. Clothes should spur our imaginations on, until we bow at last before the radiant creation that is our nation’s foremost costume: the king’s!”

DECEMBER 24, 18—

Women gradually began to replace men in the factory. This is why the women of Bougival began to look so terrible. Particularly the women from the lower-class neighborhoods, whose hair smelled bitter because they were still too fond of the Jewish custom of rubbing almond oil into their hair…

It was a factory where they made telephone receivers. At six in the afternoon they closed the shop and the women walked in a line along the Seine. They walked in wooden clogs and sang. They sang, and as they sang they went about in wooden clogs like women from a Greemvaneco, taking great strides.

And I’m going to tell you why they sang. The first shift was of young women between seventeen and twenty years of age. One of them, a friend to all — they always put her in the middle of the line — seemed so delicate that she might break. She was my age. She’d taken an interest in me, and her friends suspected her secret. I always waited for her at a bend in the road. In those days, they didn’t sing: I would hear their vulgar laughs approaching, their sour shouts, the cheap ironies of those girls who so often picked fights with one another — their cacophony not unlike the clattering of the machines they had to listen to all day. When they saw me, the workers went quiet. They acted innocent, and only Isabel would look directly at me. The sweet look in her green eyes was as bright as the sunlight falling that same instant. A few meters further down the road, in response to an order that she didn’t give, the silence would come to an end, and I’d hear the laughter and jokes once again; then, after some distance…she’d turn her head for a last look.

One day she wasn’t among her friends, but still feeling the strange power of that fragile girl — destined to die far too early — her friends fell silent as they passed me, same as on all the other days, without the least self-consciousness. Not a single one looked at me. And I knew the truth. Isabel was dying.

Having decided a few days later to inquire about her health, I installed myself again along the bend in the road, where I soon heard a song coming down the way. The women from the factory of supersensitive telephone receivers had replaced their dead friend with a song.

DECEMBER 25, 18—

Ishall report to you now a particular moment about which I can be as self-righteous and dishonest as a police informer. The day was sunny and the rumble of a carriage coming along the road hurt my ears. I was thinking about a girl whose enormous eyes, as she blossomed, were the color of green grapes.

I was losing my virginity. I was about to bend down and pick it back up again when I stopped. The indolence that has always given me the indifference of a man in love, that has always set me apart from others, stopped me from bothering.

I went home and only then understood — in the faces of my family — the extent of my loss. I couldn’t go back. Who knows where on the path I’d left it; it would be impossible to find. The afternoon was over. A summer storm had blown off the bright canvas of the bohemian circus that had set up shop nearby. A thick, fleeting rain had fallen.

I preferred to distract myself by going to the circus. To watch the lines of the umbrella and the tightrope walker converge — lines that are never entirely perpendicular. To follow a clown through the square where the picadors gather.

I arrived early. The circus hadn’t begun its show. As I watched, they lit three lines of gaslights. There were also a few Chinese lanterns at the door and a garland of small oil lamps atop the ticket office.

The band — a bugle, bass drum, clarinet, violin, and triangle — played a waltz. Later they performed a polka.

The triangle marked time. And I saw that the drummer boy had recently attached his triangle to the metal frame of his bass drum with a fresh piece of tendon. Was that, perhaps, my virginity?

DECEMBER 28, 18—

My military service was negligible. I was shuttled back and forth between the barracks at Tunis, Zaghouan, and Sousse, and spent a memorable year in Kairouan. It’s a holy city for Arabs, in Africa. A great Saracen wall still surrounds it. Past the train station, progress peters out. The last gasps are in the European neighborhood. There, progress is comprised of a post office, a “Hotel de Francia,” and a few brick houses where rent collectors live. Otherwise, the whole neighborhood consists of various isolated multistory houses, which used to remind me — in the shadows of the quick-falling desert dusk — of the wide-mouthed jars in Galard’s barbershop, where he kept the leeches that my father used to use once a week.

To this smattering of Europeanism along the edge of the Muslim city’s great white wall, we must not forget the local commissary, a town hall, a café with one melancholy pool table, and a brothel — that bastion of order and authority within the world of prostitution.

Doing my service, I met Moreau. He was in the infantry like me. Indifferent to the niceties of military life, we were both just killing time, waiting for our return to Tunis, going back and forth between the Corsican Longobardi’s café and Madame Flora’s bordello. We felt entirely at home in both places: we took off our jackets in one and our pants in the other. In the café, we played billiards like two boys passing a dull night. At Flora’s, the game was to see which of us was more of a man.

My friend Moreau wasn’t as tall or strong as I, but nature had endowed him a little more generously than it had me. Oddly, this distinction tended to put a little lead on the wings of his fantasies…The women he chose weren’t always willing to go with him. They had to get permission from Flora first, who’d come to Africa following in the footsteps of Hercules — she had already presided over a house in Gibraltar. Flora wanted Moreau to herself; he was her private reserve.

In Flora’s house, accompanying my friend, the very model of masculine crudeness, I gave, by comparison, the impression of being a somewhat delicate individual, a connoisseur of courtesans, with the air of an urbane man who would never pounce upon his female prey the way coarse farmers dig into a pile of grain to be threshed. This characteristic of mine became even more pronounced later on. But my friend Moreau always arrived at Flora’s house of pleasure already drunk. I liked to get drunk while there. The flesh of a woman was a much more intense and penetrating liquor than absinthe. Although I’m ashamed to say it, a beautiful Lorrainese blonde even managed to make me sick with love for her. I wrote poems for her. That is to say, I began constructing my first weapons.