Emilio Lascano Tegui - On Elegance While Sleeping

But my verses didn’t spring from frustrated dreams and desires. They were the flowers of reality, of satisfaction.

I’ve managed to learn about other things than pleasure without it costing me too much. For instance: the ennui in brothels is as wide as the Sahara, but a prostitute who gets bored isn’t dangerous so long as she loves us — even if her love amounts to nothing more than the fact that she’s stopped charging for her time. If, instead, she gives us money, the risk begins to grow. In such a case, if we stop visiting her, she’s likely not to hesitate to take the opportunity to entertain herself — her solitude and boredom being so great — by writing an anonymous letter and denouncing us to the police. Justice for these women perched on the edge of society’s bed is in itself a voluptuous thing. They adore gestures for their own sake, just like the arrogant, momentous language of Racine’s tragedies. Not because the protagonists of these tragedies complain a lot, but because they challenge authority and stand up to men the way a thief can stand up to a judge…When streetwalkers use irony, it’s always before the law. It’s their way of getting back at authority figures. I remember overhearing this conversation once:

“Why did you smack the officer who tried to detain you? He’d made a formal accusation of robbery.”

“I was drunk.”

“That doesn’t justify it.”

“Look, whenever I end up pregnant or drink a little more than I should, I feel the need to hit a policeman.”

Yvonne was my first love. As I said, military service wasn’t too heavy a burden. I rarely stayed in the barracks. I don’t remember any of my other compatriots. Moreau is the only other soldier I remember from those days when I wasn’t required to do much of anything. It was precisely because I had so much leisure time I fell in love — I didn’t know what else to do, and that Lorrainese blonde’s white skin didn’t have a pink or blue base to it, as you’ll find in the more commonplace female specimens: a wild salmon, salmon juice was what ran in her veins — so white, with such a white wine inside! Yvonne was a marble cup fit only to be filled by royal slaves and drunk from only by the wealthiest of western tycoons. She soon set up shop in Kairouan on her own; her long-term lover, a brilliant sort of pimp, had put her into business for herself, but she had long since stopped letting him run the show. But, to return to the question of boredom, if a woman who awaits a man in a brothel gets immensely bored, the lover who left her there to do her job in peace will end up dragging the same boredom with him through the streets, plazas, and cafes — as when a gored horse in a bullfight steps on its own intestines. The Lorrainese girl’s lover, a dark-skinned man from Marseille, was condemned as we were — much more than we were, in fact — to remain in Kairouan. He slept, drank, wandered about. He was now a representative of that mysterious fraternity of ex-men who justify and preserve the shadows of great cities. And yet this pimp, friendless and disapproved of by all, was nonetheless a fixture in the European neighborhood — as much a fascinating example of Western civilization as one of the rent collectors or the county commissioner. He was the great hope of the local constabulary: they so rarely got to accuse a foreigner of a crime — the foreigners themselves were usually the accusers. This jobless thug was destined to break the law sooner or later. The commissioner waited for him impatiently, in the sadness of his office with its two chairs and one desk, on top of which was a virgin folder meant to contain reports, and then a rubber stamp with which the chief marked his “Letters from the Orient,” as Marshal von Moltke called them, writing to his sister while he was in Constantinople.

The Lorrainese girl understood, as a married woman, the delicious risk of our love. For myself, I hoped the commissioner would soon write up a report on this man from Marseille who held my death in his hands…Soon enough, an Arab saved me.

A girl far too developed for her age, who knows how or why, always has an agent of the secret police on her tail. The girl serves as the bait that attracts the various satyrs scattered about the city. All the clerks know her. Bureaucrats who’ve made eunuchs of themselves over twenty years of expediting papers are the usual victims of these boorish policemen. And it’s the same for a man with nothing to do: he always has someone on his tail trying to reel him into a pay-by-the-hour motel. One afternoon — as my boredom, like the yawns of the camels grazing by Kairouan, whispered thickly along the courtyard of the Great Mosque — an Arab accosted me. He was one of the guides who showed the city to tourists.

He offered to show me the interior of the Arab world. A Christian can’t live among Muslims, but a Christian can see — without it being too much of a sin — Arab women with their faces unveiled. This was the spectacle he offered me. I accepted. Inside the house in question, women were weaving rugs. One of them, a little long in the tooth, berated me in every way she could think of. The other two women, girls really, smiled. When my curiosity was sated, and I headed back out to the street, my guide was waiting for me.

“So?” he asked. I gathered in time that he wasn’t curious about my reaction to the interior of the house, which wasn’t all that interesting, but instead about the young girls who had smiled at me.

“Very nice, both of them,” I told him, without enthusiasm.

“One franc,” he responded.

“A franc? What, you want a franc?”

“Yes,” he said. “For one franc you can be alone with them for a while, if you like.”

I’d never been offered girls so young or so cheap. “So come and get your franc,” I said…and that’s how I met Grisela. The father — because the Arab who’d made this proposal was the father of the two smiling girls — received one franc per expedition, adding up to the significant sum of seven hundred francs in six months…

The girl had no time to weave rugs anymore. I hoarded her until the day I returned to Tunis. Grisela’s youth, her Muslim novelty, her lapdog-like affection — in all, the extreme devotion of that thirteen-year-old girl unhinged me. Yvonne tried to get revenge on me by inviting Moreau to comfort her. But this enraged Flora, who shaved her head in reprisal. In retaliation, the man from Marseilles set Flora’s curtains on fire and was caught trying to escape in Sousse. The Kairouan police never got him. And, you know, even Yvonne, deep down, had been hoping to see them put him away!

JANUARY 3, 18—

The brothel in Sousse was small. The room where they entertained the soldiers had started to fall apart along the base of the walls, which had started to crumble into the adjoining rooms. The doors to these other rooms could no longer open all the way. It was an exclusive sort of place, in its way. Not too many clients could be allowed in at once. The house was too small, but our patience was philosophical — which only increased the danger: it was a channeled, potent, prodigious force. Fifty, eighty, a hundred men shaking with desire, worn out from jealousy, from fear, and hungry for flesh, all stuck in the same place and waiting for the same thing — this turned us into a single terrible Cyclops that rumbled outside the single bedroom, shifting its weight listlessly. Eighty men perfumed with vinegar, nutmeg, pepper, and cloves, slowly conglomerating into one big slab of meat, one creature, threatening and blind.

You could hear it knocking its forehead against the walls. The chairs collapsed under its weight, and then the rumor of a longer wait — faint as oil, quick as acid — penetrated into the cracks, ran level with the walls, into the plaza. Sometimes it looked like a stream of water, other times a line of ants, and occasionally the black of barbed wire…