Emilio Lascano Tegui - On Elegance While Sleeping

“Rome and Greece exposed such hunchbacks at birth. Medieval kings tied them to the foot of their thrones with heavy chains so that their snarls would remind them of the snarling of the discontented peasantry. The hunchback is a sign of revolution against all things! The hunchback is failure made flesh, and his hate flourishes in inverse proportion to his smallness. His kind revolted the queens of old so much that when a lady from court became pregnant, they covered their royal hunchbacks with tar and started a bonfire for good luck. That’s how they invented fireworks, you know…”

The coachman went quiet a moment. He seemed more at ease now, like an asthmatic finally able to breathe. He added: “A hunchback just mugged me back there on the corner and because of his size I didn’t even see which way he went! He took off with nine francs…”

JULY 29, 18—

Catholic liturgy has conquered women. It’s the same as with skylarks and mirrors. Anyone who adopts religion’s deep and pompous tone can easily win a woman over. This is the reason I’ve always tried my best to be as affected and ceremonious as possible. And there’s another reason too: I take my Latin roots quite seriously — I might speak French, but I count my lovers in Italian. Roots, I might add, with a Saracen sadness just beneath.

Syphilis is a civilized disease, and I intend to declare my allegiance to its aesthetic. I acquired it in the most charming of ways. Suffice to say, she who bestowed this gift upon me did so with the same ease and elegance as the doves of Aphrodite must alight upon the breasts of sleeping women…

AUGUST 9, 18—

My nights have always been fragmentary. I’ve never slept through the night. I have attacks that aren’t quite insomnia. They’re interruptions in the pleasant — literary — death that is sleep, though they are always kind enough to retie the loose ends of my unfinished nightmares when they depart.

These attacks have their origins in my childhood. In the Jesuit school where I was a student after my mother’s death, a bell would ring at random times in the night, always well after twelve, obliging us to sit up in our beds and recite a creed. Afterward, we were meant to go back to sleep as though there had been no interruption.

This custom was something like torture for my classmates and myself, particularly at the beginning of the school year. At last I yielded to the routine that has undone my nights ever since. What was the reason behind those bells, I wondered, always pealing at such an inconvenient hour?

Few Jesuits were able clear up this secret, but eventually one of the Reverend Fathers explained it to me:

When the honest Society of Jesus possessed its most prosperous missions in the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, the Indians who fell under its guardianship — exhausted by their brutal, crushing workdays — took no pleasure in their marriage beds. Husbands simply slept beside their legal partners every night without fulfilling their conjugal obligations. Thus, in those lands — generally thought of as a fertile paradise — the locals quickly developed a birth-rate problem.

A priest came up with the idea of the late-night bell as a means of correcting this problem. Once the Indians had been reinvigo-rated by a few hours of rest — interrupted by the bell — and lay back down having recited their creed, they found their women waiting for them, and soon rediscovered their appetites.

And so the Jesuit bells continued ringing this strange peal for married couples — rung by celibates who’d taken vows of chastity and always went about with eyes cast down. These insomniacs are truly worthy of the lowest third of Dante’s hell — if they don’t manage to invent an even more terrible place for themselves.

AUGUST 11, 18—

I’m waiting for bad news. Everything that passes near seems to bring it. There it is in those footsteps, retreating along the hall of this hotel. Somebody lacking the courage to knock! The rug in the hallway, accomplice to cowards, ends just outside my door, so once-silent footsteps resound there all at once on the floorboards, revealing the presence of a messenger…Who is it? Is he tall and thin like a ghost covered in a sheet? Or maybe he’s more rotund, since I can hear him brushing against the walls. He’s crossed the hall now. Farther off, a child’s crying. He’s scared. Like me, he senses danger; he cries inconsolably. The unknown that lurks in the corridor is pressing down on the fontanel in his skull, which has yet to close, and he understands the ebb and flow of the unfinished brain beneath. This child is breathing the same atmosphere in which I’m suffocating. He has a feeling he shouldn’t drink any more of his mother’s milk. His navel is doing the nervous dance of a cork in water. He feels the knot in his intestines unraveling, as if his interior equilibrium is about to be lost entirely — as though his entire body, that receptacle, were overflowing. Wax is pouring from his ears, and behind the wax is the fifth humor, the quintessence, which is the celestial ether and the honor of families.

The boy falls silent. A great current of air passes through the hall. Has the intruder departed? Everything shakes. Microbes jump into the air and then meander like sleepwalkers at hand-height. Nobody collects them, so they return to the carpet.

The ogre has disappeared. He was scared off by the ringing of a bell, a murmuring, a walking grumble wearing an apron and two big shoes — the bellhop, who just walked down the hall.

SEPTEMBER 6, 18—

How many kilometers have I traveled in pursuit of a woman’s breast! I’d lose count before I reached a number. And only for a breast! The rest of the body is irrelevant.

The days seem sad to me, and the nights even more so, if I don’t close my eyes and concentrate on the memory of breasts past. Loose breasts and barely glimpsed breasts, enormous breasts, breasts standing at attention. I’ve followed thousands of women. Two, three a day, interrupting my work, forgetting where I was headed, missing my train, crossing the road, tripping over rough ground, descending into empty basements, spying through keyholes — all for a glimpse of the secret gifts women carry with them. I’ve lived my life dreaming of a pyramid of various breasts — the way Tamerlane dreamed of pyramids of skulls.

AUGUST 23, 18—

I’ve asked myself on several occasions who lives in certain houses in Bougival. The houses with the blinds closed, the doors locked. There’s never a servant out on the patio. Maybe one cat or another. Sometimes two or three pigeons climbing up a cornice, like neighbors come for a visit, using their beaks to tidy the great starched folds of their white skirts…

AUGUST 28, 18—

Men die centenarians without ever having known a woman. All they know is a braid, an eye, a buttock, a leg, or breast, as I have.

It’s the fetish we acquire at fourteen, looking through the keyhole in a door, when masturbating like a person cleaning a nozzle simply for the pleasure of seeing it clean. Later, the body searches for relief, and later still, when a woman truly takes hold of us, it’s enough just to remember a single one of her garments, her profile, perfume, presence, or smile…

Cities are places where love is quite civilized, so when a man finds himself face to face with such a woman, these two beings — who, without admitting it, both long for the satisfaction of their many acquired vices in the most ideal possible setting and circumstances — merely head home and masturbate. Once again, the man has the opportunity to possess this woman’s leg, buttocks, neck, tongue, or breasts — her eyes deep and intense, or else blue and innocent. In this way, indeed, the same woman can serve for a hundred half-men. They don’t get jealous. Each one has his part of her.