Emilio Lascano Tegui - On Elegance While Sleeping

This isn’t conjecture. Man even dies without knowing his own wife. What is it that he loves in her, if not what he loved in the opposite sex back when he was a full-time masturbator? He’s still never experienced the love of an entire woman. Might the fault lie with the clothing that hides her entirety from us? It’s society that only offers her up to us piecemeal and forces us to masturbate until our deaths…If women went about naked, the absence of mystery would make us purer-minded, and it would take quite an effort for us to single out or dwell upon one part of her body alone. Her entire body should give us an aesthetic rather than voluptuous pleasure. For now, however, our world remains stuck at the keyhole, where we saw her for the first time…We only see a leg, an arm, a breast.

SEPTEMBER 25, 18—

Cotton mittens bother me when they’re dyed black. They always give me a little shiver of disgust. It’s the dead hand still alive underneath the dyed cotton. I can smell the winding sheets that hang on the walls during wakes and are usually damp and sometimes have silvery gray hairs still stuck in them…

Joy is in the light-colored glove one puts on in the morning, getting out of bed. Together with a striped sock.

SEPTEMBER 26, 18—

We’ve entered a new world. Its geographic limits are unknown. But every moment that transpires within is torture. The round moon tonight is a server’s tray sent up from hell. It’s yellow in color, but it wants to be red, like the sputum of some tubercular titan…

The calves born tonight all have six legs and glassy eyes. They’ll enter the alcoholic eternity of our museums in due time. Much as a villager’s boy — a seventh son — will end up in the city with a number on his chest, in the lunatic asylum, in the prison, or in the hospital. And then, tonight, there is a villager who will hang himself in the malignant shadow of our fig tree; the moon makes him think long and hard during his last moments alive.

Water and foamy piss overflow from the urinals. Beyond the star-shaped holes in their drains — in the cotton wads of the diseased — things have gotten clogged: there is emptiness and desperation in our drainpipes.

The neighborhood roosters get restless too early and, as if passing over row after row of fences, a train whistle scratches the silence.

Danger prowls around the patio.

Its eyes stop on the latches and study the bolts.

Silence like an arid field.

Silence like a seeded field.

The childlike scream of the train rages in the ravine of midnight. It’s left the rail yard. It surges on. Filled to the brim with the diseased.

Heading to the south, it leads little girls by their limp hands…those who had to interrupt their eternal dialogue on the subject of fashion while saying their good-byes on the platform — for fashion reigns even in a sanatorium. It carries diabetic mothers to Vichy. To Venice, Cairo or Bruges, it carries eighteenth-century lovers. The ones who still write love letters, I mean. It carries abbesses and seminarians, trading their convents and monasteries for moral turpitude. It carries bored people in search of the right bridge or lead cathedral roof from which to hurl themselves. Two of the train cars are full of tiny instructional skeletons from Paris classrooms that the municipality is sending to the seaside developments in Berck. Likewise, there’s a mechanic on board who will lose his mind en route and sail past the last station without stopping. And in the boxcar harnessed to this magnificent realization of human progress is a corpse with no next of kin sent as priority cargo to arrive in Bordeaux before ten in the morning. It’s his last appointment.

Such is the insomniac landscape that roasts me alive at night. It’s that little girl who I kissed in the bushes on the tiny island north of Bougival who keeps me awake; I’m worried her parents are going to come looking for me. To keep myself busy while I wait, I’ve been shredding the tissue-paper fantasies of children between my fevered fingers — those same fantasies whose wings, deep in that little girl’s soul, I managed to clip that afternoon…that girl on whom I left, for all time, my billy-goat fingerprints.

OCTOBER 4, 18—

Could it be that the thing I’m missing is courage? That I simply lack the strength to a stab a stranger without fainting — risking my own life with such dangerous sport? If it seems easy, in theory, to kill, will it prove as easy to elude our consciences, which already begin to gnaw at us and betray us on the eve of our crime, even before the deed is done?

Courage is the literary vanity of criminals. Rarely is it hereditary, as for example in the Septeuil family.

I mean the famous young woman of the Septeuil line who drank a glass of human blood on the steps of the guillotine to save her father’s, the Marquis’, life. Now her descendants can stomach anything without fainting. They have the same ferocity in them. Her granddaughter, you know, already poor, unable to maintain the status the Restoration had granted her — a duchesse brisée , so to speak — and preferring to see the family horizontal than sitting in the wrong place, had the courage to take her young daughter, fourteen years old, to a brothel. She did her mother proud. During the Second French Empire, before going to work in the luxury brothels where she eloquently badmouthed Victor Hugo, she used to rush her clients in the brothel run by a second-rate madam, where she wore bright red satin slippers. An uncle of hers — her mother’s brother, thus likewise of the Septeuil family line — soon found out his family name was being used as a doormat by city lowlifes and wealthy merchants both, and so had the courage, at seventy, to marry his niece, snatching her away to the best brothels in town, the very Stations of the Cross of sexual pleasure, at which he worshiped with the delight of a devotee, finally installing her in one of Paris’s most celebrated basilicas of love.

OCTOBER 14, 18—

I’ve always searched for the love I didn’t possess. I tried to be loved. I did everything I could. That’s all I ever did. Builders risk falling like bricks from their scaffolding. They lose arms and legs. I’ve never lost anything, and yet I’ve lost everything. Just to be wanted.

There’s nothing more in life than to love someone. To be loved. Such is the happy monotony of my life.

NOVEMBER 1, 18—

Idon’t know whether to stay or go. Nothing frightens me more than the prospect of failing to live up to the great spiritual responsibility my mother laid upon me. She thought I was a man who would never know failure. She expected so much of me, I worry I’ll leave my job unfinished.

I am her optimism. I am the player through whom she sought to wreak vengeance on this world in which men forced her to live — because, like all our perfect Spanish mothers, there was no treasure for her in this life, no jewelry to adorn her, save the leaden melancholy that came upon her as her dreams flowed away, like water over river stones in the afternoon.

NOVEMBER 6, 18—

If I wrote a book about Don Juan’s syphilis, I’d worry about acquiring that habit or weakness of writers who plot out all their actions as though for a book, writers whose days have become the monotonous pages of a novel. A book is a secret vice. If we could collect all our dandruff as easily as we collect the so-called contents of our heads, it would be just as publishable. Like the eighteenth-century woman who liked lace so much she cut it up and ate it in a tortilla, there are people who worship the fetish object that is a book and want nothing more than to see themselves reflected in it — like Narcissus.