Emilio Lascano Tegui - On Elegance While Sleeping

“Now: Will Don Juan be able to refrain from ravishing this creature, who was born with a set of wings fit to take him to the very heights of passion — like all those who have been created expressly for love? He isn’t just another woman, after all. He isn’t even a decisive departure from womankind. He is the white marble statue who won the heart of the black king in the Louvre…The personification of the belated, literary decline of mystic love. Don Juan, after so many years — since his school days, in fact — submits then, in his coach, to the satisfactions of solitary pleasure.

“A sharp pain in his temples pierces his head as the shudder of pleasure subsides between the flaccid muscles of his thighs. He is tormented now by the specter of a humiliating death. And he says to his silent spectator:

“‘Get out. I think I’m going to die. You would compromise my death.’

“But the ephebe responds, ‘No — give me that most voluptuous pleasure for which I’ve been searching so long. What I’ve always wanted is to watch someone die…’

“Don Juan doesn’t have the strength to object or prolong his conversation with this slender ambassador of carnality…and so dies a magnificent, sumptuous death with an angel at his side — just like the Bishop of Orléans, whose death you’ve already heard all about…”

MARCH 2, 18—

When winter arrived, the Seine rose toward the sky, and clouds enveloped the village of Bougival along with the changing light at dawn and dusk. You could feel the cold of the water on your skin. The lighthouses, with their distant oil lamps, languished in a tangle of tulle.

On one of these nights, as the shimmer of one such light struggled to pierce the gloom, the silhouette of a man cut through the fog on one of the outlying streets of this uninteresting village. The light hit his face, and as soon as he stepped out of this luminous zone, he spotted me and stopped, startled. My path was decisive. I moved without hesitation. And my grim determination must have shocked this anxious passerby. I read the terror in his face. A wordless dread. His throat had gone dry. I looked him over: a poor devil, a wretch, somebody I could have killed without the least caution. He was already half dead. No cry for help would have tarnished his lips; there would be no struggle to impede my crime.

We lost each other again in the mist. My victim, perhaps, fell to the ground, faint with terror. I continued my march. There wasn’t even a whisper. The winter mist had enveloped the world in its gray velvet.

I felt very alone. I began talking to myself in a loud voice and confessed the strange desire that this pale, trembling man had just woken in me. A man so frightened, at night, on an empty street…wouldn’t he have been easy to finish off? I don’t mean that I would have killed him right there, necessarily, where the green leaves of the hedge look as though they could have been painted in watercolors right on top of the fog, but perhaps further on, where his blood could have been mistaken for mud, where twelve hours would have to pass before the sun was bright enough to distinguish a corpse from a lump of refuse.

APRIL 4, 18—

I’ve sketched out my plans and am ready. I have a new strength in me, taken from the secret core of my life, driving me on, controlling me. It’s health, youth, and optimism combined. Until yesterday, my tentative novel (“The Syphilis of Don Juan”) served as a haven for my imagination. Today, it doesn’t satisfy my thirst — or, better said, can no longer stem the anguish that gnaws at me on the eve of an act that is now quite inevitable. I’m halfway between a comedy and a strange sort of drama, and feel an overbearing need to lower the curtain. No simple curtain: the front curtain of the stage, the grand drape, the great iron and asbestos curtain that drops like a zinc plate from the sixth floor and creaks as it falls. Something like that, flamboyant, coarse, unexpected — something that will impose its tyranny over my life without question. I’m going to kill someone.

I’m not frightened, I’m not scared, I won’t regret it.

I’ve resolved in advance all the premises I need to consider.

MAY 9, 18—

I’ve chosen my victim. Crossing the market, I passed a woman with blonde hair: thin, with sallow skin and washed-out blue eyes. I’ve seen her before aboard a Belgium-registered barge that was tied up at the end of the railway bridge.

The English are naturally aristocratic, so there’s nothing more miserable than seeing one fallen on hard times. The need visible in their faces — shining through the miscellaneous grit covering their Apollonian features — pains me. My victim, with her delicate face, has forgotten that she’s a woman and not some floozy. Boat grease clings to her tattered dress. She doesn’t brush her hair anymore, just makes a knot of it at the nape of her neck. Her bodice is fastened with a safety pin — the button’s fallen off. Clearly she isn’t especially happy. If she doesn’t drink in backroom bars, she certainly gives the impression of being an alcoholic; husbandless, discontent, feeling a general hostility toward the world.

As I passed her in the market, I found her concentrating heavily on some change she’d been thrown. She counted it coin by coin, like a child or a savage. Her slowness in counting, her obvious limited ability, made up my mind. It authorized my act. To unburden humanity of an imperfect being: a weakness.

MAY 16, 18—

He was born a Jew and into a career as an eye doctor. His clients went increasingly blind as he grew to adulthood with the grandfather who’d built their house. His grandfather died, and soon Alfredo Chascock invented a solution he claimed was the best remedy for any eye disease. He wouldn’t sell it or give it away. His clients had to let him drip it over their infected eyes at the highest temperature they could bear. This portentous eyewash was simply water.

Alfredo Chascock had no other hobbies besides fishing, but his naturally dishonest nature had poeticized this activity. He bought salt-water fish from the market and showed them off as if he’d caught them in the river. Chascock was, as I’ve mentioned, myopic. Along with his fishing rod, he brought some opera glasses to better observe the lush, sinuous line of the Seine. When I arrived that afternoon under the railway bridge, I saw Alfredo Chascock in a gully along the bank on the other side. He blended in with the tree trunk he was perched on. My eyes took in every detail, however, and couldn’t help registering his presence there. The iron bridge seemed like a frame put around the sky: it was that immense and high.

In that valley, a natural avenue through the world, a gray-green landscape the color of grapes, the only dark spot was a barge tied up with various cables to the posts along the bank.

The barge was empty and without ballast. It bobbed up out of the water like a loose buoy. There were stairs that ran from the riverbank up to the deck where various geranium pots, lined up along the edge, brought to mind the cornices of the houses in Seville.

The scene was calm and mute. The waters of the Seine unraveled effortlessly, rolling forth like a ball of yarn. Every once in a while, a bang came from the barge, the sound multiplied in its empty holds. It was the blonde. I watched for two hours as she came and went from the top of the barge. She was making dinner. A tuft of blue smoke rose from a corrugated iron pipe and moved toward the middle of the river where swallows were flying — the low smoke the only indication that time was passing.

Chascock put the tilapia he’d just taken from the water into his buckets. I was alone. There were no witnesses and I started up the stairs.