Emilio Lascano Tegui - On Elegance While Sleeping

VISCOUNT LASCANO TEGUI

The first time I entrusted my hands to a manicurist was the evening I was headed to the Moulin Rouge. The woman trimmed back my cuticles and polished my nails with an emery board. Then she filed them to points and finished up with some polish. My hands no longer looked like they belonged to me. I put them on my table, in front of my mirror, and changed their positions in the light. With the same sense of self-consciousness one feels when posing for a photographer, I picked up a pen and began to write.

That’s how I started this book.

At the Moulin Rouge that night I heard a woman standing nearby say in Spanish: “He cares for his hands like a man preparing for a murder.”

MAY 19, 18—

Iwas born in Bougival. The Seine flows through our village. Fleeing from Paris. Its dark green waters drag in the grime from that happy city. As the river crossed our town, it jammed the millwheel with the bodies of drowning victims, bashful beneath its surface. One last shove and their journeys were at an end. But they couldn’t pass through the sluice gates under the mill, and so it happened, on occasion, that one of their arms would go through without them — and be seen reaching into the air, as if for help. As a child, I fished out a number of these bodies. There was a mailman in town who was famous locally for always being the one to deliver news of a death; I soon developed a similar sort of notoriety, becoming known for having discovered the most cadavers. It gave me a certain distinction among my comrades, and I prided myself on this honor. I threatened the other children that I would soon find them as well — the day they drowned. They’d tilt their heads, imagining themselves tangled in the sluices beneath the mill. My authority was beyond question: I had, in making my grim prediction, planted an inkling of tragedy into everyday life; which is precisely where logic will say it belongs, once the works of Aeschylus have been thoroughly assimilated into human consciousness, and seem as ordinary and simple as a schoolboy’s composition…

Given the pressure and demands of my strange vocation, I became more preoccupied than anyone with the reputation it brought me. When I fished, which was often, I’d cast my line near the mill. I never looked at my cork, the rough current biting into it. All I was waiting for was the sight of a hand sticking up between the sluice gates. If I took a stroll, it was by the mill, and when they cleaned the machinery, I was the first to go down to the drainage cellars to examine the sludge that collected there, picking through the endless species of objects the river had dragged in — tired of its burden, relieving itself of its cargo under bridges and in the swamps along its banks.

The mill was old. It dated back to the time of Louis XIV, “the high priest of the classic wig,” as I believe Thackeray called him — the man who, when he came to Marly, couldn’t stop leaning out of his sedan to smile at the miller’s wife.

In those days, millers’ wives were known to be the most beautiful and flirtatious women in town.

During the Revolution, the Lord of Bougival asked the miller for asylum. Back then, millers held the keys to the nobility’s storehouses, and thus too served as their greediest customs men. The millers were also thieves, as a rule — stealing from the lords whose goods were in their keeping. But this particular miller surpassed himself: once he’d seen the tyrannical face of the royal house of France consumed in a bonfire on a certain gray autumn afternoon — I direct you to Rivarol’s majestic description of that day — leaving the château in the hands of the sans-culottes , he agreed to save his master and took him down to the mill cellar on the pretext of hiding him there. The miller left the task of opening the sluice gates to his wife. The Lord of Bougival didn’t scream. The waters took him, strangling him against the iron gratings; his body was torn apart, piece by piece, over the course of several months. A period during which nobody was particularly interested in watching the river as it flowed past the mill. The Lord of Bougival’s arm reached out in vain.

JUNE 16, 18—

When my mother died, my father, who was busy dyeing his sideburns, looked me over from head to toe and, finding my hair wasn’t sufficiently serious for the occasion, dyed it black. Then he dyed my eyebrows as well, which had been carrot-red till then. This combined with my mourner’s clothes made me look entirely different — like some newly discovered, hysterically melodramatic cousin. I saw just the type in a Daumier sketch soon after. I was horrified. That very day, I began to undermine my appearance — changing it gradually, quietly. Books played a large part in these transformations. I’d begin to adopt the wardrobe of one of the characters in whatever novel I was reading…and then switch models. Though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate this at the time, I wanted to strip myself of every sign that would enable people to identify me with certainty. How I hated the static images of the daguerreotypes that were then so popular in my town — the poor villagers loved the sense of permanence they saw in those pictures, salivating over the shiny copper daguerreotype plates like middle-aged bourgeois types do over gold pocket watches…

And yet, the continual evolution of my appearance in those days did have lasting consequences…such instability jolted my inner self, leaving it forever unstable, easily jangled, always rattling around inside me like the clapper inside a bell.

JULY 18, 18—

I’ve returned from seeing the two white goats. One of them looked at me. She had the eyes of a lovely señorita . The afternoon had gotten quiet, and I felt a billy goat inside me who understood her. Goats are the animals I feel closest to, so I could hardly avoid returning her stare and walking over to get to know the more beautiful of the pair a little better — her pink udder like a woman’s breast.

JULY 20, 18—

Today I threw a handful of hollyhock leaves at my señorita . She looked at me deeply before she gathered up the leaves, as if trying to trying to understand the motives behind such obsequiousness. How similar she is to our provincial girls, pinning their hopes on every man who passes through town! Even the most despicable men — the girls stare at them all equally, and with such earnest longing, the same way prostitutes stare in the city!

That sort of look makes me fall all the more deeply in love. I’ve never felt such a desire to kick down a door or jump over a wall.

JULY 25, 18—

Ifollowed the girl leading the two goats to graze by the river. My goat is named Isolina. She kept turning around; she knew I was watching. She moved her belly and udder most voluptuously. She was so busy watching me she didn’t have a chance to graze. She went over to the daisies, broke off some stems, then abandoned them. When I left, she remained there, sad, at the steep edge of a gully. Her sister, who must care deeply for her, came by and licked her belly and udder.

AUGUST 30, 18—

Since I no longer had a mother, I didn’t have anyone to help me maintain some level of communication with my elders. As a child, there were very few people I could ask for advice, who would offer me their wisdom and experience. Older people often lose the habit of interacting with children. They don’t know how to talk to them and know even less how to understand them. Being impressionable, children tolerate them, but later come to hate them. Such children get used to living among other children alone. Until, and it happens from time to time, an ambassador from the adult world passes through. It’s nearly always some old bachelor with the heart of a mother. A man who leaves his mark in all our alleyways, gets drunk in all our bars, and, in the end — as one takes home a souvenir to remember Venice — absconds with the mayor’s daughter when he leaves. Thanks to a man like this, a painter, a man from the outside world, I first experienced fear and trembling. Above all, he taught how to understand these sensations. But he didn’t come by night, dressed up like some bogeyman. No. I found myself in front of his house one morning. I had my hands in my pockets, my head was raised; I was whistling: