Emilio Lascano Tegui - On Elegance While Sleeping

Ninon a des boucles d’or

The man saw me. Stopped. He stared at me with such interest that I could only feel flattered. Here, at last, was a man with whom one could have a conversation!

“What’s your problem?” he asked. “Lose your hands?”

“Lose my hands?” I repeated to myself, feeling them in my pockets, experiencing a first little tremor of anxiety. The painter went on in that curious tone of his, sympathetic and deferential:

“Maybe they cut yours off?”

My trembling intensified. I started to shake and sweat, to feel cold, imagining myself without hands, both of them cut off by the butcher and hanging from two hooks like giblets. Unsure of myself, of my memory, I took my hands out of my pockets and looked at them.

They were still there at the ends of my arms, to be sure, but I was too startled to trust what I saw and had to look at them a long time.

The painter moved on. He made me realize, at four years old, the drama, the pure voluptuousness of living — the drunken ecstasy of our brief lives.

SEPTEMBER 2, 18—

My neighbor the painter, Truchet was his name, didn’t merely introduce me to terror. His words, his questions — like his gifts — were all quite disquieting for a child. He never gave me a handful of coins for caramels, as men generally give to children. No, Truchet gave me broken watches, which I found far more interesting in their silence than if they’d actually functioned. I’d poke around in them for several days, and when I saw the painter next I’d tell him over and over: “Sir? You know the watch you gave me, sir? I opened it and now it’s ticking.”

Making a watch tick again was, for me, as empowering as being named Grand Inquisitor. I made what little good was left in the machinery work, and then filled the watchcase with oil. In the depths, below the oil, the gears gleamed, more golden now — the balance wheel a ring of fairies, its ruby jewel bearings the eyes of mermaids, mass produced and sold at retail.

SEPTEMBER 3, 18—

Another gift from Truchet that was impossible to forget was several flags on little flagpoles. I learned geography from them. Truchet gave me a yellow one with a black eagle in the middle and told me it was the Japanese flag, since it was yellow…

Later he gave me a red one and told me it was a flag flown by Kaffirs who ate only raw meat. The cross of Saint George was sewn on it in one corner, blue over white. When I wanted to know the significance of this, he responded: “Don’t worry about a little thing like that. Probably they just used an old bit of cloth to patch the thing in Manchester.”

My sense of geography was quite fitting, for a Frenchman. Mr. Truchet was entirely to blame.

SEPTEMBER 10, 18—

Iimagined I was entering the Middle Ages whenever I entered a pharmacy: the pharmacist like the sages of those bygone days, his jars covered in Latin like the pages of a schoolbook. The Middle Ages were an orphan’s childhood, after the world lost its Greek father and had to strike out on its own. The Middle Ages were our first firm step into Humanity. The pharmacist who has replaced the village healer has all the uncertainty of a transitional state. He’s the sage of the Middle Ages advancing toward the role of the doctor. The Middle Ages meant the loss of Mercury’s staff and with it, the wings of the ancient world. Where are those wings now? Where can you find them? In pharmacies.

The smell of pharmacies…what is it if not the smell of science in the Middle Ages? If not the smell of unguents and lard? And, here and there, the stench of sulfur?

Faust is there behind the rows of glass bottles. Is he compacting powders into tablets, or is he preparing Mesué’s polychrest, which the soldiers under Francis I used to cure Naples virus?

When I ask the pharmacist in my village — who sells leeches, as in the Middle Ages — for a little cyanide, his eyes widen with surprise: a saint forced to contemplate heresy. The substance I’ve requested is dangerous indeed, an alchemical disaster — but really, I only use it to massage my scalp…

SEPTEMBER 26, 18—

This journal I write, almost without wanting to, as dusk falls, doesn’t always paint a true picture of what’s happened to me. Rather, these are evocations of events, the memory of which passes its pen across my brow.

At twelve, I came down with typhus. I think it happened while fishing for corks in the Seine. I collected these and sold them to the junk man when the weekend came. Jug corks were of particular value. Here are the statistics: for every hundred corks, six were from jugs, forty from champagne or wine bottles, the rest from medicine jars. I rescued these corks — having traversed the sewers of Paris and bobbed forty-six kilometers along the Seine — from floating into the ocean.

One of those corks must have given me typhus. My successor, another village boy, got sick as well. The junk man always boiled our corks before he resold them.

After a number of fantastic voyages through the feverish deliriums caused by an impossible temperature of nearly 44 °Celsius — never before seen in a human being, drawing the curiosity of doctors and scholars from universities as far as Paris, Dijon, and Lille — I lost three kilos a day, and then all my hair. All the people I saw during my out-of-body experiences were also bald, for some reason. My hair grew even redder than before, and one of the doctors who thought me an ideal subject took it upon himself to demonstrate that, as I resided in Bougival, and Bougival was next to Le Croisic, a town where they grew prodigious amounts of carrots, the color of my hair had responded, in this new phase of growth, to the colorings inherent in my environment. In a word, the doctor wanted to prove that my reddish hair was a product of local horticulture.

It was this same doctor who acquainted me with the pleasures of scalp massage. I mean concoctions of ammonia, quinine, sulfuric lime, and above all, potassium anhydrite, which left me with green hair for several hours. Doctor Rochefort tried all sorts of chemical solutions on my head, but the results always ended up contradicting his theory. I don’t know what he thought would happen.

Those concoctions made up a good part of the magic of my childhood — those strange formulas spilling over my scalp and tingling through my body. I don’t believe in opium or morphine, and even ether leaves me fairly cold. Those applications of cyanide, however, are what gave me that latent tickle at the base of my neck; sometimes I’d scratch myself so often I’d break out in blisters. Vaseline with camphor did no good. Ethyl chloride, however, thanks to its average temperature of 40 °C below zero, gave me a little relief, at least.

Ammonia massages were the only ones I could get at a moment’s notice, given how easy it was to find a place that offered them. As a child, instead of going to the circus on Sundays, I would go to the barbershop. If my father gave me a franc, it was enough for three treatments, but because the alkali always left a dark greasy trace on the towels, I’d scrub my head with the day’s newspaper before I left one barbershop for another. The fresh ink from the news would stain my hair so not even the towel betrayed me — and the barber wouldn’t suspect anything about my hygiene either.

Only once did I give myself a sulfate of quinine treatment. I went to the hospital dispensary with a neighbor woman who was sleeping with the pharmacist, and got my hands on a jar with some quinine salts left in it. For ten days, my head was entirely numb. I’d go to bed without knowing whether my forehead was against the pillow or exposed to the air. My scalp was drunk.

OCTOBER 4, 18—