Emilio Lascano Tegui - On Elegance While Sleeping

“Her voice carried up through the house. I heard someone else running — the steps seemed to be coming from the ceiling. An older woman with a decisive air appeared then in the doorway. In one look, she took in the scene. No hesitation. She knew perfectly well what had to be done in difficult situations such as these, as though she’d already had a troupe of daughters inducted into Paris Opéra Ballet (excellent training, then as now, since — as I’m sure you know! — the Opéra is absolutely the last word in upper-class bordellos)…

“‘Help me,’ she said.

“We tossed the body onto the carpet next to the bed and then dragged the bishop into the living room. We began to dress him there, putting on his skullcap just so and placing his pocket watch at his side. With great effort, we managed to get the corpse seated in the armchair next to the piano.

“The cadaver still hadn’t stiffened. He yielded gallantly to our efforts, as though apologizing for the disaster, while we did with him whatever seemed best. The mother, whose features to my now fairly sympathetic eyes were becoming more and more aristocratic by the minute, picked up a musical score and placed it in the bishop’s hands. When we propped him back against the headrest, the departed released one final mouthful of minced chard he’d been saving in his stomach, and it spattered all over the music.

“The Curia, to which the young maid had run when she bolted from the house, sent three novices in black. Improvising, they entered skinny and solemn into the Louis Philippe-styled salon. One of them stayed to guard the door. Another headed to the right to get a good look at the scene of the crime. The third went straight to the cadaver.

“‘Could you please go over the sequence of events?’ this inquisitive one asked, like a detective.

“‘It’s all quite clear,’ the lady of the house replied — her performance almost stage-worthy. ‘My daughter was at the piano,’ she said. ‘Monsignor wanted to sing for us. He took the score, and just as he was about to sing the first note, he doubled over. His head fell against his chest, and stayed that way.’

“And that’s what went down on record. But deep in my heart, down where we all still have a little honesty, where we judge ourselves without mercy, without making excuses, I could never abide by those ‘facts.’ In our magnificent mise — en — scène, we’d committed one notable error: my accomplice had planted the musical score upside down…”

The coachman began to brood after this, as if truly upset. A moment later he touched my hand and said: “We’re there! See you tomorrow! Time to get down.”

JANUARY 2, 18—

To live is the victory of the fetus. Being born is its only end. During its nine months of reflection, death doesn’t seem at all the tragedy the Christian philosophers make of it. One doesn’t think in the waiting room. For the fetus, just seeing the light is a triumph. It’s everything. Think how long it’s had to avoid the machinations of abortion, its various run-ins with all those methods enumerated by the penal code as excuses for depriving a citizen of her civil rights: the freezing shower to make the ovaries shiver; later, the crude, perfumed infusion; and then, later still, when it’s clear there’s no hope, the probing iron in some menopausal matron’s hand, wielded with all the skill of a novice butcher or an ever-so-proper gentleman who considers it quite enough to expectorate near the spittoon, so as not to offend passersby. But in the end, at last, the fetus, triumphant, can exclaim: Toute la lyre!

Thus, despite its notable success, the face of a newborn reveals something about the precariousness of our life on earth. The womb was an uninterrupted series of threats. The triumph of the fetus can never be more than melancholy; see its wide forehead, as though its tiny frontal lobe has already begun to consider, despite itself, the likelihood of its eventual death by stroke…

FEBRUARY 24, 18—

Ihate the great boulevards invented by Haussmann. The people who toil and bore themselves to exhaustion along those streets remind me of the words of Saint Paul: “the wages of sin is death.” Yes, they are the whited sepulchers: gorgeous women who flit through life like butterflies, uncertain of whether there’s any beauty under their makeup; men who’ve prolonged their stay in their mothers’ wombs by way of these gorgeous women, continuing to live off their maternal blood and pus; wrongheaded men who bend down to retrieve a tiny piece of green paper in case it might have a coin inside, or perhaps an entire fortune; and then, getting in these transients’ ways, a waiter who comes out carrying a flowerpot by its handles and places it on the edge of the sidewalk, as though this were the road to Damascus…

FEBRUARY 28, 18—

Nothing spreads sadness like popularity. It knows how to make us bitter, how to cause the same resentment that oppresses us after possessing a woman. Popularity is this: to take a woman into your arms, to feel pleasure approaching, and then, the very next instant, after a brief rest, to have your umbilical cord cut all over again, and find yourself once more with the sadness of a newborn — with their wide foreheads, rheumy eyes, grimaces of pain, wrinkled genitalia. I’ve experienced popularity, as I think I’ve already mentioned. I’ve been quite proud of myself ever since I was a small child, after having discovered no less than five cadavers in the sluice gates of our mill.

That’s how precocious children get old before their time. Seven-year-old violin prodigies are old by twenty. All the applause tires out their souls. They get increasingly effeminate. By the age of thirteen, their managers have to work hard to keep their protégés’ curls looking properly childish. Beards are plucked. At night, women come to kiss these children like they’re sheep — and men come to kiss them like they’re women. Such prodigies know all the pleasures but the sensual ones; their childhoods must be eternal. Once they’ve served out their contracts, they’re left to the tender mercies of critics, those deflowerers of knowledge, who put up one makeshift dam after another, hoping to keep any freak floods of intelligence from getting too rapidly disseminated…By sixteen, the once precocious child resembles a wealthy fifty-five-year-old businessman, valuing nothing more than pleasure now, surrendering himself without compunction to common soldiers in their fortifications and the peasants who ride the cargo wagons at night, rolling down dead roads.

APRIL 4, 18—

Even the greatest skeptic can nonetheless catch a glimpse of happiness in a woman’s smile…happiness, which, as the Arabs say, treads upon golden heels. I knew, as a child, a woman whose look had a certain sweetness to it. Her beauty came from her being nearsighted.

I used to pass by a house where a few of my female relatives lived. At the time, they’d given shelter to an orphan girl who’d committed a terrible sin: well, she’d gone to bed with a man…

I’ve never seen the pain of innocence so intensely reflected in a human eye. Maria Luisa, the orphan, looked at me as one might a passing angel. I was the only man who ever came into her new home since her fatal fall. She’d already spent a week in the darkness of the attic with nothing to eat or drink but hard bread and water mixed with soap, as a punishment for her weakness. My aunts were rigorous moralists — spinsters.

Into this improvised convent came Maria Luisa’s Fairy Godmother, hoping to rescue her, and taking on, for this purpose, the form of tuberculosis — saying: “Your deliverance is at hand.” This lady who herself looked at me with the eyes of an angel en route to heaven, this woman who’d aspired to the grand title of “mother”—like the little girls who stick pillows under their skirts and say they’re pregnant — died at dawn in the care of my religious aunts, who were “certain” that this was for the best. When it was over, they sighed with relief. “God’s will has been done,” my Aunt Javiera said, whose breasts had never grown and who wore grayish housecoats that pleated in a puff over her chest.