Emilio Lascano Tegui - On Elegance While Sleeping

I’ve felt those fatal eyes look upon my boyish — perhaps occasionally girlish — soul. Eyes encrusted in the stokers’ faces — Greek statues during the decline had eyes made of agate, emerald, and gold. Those eyes passed by, mirroring me without seeing me, vacant of all sense or sentiment. Eyes the same as the cheap crystal eyes of embalmed animals in provincial museums.

SEPTEMBER 9, 18—

Marie Germain changed genders at twenty-two years of age. I established mine when I was only ten, an age when boys flirt with the idea of being female and some are already as sensitive as girls. I had a classmate we all kissed as if he weren’t another boy. And Osvaldo — that was his name — was thrilled with all of this attention, because he didn’t catch on that we were courting him, and that this was why we all offered him the best of ourselves. We used to invite him to take walks with us, and he gave us the added pleasure of having to lie to his parents in order to come along: he would sneak out of his house to join us. The skin on his face and legs was entirely feminine, and I was so jealous that I ended up having a falling out with him. I almost preferred to abstain from his company entirely than watch him belong equally to all my friends. When we eventually made up, I no longer took any pleasure in him. He repulsed me. Osvaldo, as a result, would do anything to make me like him again. I’d take him to the riverbank and make him trap leeches for me: I’d tell him to go barefoot into the underbrush along the riverbank and he’d come out with leeches fastened to his calves. As he helped me with my leech business (and he’d kiss me ardently as I exploited him — I couldn’t stand it), he got thinner, taller, and his rosy complexion turned sallow. One day they expelled him from the Convent of Saint Francis, and after that I only saw him occasionally, in Paris, powdered like a girl and walking on the balls of his feet, looking back to see if there was anyone following him. When he turned his head, he’d smile. A look, one might say, as though he’d just received some sort of sign.

I never found any hints in Bougival’s history that the town might once have been a Huguenot stronghold. But where Osvaldo was concerned, my village showed itself to be indignant and Puritan to a fault. It was cruel how the townspeople singled him out. They took great pleasure in offering him up as a sacrifice, making an example of him, imposing a strict, unending policy of droit du seigneur upon him in exchange for a fleeting sensual pleasure…forcing themselves on that poor, sick boy, who was as fit for the sanatorium as he was innocent before the law. After all, what wouldn’t he do for us so long as we went on keeping him company? As a child, Osvaldo had bored peepholes in the doors to his mother’s and sister’s rooms — the former had now married for the second time, the latter was a fifteen-year-old virgin with a luscious Spanish body. The perverts who liked to accompany Osvaldo on his viewings could choose whichever hole they preferred: the one that looked in on Osvaldo’s libertine stepfather, or the one that opened onto the rosy, naked innocence of the young virgin sitting at her mirror, feeling the anxiety common to every lonely woman during the infinite solitude that is night in the provinces.

SEPTEMBER 10, 18—

At a certain point in my life, I remember having seen and spoken to people who’d achieved a greater degree of perfection than the people I know now. But I’ve forgotten the details of these encounters…

I also remember that, at that age, coach-horses would smile at me. Yes, they smiled at me…and leave us not concern ourselves with the incredulity of those men who have never been children, and whose refusal in those days to believe my stories crippled every one of my affirmations with doubt as soon as they left my mouth.

OCTOBER 14, 18—

Fish — I refer to the ones in the Seine — are old and tired by the time they arrive in Bougival. They are experts in all the varied methodologies of the art of fishing. When I whistle to myself on the riverbanks, I see fish entertaining themselves by flipping out of the water to enjoy my music. This when they won’t move so much as an inch for a bit of bait on a line. Because fisherman who don’t know how to whistle are boring.

NOVEMBER 2, 18—

Raimundo the coachman invited me back up onto his coachbox. Once again came the stories of the neighborhood, one after another, because he still likes to keep a little of the confessional in his life. We were riding around the green bonnet of Mont Valérien when we saw a large cluster of young women watched over by two nuns. Raimundo warned me:

“Look at the girls, kid, at every one — you need to get used to them. Any man who lets a girl pass unobserved will end up with an enemy at his back. You have to look at them, adore them, value them — some shamelessly, some sadly, but don’t let any woman be an exception. Nature won’t forgive you for it.”

Raimundo the coachman then looked over at the nuns — as though through an open fly.

He added: “I know them…I know them! From the Soeurs de la Charite de Jesus! You know, there was a nurse from that order once who fell in love with a patient — he was one those invalids who feel more at home in hospitals than out in the world, and she really was dying of love for what was left of that wretched, suffering bit of humanity…just the sort of thing city men like to hear, since they hope to get the same treatment when their turns come. Hers was a love without limits, you know, spiritual, and watching her patient through the windowed door of his room, the nurse ran her eyes over the sweet line of the man’s profile just as death began to tug at it. A love without words! But death, who’s also a woman, got jealous: it became a battle between two women, you see, and death soon got the upper hand by poisoning the nurse’s drinking water with an aphrodisiac…her love went from purely spiritual to carnal to the point of paroxysm! Alone in her quarters, the nurse descended to the basest depths of earthly love. Death had won. The devout woman died in grand fashion. They buried her with all the pomp reserved for those who die in the line of duty. A tricolor flag covered her coffin. The other nurses, doctors, and convalescents accompanied her remains to their final rest. A carpenter’s apprentice who’d gone to find the hospital door behind which the nurse had expired followed the beautiful procession with the entire doorframe on his shoulder — a new Simon of Cyrene. However, the door he carried had been infected with the late sister’s lust, and thus a new fount of love emerged on the earth…”

NOVEMBER 17, 18—

Bougival is full of old women. Their big faces fill the windowpanes. My God, how old they are! Not even death can get their attention. They’ll only die once they finally tire of listening to the ringing of the village bells.

DECEMBER 25, 18—

It’s the same story with the hens of Bougival. Unlike our roosters, they never seem to make any progress toward the chopping block. Not even when they change owners. On the contrary: if stolen, the thief simply ends up taking them to market, and they go on living. It’s as though, without admitting it, man and bird have come to an agreement — an agreement that would be much more precise if humans didn’t despise their fellow creatures so much; if, instead of wasting time deciphering ancient Chaldean, we worried a little more about deciphering the language of the animals we actually spend our time with! In any case, I’ve discovered numerous curious cohabitations in my town — intimate, embarrassing dramas. Now that I’ve strayed onto this subject, I might as well record the influence that one of my neighbors exercised over the birds in her poultry yard.