Dany Laferrière - How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired

“The Philosopher-King speaks.”

“I’m warming up for my interview. Can you see me on TV, with noted sexologist-for-the-people Janette Bertrand: my opinion, Mme Bertrand, is that we have too many distractions. Leisure time, the bomb, religion, marijuana, TV. Madame, we are the last ones to get off on sex. Whites have lost their interest in it. Though I’m not talking about the women. some interest is still apparent. Am I shocking your audience?”

“Not at all. On this program we’re free to discuss everything. But what about porno films and dirty books; wouldn’t you say that that disgusting proliferation proves that whites, despite what you say, are still interested in amorous activity — in sex, as we say in modem language?”

“It’s a trap, madame. The West no longer cares about sex; that’s why it tries to debase it. It’s all directed against blacks because the Judeo-Christian world believes sex is their domain only. It can’t help but knock down the merchandise. But we blacks must restore sex to its full glory.”

“Is that the theme of your New Crusade?”

“In so many words.”

BOUBA MUST need a sleep cure if he’s confusing a Negro with Janette Bertrand. (Me Tarzan, you Jane.) People have been talking about mutation for a long time now. But I didn’t know it had gone that far.

JUST AS i was finishing that chapter, Bouba came in with a fabulous girl. California style. Sun and orange groves. White teeth and sparkling smile. A regular cover girl. Finally! At last!

“Forget the dishes, man, we’re eating out.”

“It couldn’t come at a better time. I just finished the first draft of my novel.”

“Did you hear that? He just finished it.”

Bouba grabs the manuscript and goes dancing around the table.

“I could use a shower,” I say.

“We’ll wait, Homer.”

A SHOWER. A novel on the go. A knock-out girl and a meal in the cards. Some days it all works. I finish my shower. My head is spinning. Allah is taking a personal interest in me these days.

“Are you vegetarians?” Miz Cover Girl asks sweetly.

“No, herbivores.”

She smiles. I know that perfect happiness is not of this world. (“Had they believed in Allah and the Prophet and that which is revealed to him they would not have befriended the unbelievers. But many of them are evil-doers.” Sura V, 81.)

A CRUMMY restaurant on Duluth Street.

Nuts and berries on the menu. A dozen diners religiously munching on bowls of alfalfa. We take a table at the rear, back to the wall. The sound of mouths masticating reminds us of a mosque. We listen to the vegetarian credo mouthed by a herd of cud-chewers. We order our meal from a nature girl who looks as though she was raised in an alfalfa field. Cuisine à la sunflower oil. In the restaurant, twenty-odd wooden tables are scattered through three small rooms. The walls are cluttered with maharaji brochures, eco-agro journals, mystical propaganda and comic strips. How can you eat in this decor? The guests look desperate in their lumberjack shirts. On the wall behind me I read this appetizing offer: “Christine, organic woman into spiritual ways, seeks to share house in the country. Prepared to share with one or more people who wish to experience forms of Chinese energy (tai chi and acupuncture) in a beautiful natural setting.” Cruising verboten no doubt; too bad, it would be curious to see a Negro performing forms of Chinese energy with a white girl. A large poster displays a tunic-clad young woman: MARGILIS. Margilis at the Conventum. MARGILIS UNLEASHED. We hit the Conventum. In the lobby, we admire an exhibition of caged apes wearing tutus next to six large black-and-white posters of an off-Broadway play. We go in. Margilis. Intermission. I go to the john. A coded message next to the mirror: New York, Luigi? Jojo, Smith. Paris Lucienne Lambale / London Marie Lambert Co. / Principal dancer for Talk of the Town, “émission zoom / ballet jazz de Montréal Eddy Toussaint &. Co.”

I go up to Miz Cover Girl, who’s absorbed in conversation with two other girls. She does the introductions. One of the girls is skinny; the other enormous. A biological scandal and an anthropological curiosity. There’s Miz Alfalfa (the nice one), nature-girl, clear skin, freckles, smell of hay, probably goes for love in the stables. She emanates a robust sensuality. The other one is a walking skeleton, no breasts (not even a trace), smokes three packs of cigarettes a day and writes poetry. Miz Alfalfa, naturally, tends the alfalfa fields in a commune called “The Together Revolution Alfalfa Company Inc.” She eats, talks, sells and shits alfalfa. Probably fucks it too. One day she’ll give birth to alfalfa babies. While Miz Alfalfa tells us the heroic tale of alfalfa, Miz Gitane is smoking up a storm.

MARGILIS, PART 2. No one wants to make a decision. We go into the Conventum bar and gulp down a merguez sandwich. Next on the menu is a poetry reading at the Dazibao gallery that no one wants to miss. Bouba and I were hoping to stop off at Zorba’s for a souvlaki, out of nostalgia for meat.

Dazibao, rue St-Hubert, up above Café Robutel. To get there you have to climb a steep stairway welded to the Robutel like a handle on a coffee cup. The price of admission is a stack of copies of the nbj, the magazine for avant-garde poets. Total cost: $2.50. Whither Mayakovsky and the era of free poetry? Inside, every rejection-slip poet in Montreal. Alcoholic, mystical, lumberjack, truck-driver, tubercular poets and cruised-out poetesses. Bouba and I find room in the rear. A great big guy next to Bouba screams bloody murder after every strophe. Cases of beer at his feet. Poetry by the bottle. An enormous poetess, as round as a beer-barrel, tells the story of her lumberjack lover who was jealous of her books. A gentle giant wanted to sing us a lullaby. Another poetess, totally drunk, sits down between Bouba and me. Then the enormous poetess returns to the stage to tell the story of her lover whose feet stank. Make love with your boots on or get out. Most of the time he did it without his boots and the house stank for a week afterward. I went home. The novel was waiting for me. I put my last beer next to the Remington and made a sandwich. It was going to be a long night.

HORIZON OBSCURED. I can’t make out much. I’ve been in isolation for three days with a case of Molson, three bottles of wine, two cans of Ronzoni spaghetti, five pounds of potatoes and this goddamn Remington. Next to the bell downstairs, I put up a sign that any idiot can understand: “Do Not Disturb: Great Writer Writing Last Masterpiece.” After three days of straight typing, the lower-case letters are beginning to look iridescent. The capitals resemble those hairy spiders from the tropics. The room pitches lightly on a sea of Molson. Waves of dense heat flow over my back. The consonants fornicate and whelp as I look on. The dishes pile up. The garbage can is overflowing. I’m suffocating. I watch, inert, as the cockroaches go about their business. The room is running in ultramarine humors. How not to consider yourself a genius under such conditions? This horrid heat! I can picture Homer, old Homer himself, typing out his first book, his Iliad, under the Mediterranean sun. Borges would have kept his anthracite suit at 88 degrees F. Bukowski too. Not Saint-John Perse, despite his Caribbean roots. All you need is a good Remington, no cash and no publisher to believe that the book you’re composing with your gut feelings is the masterpiece that will get you out of your hole. Unfortunately, it never works that way. It takes as much guts to do a good book as a bad one. When you have nothing, you can always hope for genius. But genius has refined tastes. It doesn’t like the dispossessed. And nothing is all I’ve got. I’ll never make it out of here with a so-so manuscript.