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

HEMINGWAY SHOULD be read standing up, Basho walking, Proust in the bath, Cervantes in a hospital, Simenon in a train (Canadian Pacific, anyone?), Dante in paradise, Dosto in the underground, Miller in a smoky bar with hot dogs, fries and a Coke. I was reading Mishima with a cheap bottle of wine by the bed, totally exhausted, and a girl in the shower.

She stuck her dripping head through the half-open bathroom door and issued two or three rapid requests: a towel to cover her breasts, another to go around her hips (I love Gauguin!), a third for her wet hair and a fourth so she wouldn’t have to set foot on the filthy floor.

She came out of the bathroom with a smile. It cost me four towels to see her teeth. I resumed my position, opening Mishima to page 78, and disappeared into pre-war Japan for eighty-eight seconds, good for three and two-thirds pages, before falling into a Fuji bonze Negro sleep.

Sleep is practically impossible in this muggy heat. I left the window open and the hot air completely knocked me out. I’m as groggy as one of those smalltime boxers who turn up in Hemingway stories. I don’t even have the strength to drag myself to the shower. An ocean of cotton closes around me.

I don’t know how long I spent in that state. A distant buzzing awoke me. Airborne above the sink, an enormous green fly with bloodshot eyes is crashing into things. The fly looks blind. Totally drunk on the heat. Frenzied beating of wings. A fly high on codeine. A final collision with the wall and it does a kamikaze dive into the dishwater.

From the horizontal position I consider the cardboard boxes and green garbagebags stuffed with dirty laundry, books, used records and spice bottles that have been cluttering the floor for two days now.

The old fly is inert. It floats on its back. Its pollen-yellow belly swells with water. I pick up Mishima, page 81. The words run like fly streaks. The letters tremble and shimmer. Sentences jump like living things and move before my eyes.

The fly is a stiff corpse drifting among the glasses. I alone am responsible in the eyes of the Lord of the Flies. Bouba maintains that Beelzebub lives upstairs.

The bottle slumps sadly at the foot of the bed. I take a good pull and drift off into sweet somnolence. The wine trickles down my throat, smooth and warm. Not bad for the cheap stuff. I feel soft and sated.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 I get up, steer clear of the shower and give myself a brisk face-wash in the sink. The cold water finishes the slow process of my awakening. Bouba must be on the Mountain checking out the girls getting a tan. The couch resembles an abandoned wife. Bouba will be back later; today is his weekly day out. Bouba is a true hermit. He can spend whole days without even turning on the light. The day passes; Bouba meditates and prays. He wishes to become the purest among pure men. He intends to accept the challenge issued to Muhammed: “You cannot make the deaf hear, nor can you guide the blind or those who are in gross error.” (Sura XLIII, 39.)

Miz Literature left me a note, folded in four and stuck in the corner of the mirror. She had almost slipped my mind. She’s the McGill girl, the one Bouba nicknamed Miz Literature. That’s Bouba’s method. The girl we met the other day at a sidewalk café on St. Denis eating ice cream — he called her Miz Sundae. So as not to get Gloria Steinem on our case we say “Miz.”

Miz Literature used two long paragraphs to tell me she had gone to a “delicious Greek bakery on Park Avenue.” She’s some kind of girl. I met her at McGill, at a typically McGill literary soirée. I let on that Virginia Woolf was as good as Yeats or some kind of nonsense like that. Maybe she thought that was baroque coming from a Negro.

The room is awash in dark sweat. The fly has long since joined his comrades in the great beyond. Above, Beelzebub has been appeased. Green garbage-bags litter the middle of the room, their mouths agape. In a box (Steinberg cardboard special), with no semblance of order: a pair of shoes, a box of Sifto iodized salt, turned-up winter boots, a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, books, rolled-up Van Gogh reproductions, pens, a pair of sunglasses, a new ribbon for my old Remington and an alarm clock. Idly, I stow it away in a corner, by the fridge. The sun comes slanting through the window in blades of light.

I pile the old newspapers into two stacks. It takes a while to bundle them up, then I stack them at the end of the table. I move silently through the darkness. I’ve sweated enough for a shower. The bathroom is tiny but at least there’s a tub, a sink and a shower — a miracle for this part of town. The old buildings in the barrio, if they’re lucky enough to have a bathtub, never have a shower.

Miz Literature left her scent in the bathroom. In his journal (Le Retour du Tchad), Gide writes that what struck him most in Africa was the smell. A smell of strong spices. A smell of leaves. The Negro is of the vegetable kingdom. Whites forget that they have a smell too. Most McGill girls smell like Johnson’s Baby Powder. I don’t know what making love to a girl (over twenty-one, duly vaccinated) who stinks of baby powder does for you. I can never resist going kitchie-kitchie-koo under her chin.

Miz Literature brought her bag of toiletries. Danger. What is she after? Is she intent on subletting the single room Bouba and I share? She must have a spacious Outremont apartment, full of light and fresh air and sweet smells, and now she wants to come down here to live! In the heart of the Third World. These infidels are so perverse!

Miz Literature’s open bag reveals a toothbrush (there’s already a constellation of toothbrushes above my sink), and a tube of Ultra Brite toothpaste (does she think the Negro’s sparkling white teeth are pure myth? Well, think again, WASP. No kidding, it’s the real thing. Ivory jewels on an ebony ring!). Special soap for dry skin, two tubes of lipstick, an eyebrow pencil, some tampons and a little bottle of Tylenol.

I never go anywhere without my little photo of Carole Laure. Hungry mouth and wide eyes next to the long, soft, refined adolescent face of Lewis Furey. The rich boy, intelligent, sophisticated, gentle, clever as they come — shit! Everything I’d like to be. Starring Carole Laure. Carole Laure starring in my bed. Carole Laure fixing me a tribal dish (spicy chicken and rice). Carole Laure listening to jazz with me in this lousy filthy room. Carole Laure, slave to a Negro. Why not?

Through a microscope, this room would look like a camembert cheese. A forest of odors. The teeming (like the tearing noise of silk paper) of shiny creatures. In summer everything spoils so quickly. A fuckfest of a million germs. I picture the planet that way and among those millions of yellow seeds, I dream of the five hundred out of the five hundred million Chinawomen who would take me for their black Mao.

A DISCREET knock-knock-knock at the door. I open. Miz Literature comes in, arms loaded with pâté, croissants, cheese (brie, oka, camembert), smoked sausages, French bread, Greek desserts and a bottle of wine. I make a summary stab at housekeeping, all aglow at the prospect of eating something besides Zorbaburgers or spaghetti à la DaGiovanni.

I throw open the window: dry, burning air pours into the room in waves. I clear the sink of dirty plates and glasses and drain the soapy water. The fly is sucked downward into a better world. “I swear, by the moon!” (Sura LXXIV, 35.) Farewell, Fly.

Miz Literature finishes cleaning the table. She puts water on to boil for tea. I get comfortable. She fills my glass with wine. I close my eyes. To be waited on by an English girl (Allah is great). Fulfillment is mine. The world is opening to my desires.