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

I begin to look at Miz Literature with new eyes, though she hasn’t changed. She’s a tall girl, a little hunched over, with albatross arms, her eyes are a little too bright (too trusting), she has pianist’s fingers and a face with astonishingly regular features. Apparently she never had to wear braces, incredible for an Outremont girl. She has small breasts and wears a size 10 shoe.

“Aren’t you eating?” I ask her.

“No.”

She answers with a smile. The smile is a British invention. Actually, the British brought it back from one of their Japanese campaigns.

“Don’t you want to eat?”

“I’ll just watch you,” she breathes.

Just like that, with her eyes on mine.

“I see. You’ll just watch me.”

“I’ll watch you.”

“You like watching me eat?”

“You have such a good appetite. ”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“Watching you eat fascinates me. You eat with such passion. I’ve never seen anyone do it like you do.”

“Is it funny to watch?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I find it moving, that’s all.”

Watching me eat moves her. Miz Literature is incredible. She was brought up to believe everything she’s told. Her cultural heritage. I can tell her the most outlandish stories and she’ll nod her head and stare with those believing eyes. She’ll be moved. I can tell her I consume human flesh, that somewhere in my genetic code the desire to eat white flesh is inscribed, that my nights are haunted by her breasts, her hips, her thighs, I swear it, I can tell her all that and more and she’ll understand. She’ll believe me. Imagine: she’s studying at McGill (venerable institution to which the bourgeoisie sends its children to learn clarity, analysis and scientific doubt) and the first Negro to tell her some kind of fancy tale takes her to bed. Why? Because she can afford that luxury. I surrender to the least bit of naïveté, even for a second, and I’m one dead nigger. Literally. I have to be a moving target, otherwise, at the first emotion, my ass would be grass. Miz Literature can afford a clean clear conscience. She has the means. I gave up on that luxury a long time ago. No conscience. No paradise lost. No promised land. You tell me: what good can a conscience possibly do me? It can only cause problems for a Negro brimming over with unappeased fantasies, desires and dreams. Put it this way: I want America. Not one iota less. With her Radio City girls, her buildings, her automobiles, her enormous waste — even her bureaucracy. I want it all: good and bad, what you throw away and what you keep, the ugly and beautiful alike. America is a totality. What do you expect me to do with a conscience? I can’t afford one anyway. The way things are going, it would be down at the pawnshop in a flash.

I have to make sure not to bug Miz Literature about being so nice. She’s still the best thing a Negro can afford in these hard times of ours.

BOUBA EMERGES from a 72-hour sleep cure and inquires after the health of our planet.

“What about the bomb?”

“Not yet.”

“What are they waiting for?”

“Your sign, Bouba.”

“What sign, man?”

“The Big Sleep.”

“What keeps you holding on?”

“The thought that there’s still plenty of beautiful girls out there, and the illusion that one day I’ll have them all.”

“Beauty, beauty. What’s beauty anyway?”

“It’s what straightens out a crooked nigger.”

“You’ve got it all wrong, man. Desire is what gives you that hard-on.”

“Whatever you say, Bouba. But where does desire start in the first place?”

“When you get a hard-on, it’s your vision of the world, it’s the fantasies of your adolescence and the weather outside that’s giving you a hard-on. Beauty has nothing to do with it.”

“But a nice ass. ”

“Only in your mind, man.”

“Ass exists only in my mind?”

“Sure, man. Here’s the proof: when you make love with a girl and she’s on her back, you don’t even see that mythological ass.”

“We don’t all do it the same way.”

“Don’t confuse the issue — we always go back to that missionary thing. All right, let’s take the mouth. You meet a girl in the street. She has a sensual, hungry mouth, the whole package. You tell her this and that, she answers that and this, and a couple hours later you’re kissing. But when you’re kissing you can’t see her mouth. When you’re up that close you can’t see anything at all.”

“All right, you kiss her with your imagination, I go along with you there. But when you kiss her you’ve got this picture of her mouth in your mind, that’s why you wanted to kiss her in the first place. At the moment of the kiss, desire is consummated.”

“But the mouth in your mind, your ideal mouth, is better than the real mouth, the mouth that belongs to the girl you happened to meet on such-and-such a street at such-and-such a time. At the last minute she could change mouths and you wouldn’t be any wiser.”

“That’s ridiculous, Bouba. Who’s ever changed mouths?”

“For the sake of argument, man.”

“You’re one Cartesian nigger!”

“ You’re the Cartesian, man. I’m a Freudian: a goddamned Freudian nigger.”

“What have you got against Beauty anyway?”

Bouba is sitting on the couch now. The debate shakes his entire being. He debates with his body. Seeing him sweat, you smell him. Suddenly his words start pouring out. He’s like a tiger with a whiff of blood in his nostrils. The blood of his next victim. My blood. Nose to the ground, he sniffs his idea back to its source. He pretends he didn’t hear my question. I know him too well. There’s nothing wrong with his hearing. His mind is just as acute. He doesn’t think like other people. He thinks against them. He has a personal vision of things and he expresses it with his long, supple, fragile hands. As he speaks they sketch arabesques as strange and astonishingly complex as ideograms. At first it looks as though he’s shooing flies with those endless hands like dowagers’ fans, but when you look closer and listen to his words, you see the organic link between the idea and the dance of his hands. Slender, sophisticated hands that have never worked. The hands of an old mandarin. Which makes for a rather baroque atmosphere. Two blacks in a filthy apartment on the rue St-Denis, philosophizing their heads off about Beauty in the wee hours. The Repast of the Primitives. The kettle is boiling. We have no radio, no TV, no telephone, no newspapers. Nothing to keep us in touch with this lousy planet. History is not interested in us and we repay the favor. It’s even-steven. All that matters is this grave and gratuitous conversation between me and that crazy ape-man Bouba. The fate of Judeo-Christian civilization is on the line. Two blacks on the dole hold the keys. We are discussing matters of life and death and Bouba, hirsute of head, confers a certain mystique to our confabulation. Bouba is lost in thoughts dangerous to his mental health. He wants to talk me into a verbal pulp. He can argue all night over the sex of angels. (Talking about angels, especially the fallen kind, I haven’t heard from Beelzebub for some time now. I wonder what he’s up to up there.) Nothing can resist Bouba’s manic lucidity. His face becomes distorted with tics, his eyes two round, brilliant marbles. Horizontal on the ancient couch. Just before daybreak, you come to appreciate his terrifying rhetorical machine. Endless argumentation broken by fits of coughing. His monologue can last for hours, flowing uninterrupted, serpentine, snaking, sinuous, Proustian sentences like a long, many-colored ribbon. The Word is his poison. With his narrow, bare chest, his hair in revolt and his beard narrowing to a point, he looks like an Old Testament prophet. (“By the declining star, I swear!” Sura LIII, 1.) I picture him as the last man on this barren planet after the nuclear blast, his words flowing endlessly, considering the decor as no more than a minor annoyance.