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

“Wait,” she breathes.

“Is everything all right?”

“You’re the first man I’ve ever said that to.”

“Huh?”

“I want to be yours.”

We made love again. Miz Literature got up an hour later and went to take a shower. She’s an hour and a half late for her class. She has to go back home first, change, then hurry to McGill. I stay in bed. No showers for me after love-making. I keep the smells. I open Bukowski’s book. Miz Literature kisses me chastely on the forehead then leaves with a final, astonished glance at the couch where Bouba still sleeps, mouth wide open and arms crossed over his chest.

WITH GREAT ceremony, I remove the dust cover from the old Remington 22. The machine gives me a nasty look. We haven’t seen each other for a long time. The machine is sulking. I had it in pawn for a while. To cheer it up (there’s nothing worse than working on a depressed typewriter), I give it a good cleaning. I oil it with petroleum jelly. The Remington shines like a wild rosebush in the rain. My work table (which is also the dining room table, the spare chair and a makeshift bed when the desire arises) faces a narrow partition, away from the window. Behind the wall across the way is the room of a professional cyclist who spends night and day polishing his heap. Slowly, daylight enters the room. I flip open the Remington’s top and replace the ribbon. The cursor moves as smooth as silk. I slip a white sheet of paper in the roller, move my chair in front of the machine, settle in with a bottle of cheap wine at my feet and, once the ritual is over, I put my chin on my palm, dreaming as we all do of being Ernest Hemingway.

THREE HOURS LATER, the page as white as ever, I decide to clean house (sweeping, cleaning, the dishes) as proof that genius can express itself in a variety of ways. Waves of heat flood in through the window. I pile the books in a corner under the table and stow the typewriter under the bed.

The room is a pigsty. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I sweep up wherever the broom will reach and take down the trash. You could bake in this room. The room smells of sulfur and the whole place could burst into flames at any minute. I pick up bottles from under the table, the bed and the couch. I go down to Pellatt’s and get ten cents each from the guy behind the counter. Ah, America, America, America! (“On the day we call a witness from every nation, their pleas shall not avail the unbelievers, nor shall they be allowed to make amends.” Sura XVI, 85.) Nothing like routine to get you back in shape. I decide to do my change of address at the post office on St. Catherine Street. I go down St. Denis to St. Catherine and turn towards Radio-Québec. The air is quivering with heat. Strike a match and all Montreal will go up. I walk slowly. Just ahead of me, a girl comes out of Hachette with Miller under her arm and almost nothing on her back. My temperature shoots up to 120. It’s 90 degrees in the shade. The slightest spark and I’ll blaze like a slum on a Rio hillside. I warned myself to be careful. Every summer I go crazy like this, and a girl eating ice cream is always to blame. Miz Bookstore’s flavor is raspberry. In the final analysis, what’s a girl with ice cream except someone who is hungry or thirsty? But in the summertime it’s more than that. Just as I was about to fall in love with Miz Bookstore, I see another girl gliding down the street on her radiant bicycle, whistling. I stop breathing. She brakes and stops at the corner. Red light: her left foot on the pavement, her back bent gracefully, the nape of her neck exposed. Girls like to keep their hair short in the summer. Her body like a bent bow. Green light: she shoves off with her right foot on the pedal. Her body like the arrow that flies. Last image: her back a pure line, the graceful movement of her hips, her slender, adolescent thighs. The emotion: the pain of losing someone forever whom you’ve loved totally, if only for twelve and three-tenths seconds.

THERE’S A LONG line at the post office. We’re packed in like sardines. I check out the sardine in front of me. She’s reading a book. This particular sardine is book-crazy. Whenever I see someone reading, I have to know what book, if it’s good, what it’s about.

“What’s it about?’ ”

“What’s what about?”

“Your book.”

“It’s a novel.”

“What kind?”

“Science fiction.”

“Is it good?”

“It’s okay.”

“You don’t like it?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

She brushes aside her red hair. Some women’s eyes scare you. She’s been over-cruised and she’s sick of it.

“What do you want anyway?”

She’s talking loud.

“Nothing, nothing.”

”Leave me alone, all right?”

“Forget it,” I stammer.

Most of the people in line have turned around to watch the spectacle of the Negro attacking the white woman. One girl with a shaved head up towards the front of the line wheels around, rage in her breast. She raises her voice to tell everyone how we’re all maniacs, psychopaths and hassle-artists who are always coming on to women. “They’re never around in winter but when summer comes they crawl out of their holes, whole bunches of them, to hassle people with their scarves and drums and bracelets and bells. The hell with their folklore! And it’s not just the niggers! Now we’ve got the Latinos with their chains around their necks, their necklaces, their rings, their broaches, pushing baubles on us in the cafés. If it’s not a fake Mayan jewel, it’s their body. That’s all those Latins think about.” At first the audience agrees with the shaved-head girl; who among them hasn’t been importuned by a folkloric cruise? But to attack the trade of those poor South Americans and the tradition of the Negroes is going too far.

A man in his forties jumps in. Your typical union man. Worn face. “You can’t be prejudiced,” he says, “lots of guys hassle women and not all of them are black. If you think that about blacks, what do you think they think about us? We colonized them! Sure, coming onto a woman is degrading for her, but it’s an innocent game compared to the slave trade.” For a moment everyone is too shocked by the perversity of the argument to react. Once they get over it, the shaved-head girl counterattacks. “Tell me about it! The colonizers played out their phallic domination fantasies by crushing other people and now that the time’s come to pay the bill, this bastard is offering our women for the niggers to fuck.” Our women! She said our women. Everyone must think she’s a lesbian defending her territory.

Finally, I manage to change my address. I stroll down St. Catherine. The heat is intolerable. I go into a bank building, cool with air conditioning, and guess who I see: Miz Shaved Head with the girl from the post office. She got her. Cruising is practically impossible with that kind of unfair competition.

BOUBA CAME BACK from the store. Except for some dehydrated potatoes and rotten onions, we had run out of provisions. Bouba fell for the Pellatt’s special: a pork shoulder at $1.09 a pound, fresh green onions at $2.39, six boxes of Campbell’s Soup at 29 cents each, dish soap (we were in dire need) for $1.87, a carton of creamy margarine (disgusting) for 59 cents and, at the regular price, a kilo of iodized salt, a 25-pound sack of Uncle Ben’s rice and three cans of spaghetti.

Bouba is making chicken and rice with peanut sauce. The smell is inspirational. I sit down at the typewriter in hopes of forcing something out of a Remington 22 that actually saw Joan Baez in the flesh. I bought the machine at a junkshop on Ontario Street that sells pedigreed typewriters. Old machines. The guy sells them to young writers. Who else but a young writer would be foolish enough to go for such an obviously commercial ploy? Who else would consider himself a writer just because he owned a machine that belonged to Chester Himes, James Baldwin or Henry Miller? This guy pitches his machines according to the kind of book you want to write. If it’s a paranoid book, he’ll sell you the schizophrenic machine that belonged to Tennessee Williams. If you’re looking for a suicide machine, there’s Mishima’s old model. For those in the family saga game, Joyce Carol Oates’s Olivetti will do the trick. Want to write a bestseller? Step right up and purchase the solid gold heap that Puzo owned. And if you’re interested in the tangled destinies of a young Southerner and his neighbors (a Jewish genius and a disturbed young Polish girl), take Bill Styron’s Corona. How can one choose among this embarrassment of riches? It’s like Ali Baba’s cave for a young writer. The junkman’s voice left me no repose, praising Salinger’s discreet machine, Gabrielle Roy’s tin one, the prudish machine of Virginia Woolf, etc. Here’s the terrorist machine that the Black Panthers used to type their communiqués — it’s a portable, of course. The choice boiled down to Hemingway’s old Underwood and the Remington 22 that belonged to Chester Himes. I took Himes.