Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“Oh, there you are, Mills,” Bufesqueu said, rising up off his cushion like a host when he spotted George. “Perhaps you can settle a little argument for us.”

“It isn’t an argument, Tedor. We weren’t arguing,” a eunuch Mills didn’t recognize said.

“It’s about the female slaves,” Bufesqueu said. “Qum el Asel contends they’re actually improved by servitude while I hold that whatever civilizing effects their condition provides, is motivated by the universal hope of getting on, being noticed by their mistresses, et cetera. It’s merely public relations, a sort of show business, a means to an end rather than the end itself.”

“Oh please, Tedor,” Qum el Asel said. “Ends? Means? Mean you to end so meanly, man?” He looked at the harem women and George followed his glance. They batted their eyelashes, silently fluttering their gauzy veils with their tiny poutlike breaths. “I mean, ” and he looked at them again before he continued, “toward what end should any discussion strive? Fact, I should say.

“All right, what are the facts? You take a girl out of the jungle — I know, I know, many of these girls are as white as you are, Tedor — out of her village then, whatever tiny patch of cultivated wide spot in the road — all right, I know, some of these ladies are from no farther off than downtown Constantinople — she’s accustomed to distinguish by the name of ‘home,’ but anyway you take her, and, to this point, probably all she’s learned of the observable world is how to prepare a couscous or, if she is from that jungle, the local mean sanitation practices for — please forgive me — wiping her behind.

“But what happens? You steal the girl or perhaps buy her from her parents or a surviving brother (and I’ve known of cases, girls right here at Yildiz incidentally, where the seller has actually been a bona fide husband), and introduce her into a totally alien milieu, say the Yildiz seraglio, though it could be anywhere really, the British Empire, suburban San Francisco, the Argentinian pampas, and all of a sudden, if she’s assigned to the kitchen say, she’s learning new recipes, preparing alien dishes in alien pots and pans and eating the alien leftovers with an alien cutlery. She’s learned, you see, her experience broadened perforce by force itself.

“Multiply this. Compound it by all the techniques indigenous to whatever culture she’s been entrusted to and you have a girl — enslaved she may be — who is indisputably more cultured and knowledgeable than her unsold sister in the sticks. You have more. You have a girl who’s probably more knowledgeable than the woman in whose charge she finds herself if only because she knows — please, you must forgive me, Tedor, but it was you who introduced this business of ends— two ways of wiping her behind while the mistress knows only one.”

Several of the women applauded, their left hands making a delicate brushing motion against their right. Others blew against the veils which covered their mouths, briefly exposing bits of naked jaw, chin, flashes of mouth, the mysterious flesh paler than the skin which covered their cheeks and the thin strand of brow just visible beneath their chadors.

“Qum gets that round, Tedor,” a woman said. Bufesqueu nodded in pleasant agreement. “Have you anything to add, Mr. Mills?”

George shook his head.

“I can lift five of you at once,” a big eunuch said.

“ Five of us? At once? Oh, I don’t think so. Your arms aren’t long enough to fit around five, ” said the Oriental woman whom Mills had seen there the last time.

“Yes,” he said, “five.” A dozen women volunteered and the eunuch who would be doing the lifting began to choose among them.

“Sodiri Sardo’s picking only the lightest,” a fat Negress whose name was Amhara objected.

“Oh no,” the eunuch said and chose Amhara too. He led her to a chair and directed the others to sit on her lap, arranging them in the order of their size.

“See? He doesn’t have to get his arms around all five of us,” said the woman on top.

“I didn’t know there was a trick to it,” the Oriental said.

“It isn’t a trick, it’s strength,” the eunuch said. “Is everyone ready? Don’t squirm now.”

The women, clumsily balanced, were stacked in a heap of diminishing laps. They couldn’t stop giggling. The other eunuchs moved around them, professionally estimating Sodiri Sardo’s task as they might a golf ball along a difficult lie.

The big eunuch squatted, one arm under the black woman’s thighs, the other behind her back. “All right,” he said, “I’m going to pick everyone up now. Stay still as possible.”

He lifted them easily and crossed the room with them. He set them down carefully.

There were more brush strokes of applause, more veil blowing.

“Sodiri’s strong,” a eunuch admitted, “but let him try that stunt with me underneath and the girls in my lap.”

“Are you saying I can’t?” Sodiri challenged. “Go on then, sit in the chair.”

They started to arrange themselves again, the eunuch on the bottom this time. “Amhara got to hold all of us last time,” a woman said. “She’s not that much heavier than I am. You rest, Amhara. The girls can sit on my lap.”

“Horsey shit,” Amhara said.

Amhara sat on top of the woman who had displaced her and the others piled on top of her.

“You ready now?” Sodiri asked. “They ready, En Nahud?”

“Not quite,” the eunuch said. “They’ve got the giggles. Let them calm down first.”

“Go on,” Amhara said, “see can you pick us up.”

He picked them up.

“See can you carry us cross the room and back,” Amhara said in the air.

He carried them across the room and back.

“See can you climb the stairs,” En Nahud said.

Sodiri climbed a few stairs at the rear of the lounge. He set everyone down. The women who had been carried professed astonishment. They shook their heads vehemently, their veils flaring like the ballooning skirts of dancers.

“Did you think he could do it?” they asked each other.

“No,” they answered, shaking their heads wildly, raising the edges of their veils, “did you?”

“No! Did you ever see someone so strong?”

“ No! Never! Not! ” they answered, doing that thing with their heads again. “How about you?”

“ Negative! No! Not me! Not one time! Eunuchs are the strongest!”

Which gave Bufesqueu his opening.

He discoursed on the proposition of whether it was possible for eunuchs to rupture.

Bufesqueu was brilliant, locating his argument scientifically but saving his great point till the end of his speech when he announced in a low, husky voice that if eunuchs couldn’t rupture it had to be because they were without testicles. He drew the word out and mentioned it repeatedly. He need hardly point out, he said, the women, too, were without tesss ticles but had love holes where tesss ticles would go if they were men, and everyone knew that women with love holes — he called them love holes — could rupture. He said “love holes” repeatedly also.

There was additional applause, tunes genteelly whistled into veils, astonishment registered by a forceful constriction of the brows, a general female giggling and swooning, heads vigorously thrown back till veils were hiked midnose.

They loved, they said, metaphysical discourse.

Someone raised the metaphysical question of whether or not eunuchs could expose themselves. Debate raged angrily on both sides of the question. Mills thought the eunuchs might come to blows.