How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired (3 page)

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.

The Negro Is of the
Vegetable Kingdom

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.

Cannibalism with a Human Face

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.

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.

When the End of the World Comes,
We Will Still Be Locked in a Metaphysical Discussion about the Origin of Desire

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.