How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired (7 page)

BOUBA WENT
out for a walk on the Mountain. It's his day out. Miz Sophisticated Lady is much better naked than I imagined. She has a wild sexuality that contrasts wonderfully with that starched look of hers. You have to be a little warped to fuck her. She got right down on all fours and I took her then and there. To my own sweet rhythm. She keeps asking for all kinds of dirty stuff and coming from Miz Sophisticated Lady, it's wonderfully perverse. I move in slow motion. A ticket to eternity. I take her from behind and she howls. High-pitched, eccentric screams. She's a nervous yet trusting fuck. It's not difficult to give her what she wants: penetrate her violently, till it hurts, then pull back nice and easy. Elementary, indeed. But surprising all the same from a Sir George girl. Looking at her tastefully dressed, you'd never suspect the voracious, insatiable little animal lodged deep in her vagina. I feel my legs tremble, the nape of my neck growing tense. The cry uncoiling deep in my stomach. The heart of my sex in jubilation like a fish swimming upstream. The Koran says, “Is it the truth that you are preaching, or is this but a jest?” (Sura
XXI
, 56.) I carry her to the bed with no let-up in the rhythm, holding her at the end of my cock. Like a flower blossoming at the end of my black rod. The window still open on the Cross of Mount Royal. Miz Sophisticated Lady lying on her back. Displayed. All moist and soft. Allah be praised! This Judeo-Christian girl is my Africa. A girl born for power. So what is she doing at the end of my black rod? The juices flow between her white thighs. Her eyes are turned inward (reminding me of a childhood image of St. Thérèse of Lisieux in ecstasy). Her bent neck rests on my left shoulder. (“His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me”—The Song of Solomon.) No sounds. Non-verbal communication. Just fucking. Fucking. Fucking. I slow the rhythm. She moans a personal Sura. I can't make out this perverse, animal esperanto. I put my ear to her mouth. “Fuckme fuckme fuckme fuckme fuckme fuckme fuckme fuckme fuckme fuckme fuckme . . .” I'm coming! Let me push you over the edge. A combination of quick jabs (one two—one two three—one two) before finishing off with one from close in. Winded. She sits up suddenly then throws herself back onto the bed in a single movement as waves of spasms flow through her. I move in deep and slow. I want to fuck her subconscious. A delicate task that requires infinite control. Think about it: fucking the subconscious of a Westmount girl! I catch a glimpse of my oiled thighs (coconut oil) against this white body. I take her white breasts firmly in my hands. The light down on her white marble body. I want to fuck her identity. Pursue the racial question to the heart of her being. Are you a black man? Are you a white woman? I fuck you. You fuck me. I don't know what you're really thinking when you fuck with a black. I'd like to put you at my mercy, right here. Slow movement of the pelvis. Almost monotonous. Changes of rhythm scarcely perceptible. What about you? You're there in total metaphysical concentration and I don't know what you're thinking. But I do know there's no sexuality without fantasy. You seem unfeeling. You hardly move. Are you indifferent? Is it coming from the deepest part of your being? My sex celebrates your golden hair, your pink clitoris, your forbidden vagina, your white belly, your bowed neck, your Anglo-Saxon mouth. To touch your
WASP
soul. Metaphysical fucking. Mystic vapors. It's all clothed in unreality. There you are, prone, with your Ophelia face. Slowly you slip from the material world. I will pull out of this inert, unfuckable, indifferent body. I pull out slowly. What is this cry? Where does it come from? It is the cry of the vagina itself. I hear its voice: “Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yeeeeeeeeees.” A taut, keening cry in high C, sharp and lasting, inhuman, first allegro, then andante, then pianissimo, an endless, inconsolable, electronic asexual cry, modulation for modulation a perfect copy of the primal scream from Beelzebub's chamber above.

DUKE ELLINGTON
finishes up “Hot and Bothered.” Miz Sophisticated Lady sleeps on. I sit down to write. The Remington seems to be in a good mood. I'm typing like crazy. Clattering in the night. The sentences come all by themselves. I laugh. I'm naked. My sex still anointed. My body sweet from all the smells of Miz Sophisticated Lady. I'm writing. I'm happy and I know it.

An hour later. The middle of the night.

“Hey! Wake up!”

Miz Sophisticated Lady wakes me in the middle of the night.

“Hey!”

“What? What's wrong?”

“There are mice in here.”

I rub my eyes.

“No, there's no mice here.”

I go back to sleep.

Ten minutes later.

“Hey!”

“Now what?”

“I heard mice!”

“Oh, shit.”

“I'm sure there are mice in here.”

“In the building?”

“No, in the room.”

She is sitting in the lotus position on the bed. Neck pivoting. Her frightened eyes sweeping the room. At any moment she expects to see a single-parent family of mice come traipsing across the floor.

“I don't hear anything. Listen.”

“I heard them!”

I'm fascinated by her eyelashes flickering at an infernal rate (8,000 beats a minute, I'd say). If nothing intervenes, she'll soon enter a trance (boudham saranam gacchami) and effortlessly reach the center of purity of Tathagata, there where no mouse may importune her.

“I'm going to go see,” she resolves.

As if it were the biggest decision of her life. I hear her switch on the bathroom light. What danger can a mouse possibly represent for a healthy Westmount girl? If a tiny mouselet sends her into panic, what about a Negro? Making love to a Negro isn't frightening; sleeping with him is. Sleep is complete surrender. It's more than nude; it's naked. Anything can happen during the night, when reason sleeps. Do we dream our lover? Do we penetrate his dreams? Shifting sands, says the Western world. Danger. Beware. Danger of osmosis. Danger of true communication. What started out as a simple roll in the hay can turn into . . . It's happened before: young, white, Protestant Anglo-Saxon girls sleep with a Negro and wake up under a baobab tree in the middle of the bush, talking over family affairs with the village women. Did you hear about the daughter of one of the heads of Canadian Pacific who lay down with a Negro on Mount Royal one summer's day, in plain sight? No one's seen her since. And the daughter of the program director at Radio-Canada is selling reed baskets and fishing nets in a little Casamance village. What about the wife of one of the members of the McGill board of directors who's harvesting peanuts in Senegal? There's no end to cases like this. Be careful. Fucking with a Negro is all right (it's even recommended), but sleeping with one . . . I picture Miz Sophisticated Lady running down an antelope, preparing manioc to make cassava and serving tea at the death-bed vigil. “Sleep with a Negro and wake up in Togoland”—a new travel agent ad. What is Miz Sophisticated Lady doing in the dark with this Negro? Chasing after a mouse. I fall back asleep, battle-weary, leaving her to the hunt. Gently, I enter sleep. In slow-motion flight. I clearly hear Duke Ellington playing “Soda Fountain Rag.” The rag reminds Duke of the good old days at the Poodle Dog Café. Duke plays this hilarious thing with guys who can crack you up. Edison and Cootie Williams on clarinet (who could ask for more?), Bubber Miley and Stewart blowing trumpet with a disdainful sound as if their minds were somewhere else, but how it swings! Al Sears, Al the Great, on sax. Brand on bass (can't you just hear it?) and Sonny Greer on drums. With a band like that you could bring down the house. Upstairs, Beelzebub is sleeping. Hades in repose.

“Hey!”

“Hey” is for horses! Don't these Westmount girls have any couth? They don't respect the sleep of their bedmates. Miz Sophisticated Lady, it seems, has stumbled onto something.

That something is Bouba. Bouba sitting on the couch in the darkness, devouring a head of lettuce. (The Koran says, “You shall eat the fruit of the Zaqqum-tree”—Sura
LVI
, 52—“and fruits of your own choice and the flesh of fowls that you relish”— Sura
LVI
, 28.) I must admit it's an impressive sight for a Westmount girl. I didn't hear Bouba come in. He must have been quiet about it. And since Bouba eats anything at any hour of the day, he must have opened the fridge with a hole in his stomach, only to find a head of lettuce. He must have set about consuming it in silence. But Miz Sophisticated Lady's sharp ears picked up the sound of gnawing incisors. And now she has come upon Bouba devouring a head of lettuce in the dark.

“I don't get it,” was her only comment.

She does not get it.

“It's not easy.”

“I just can't understand such a thing.”

She just cannot understand such a thing.

“It's just that way.”

“Can't you explain it?”

“Can it wait till tomorrow?”

As if I had refused a drowning man a life preserver. How can I tell her that this cultivated, concerned young man with whom she chatted away the afternoon nourishes in his heart of hearts a deep and abiding hatred of milk, steak, cheese and eggs? (“Believers, do not forbid the wholesome things which Allah has made lawful to you.” Sura
V
, 89.) Would she believe me? Or at least understand? It goes back to the embryonic stage of the blackman. For Bouba, these foods are and will forever be malevolent devils working to reduce him to slavery. Bouba is a brave man engaged in constant warfare in his very chamber. Warring against dark forces of blackest despair. He knows he doesn't stand a chance. His body is covered with scars. Wounds, some still bleeding. Blows that would prove mortal for most. But every night (and tonight was no exception) he continues to match swords in hand-to-hand combat with the hydra of the Stomach.

I really laid it on thick. And immediately regretted trying to explain this very private combat to a girl from Sir George who's been following the Scarsdale diet since her first period. She told me that the Self must have another destiny than to gulp down carbohydrates. For a famished Negro, Hegelian man is one of the sickest jokes in the Judeo-Christian panoply.

THE COTTON CLUB ORCHESTRA
launches into “Mood Indigo.” I hear Bouba whistling in the dark. Miz Sophisticated Lady is sitting on the bed in the higher biped position. Upright, proud, pathetic. Miz S.L. is literally bursting with indignation. I don't know exactly when I committed the fatal faux pas. But it was monumental. Irreparable. It must have been when I said that Negroes are still at the Big Feed stage and that for them eating a bowl of rice is sometimes preferable to the mysteries of love. Normally, the Negro should be upset, indignant at still being in such a terrible situation. There's no reason for an English girl to get upset. Besides, comparing a Westmount girl to a bowl of rice is a philosophical reflection beyond my means. Mao did not make the revolution so that every Chinaman could enjoy a Chinawoman, but so that every China-man and Chinawoman could enjoy a bowl of rice a day. Therefore, for the Chinese, man or woman, rice is a sacred thing. Whereas for Miz Sophisticated Lady, a bowl of rice is a bowl of rice. She won't let me call a cab. The pride of the powerful. She exits. And the more I think about it, the more I believe that it really wasn't a fight over rice, but an old historical misunderstanding, irreparable, total and definitive, a misunderstanding over race, caste, class, sex, nation and religion.

IN THE
hollow of his palm! Bouba assembles the frail chicken bones that were lying on the table. I settle in on the couch with Borges and thirty seconds later the first notes of “Take the A Train” fill the room. The music insinuates itself into my sinews, casting me into that moist, tropical sound jungle as old Duke looks on with cool, ironic eyes. While Bouba keeps time with two Chinese chopsticks.

“Hear that, man?”

“I hear it.”

“‘Hot and Bothered'—you like that?”

“It's okay.”

“Admit it's genius, admit you've never heard anything like that in your whole lousy life.”

“I admit.”

“And
there,
” Bouba goes on. “Stravinsky took the line and ran with it.”

“What's that?”

“You didn't recognize it?”

“No.”

“‘Sophisticated Lady,' man. Pure symphonic jazz.”

Negroes at the Exile Cafe

BISTROT À JOJO
. Noon. Warm temperature.

We're sitting at the back. In the shadow of filtered light. Armchairs. Soft soundtrack. A bar for the well-off.

We order zombies.

The man across from me is from the Ivory Coast. He's been in Montreal fifteen years. He went through the October Crisis.

“What was it like?”

“You mean October?”

“I'm not talking about that.”

“You mean the ‘decline,'”

“That's right,”

He takes a lungful of air.

“You know something, brother, there was a time when black meant something here. We picked up girls just like that.”

He snaps his fingers. A black angel moves across the field.

He looks at me with his parchment face, a delirious sage under a baobab tree on a full-moon night.

“Yes, brother, it was the golden age of black.”

The ivory age, I'd say.

The waiter finally arrives with our drinks. A big tip.

“The tip is very important, brother. It's your respect, your dignity, your survival.”

The man is totally disillusioned. As if he had let go a long time ago. And been falling ever since. Free fall.

I get things going again.

“What percentage?”

“You mean the tip?”

“No, the girls.”

“One black for six white girls. And there, brother, I'm talking about your average black man of average height and appetite. In the smaller towns, we were king of the castle. Those were the good old days, brother, if ever there were any.”