“Foreplay is important but it kills love to give it too much credit.”
He stopped, struck up a conversation with a child who was selling guava at that late hour of the night,
“You a tourist?”
“Why?”
“Because it’s tourists who speak kindly to us, and take pictures of us that they go and sell back home.”
“I am not …”
“Give me some money.”
took a motorcycle taxi, direction: Tram 83.
MEETING A PUBLISHER SENT FROM HEAVEN IN TRAM 83.
Lucien walked into Tram 83 around three in the morning. Men with multiple pronunciations, always the same. Ditto the single-mamas, shorthand for women. Darkness. A band dispatched from Acapulco was performing a revised and corrected Marvin Gaye opus. The instruments could barely stand. Two strapping lads on drums. Three on attack-vocals. Two hairy fellows on lead guitar. A saxophone. And the band’s supremo himself, in braces, complicating the basic vocal quartet (now soprano, now alto, now tenor, now bass and backing vocal). When he raised his voice, a young, almost naked tigress came forward, a strategy to win over the already seduced crowd. Euphoria. And indeed they succeeded in electrifying the room without the slightest effort. Nobody playing court tennis. Nobody playing poker. Nobody playing chess. Nobody bowling. Nobody even in the sanitary facilities. At university, he and Requiem used to implement the same method. Before the show proper, a dessert: either a circus number, or else a quick striptease turn performed by five volunteers. It caused quite a stir. The ecstatic students disrobed, climbed right up on stage and swore by the delights of forbidden fruits. Requiem, who was a good, a very good actor, couldn’t stomach the idea of holding out a hand to the audience. “What a waste,” he cried vehemently, “we came for texts, not for orgiastic sessions of any kind!” Of course this Requiem was of a different tune in his youth, calm, sincere, and loyal. Time makes brutes who wait for just the right moment to draw their pistols. That doesn’t mean Requiem was a brute — a necessary nuance.
“Do you have the time?”
Lucien headed toward the table they’d occupied the previous night. A man, school principal type, past fifty, was already sat there. Alone with his cigarettes and a fine row of bottles, portents of an inveterate alcoholism. When you got wasted, you didn’t return the empties, in order to avoid misunderstandings. The waitresses and busgirls were inclined to tell you ten bottles instead of the three or five you’d actually ordered. No surprise to come across a guy with fifty empty bottles on his table and even the floor.
“Evening, sir. May I sit here?”
Standing before the seemingly very pleasant man.
“As you wish!”
Hardly sat down:
“Where are you from?”
“Vampiretown.”
“And before, I mean, before Vampiretown?”
Lucien stammered. Remembered his friend, Porte de Clignancourt, putting himself through the ordeal of contacting Paris theaters, and he there, in the middle of watching a botched concert. Remembered the girl from the elevators. Remembered that abrupt power cut.
“I just came from the Back-Country.”
The man’s curiosity intensified. Clasped his hands together as if invoking higher deities. A gold bracelet on his left wrist let Lucien guess at his interlocutor’s pecuniary caliber. Behave and maybe he’ll help you get on your feet again, he wondered softly to himself.
“How so?”
“I’m passing through. I don’t know if I’m going to extend my stay.”
“I can see life’s treating you well here.”
He told him this with all the pride of Archimedes discovering his “any body partially or completely submerged in a fluid at rest is acted upon by an upward force equal to the weight of the volume of fluid displaced.”
“Yes, I’m enjoying myself.”
The image of his friend, Porte de Clignancourt, flitted through Lucien’s brain a second time: “I’ve got the Festival des Francophonies en Limousin, the Tarmac and other Paris theaters, the contacts in Brazil. And what about you? Are you enjoying yourself with this guy shooting questions at you?”
He sighed.
“Do you have the time?”
A band from the Amazon, composed of Indians, readied themselves to go on stage. The interrogation continued. The man was surely someone influential. He wanted to know everything and was not to be offended. Who knows, perhaps his future Good Samaritan? Good intentions can be found even in the lion’s den. Each answer stirred his curiosity further.
“Married?”
“…”
“Divorced?”
“No.”
“What line of work are you in?”
He hesitated to go on.
“I hold a bachelor’s degree in history.”
The interlocutor slammed his glass down on the table and erupted into laughter. As if that weren’t enough, he got out of his chair, took a few steps, asked the musicians to lower their voices, and pointed his finger at Lucien:
“Dear friends, you’re not going to believe me: this man you see is a historian!”
General hilarity.
The whole Tram as one:
“Didn’t you give a shit, or what!”
Then as a scattered choir:
“And you earn a living doing history?”
“Look what can happen by dint of imitating the tourists!”
“You study girls too, or just history?”
“You’re an embarrassment to us, with your wallowing in art history!”
“I’ll throw myself onto the tracks if dad insists I study history and stuff,” exclaimed a kid, barely ten years old, who was with his father.
He returned to his table and half mouthed an apology at Lucien, who still didn’t understand what had just befallen him.
“I couldn’t help it. I just didn’t imagine there were any brainy people left in the City-State. This country’s been knocked flat, it’s all got to be rebuilt: roads, schools, hospitals, the station, even men. We need doctors, mechanics, carpenters, and garbage collectors, but certainly not dreamers!”
“Do you have the time?”
The music had resumed with even greater intensity. Lucien had lost the courage to give the man who had just humiliated him a withering look. He did, however, wish to get himself off the hook.
“You can’t do anything about a passion. But I’m not just a historian. I’m also a writer.”
A guy at a neighboring table butted in:
“Writer or historian, same difference.”
“I’m in writing, he insisted.”
“Writing. Writing. Writing.”
His interlocutor pronounced this word in a guttural voice. He remained circumspect, as if victim of an apparition. Lucien remained on his guard, for fear of being made a fool of a second time.
“I’m a writer but …”
“Young man, you are looking at Ferdinand Malingeau, director of Joy Train Publications.”