JULY 18, 18—
Generally, the trips that my friend the coachman took me along on were from the stables to Mont Valérien. Happy as the dawn, my charioteer would depart for Paris, estimating his day’s tips. But one winter night I found him along the road from Chatou to Rueil, along the Seine, his coach was tracing a series of Ss like a staggering drunk. Not really wanting to, he accepted my company on the coachbox. He talked to himself. After some time, he decided to explain the cause of his uneasiness — his voice hoarse, croaking with rage, bombastic, as he affirmed the following (letting his reins fall in the process, always the sign of a coachman who’s lost control):
“Look — when you hear that someone’s snuck into a jeweler’s through the sewers or the municipal water pipes and the walls have been drilled through and the tile floor’s been ripped out, the perpetrator is almost certainly a hunchback.
“Did you know that by the fourth century, there was a distinct race of hunchbacks flourishing in the Byzantine Empire? Today this race is nearly extinct, though new, atavistic examples occasionally recur. The few specimens still alive come out only at night, under the arch of the railway bridge.
“When the signal lights go from red to green and, as happens from time to time, two trains collide on the tracks, it’s not unusual for a hunchback in a nearby hovel to step out to entertain himself with the crunching of their vertebrae, the grand horrific spectacle of two mathematical axes meeting in a terrifying geometrical equation, their polygons making nonsense of the imaginary points once delineated by their locomotives, not to mention the impassive parallels of their tracks. It is the hunchback, you see, who’s engineered these astounding and macabre orgies of destruction, walking happily through the carnage thereafter to gather up, where he may, those pulpy bits of brain that, in the ashes of the inferno, look like giant mushrooms that have sprouted from this new lake of blood, upon which float the dining car’s silver serving trays, and from which, in places, one may see the silver handles of drowned sugar bowls reaching into the air. The hunchback amuses himself by fishing out the bowls while the surface of the pool of blood coagulates according to the same fatal law that produces a crust of salt at the edges of the Dead Sea…
“Rome and Greece exposed such hunchbacks at birth. Medieval kings tied them to the foot of their thrones with heavy chains so that their snarls would remind them of the snarling of the discontented peasantry. The hunchback is a sign of revolution against all things! The hunchback is failure made flesh, and his hate flourishes in inverse proportion to his smallness. His kind revolted the queens of old so much that when a lady from court became pregnant, they covered their royal hunchbacks with tar and started a bonfire for good luck. That’s how they invented fireworks, you know…”
The coachman went quiet a moment. He seemed more at ease now, like an asthmatic finally able to breathe. He added: “A hunchback just mugged me back there on the corner and because of his size I didn’t even see which way he went! He took off with nine francs…”
JULY 29, 18—
Catholic liturgy has conquered women. It’s the same as with skylarks and mirrors. Anyone who adopts religion’s deep and pompous tone can easily win a woman over. This is the reason I’ve always tried my best to be as affected and ceremonious as possible. And there’s another reason too: I take my Latin roots quite seriously — I might speak French, but I count my lovers in Italian. Roots, I might add, with a Saracen sadness just beneath.
Syphilis is a civilized disease, and I intend to declare my allegiance to its aesthetic. I acquired it in the most charming of ways. Suffice to say, she who bestowed this gift upon me did so with the same ease and elegance as the doves of Aphrodite must alight upon the breasts of sleeping women…
AUGUST 9, 18—
My nights have always been fragmentary. I’ve never slept through the night. I have attacks that aren’t quite insomnia. They’re interruptions in the pleasant — literary — death that is sleep, though they are always kind enough to retie the loose ends of my unfinished nightmares when they depart.
These attacks have their origins in my childhood. In the Jesuit school where I was a student after my mother’s death, a bell would ring at random times in the night, always well after twelve, obliging us to sit up in our beds and recite a creed. Afterward, we were meant to go back to sleep as though there had been no interruption.
This custom was something like torture for my classmates and myself, particularly at the beginning of the school year. At last I yielded to the routine that has undone my nights ever since. What was the reason behind those bells, I wondered, always pealing at such an inconvenient hour?
Few Jesuits were able clear up this secret, but eventually one of the Reverend Fathers explained it to me:
When the honest Society of Jesus possessed its most prosperous missions in the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, the Indians who fell under its guardianship — exhausted by their brutal, crushing workdays — took no pleasure in their marriage beds. Husbands simply slept beside their legal partners every night without fulfilling their conjugal obligations. Thus, in those lands — generally thought of as a fertile paradise — the locals quickly developed a birth-rate problem.
A priest came up with the idea of the late-night bell as a means of correcting this problem. Once the Indians had been reinvigo-rated by a few hours of rest — interrupted by the bell — and lay back down having recited their creed, they found their women waiting for them, and soon rediscovered their appetites.
And so the Jesuit bells continued ringing this strange peal for married couples — rung by celibates who’d taken vows of chastity and always went about with eyes cast down. These insomniacs are truly worthy of the lowest third of Dante’s hell — if they don’t manage to invent an even more terrible place for themselves.
AUGUST 11, 18—
I’m waiting for bad news. Everything that passes near seems to bring it. There it is in those footsteps, retreating along the hall of this hotel. Somebody lacking the courage to knock! The rug in the hallway, accomplice to cowards, ends just outside my door, so once-silent footsteps resound there all at once on the floorboards, revealing the presence of a messenger…Who is it? Is he tall and thin like a ghost covered in a sheet? Or maybe he’s more rotund, since I can hear him brushing against the walls. He’s crossed the hall now. Farther off, a child’s crying. He’s scared. Like me, he senses danger; he cries inconsolably. The unknown that lurks in the corridor is pressing down on the fontanel in his skull, which has yet to close, and he understands the ebb and flow of the unfinished brain beneath. This child is breathing the same atmosphere in which I’m suffocating. He has a feeling he shouldn’t drink any more of his mother’s milk. His navel is doing the nervous dance of a cork in water. He feels the knot in his intestines unraveling, as if his interior equilibrium is about to be lost entirely — as though his entire body, that receptacle, were overflowing. Wax is pouring from his ears, and behind the wax is the fifth humor, the quintessence, which is the celestial ether and the honor of families.
The boy falls silent. A great current of air passes through the hall. Has the intruder departed? Everything shakes. Microbes jump into the air and then meander like sleepwalkers at hand-height. Nobody collects them, so they return to the carpet.