Leper Tango (14 page)

“You know the last time I cried? Forty-seven years ago. It was a Thurday evening. Standing outside the Bobigny. You know. Just by the Bastille?”

“Can't say that I have.”

As I descended the stairwell, her squawking voice resonating from the top floor.

“You ever ask an old lady her first name,
monsieur

Franck
?”

The cit y had been dark and grey for weeks. Two months into spring, and nothing but rain. The Seine had overflowed, and there were no signs of water levels abating. Tainted water seeping out of the sewers, onto the street in a slow, relentless progression. The trains had been on strike for seven days running, emptying Paris of the movers and shakers and the suburban workers.

The local
riverains
were back in control, and the tone had changed back to traditional Parisian rude self-contentment.

Over time, my appetite had been gradually, but progressively increasing, taking up larger and larger parts of the daylight hours. Part of this may have been brought on by my nascent friendship with Tranh, but there were other reasons, ones I explained by the fact that I was getting over Sheba. There was no getting around it. The stronger the addiction, the worst the cold turkey. It was better to return to soft drugs, like wine and food, and the result was more than salutory. By the time evening arrived, I was now at the point where, if on a binge, I could devour a ten course meal.

I dropped into a butcher shop on the St-Denis exchange operating under the name
Charcuterie de l 'Orient
.

The meat on display, particularly the lamb, had a distended appearance, as if the animal had crawled a few last steps across the slaughterhouse floor after the first swing of the axe on its head misfired. I ordered a Merguez sausage sandwich from a grinning, buttery faced ogre sliding a chain of sausages through his thick palms. Two young men, clad in butchers' aprons, were engaged in casual discussion beside me. They were drinking acrid coffee, smoking Marlboros as they discussed the legs of a young short-skirted client, or more precisely, the cunt perched bare centimetres above its hem, and just exactly how they wouldn't mind sticking a few
merguez
into the vaginal crevice within.

One of the two mentioned that earlier that afternoon he had masturbated in the breaded mix for the
escalope milanaise
. His colleague nodded blandly, adding that he never completed a shift without shooting off at least one wad of jism into one of the mixes for
pâté
or
mousse au canard
. I considered for a moment whether this was braggadocio or a case of something else. It was not pleasant to contemplate, but neither was eating eggs, if you thought about it too much. That was the key. Not to think too much about things.

On the bigger playing field, hoof and mouth disease had swept the continent, but within Paris, a stubborn, well-anchored form of madness had possessed the locals. The restaurants, shunned by fearful tourists, were selling meat at cost, bringing in the lower end of the social spectrum. Every where, but nowhere more than in
les Halles,
the ragged dregs of the city had temporarily repossessed their chairs and tables from the Japanese and the Americans, and seized the occasion. A large blackboard sign in the terrace area of
Aux Tonneaux des Halles
advertised Ricard at one franc, over a sign: Have you caught Hoof and Mouth Fever?

The inside of the bistro was packed to overflowing. A twenty-something, female accordionist, rust-coloured hair in ropy braids to her waist, a pleated sk irt over striped leotards and high-heeled saddle shoes, rouge forming t wo blazing suns on her cheeks. I spotted Rhanya. She was weaving across the floor just behind the accordionist, waltzing very unsteadily with a
beur
half her age. The
beur
's eyes were half-closed, his head pushed against Rhanya's large head nurse breasts. The regular clientele had been replaced by kitchen staff and dishwashers, six garbage men in Ville de Paris lime
-
green coveralls, drinking pastis. The employees wolfing down Chinon wines and the cheapest tripe,
rognon
, giblets,
ris de veau
and other unidentifiable offal being sold at discount.

I moved down
Montorgueil
towards St-Eustache church. The Indian beggar standing at his post at the side entry into the nave. He spotted me, broke into a smile.

“Once a gentleman, no?”

I nodded, flipped him a franc.

“Ever been to Gujarat, my friend? You can have a woman for eight rupees.”

I moved onwards towards the old commodities exchange, and a few more tripe and pigs foot joints. At the Pied de Cochon
, a heav y set, tall, stooped, silver
-
haired
man was gathering himself from the ground. He had a fresh cut on his forehead and a streak of mud on his cheek. Two men, shaved heads, both wearing black pants, white shirt, black tie. Their arms folded.

“I am chair of philosophy at the University of Chicago. Alistair Needham. You fools, how could you not have heard of me. Alistair Needham!” The taller of the two men shook his head. “
Ça ne me dit rien. Et, toi?
”

His accomplice shook his head. “
Que dalle.
”

Alistair Needham tried to push past him. “
Désolé
. No tourists. For the poor today.” “But, I can pay!”

“Come back tomorrow. Tomorrow.”

Inside the
Pied de Cochon
, two men in waiters' uniforms were sleeping on the floor, partially blocking the entrance.

In the centre of the restaurant a table of twenty men, in from the slaughterhouses, still wearing their bloodied aprons, were throwing knives into the walls in a makeshift competition which the owner watched with grim resignation. The rest of the
Pied de Cochon
filled with derelicts who had briefly abandoned their begging at nearby StEustache church to join in the orgy. For the lower urban classes, hoof and mouth was manna from heaven. It meant they could eat properly, if only for a few days.

I took a window table, looking out onto Place StEustache and the Commodities Exchange. The taller man who had just refused entry to the American dropped a menu on the table.

“What's on special today?”

“The temptation of St Anthony.”

“That'll be fine. With a bottle of Moselle.”

Two minutes later, the waiter returned with an oversized, shallow soup bowl, filled with a steaming heap of pigs tail, knuckles,
museau
, dismembered corpses floating in a thick brown gruel. He dropped a large, wooden salad-mixing spoon onto the table.

“
Voilà
,” he said. There. You're served.

I dug into the food. Food was a solution for everything. If people were worried about getting afts in their mouths, or developing a mutant strain of sclerosis because the cows were mad, that was their problem. This was Europe, and the general genetic balance periodically called for a plague, or a war or a genocide from time to time to bleed the collectivity and keep everyone on their toes. If you didn't like it, you could move to America where filth was a strict liability offence, and you could keep a weapons arsenal in your kitchen, provided it was cleaned once a week.

I decided to stop in and see Millie, who operated solo out of a
chambre
on the sixth floor of the Hotel Clauzel on
rue des Martyrs
. She had set up a makeshift waiting room out in the hallway, consisting of two chairs and a coffee table near the elevator. She had left a book open on the coffee table, at a page with the following quote underlined in red pencil:

My soul is a black maelstrom,

Immense vertigo surrounding emptiness.

Millie emerged in the corridor, cheerfully, but briskly escorting her previous john, a skinny, bald-headed coot, to the elevator. She had coarse salt and pepper hair braided rasta style, which hung like a bead curtain to her shoulders. She wore a white miniskirt and a long garland which slithered its way down her ankles, drunken Judy Garland style. She walked right past me, escorted the bald eagle to the elevator, watched the doors shut, then turned towards me.

“So, when's the last time you had your cock sucked, Franck?”

Usua l ly, the non-French product I sampled was shipped in from Guadeloupe, Dominican Republic and former French African colonies in the Indian ocean. Millie, however, was from Chicago, and the only onduty American whore I ever met in the city of Paris. She had taken up whoring after being fired as a heavy-duty machine shop operator and had to dig up some cash quickly to have her uterus removed. At least that was the way she stated the case to me, the words blasting out of her Cherokee-Irish mouth like heat from a kiln.

We returned to her room, She had made little effort to remake the bed, and the sheets were rumpled still from her previous client.

“So, what is it today, Franck?”

About t wo or three minutes into humping, I suddenly felt Millie's vulva grip the base of my cock like a Venus fly-trap. The stem and head of the penis, however, seemed to be stretching out, as if it had embarked on an independent speleological expedition into a cavernous grotto of the Pyrenees. I could only guess what tracts and canals my dick was peering at through sensory devices whose existence I had never suspected prior to now.

For a moment, I imagined the giant worms of Frank Herbert's
Dune
trilogy, burrowing through extra-terrestrial sand to locate life-sustaining water. In retrospect, the loss of her lower body had caused me to lose control of my mind. The undertone of rumbling utterances gained slightly in cadence as the rhythm of my own humping increased, which led me to believe it was just one of those parallel mental tam-tam reverberations which knocked the walls out of my brain any time I found myself in a bordello. Nothing special was registering on the mental Richter scale. Millie, right in the middle of fucking, started repeating a phrase:

“ ... je suis une femme pour qui le monde extérieur est une réalité intérieure.” The simple resonance of the phrase seemed to coagulate with the acrid stench of the room.

Millie bent over and touched her toes, demonstrating an age-defying, aboriginal suppleness worthy of a contortionist. I stared for a moment at a scar, dead centre of her back, which resembled a paddlesteamer, while I attempted to light a cigarette. A poster on the scarlet wall behind her scrolled upwards and downwards as I moved into a steady hump. Up, down, up, down.

Conferencia Futurista

José de Almada-Negreiros

Teatro Republica

Sabado, 14 de abril 1917

52 cts

While examining the toreador posture and inflated pleat trousers of the futurist poet of the previous century, I heard another snorting noise, and perceived for the first time that it was coming from Millie herself, who was now rigid. She looked to be in a trance. Although her body was stiff and immobile, her Cherokee straw hair bobbed up and down over a string of black moles strung out in a semi-circle between her shoulder blades. She pointed her ferret
-
like snout forward, sniffed, wheeled around and stared up at me. Her eyes rolled upwards, briefly exposing a long, pointed, ghoulish set of eyeteeth. Then she regained her focus and smiled, her eyeteeth still visible. I examined my prick, which now hung limp and lifeless, its vitalit y depleted by the clinical squeeze of Millie's vulva. Fucking Millie was like masturbation. Desecrating a grave.

“Stick around, Franck. I'll pour you a drink. Fuck it, I miss talking to Americans.” “I'm Canadian.”

“You'll just have to do.”

She poured me a Kronenbourg.

“What do you feel when you fuck me?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Nothing. Nothing personal. My mind's elsewhere.”

“Didn't you even notice? I mean my machinery. It's gone. I've been gutted. Disembowelled.”

I watched her examine herself in front of a vanity mirror, brushing and rebrushing a straw mane of hair nonchalantly, swinging it over her shoulder as if she were Lady Gueneviere and not a chronically unemployed Illinois heavy-duty machine shop girl who had to become a trans-Atlantic tool operator to earn enough back pay to cover costs to remove her own body parts.

“You still hung up on
la gamine
?”

“Have you heard something?”

“Forget her, Franck. Do you know how many men

she's done her number on?”

“What number would that be?”

“Don't think you're so goddam special, Franck.”

“You have no fucking idea what she did or didn't do.”

“Oh yes I do. I know exactly what she did. That's the problem with you men. Even you goddam johns think you're special cases. But you're replaceable. Jesus, she's probably out doing some john who's got ten times your cash flow.”

“So, you've seen her.”

“Getting a little paranoid, are we Franck? She's already done her number all right.”

“I'll take care of her.”

“No you won't. No one ever takes care of
la gamine
.

She's in a league of her own. Listen to me, Franck. I'm from Chicago. A West side slum, Franck. My brother is doing five to ten for armed robbery. Take it from me. You're an amateur.”

“Who are you, Mary Magdalen?” “Who the fuck is Mary Magdalen?” “A whore.”

“Fuck you, Franck. You think I read Pessoa, and I don't know who Mary Magdalen is? No wonder you're always in shit. Why do I try to help people? Fucking waste of time.”

“Don't worry about it.”

I looked past her, out the window of the sixth floor of the
Hotel Clauzel
. A slight mist clung to the building across the street, enshrouding a billboard advertising French
haute cuisine
fast food version. Behind it, the silhouette of the night sky transmutating into early morning cobalt.

Three bangs on the door signalled that my time was up and that another john had arrived in the Hotel Clauzel.