by Helena Settimana
(4/11/01)
This is the way it goes down: you are in the Bureau des Postes in
Boulogne-sur-mer trying to mail a postcard to your sister in London while
Charles Aznavour is humming La Vie en Rose into the back of your head. Of
course it is not Charles, who you think might be dead, but the man is trying
hard. The tiny hairs on your neck start to prickle as his breath rolls in a
wave over your collar. Eventually he says in English, to no one in
particular, "I don't think she is French." This is where you turn with the
sweetest smile, and in your plummiest tones, tell him that he is right. This
is where your words pile into your throat like dead flies between
windowpanes, and know that the singer of the songs is someone you might lie
with. You like trying to see the world without leaving your bed. He has
black eyes, spiraled, coiled Tunisian hair; biblical teeth.
The crooner suggests a café, and midway through your mocha you are wishing
for absinthe and the company of talented dwarves à la Lautrec. You tell him
so. He calls for anisette. He is charming, and you are shocked to hear that
he is the son of the local horse-butcher. "Horse butcher's sons go to
college too," he says and smiles in a distinctly feral, Gallic way. He offers
to show you the shop, closed now for the weekend.
The cuts of meat are laid out as in any other butcher shop, and in the back
hang the carcasses; the heads, bits of body parts in a bin: tails, bony
legs, folds of skin and hide, coils of gut, cocks and balls: refuse. It is
here in the cold with dead horses hanging from heavy steel hooks that he
kisses you, hot and fevered so that you taste blood, coppery on your lips.
His hands are hard and knowing and invasive. They wind like vises around
your thighs, creep like small animals into your folds, burrow into the wet,
and inhabit you there. You watch the vapor emitting from your mouths, noses
puffing, the stacks on steam engines, liquid air rising from manholes in the
street.
This is how you come; balanced like a meat puppet around his hand, pulling
at his narrow, uncut, olive pisser until your fingers are webbed together by
his load.
Later, alone at night, you dream of whores; a clever dwarf with Tunisian
hair and of you, you, you, impaled upon a cold, severed cock.
