“Ass exists only in my mind?”
“Sure, man. Here’s the proof: when you make love with a girl and she’s on her back, you don’t even see that mythological ass.”
“We don’t all do it the same way.”
“Don’t confuse the issue — we always go back to that missionary thing. All right, let’s take the mouth. You meet a girl in the street. She has a sensual, hungry mouth, the whole package. You tell her this and that, she answers that and this, and a couple hours later you’re kissing. But when you’re kissing you can’t see her mouth. When you’re up that close you can’t see anything at all.”
“All right, you kiss her with your imagination, I go along with you there. But when you kiss her you’ve got this picture of her mouth in your mind, that’s why you wanted to kiss her in the first place. At the moment of the kiss, desire is consummated.”
“But the mouth in your mind, your ideal mouth, is better than the real mouth, the mouth that belongs to the girl you happened to meet on such-and-such a street at such-and-such a time. At the last minute she could change mouths and you wouldn’t be any wiser.”
“That’s ridiculous, Bouba. Who’s ever changed mouths?”
“For the sake of argument, man.”
“You’re one Cartesian nigger!”
“You’re the Cartesian, man. I’m a Freudian: a goddamned Freudian nigger.”
“What have you got against Beauty anyway?”
Bouba is sitting on the couch now. The debate shakes his entire being. He debates with his body. Seeing him sweat, you smell him. Suddenly his words start pouring out. He’s like a tiger with a whiff of blood in his nostrils. The blood of his next victim. My blood. Nose to the ground, he sniffs his idea back to its source. He pretends he didn’t hear my question. I know him too well. There’s nothing wrong with his hearing. His mind is just as acute. He doesn’t think like other people. He thinks against them. He has a personal vision of things and he expresses it with his long, supple, fragile hands. As he speaks they sketch arabesques as strange and astonishingly complex as ideograms. At first it looks as though he’s shooing flies with those endless hands like dowagers’ fans, but when you look closer and listen to his words, you see the organic link between the idea and the dance of his hands. Slender, sophisticated hands that have never worked. The hands of an old mandarin. Which makes for a rather baroque atmosphere. Two blacks in a filthy apartment on the rue St-Denis, philosophizing their heads off about Beauty in the wee hours. The Repast of the Primitives. The kettle is boiling. We have no radio, no TV, no telephone, no newspapers. Nothing to keep us in touch with this lousy planet. History is not interested in us and we repay the favor. It’s even-steven. All that matters is this grave and gratuitous conversation between me and that crazy ape-man Bouba. The fate of Judeo-Christian civilization is on the line. Two blacks on the dole hold the keys. We are discussing matters of life and death and Bouba, hirsute of head, confers a certain mystique to our confabulation. Bouba is lost in thoughts dangerous to his mental health. He wants to talk me into a verbal pulp. He can argue all night over the sex of angels. (Talking about angels, especially the fallen kind, I haven’t heard from Beelzebub for some time now. I wonder what he’s up to up there.) Nothing can resist Bouba’s manic lucidity. His face becomes distorted with tics, his eyes two round, brilliant marbles. Horizontal on the ancient couch. Just before daybreak, you come to appreciate his terrifying rhetorical machine. Endless argumentation broken by fits of coughing. His monologue can last for hours, flowing uninterrupted, serpentine, snaking, sinuous, Proustian sentences like a long, many-colored ribbon. The Word is his poison. With his narrow, bare chest, his hair in revolt and his beard narrowing to a point, he looks like an Old Testament prophet. (“By the declining star, I swear!” Sura LIII, 1.) I picture him as the last man on this barren planet after the nuclear blast, his words flowing endlessly, considering the decor as no more than a minor annoyance.
“WHAT DO I have against Beauty?”
Bouba savors the question. It’s right up his alley. The kind of question that sets off a Boston marathon of words. A question that pushes and tugs, the kind of thing you can change the world with. “What do I have against Beauty?” Bouba scratches his chin. His nervous tic. It signifies, Here is a question you do not answer lightly. Bouba pours himself more tea. He’s in no hurry. He has plenty of time. Eternity is on his side. Outside, people are stirring, awakening, getting their clothes on, gulping down breakfast and rushing off to work. Brainless ants. The world is in terrible need of marginal thinkers, starving philosophers and impenitent sleepers (“The sleeping man reconstructs the world,” said Heraclitus) to keep on spinning. Bouba spends most of his time on the couch reconstructing the world. Today, he will attack one of the Western World’s last bastions: Beauty.
“Here’s the problem, man: Beauty is shameless.”
“Great! I’ve got a nigger moralist on my hands now.”
“It’s thermodynamic, man, not moral. There’s a certain temperature that determines the degree of desire we feel for someone. The heat can go in two directions, inside and out.”
“All right. Then what?” I still don’t trust Bouba’s demonstration.
“Beauty’s heat goes only to the outside.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I prefer implosion to explosion.”
“I don’t think I get it.”
“All subtlety is lost on a guy like you.” In a discussion, Bouba acts as if I’m a complete stranger. “All right, take Miz Beauty. She thinks she’s doing you a favor by fucking with you, while with Miz Piggy, you’re doing her the favor, and that makes all the difference in the world.”
“Altruist!”
“Not at all. The relation is different — and to my advantage.”
“Is that so?”
“Haven’t you ever made love to a big ugly girl who’s half moron and up to her fat neck in complexes? Pure ecstasy, man. Non-stop whispering in your ear, what a great man you are, all that. But try making love to one of these Brooke Shields clones: all she wants is compliments, talk to me, talk to me, the famous talk to me people talk about so much, which boils down to I Demand Compliments. Only Allah is worthy of such praise. The Koran says, ‘Praise Allah morning and night.’ Miz Beauty does not speak. You’ve got to discover her erogenous zones, her favorite subjects of conversation, her sign, all on your own. Meanwhile, Miz Piggy’s coming like an express train. She doesn’t get it every day. And she’s hell-bent to make the most of it. She wants more, more, more. And that, man, is the true foundation of fucking. The rest is representation, pure fashion show, masturbation on a glossy page from Vogue. ”
“What if you end up with an ugly girl who’s no good?”
“That could only happen to you, man.”
If I understand correctly, the couch is one of those fat girls seething with complexes who’s great in bed. When you consider the couch with a minimum of sensitivity, you realize what Bouba’s practiced eye saw all along. The couch is endowed with the open, luxuriant forms of Rubens’s women. Standing before his canvases, who has not dreamed of such fleshly immersion? Such generous smooth bodies?
Bouba drains his teacup and goes quietly back to bed like a black maharajah in his St. Denis harem. Let the world hurl itself towards nuclear culmination. Bouba is sleeping.
Must I Tell Her That a Slum Is Not a Salon?
MIZ LITERATURE comes sweeping in with an enormous bouquet of peonies. I’m still in bed with Bukowski. The window is closed. A line of sunlight cuts the page in half lengthwise.