The Dissertation, page 16
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
M. Braquemard Fauconnier, the fifty-year-old Belgian who became León’s protector, believed he’d made the conquest of a lifetime. He was a tall, pale fellow with a slightly bulbous lower lip and milky blue eyes in which, if one looked closely, one could see an asthmatic eight-year-old who cannot get to sleep until maman brings him a good-night kiss. His schooling and some early lovers had endowed him with a wide though superficial culture. His Parisian tailor composed his flabby body into the counterfeit presentment of good health. His large inheritance permitted him indulgence, of his hobbies, which were art criticism and travel, and his vocation, which was sodomy. Although he hunted ceaselessly for fresh meat, he bore himself with great restraint and circumspection, exhaling but the faintest fragrance of effeminacy in his way of brushing his clear-lacquered fingernails across his lips while yawning or his tendency to speak a trifle quickly when a potential cher ami was within hearing. He was vain of his exquisite taste, his delicate, impeccably refined sensibilities, but he didn’t really like himself at all, and thus he marveled at what he thought was his seduction of a perfectly beautiful, ostensibly hetero, anally-virginal young man. In fact he was seduced by León.
Having decided to become a whore, León might certainly have looked to women. He had his youth, his education, his good looks. Dr. Heilanstalt had given him some cash and a good suit of clothes; five months abed had furnished that ethereal pallor which your moneyed dame often finds fetching. His experience with Edna Scallop must have shown him gigoloing is revolting. Perhaps he considered it and then rejected it as foul but not quite foul enough. In any case, he took the doctor’s gifts and Edna’s parting thank you of six flasks of morphine and went trolling for a wealthy invert. He fished M. Fauconnier so skillfully that Fauconnier believed himself the predator.
One may imagine62 León perched at the bar of the St. Regis, nursing a goblet of vermouth and soda, ostensibly immured in his own thoughts but keeping the room cased by discreet spyings in the mirror. Fauconnier glances in, sees something interesting, strolls up and takes a stool one stool away from León’s, shoots his cuffs, spikes elbows on the bar, orders Pernod, and passes some remarks in French to the jowled barman. León retains eyes front but smiles effusively at the first clever mot. Fauconnier looks over suavely, hesitates, receives no answering look, continues chatting—in a most animated manner, strewing out pearls of wit. In due course León smiles again—as to himself, you understand; as one who does not seek but cannot help to overhear; as one who knows the language, appreciates good talk, admires the speaker’s brilliant sense of humor, and, perforce, smiles. Fauconnier takes the bait:
“Vous parlez français, par hasard, jeune homme?”
They chat—or rather Fauconnier displays his cleverness and culture like a peacock’s plumage; León admires. The cocktail-hour tide seeps in, filling the tables, bubbling about the bar, and M. Fauconnier moves from his stool to stand at León’s side. They switch, at Fauconnier’s invitation, to something stronger—“Un whisky maintenant, par exemple? Bien? Formidable!”—and go on chatting. Yes, agrees León as Fauconnier drains his second whisky, it grows stifling in here. Yes, in point of fact, he’s free for dinner.
One may imagine them sconced in a fashionable corner at the Chambord, sucking braised capon. Fauconnier discourses with sibilant respect of Proust and Gide—of their literary genius, not their love life. It’s a bit early for the latter, but then he can’t resist and works it in discreetly, praising “pauvre Marcel” on the skill with which he fashioned blossoming young girls from his male playmates. And the delicious boy takes it in stride, shows no repugnance, even remarks that (he supposes) love remains love no matter whom it’s felt for or how it’s expressed.
One may imagine their handshake upon parting: León presses virilely before retreating to the Y. to plot campaign; Fauconnier lays his left hand over León’s right, breathes “Cher jeune homme,” then taxis off to an androgynous bordello on West Fourth Street to ’suage his thirsty letch. One may imagine their next day’s rendezvous at the Met Museum, their evening at the theater, their afternoon with Rubinstein and Chopin at Carnegie Hall. One may perfectly well imagine both their lunch at Rumpelmayer’s (where Fauconnier, after checking slyly to make sure that the two silver-fox-draped Jewesses at the next table, who might know French, were too engrossed in their own gossip to eavesdrop, delivered—just in passing, you understand, just to make conversation—his famous Bumberry Prize lecture, “Great Faggots of Art and Letters,”63 in which he proved by unassailable logic that since the golden days when Socrates cornholed Alcibiades, everyone with any taste or talent was queer) and their dinner at Delmonico’s (where León told with poignant entirely fabricated innocence how through his orphaned youth he’d yearned, to have a father and then looked up, moist-eyed and reverent, toward the slavering Fauconnier). While one is at it, one may also imagine their late evening conversation in Fauconnier’s suite, during which León reeled the fat cod in. León reclines like Mme Recamier on a silk-upholstered, blue-and-beige-striped chaise longue. Fauconnier, bleary with lust, has dragged a scrollarmed desk chair to within half a meter of León’s crotch, has clasped his hands firmly together to impede their premature activity, and has invited León to move in with him and to travel with him to Europe as soon as passages can be procured. León temporizes by declaring that he has no passport. Fauconnier lets his hands fly ceilingward, assures his dear fellow that such things can be remedied, what is money for? León looks down demurely and pleads that he feels so strongly drawn to M. Fauconnier that were they to live in close proximity, he might begin to feel, to do … Fauconnier grinds his teeth, manages to smile, to shrug avuncularly, and to whisper that there is nothing to fear in friendship, in the true friendship of men. Then León topples into sobs and confesses that he has already betrayed their friendship, and Fauconnier shudders, conjuring up the image of a youthful rival to whose muscular embraces León repairs each night. León confesses there is something terribly wrong with him, and Fauconnier glances mentally into a glossy tome filled with illustrations of scabrous maladies. Then, finally, León blurts out that he’s a morphine addict, and Fauconnier, unspeakably relieved—no, not just relieved, exultant, since he will have the wretched boy entirely in his power—reaches a trembling hand to León’s knee, calls him his dear, dear boy, grants him full absolution—“Ça! Ça n’est rien entre deux hommes du monde” —feels his hand tentatively touched in gratitude, in love, reaches it higher, transfers his buttocks to the chaise, leans forward, and flops, gasping and gaffed, in León’s net.
But if one is going to imagine all that, one is then obliged to imagine, one is forced to imagine, one is remorselessly compelled to imagine what follows in suite. An implacable and iron hand seizes one’s poor imagination and stuffs it down into the mess that follows next. One cannot help imagining a supine and unbuttoned León allowing those clear-lacquered fingers to roach over his flesh, letting that flabby body leach against his, permitting that bulbous lip to snail across his abdomen and clam his manhood. One is unable to avoid imagining León twitching his loins in uncontrolled, unfakable pleasure as several million of his potential sons and daughters spurt hotly onto Braquemard Fauconnier’s gold inlays. And one is powerless to blot out the image of León Fuertes kneeling before the chaise, resting his naked belly on the silk, submitting peacefully while the old pervert trowels cold cream onto his (León’s!) pouting bung, anoints his own puffy lob, and slides it in.
My father, León Fuertes, was a kept boy for three years—a Ganymede, a pederast, a gonzel. He delivered himself entirely to this profession, leaping with abandon to gross couplings, till Fauconnier wondered if he was truly a fresh convert and not a refugee from some Calcutta burdel who’d been at them from childhood. The acts, in themselves, would not have been degrading, but that they were inauthentic and done as self-punishment. León wasn’t gay, he wasn’t bi. He didn’t crave to have sex with men, he didn’t enjoy it. He flogged himself to it, against disgust, and later indulged in feasts of self-pity. He put on all the trappings: the twittered moues and languid mincings and simpering smirks, warping his mind so that his body altered. His voice mounted an octave, his hips rounded, his legs slimmed. He might have vaulted the sex barrier as cleanly as Rebeca had, but that he kept the organs he was born with. With Rebeca, the change occurred, and she adapted. León forced the change to procure defilement.
He went with Fauconnier to Europe on a fake passport with a phony name and a false nationality, luckily enough, or else the evil reputation that he won there might have blocked a return to himself and smashed his life. Nowhere on that decaying continent, not in Capri or fuming Venice, was there a more flagrant and disgusting swish. He mastered all the repertoire of vice, adding refinements of his own which would have shocked Gomorrah, and played on Fauconnier, wasting his body and reducing him into an idiocy of sexual dependence wherein León was able to extort large sums for this or that caress and get away with any infidelity or insult. His public behavior was a perambulating scandal up and down the Côte d’Azur. He referred to himself loudly in the feminine gender, flirted in blatant glee with handsome waiters, squealed sluttish epithets in packed cafés, and boasted of his loves, some real, some fancied, with a shamelessness and wealth of filthy detail that embarrassed even other perverts. At Cannes he rose from a winning hand at baccarat to embrace the croupier, kiss him on the lips, run mousy fingers down his shirt front and inside his pants, so that the poor man had convulsions, and the cards and chips went flying, and the game broke up, and León was whisked rudely from the building and warned on pain of jail never to step inside again. In Nice he put on drag and captivated a thirty-nine-year-old Wyoming cattleman, a dead ringer for Gary Cooper and as straight a man as ever pulled on boots. He’d heard about those Frenchy wimmin and their wiles, but he’d never bought much of it till he met the real McCoy, and León led him a terrific chase: check-to-cheek dancing under smoldering stars while saxophones moaned passion and the sea lapped softly at the smooth stones of the plage; hand-holding midnight strolls along the Promenade des Anglais; slow horsecab rides to nowhere punctuated by deep endless kisses; and at length, an intimate rendezvous, at which León (Léona to the gringo), pleading virginity and fear of pregnancy, stayed fully clothed but made him profusely happy with a triad of concatenated blow jobs. That night the man proposed. The next day León met him for lunch on the well-frequented Negresco terrace and (between the pâté and the sole amandine) pitched him to gibbering, foam-flecked lunacy by removing first earrings, then silky lashes, then lip rouge, then auburn wig, and then frock, so that before the maitre d’hôte hustled him off, León stood a moment in male bathing costume, thrusting the pouched proof of his virility into the gringo’s face. And in Villefranche one night he took on the entire starboard watch of a Greek frigate. He delighted in seducing married men, in splitting pairs of homosexual lovers, in debauching schoolboys, and he vaunted his conquests proudly, as though there were no finer thing in all the world than to have been reamed by every dingus in the south of France.
Actually, he stewed in self-loathing. His pose of shamelessness drenched him with shame, in which he soaked as punishment for shameful actions. Hence be was drawn to that particular class of thug (homos themselves, if often latent ones) who like abusing queers. He would pursue them—pimps, degenerates, the rankest sewer flotsam—and beg for love, or attempt fondling, till, whining and blubbering, he got his longed-for beating. And so, as yet another step in his descent, he put himself in bondage to such a type, a certain minor gangster of Toulon called Dédé-le-julot. He fell in love with Dédé, that kind of love whose gratification is injury and humiliation, a coprophagous love engendered by its object’s foulness. He left Fauconnier and became one of Dédé’s cocaine pushers.
This move paid him abundant dividends of squalor. Dédé abused him with satisfying regularity and cruelty. Dédé reviled him. When one of Dédé’s streetwalkers fished a particularly kinky client, Dédé made León accommodate the fellow. And when Dédé staged exhibitions in the shuttered barroom of a hôtel de passe, León’s was the main act in the repertory. Sconced on a mattress ringed by sweating men and prospecting harlots, he played Desdemona to a Mauritanian longshoreman, a marvelously well-equipped performer whose sole thespian defect was that he tended to become personally involved in the drama and to jam prologue, rising action, and catastrophe into three frenzied minutes. Thus León clawed himself down into the slough of degradation. Thus he indulged himself, for self-hatred is a mark of pride, and León surely cared about himself immensely to take such pains in his defilement. He did everything, absolutely everything, to lower himself.
At length he reached bottom.64 One night as he lay whimpering in his room—a cubicle in a weary old fornicatorium beside the harbor in Toulon—his grandmother Rosenda and his great-grandmother Raquel and his great-great-grandmother Rosalba came to him, although he saw them not, and brought him a kind of clearness. He remembered his bright promise and reviewed his terrible descent, his headlong fall which was no accident of chance but freely sought. He looked at himself with the eyes of that young León who had seen the bums and perverts of La Cuenca, his drunken stepfather, Florencio Merluza, for example, or the abject sweeper of the cheap cantina where Merluza drank. And these seemed decent men worthy to wear God’s image beside the 1940 model León Fuertes.
Then León wished himself a dung beetle or a toad or any crawling thing to which such baseness might be native, but there was nothing lower than himself and nowhere lower to descend to. And so he got up from his bed and went past the window—which let in the warm breeze of the May night and the immemorial raucous bruit of harbor revelry—and took his razor from the shelf above the washstand and cut his throat. He looked in the stained mirror, smiled sickly at himself, and cut his throat. He laid the edge of his razor against his flesh above the bridge of his clavicle and cut his throat. But no blood flowed. He pried the gash apart with his fingers and stared into it and rubbed it with his knuckles, but his veins refused to bleed.
Then León thought that he was dead and gone to hell. He had died the same night as Rosario and had been in hell ever since. One of his suicide attempts had worked, and he had dropped into a proper Christian hell where incest was punished with imaginative rigor for eternity. His damnation would drag on across the eons, on and on without release.
While he was thinking this, he watched the deep slash in his throat pucker and heal, and this recalled the way his wounds had healed years before on the Fort Shafter ball field. Then León suddenly decided he had gone to hell alive, not dead, that he had written his own ticket for the trip, but that something inside him had remained unsoiled and uncorrupted. Next he decided he had indulged himself enough in that kind of tourism, that it was time to search for a route back. He looked at himself in the mirror and laughed, half bitterly but half in cheer as well, and decided that he had seen some things of interest but that wherever he went from now on, he would not pass this way again. Then he bathed himself as thoroughly as he could and left that place and his morphine and his syringe and his life of shame. A few hours later the Wehrmacht smashed into France and furnished him a path to reclamation.
13. Journey
IT IS NOT KNOWN if Churchill, when he offered the British blood, sweat, and tears, considered these detergents. We are accustomed to regard them soiling agents, and so they are in all too many cases. But they can cleanse as well. Some stains can be expunged only in blood. Sweat works for others. Tears are fine solvents too, if they be tears of grief and not self-pity. Besides these, many heinous blots are washed away in the adrenaline of fury. León Fuertes bathed in these hot fluids for five years and emerged clean.
War is an evil, or is thought so now. Love is a good, or so it’s held to be. But nothing in this world is pure or simple, nothing is absolute, no general truth obtains in every case. Love has ruined millions—war, which is mostly waste, sometimes preserves. Such was the case with León.
In late June, 1940, when he’d recovered from the torments of morphine withdrawal, my father, León Fuertes, lay, feeble and penniless, in a flophouse in Marseilles, more or less in the same moral condition as the French Republic: after years of self-indulgence and excess he was defeated and dishonored. Then his three military ancestors65 came to him in a dream. General Feliciano Luna wore the stylized vaquero outfit with twin six-guns in which he had been decked with a bogus presidential sash in La Merced in 1883. General Epifanio Mojón wore the blue uniform of a subaltern in Simon Bolivar’s army. General Isidro Bodega, who had never seen a battle, not even from a distance, was the most resplendent of the three, festooned with glittering stars and decorations and dangles of gold braid. He stayed in the background and said nothing. The others talked of war.
War, said General Epifanio Mojón, appeared a monstrous evil to all men of worth—that is, men who had work to do and loved ones to care for. It came to the worthless, though, wearing the mantle of a savior. In war, the general said, worth didn’t matter. One man was as good as the next for filling up a rank and stopping bullets, and if it came to close quarters, the worst men were the best. And there was plenty of fresh death about to cure all past remorse. War was a resurrection.
