Leper Tango Read online

  My descent into the catacombs of St-Denis started by way of Place du Chatelet, pushing through the Friday night shoppers until the wide square narrowed into a tubular stretch between Pas du Grand Cerf and Aboukir, where the commerce of whoring began in earnest, and continued through to its North end at the Porte St-Denis. No sign of the arid spheres of Paris society. The wellbred gallantries of better quarters yielding to a buttery river of sperm, blood, skin and vomit gushing upstream towards Montmartre, where St-Denis himself was decapitated, prior to walking across the city carrying his detached head in his hands.

  I caught sight of her as I rounded onto Boulevard Sebastopol. She looked all right. Knew how to strike a pose. Casual, swinging a purse, smoking a cigarette. Something mundane and day-to-day in it. A veteran Parisian whore. I’m out doing my job. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a cunt for sale.

  I offered her a cigarette. What’s your name? Francine, she cooed, culling out of her mental catalogue. What’s yours? Oh, Franck, I answered out of my own brochure of duplicity, and bang, the contract was sealed. Francine and Franck. Just a nice couple having a chat on a Parisian trottoir. How’s your cunt, Francine? Just fine, Franck. I’ve let fourteen men stick their dick in it this morning, and I’ve sucked t went y-six cocks. Are you available still? Of course. But, do you have special requests, she said, with a side glance to see whether I had a hard on or not. Judging from the knife scar down her left cheek, she had good reason to be a little careful. “Tu as l ’air correct,” she concluded.

  We moved up rue Réaumur together, Francine half a step ahead. She had ink-black hair which flowed to her shoulders in rivulets. I imagined her dancing tango in an obscure, ill-lit private club, somewhere on the Iberian peninsula, then being expelled for performing fellatio on the instructor as his wife walked through the door.

  At St-Denis, she turned North, me following in tow, until we arrived at an entrance located at 143 bis, which led into a narrow outside corridor. We continued five or six more paces, her buttocks swivelling between two musty walls. Then, a showcase window, blocked by venetian blinds. A red neon sign advertised Thai massages, blow-up dolls, aphrodisiacs.

  “Here. In here.”

  She drew back a curtain in the doorway, and we entered a long room set up as a film theatre, with a dozen fold-up chairs arranged into a haphazard semblance of rows. The screen at the opposite end was an off-white bedsheet nailed to a sheet of plywood. As we sat down, the bicycle chain tackety tack of a thirty year old sixteen mm projector announced the showing. At first, nothing but light, which briefly exposed two long yellow streaks across the middle of the screen before the film began.

  “Très kitsch,” she said, but the tone of kitsch implied it was perched near the apex of her pyramid of values. I caught sight of an old man in the far corner, his pants at his ankles, jacking off. The film was in black-and-white, an ancient silent movie, other than the player piano jangling in the background. A long dead porno idol dressed in white lingerie sat in a chair of a far West saloon, her breasts partially exposed over a half-cup bra. A second woman entered the saloon, dressed in the Charleston style, smiled, then, a propos of nothing in particular, bent over the knees of the f irst woman, who began thwack ing her on the ass with a wooden ping-pong paddle. The projector briefly sputtered, then shifted into another scene. The same feminine duo, now clad as Austrian frauleins, on all fours, being walked on hunting grounds by a thick-necked moustachioed man wearing a green leather jacket, peasant hunting cap, carrying a boar spear.

  Meanwhile, Francine had crawled to her knees and was now facing me. She leaned over, stuck her hand inside her purse, pulled out a condom and a small plastic glass.

  “What’s that for?” “Something special.”

  She pushed her index finger and thumb inside her mouth around her upper gums. A clicking sound like a suction pump pulling on the roof of her mouth. A full set of dentures popped out of her mouth and into the glass.

  “Sthpethial,” she lisped, wrapping her gums around my cock. Lifting three fingers upwards. I slipped three hundred franc notes between her index and forefinger. Glanced over at the old man, still industriously jacking off in the front rows of the makeshift theatre. A look of ragged intent on his face, as if summoning the troops for one last charge into the German lines on the Marne river. His trenchcoat rising and falling. A tent in a nor‘wester gale, flushing shit and mud across a no man’s land. Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.

  “Ca va?”

  “Sure. Go for it.”

  Later, she asked me whether I had access to a computer. As a matter of fact I do, Francine. Here, then take this. She pulled a f loppy disk out of her purse and slipped it into my jacket pocket. Goodbye, Franck. Enjoy. Then evaporated. The way they all did. I drifted down rue Aboukir, my mind nowhere, until I fell on Clér y and the now familiar nocturnal spectre of the Société Parisienne des Boutons. De Vecchi was entering his apartment on the third floor, wearing nothing but a sweat-stained undershirt over grey jogging pants, the exposed portion of his torso protected by enough hair to turn an orangutang green with env y. The door closed behind him.

  As I passed by Ducastin-Chanel’s door on the sixth floor, I could hear her cajoling her cat.

  “Descend, descend,” she squawked, “combien de fois je t’ai déjà dit, minou? Come and see madame Claude.”

  I entered the flat, reached for one of the four bottles of Côte du Rhône perched on the tile counter, poured out a glass, drained it. I repeated the process three times. I f lipped open the laptop, pushed in the diskette and opened the file. The screen burst into a pyrotechnic display of a garbage dump. This was succeeded by a panoramic shot of screeching seagulls unleashing shit pellets onto the shell of a giant Galápagos tortoise. Then a flash onto a clip of another spanking scene. Then a shot of Hitler being appeased by an obsequious, arse-bending crew of Iron-cross bearing senile generals. Suddenly, an eclipse. Followed by a whore jacking off a donkey. All shot with a hand-held camera by someone suffering from a nervous disorder.

  I lit a cigarette, walked to the window overlooking the Société Parisienne des Boutons. Across the way, all the textile operations closed for the evening. On the third floor, one room alight. A forty-ish man, shoulder-length hair, skinny as a rockstar, reptilian features, swatting a girl. Her head was bowed, in complete submission to him. He was toady, pock-marked. Whatever had happened to him had been used as barter material to acquire his air of authority. As much as anyone could own anything, he owned the girl. She had given up her liberty. Whatever. I turned out the light, lay on my cot and lit a cigarette.

  A fter a while, thoughts once again channelling through ducts and micro-vessels in a chaotic harmony that suited me. Déjà vus. The usual thoughts aborted by short circuiting of the cerebral vectors. Memories of whores. Nothing but whores. The whole planet crawling with cunt for sale, or cunts selling shit, or shitheads looking for cunt, and me only one john in a buyers’ market, and unable to meet the supply, unable to satisfy all the cocksuckers in the world who just wanted my jism and my cash, and wanted to suck it out of me as soon as possible.

  The rain was falling again, splashes pinging off the aluminum roof, bouncing off so loudly that I recalled a similar time, in the St-Regis Hotel, San Francisco, after being dumped by my first wife, Donna, and was just getting ready to take a mental elevator up seventy-five floors, fuelled by some high-octane blotter acid. Four hours, I was married to a whore named Donna. After a four-hour engagement. Then it was over.

  I was awoken by the Portuguese concierge who had come to collect the rent. Yes, she added, as an afterthought, this also came for you. It was postmarked from Bourque, concerning a character reference for my disbarment hearing. He was quite matter of fact about the whole thing, seemed more interested in knowing whether I was still frequenting that lovely nymphette he had once seen with me in the old port. Followed by a brief codicil, congratulating me on my return to the city: “I remember my years in Paris were constantly plagued by the
imminent prospect of financial difficulty. But, to my mind, the price was trifling. Paris is its own reward, Robinson. Just hang in there and ENJOY EVERY MINUTE. Daily life can appear banal occasionally, but don't let that happen. All those flirtatious glances in the gutters of Pigalle — Jesus, I’d concede disbarment three times over just to leer one last time into the eyes of those shameless tarts ...”

  Bourque, my seventy year old mentor, handing down his last piece of nostalgia from the annals of his own depravity, still salivating at the prospect of an ultimate, mind, body or soul-wracking experience.

  But, I was too far away, another anonymous john in a whore of a city. Whore writ large in every nook and cranny. You could see the whore in the most erudite comments of the oldest member of the Académie Française. You could hear it in every discourse pronounced by the politicians, judges, clerg y and the journalists. It looked to me like everybody was on the take, one way or another, which eased the pressure considerably.

  Not that I was in better shape just because I had a clear read on things. I was a john, which by definition meant I would empt y my wallet when my prick was standing on end. I could see the confidence trick, deconstruct it as my contemporaries would put it, but I far preferred to believe the whore when she claimed it was all about beauty, when I knew damn well it was and always had been about cash up front.

  They were lined up in their usual postures in le paradis club on rue des Martyrs. Six tiny broads perched on stools. All wearing miniskirts, all between johns, all of them indistinguishable. Fungible goods. Girls from the 18th arrondissement or from the provinces. Girls who just didn’t have the hand-eye coordination or the drive to become Monoprix cashiers. Cleopatra bartender. An awning of indigo bangs hanging over her forehead. Scarlet lipstick burnishing a ghoulish complexion.

  Despite being twice the size of anyone in the place, I managed to fit in after a while. That was easy enough.

  Order a beer. Light a cigarette. Say nothing. Tip the girls. Become listless. Do nothing. After a week, I fit right in with the ersatz Rodin sculptures and the velvet table tops.

  I had taken to carrying a book of Hieronymus Bosch paintings during my wandering. A detail of the left wing of the Garden of Earthly Delights peered out from page 73. The painting depicts a bird-headed monster devouring damned souls, then defecating them into a chamber pot, after which they fall into a foul pit. The seven deadly sins hover obsequiously around the monster. The slothful man visited in his bed by demons. The glutton forced to vomit into the pit. Vanity viewing her reflection in the backside of the devil.

  After an hour or so, I waved one of them towards a curtained door way. She led me through, up a set of stairs, then along a hallway to one of the rear bedrooms.

  She opened the door with an old skeleton key. Two counter-clockwise revolutions, then inside. What’s your pleasure, sir? W hat’s your name? Zazie. That’s not a name. What’s your real name? Alena. What’s your pleasure, sir? My pleasure is another room. That’s impossible.

  Next time, I want a room looking out over the street.

  You have to ask Yannick. Who is Yannick? The guy at the door. He’s not a client? A client? Ha! Pauvre con. Then, more impatiently, as if expecting Yannick to kick the door down, what do you want? Une pipe? Get to the point, m’sieur. I don’t have all night.

  “There was a Sheba who worked here once.” She laughed.

  “Oh, ça alors. Look, I have to go back to work.” “When’s the last time you spoke to her?”

  “Listen, you want something special, something you’ve never tried, two thousand francs. Sinon, faites pas chier le monde, OK?”

  II

  I was back in the city for my own reasons, but those reasons would take care of themselves in good time. Meanwhile, the cafés were there, and you could remain inside for as long or as little as you liked, no questions asked. The café denizens acted like they were members of Masonic orders, or provided unnamed but extremely essential ser vices, or were in on the latest conspiracy to end civilizations. At the same time, there was a certain humility to their arrogance. Which is to say, none of them spent their time telling you they were going to reinvent the wheel or change the world. It’s pretty hard to take it personally if someone brags about seven generations of his family cleaning sewers or pouring béchamel into Croque Monsieur sandwiches.

  I followed a default nocturnal trajectory which took me through the sleazier ends of the St-Denis and Montmartre quarters. Down the stairs of N° 2 rue de Mulhouse, out the thick porte cochère horsegate door, onto the rue des jeuneurs, which I followed up to boulevard Mont-martre. Ten million people in the city, and never more than t wo or three desolate f igures on the street of fasters.

  The pure desolation of the street, its name, the grime of the couscous palace at the end of the road, provided me with the backdrop I required to review a set of apparently random facts which had accumulated in my mind. The facts were simple, when placed one in front of the other. They added up to my life. But, taken together, they lost all meaning, became more indecipherable than Boolean algebra.

  My thoughts by now had carried me well into the backwash of the 9th arrondissement, and into a twentyfour hour café in the Faubourg Montmartre called Le Bled, owned by a Marseillais second-tier mafia racketeer known as Coco Lunettes. Ghassim, a hundred and thirty kilo gorilla from Chad, surveyed proceedings from the entrance. A group of Africans were jamming franc pieces into illegal slot machines near the bar.

  I parked myself at the counter beside a grey-haired paunchy man wearing a tweed cap.

  He held a large goblet of Leffe beer in his right hand, and was staring fiercely at his companion, a middle-aged Asian gentleman. His listener looked to be Vietnamese. Thick-lensed glasses. Dressed Camus existential. Camus existential had always been a big look for the Asian crowd. A halfway ground bet ween inscrutability and pessimism as a fashion statement.

  “Meteor, Khaled,” I ordered. “Good evening, Mr Robinson.”

  The old man at the counter beside me struck me right away as one of those sour lefties from the sixties who figured they were Picasso or Che Guevara for whatever reason, and rained their bitterness on the world. “Diderot was right, mon cher ami. ‘L’art est au fond des testicules’.”

  He turned and snarled in my direction: “What do you have to say about that, monsieur l ’américain?”

  “You’ve pretty well covered the topic.” The Asian man waved him silent.

  “Allez, du calme. Roger, this gentleman is not responsible for whatever ails you.”

  He extended his hand in my direction.

  “Allow me to introduce myself. Victor Tranh. Chairman of the unoff icial ninth arrondissement club of reprobates and degenerates. Merde de la merde. Santé.

  And your name?”

  “Franck Robinson. Reprobate.”

  He raised his glass as a toast.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Sure. Victor Tranh. Chairman of the reprobates.”

  "No, Franck Robinson. I am the son of Vo Nguyen

  Giap, the man responsible for the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.”

  “And only a Phu people remember who your father is?”

  Victor Tranh laughed. Like mice in an attic. Unexpected and irritating.

  “Hee, hee. That is very funny, Robinson. So, you have a sense of humour. Excellent, for I am convinced that your life is a disaster.”

  He scrutinised me for a moment.

  “You’ve done time, haven’t you?”

  “You ask a lot of questions.”

  “Let me offer you a beer.”

  “Sure.”

  Roger the leftie had drifted towards the exit door of Le Bled, where he was banging angrily at the flippers of a vintage pinball machine called Bon Voyage. For a minute or two, Victor Tranh directed his clinical gaze at Roger the leftie while tossing back his Leffe, then turned towards me.

  “You ever feel loneliness, Robinson?”

  “Sure, we’re all a
lone in the end. That’s lonely enough.”

  “Loneliness is a funny thing. It has nothing to do with being physically alone. It’s realizing that, no matter what you do, nobody even comes from the same planet.

  It can get lonely at times. Sometimes, the loneliness gets so intense, you become attached to it. In a perverse way.

  Then, when it lessens, it becomes hard again. Beer?”

  “Beer.”

  “What brings you to Paris?”

  “Just passing through.”

  “What’s her name?”

  He wiped the beer off his mouth with the sleeve of his trenchcoat.

  “No one just passes through the Faubourg Montmartre. This place is for people who fall off the planet.

  Maybe you should share your story. With a friend.”

  It was the way people talked nowadays. Share your

  story. No story to share. I had taken up with a whore named Sheba, then did the rest of what followed. Sheba.

  A lifer. Someone who really believed in it as both art and craft. You never read about people who answer a calling anymore. One hundred and forty-three titles on billiards listed in Books in Print. The perfect carem. The champion players. The crowds. The best tournaments.

  Nothing on whores. Who gives the best head. The oldest whore in the world. The managers and agents. No customer surveys. No instruction manuals. In a spoon-fed universe, whoring was the last refuge of the autodidact.

  “Why do you think people talk like that these days?”

  “Like what?” “You know. Share your story.”

  “You don’t want to share your story?”

  Victor Tranh now turned to the remainder of the six drunken clients in the bar.

  “Il s’appelle Franck Robinson. He has no story to share!!”

  I’d spent enough time in Southeast Asia to know the place was as good at producing lunatics as any other part of the planet. Tranh ’s laugh now a rodential flood of scavengers racing into a cellar after a block of Roquefort.