Читать книгу Satori in Paris and Pic - Jack Kerouac - Страница 11

IT’S HARD TO DECIDE WHAT TO TELL IN A STORY, AND I always seem to try to prove something, comma, about my sex. Let’s forget it. It’s just that sometimes I get terribly lonely, for the companionship of a woman dingblast it.

So I spend all day in St.-Germain looking for the perfect bar and I find it. La Gentilhommière (Rue St. André des Arts, which is pointed out to me by a gendarme)—Bar of the Gentle Lady—And how gentle can you get with soft blonde hair all golden sprayed and neat little figure? “O I wish I was handsome” I say but they all assure me I’m handsome—“Alright then I’m a dirty old drunk” —“Anything you want to say”—

I gaze into her eyes—I give her the double whammy blue eyes compassion shot—She falls for it.

A teenage Arab girl from Algiers or Tunis comes in, with a soft little hook nose. I’m going out of my mind because meanwhile I’m exchanging a hundred thousand French pleasantries and conversations with Negro Princes from Senegal, Breton Surrealist poets, boulevardiers in perfect clothes, lecherous gynecologists (from Brittany), a Greek bartender angel called Zorba, and the owner is Jean Tassart cool and calm by his cash register and looking vaguely depraved (tho actually a quiet family man who happens to look like Rudy Loval my old buddy in Lowell Massachusetts who’d had such a reputation at fourteen for his many amours and had that same perfume of smoothy looks). Not to mention Daniel Maratra the other bartender, some weird tall Jew or Arab, in any case a Semite, whose name sounded like the trumpets in front of the walls of Granada: and a gentler tender of bar you never saw.

In the bar there’s a woman who is a lovely 40-year-old redhead Spaniard amoureuse who takes an actual liking to me, does worse and takes me seriously, and actually makes a date for us to meet alone: I get drunk and forget. Over the speaker is coming endless American modern jazz over a tape. To make up for forgetting to meet Valarino (the redhead Spanish beauty) I buy her a tapestry on the Quai, from a young Dutch genius, ten bucks (Dutch genius whose name in Dutch, Beere, means “pier” in English). She announces she’s going to redecorate her room on account of it but doesnt invite me over. What I woulda done to her shall not be allowed in this Bible yet it woulda been spelled L O V E.

I get so mad I go down to the whore districts. A million Apaches with daggers are milling around. I go in a hallway and I see three ladies of the night. I announce with an evil English leer “Sh’prend la belle brunette” (I take the pretty brunette)—The brunette rubs her eyes, throat, ears and heart and says “I aint gonna have that no more.” I stomp away and take out my Swiss Army knife with the cross on it, because I suspect I’m being followed by French muggers and thugs. I cut my own finger and bleed all over the place. I go back to my hotel room bleeding all over the lobby. The Swiss woman by now is asking me when I’m going to leave. I say “I’ll leave as soon as I’ve verified my family in the library.” (And add to myself: “What do you know about les Lebris de Kérouacks and their motto of Love Suffer and Work you dumb old Bourgeois bag.”)