Free How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired by Dany Laferrière Page B

the proof.”
    She rummages through her bag and pulls out a balled-up piece of paper. Then wipes off her lipstick with it and throws it away, into the rain.
    HER ROOM is upstairs, across from her younger sister’s (a Roy Orbison groupie). Posters of Roy everywhere. Roy at the National Arts Centre. She pinned a tiny photo on the picture of Roy that covers the whole left side of the room: two suntanned girls hitch-hiking with their tops off. Roy at the Peterborough Memorial Centre, with a certain Vicky. Roy at the Lord Beaverbrook (this time she wrote “Roy Roy Roy” on the poster in black felt-tip pen). Roy at Toronto’s Massey Hall and the Winnipeg Concert Hall (consumption in the hall that night: one ton of marijuana). The last concert was on Vicky’s sixteenth birthday. On a Roy poster she scrawled in eyebrow pencil, “I just feel like killing myself.”
    â€œThose are Penny’s things, she’s my younger sister. She’s really crazy. She’s on tour now with Men at Work.”
    Miz Literature puts on a Simon and Garfunkel record and runs off to the bathroom to dry her hair. I stay in her room. Cushions everywhere. All kinds of colors. Left-over from the sit-in days of the seventies. Books piled up on the floor next to an old Telefunken record player. To the left, facing the door, a large walnut wardrobe. Reproductions: a beautiful Brueghel. An Utamaro by the window. A splendid Piranese, two Hokusai prints and in the corner by the library (made of bricks and boards) a precious Holbein. By her bedside, against the pink wall, Miz Literature placed a large photo of Virginia Woolf taken in 1939 by Gisèle Freund at Monk House, Rodwell, Sussex.
    I CAN hear the water running in the bathroom sink. Private sounds. A wet body. The luxury of soft Anglo-Saxon intimacy. Big red-brick house with walls scaled by ivy. English lawn. Victorian calm. Deep armchairs. Old daguerreotypes. The patina of antiques. Shiny black piano. Engravings from another age. Group portrait with corgis. Bankers (double chin and monocle) playing cricket. Portraits of young girls with long, fine, sickly features. Diplomat in pith helmet posted to New Delhi. Odor of Calcutta. This house breathes calm, tranquility, order. The order of the pillagers of Africa. Britannia rules the waves. Everything here has its place—except me. I’m here for the sole purpose of fucking the daughter. Therefore, I too have my place. I’m here to fuck the daughter of these haughty diplomats who once whacked us with their sticks. I wasn’t there at the time of course, but what do you want, history hasn’t been good to us, but we can always use it as an aphrodisiac.
    MIZ LITERATURE walks into the room. Tired but still smiling. I’m lucky to have found her.
    â€œSherry?”
    â€œSherry.”
    â€œWhat would you like to hear?”
    â€œFurey.”
    â€œSherry with Furey.”

A Description of My Room
at 3670 Rue St-Denis
    BESSIE SMITH (1894–1937), Chattanooga, Tennessee. Poor Bessie. I’m so down-hearted, heart-broken too. I’m stretched out on the river bottom (“Mississippi Floods”), with the songs of the cotton pickers for a lullaby. The Mississippi invented the blues. Every note holds a drop of water. A drop of Bessie’s blood. “When it rained five days and the sky turned black as night / When it thundered and lightninged and the wind began to blow. . .”
    Poor Bessie. Poor Mississippi. Poor muddy-water girl. Poor Bessie with her lynched heart. Black bodies running with sweat, bent over the snowy grace of the cotton. Black bodies shining sensual, beaten by the cruel wind of the Deep South. Two hundred years of desire thrown together, boxed in, piled up and sent down the Mississippi in the hold of a riverboat. Black desire obsessed with pubescent white flesh. Desire reined in like a mad dog. Desire flaming up. Desire for the white woman.
    â€œWhat’s happening