frustration over everything. Berlin was hell. He thought of that essay Nietzsche had cobbled together in the last sane year of his life after he fell out with Wagner. Nietzsche Contra Wagner. Loeser Contra Blumstein. Loeser Contra Omnes .
How did Lavicini feel when he left Venice? How long did he think he’d be gone? Did he have the slightest fear that he might die in a foreign land?
All right, Loeser decided. Fuck it.
Paris.
3
PARIS, 1934
‘Dear Mother and Father. Good news: I am rich. I have cornered the market in foreskins.’ Scramsfield sat outside a café on the Rue de l’Odéon, trying to convince himself that, really, it was a blessing that the plan had failed, and the first of his consolations was that he could never have told his parents. ‘I have given up literary ambitions for ever now that the tender hatbands of newborn boys have brought me a different sort of fame. I can walk into any bar in Paris and straight away there is a shout of, “Ho, drinks on the house for the snozzle tycoon of the Champs-Élysées!” ’ No. Impossible.
But of course he needn’t have been so explicit: he could just have said he was in the medico-cosmetic supplies business. Which would have been true. According to the Armenian, half the foreskins were going to be mashed up into a skin cream and the other half used as grafts to heal burns and pressure sores and venous ulcers. The reason that old women and private hospitals would pay thousands of francs for an ounce of penis carpaccio was that apparently the cells of a fresh baby were still so vague that they’d melt benignly into any old forehead or thigh. It sounded like voodoo, like medieval popes drinking infants’ blood to put off death, but after some consideration Scramsfield had decided he believed it: he only had to think of himself in 1929, getting his first sight of Le Havre from the deck of the Melchior , to remember that as a new arrival you would shake hands with anyone you met as if they were your best friend. The Armenian had explained that there was no particular reason it had to be the foreskin; it could just as well be the belly fat, except that of course the foreskin was normally the only disposable part of the kid, whereupon Scramsfield had wondered what he meant by ‘normally’; but anyway, that was what distinguished it from the famous monkey gland racket, where the idea was that you couldn’t sew just any part of the monkey into a man’s sac, it had to be the inventory of the monkey’s own sac, so you’d get all the relevant endocrinal juices.
Perhaps ‘racket’ was the wrong word. Scramsfield had a friend called Weitz who was a dentist. (He often left his consonants half formed when he spoke, as if his mouth were wide open; Scramsfield had once asked him about it and he said it was the same as how if you lived in a foreign country for long enough, you started to pick up the accent.) Last year Weitz had published a short but influential article in the European Journal of Anaesthesiology , and as a result he’d been invited to dinner with the famous Dr Serge Voronoff up at the Château Grimaldi, where an animal trainer from a bankrupt circus was employed to run the monkey-breeding operation that took up most of the grounds. Weitz reported that Voronoff truly believed in what he was doing: he truly believed that he could give a man an extra twenty or thirty years of life – and ruffian sexual prowess – by hiding a monkey testicle like a contraband package between the man’s own pair. ‘You are only as old as your glands,’ he would say. For years, the patients had queued up: he’d grafted presidents and maharajahs and the Duke of Westminster’s dog and even, it was rumoured, Pope Pius XII, which made you wonder just what it was about that particular job that made you so desperate to postpone the big meeting you had scheduled with your boss. And now that everyone else had finally realised the whole thing was nonsense, and its inventor
How did Lavicini feel when he left Venice? How long did he think he’d be gone? Did he have the slightest fear that he might die in a foreign land?
All right, Loeser decided. Fuck it.
Paris.
3
PARIS, 1934
‘Dear Mother and Father. Good news: I am rich. I have cornered the market in foreskins.’ Scramsfield sat outside a café on the Rue de l’Odéon, trying to convince himself that, really, it was a blessing that the plan had failed, and the first of his consolations was that he could never have told his parents. ‘I have given up literary ambitions for ever now that the tender hatbands of newborn boys have brought me a different sort of fame. I can walk into any bar in Paris and straight away there is a shout of, “Ho, drinks on the house for the snozzle tycoon of the Champs-Élysées!” ’ No. Impossible.
But of course he needn’t have been so explicit: he could just have said he was in the medico-cosmetic supplies business. Which would have been true. According to the Armenian, half the foreskins were going to be mashed up into a skin cream and the other half used as grafts to heal burns and pressure sores and venous ulcers. The reason that old women and private hospitals would pay thousands of francs for an ounce of penis carpaccio was that apparently the cells of a fresh baby were still so vague that they’d melt benignly into any old forehead or thigh. It sounded like voodoo, like medieval popes drinking infants’ blood to put off death, but after some consideration Scramsfield had decided he believed it: he only had to think of himself in 1929, getting his first sight of Le Havre from the deck of the Melchior , to remember that as a new arrival you would shake hands with anyone you met as if they were your best friend. The Armenian had explained that there was no particular reason it had to be the foreskin; it could just as well be the belly fat, except that of course the foreskin was normally the only disposable part of the kid, whereupon Scramsfield had wondered what he meant by ‘normally’; but anyway, that was what distinguished it from the famous monkey gland racket, where the idea was that you couldn’t sew just any part of the monkey into a man’s sac, it had to be the inventory of the monkey’s own sac, so you’d get all the relevant endocrinal juices.
Perhaps ‘racket’ was the wrong word. Scramsfield had a friend called Weitz who was a dentist. (He often left his consonants half formed when he spoke, as if his mouth were wide open; Scramsfield had once asked him about it and he said it was the same as how if you lived in a foreign country for long enough, you started to pick up the accent.) Last year Weitz had published a short but influential article in the European Journal of Anaesthesiology , and as a result he’d been invited to dinner with the famous Dr Serge Voronoff up at the Château Grimaldi, where an animal trainer from a bankrupt circus was employed to run the monkey-breeding operation that took up most of the grounds. Weitz reported that Voronoff truly believed in what he was doing: he truly believed that he could give a man an extra twenty or thirty years of life – and ruffian sexual prowess – by hiding a monkey testicle like a contraband package between the man’s own pair. ‘You are only as old as your glands,’ he would say. For years, the patients had queued up: he’d grafted presidents and maharajahs and the Duke of Westminster’s dog and even, it was rumoured, Pope Pius XII, which made you wonder just what it was about that particular job that made you so desperate to postpone the big meeting you had scheduled with your boss. And now that everyone else had finally realised the whole thing was nonsense, and its inventor
Similar Books
