NIEW INNOCENTS ABROAD
275
choregos of it all: when one of the young American literati made
his
pilgrimage to the Master, the old Protestant presented him with a
copy of
Corydon
(which promulgates another and much more
Spartan kind of homosexuality), and waved a solemn admonitory
finger in the young man's face:
«Ie ne suis pas tapette, Monsieur,
je suis pederaste."
By an entirely consistent stroke of luck I had descended upon a
small hotel on the Left Bank where I was surrounded by the gay
boys. My room was just under the roof, where far into the night
their whispers drifted up to me from below. I never heard a girl's
voice at night all the time I was in that hotel. In daylight, mostly
in the afternoon, I used to run into them · as they came gowned
from the bath, trailing a thick cloud of perfume behind them all the
length of the hallway, pausing to rake me with the classic stare of
the tailor threading the eye of his needle. It wasn't all fun for them,
though: a few months before, one of them, the vein in his wrist cut,
had been fished out of the bathtub by the
patron
and sent off to an
asylum outside Paris; he had been released after a month or so and
was now back at the hotel; the
patron
did not mind, for the young
man had paid his rent regularly, and the attempted suicide had
made no
scandale-there
had only been the trouble of washing the
bathtub. The incident gave the hotel something of a macabre legend
for me as I lay awake at night listening to the whispers. I was un–
easy enough anyway: it seemed to me I had strayed into the wrong
place, a close-knit family in which I was bound to feel myself a
stranger, and inevitably with the stranger's uneasy feeling that
there is something wrong with him when he does not fit in.
The great advantage of travel is that it scrambles everything.
In the compartments of trains, busses, the smoking-rooms of ships,
you rub elbows with all the inconceivable types that you normally
do not meet back home. New York is a megalopolis divided and sub–
divided again into thousands of isolated communities among which
the homosexual has established his own city of night. You catch
enough glimpses of it, but you are never living
in
it, because your
own groove holds you so snugly that you forget the enormously
different human worlds that surround you. But travel scrambles
everything, and here, three thousand miles from home, I was
im–
mersed in their city of night through all the accidents of voyage
