Boris Vian: Don't Trust the Band

Nightclub patrons, don’t trust the band!

You arrive there, in a good mood, well dressed, the right cologne, and happy with life because you have had a nice meal. You sit yourself down at a comfortable table, a mouth-watering cocktail in front of you. you have taken off your expensive warm overcoat. You arrange your furs, jewellery, and accessories as you take a look around. You smile. You start to relax… You look at your neighbour’s corsage, and think that while you are dancing you might move in on her… you ask her to dance… and your troubles begin.

Of course you have noticed those six guys in white jackets producing rhythm on stage. At first the music doesn’t have any effect on you, but then gradually it enters your body through the pores of your skin, reaches the eighteenth nerve centre of the fourth cerebral convolution at the top on the left which, as everyone knows, since the work of Broca and Captain Pamphile, is where the centre of pleasure born from the detection of harmonious sounds is located.

Six guys in white jackets. Six guys paid to be there. It used to be that staff only had eyes to avoid knocking over your glass when handing you the menu, and no ears other than the one designed specifically for hearing your order or the discreet tap of your finger on the crystal. You allow yourself to jump to conclusions about those six guys because of their white jackets. Oh, patrons! Don’t let them fool you!

(Don’t be annoyed if I have been treating you as a friend just now, talking to you man to man, and if, in a little while, I emphasize the dazzling cut of your neckline with a bold pen. Patrons, you should all be aware that you are hermaphroditic.)

But just as you invite your neighbour to dance… Oh, patrons! Woe betide you!

For one of those guys in white jackets, one of them who is blowing in tubes, or tapping on skins or keys, or plucking strings, one of them has spotted you. What do you expect? Even though he has a white jacket, he is still a man!… And your neighbour, the one you have just asked to dance, she is a woman!… No mistake about that!… She is very careful not to be seen here in anything but the finest clothes. No slacks and big boots, which might make you mistake her for a teenager, which she certainly is not, if by some chance you saw her on the Avenue du Bois in fading light. But you wouldn’t make that mistake twice!

(The guy in the white jacket, whose elevated position allows him to look down on the crowd, a technique made fashionable by certain people in the world, Charles de Gaulle known as Double-Master, and Yvon Petra known as Double-Metre, just to name two, does a double-take when he sees someone who stands out.)

And patrons, that is when you cease to be hermaphroditic.

You split in two: a horrible man, a red-faced over-indulger, the kind of gluttony, a coke dealer, a dirty politician; and a ravishing woman, whose tight-tipped smile bears witness to the harshness of the time that forces her to dance with this clod.

What does it matter, you horrible man, if, in reality, you are twenty-five years old with the body of Apollo, if your charming smile reveals a perfect set of teeth, if the dashing cut of your suit emphasizes the broadness of your shoulders?

You will never win. You are a peasant, a miser, a misfit. You have a father who is an arms dealer, a mother who has been around, a manic sister, and a brother on drugs.

She is crying out to be noticed… She is ravishing, I tell you.

Her dress… with that neckline! Square, or round, or heart-shaped, or plunging, or to the side, or no neckline at all if the dress is off the shoulder… And that figure!… You know, it’s easy to tell whether or not she is wearing anything under her dress… It makes faint raised lines around the top of the thighs...

(But it only makes them if she has anything. Usually, if there are no lines, the guy on the trumpet hits a false note the guy on the trumpet hits a false note that you don’t notice, because you generously put it down as being what you would expect from hot jazz.)

And her smile!… Her perfectly shaped red lips that must surely taste like raspberries… And you!… You dance like an elephant. You are sure to crush her delicate feet.

And then you return to your seat. Finally, she can catch her breath. She sits back down next to you.

Now what?

Her hand… Her slender fingers with silver and polish… on your country bumpkin shoulder?… And she is similar at you?

Oh!… The bitch!… All the same!…

And then the guys in the white jackets launch into the next piece…

Taken from

https://ojs.latrobe.edu.au/ojs/index.php/AALITRA/article/view/662/588