Salope Foutre: Sucer Mon Robinet

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.[1]

Most people would concur, but not Salope Foutre. Finding him changed my life, like listening to Miles, Monk, and Mingus. I could find no English translation of Salope Foutre’s only book and so I had to go to Paris. I found an old dogeared copy by the Seine River. It was very expensive, as you can imagine. Paris is so expensive.

It took me a year to read the beautiful book, yes, beautiful. Do not get angry with me, some people find beauty in the most ugly things, look around you, look at the concrete monsters housing the dehumanized humans, go into an art museum, turn on the television, turn on the radio, we live in an age of the ugly. I translated the book from French into English. Here is a taste of that most delectable book.

Je suis reposé sur un mettre hors jeu et mon robinet brûle parce que j’ai juste versé le gaz plus d’il et l’ai allumé.

Here is my translation:

I am sat on a bench and my cock is burning because I have just poured gas over it and lit it.

For Salope Foutre, sex was Rabelaisian. Pain and suffering, he welcomed them warmly. Penury was a thing that clothed him. He suffered greatly and the fruit of his suffering was a book that should be placed next to Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, next to Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit. Sucer Mon Robinet should be read by all, the intelligentsia, the pleb, the drunk, the opium eater, the whore, the chimney sweep. It is a great book of wonder. Although Salope Foutre was a great liar, he was mendacious all through his life, lying to all and sundry, the book is full of great truths, the book simply tells the truth.

It was just past midnight New Years Eve 1982, I was reading Salope Foutre, and there on page two was the word, “FUCK.” I was shocked. He used the word fuck as it should be used; his fuck smelt of excreta, rotting fishheads, whore’s twats reeking of burnt rubber. The verb became animated and I almost threw up. Sucer Mon Robinet was full of fuck. It is a book of fuck. It is a fuck book. It fucks with you.

I sit before this with the impotence of Abelard. This is not a quote, this is I.

Avez-vous une lumière pour ma cigarette.

This is a quote. These were Salope Foutre’s last words before they shot him. He was shot because he attended the German Writer’s Congress at Weimar. He was a nefarious man, he practiced what he preached, unlike most. A bullet was shot into his head sometime in ’45, in a back street, in Brussels, he was trying to make his way to Iceland, he was dressed as a nun. The fog of war obfuscates. He did not have time to write another book. The world was robbed of a pure soul. Remember, ‘pure’ means ‘undiluted’. He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.[2]

[1] You know who said it.
[2] Again, you know the culprit.

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Paul Kavanagh is the author of Iceberg and The Killing of a Bank Manager.