Funeral Rites (19 page)

“It's pretty hot even for July, eh? You'd think we were in Algeria.”

He had turned naively to his fellow worker, but his tone of voice indicated that he was addressing the maid. With both hands in his pockets and his chest thrown back, he stamped with his heel, which clacked on the dry earth.

“It sure is warm,” said the other. And he winked at his colleague in such a way that one would have thought he had just uttered a remark charged with weighty implications.

“What we need now is rain. It's hot enough for vegetables.”

“And us, we need wine, don't you think?”

They both roared with laughter, and the one who had spoken first, a tall brown-haired chap of about thirty with rolled shirtsleeves, laughing eyes, and flashing teeth, pushed away the starshaped wreath that was lying on the tombstone and sat down beside the maid.

“You look tired, girly.”

She seemed to be smiling, since fatigue made her grimace. Unlike Paulo, who was always grim, Riton was smiling. His was a joyous nature. When he made gestures such as getting on a bicycle and driving off fast with his body bent over the handle bars, or leaning against a railing, or watching girls in a casual way, or hitching up his trousers, men in the street would look at him with astonishment. And when he knew he was being observed, he would smile good-humoredly. With a smile on his face, he would accentuate the pose and thus succeed in being all coquetry. But let us go back to the maid. This book is true and it's bunk. I shall publish it so that it may serve Jean's glory, but which Jean? Like a silk flag armed with a golden eagle crowning darkness, I brandish above my head the death of a hero. Tears have stopped flowing from my eyes. In fact, I see my former grief behind a mirror in which my heart cannot be deeply wounded, even though it is moved. But it's a good thing that my sorrow, after having been so pitiful, triumphs in great state. May it enable me to write a cruel and beautiful story in which I keep torturing the mother of Jean's daughter.

Every grimace, if observed minutely, proves to be composed of a host of smiles, just as the color of certain painted faces contains a host of shades, and it was one of those puckers that the gravediggers saw. The maid did not answer. A kind of murmur continued inside her,
though thought was foreign to her: that her foot hurt, and that Madame was, at that very moment, clearing the table.

“You can see she's sad,” said the other man.

“Not at all, death's never serious, young lady. We see it every day.”

He put his grimy, though broad and shapely, hand on the maid's knees, which were covered by the black dress. She was paralyzed with such indifference that she would have let her throat be slit without thinking of any reproach but the following:

“Well, well, so my time has come.”

The man grew bolder. He put his arm around her waist. She made no movement to shake him off. In view of what seemed to be willingness on her part, the second grave-digger regretted not being in on the fun, and he sat down on the stone on the other side of the maid.

“Ah, she's a very nice little girl,” he said laughingly. And he put his arm around the maid's neck and pulled her to him, against his chest. No doubt an entreaty arose within her, but she found no word to formulate it. The sudden boldness of his mate excited the first fellow, who leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. Both men laughed, grew still bolder, and kept pawing her. Beside her little daughter's fresh grave, she allowed them to mistreat her, to open her dress, to stroke and fondle her poor, indifferent pussy. Grief made her insensitive to everything, to her grief itself. She saw herself at the end of her rope, that is, on the point of flying away from the earth once and for all. And that grief which transcended itself was due not only to her daughter's death, it was the sum of all her miseries as a woman and her miseries as a housemaid, of all the human miseries that overwhelmed her that day because a ceremony, which, moreover, was meant to do so, had extracted all those miseries from her
person in which they were scattered. The magical ceremony, which lies in polarizing around its paraphernalia all the reasons one has for being in mourning, was now delivering her up to death. She thought a little about her daughter and a little about her wretched lot. The men's hands met under her dress. They were laughing very loudly, and often their laughter was carved by a kind of death rattle, when desire was too great. But they did not particularly want to screw her. Rather, they were playing with her as with a docile animal, and in their play, in order to complete it, they placed on her head the wreath of glass beads which the tall one pushed down with a tap of his fist, while his friend, with another tap, knocked it down over her ear, where it remained until that evening, at the cocky angle at which militiamen and sailors sometimes wear their berets, pimps their caps, and Fritzes their black forage caps.

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Flowers amaze me because of the glamor with which I invest them in grave matters and, particularly, in grief over death. I do not think they symbolize anything. If I wanted to cover Jean's coffin with flowers, it was perhaps simply as a gesture of adoration, for flowers are what one can offer the dead without danger, and if the practice did not already exist, a poet could invent this offering. The lavishing of flowers gives me a little rest from my grief. Though the youngster has now been dead for some time, the notes on which I base this book—which is meant to be a tribute to his glory—bring back the sadness of the early days, but the memory of flowers is sweet to me. As soon as I left the icy amphitheater, when I no longer saw his pale, narrow, terrifying face with the bands
around it and his body with other linen, but in their stead the embellished, stylized, perfumed, and moving image of that spectacle, no sooner did I feel amazed and indignant at the wretched dryness and poverty of those remains, and suffer thereby, when I saw them and then wanted them to be covered with flowers. With my eyes still full of tears, I rushed to the nearest florist and ordered huge bouquets.

“They'll be delivered tomorrow,” I thought, feeling calmer, “and they'll be laid all around his body and face.”

The memory of those funeral flowers, furnishing a helmet for the soldiers who flee amidst the laughter of girls, cluttering the amphitheater, gives shape to the most beautiful expression of my love. If they adorn Jean, they will always adorn him in my mind. They bear witness to my tenderness, which made them spring from Erik's splendid whang. Dawn was breaking, what a dawn that haloed whang breaking out of the hoodlum's pants was, what a gloomy dawn!

I have no right to be joyful. Laughter desecrates my suffering. Beauty takes my mind off Jean, to whom the sight of vileness brings me back. Is it true that evil has intimate relations with death and that it is with the intention of fathoming the secrets of death that I ponder so intently the secrets of evil? But all these evils do not help me reason. Let us try in another key: is it possible, to begin with, if my grief diminishes when I contemplate evil (which I am willing, for the moment, to call evil according to conventional morality) that it does so because the distance is less great between this world which is decomposed by evil and Jean who is decomposed by death? Beauty, which is organization that has attained the height of perfection, turns me away from Jean. Better a fine living creature than a fine object, and my suffering
increases. And I weep if I do not bind Jean to this world in which beauty lives.

Yet, though I take pleasure in the sight of so many ugly things which I make even uglier by writing about them, in that which Jean's death inspires me to write, there is an order to do no evil. Is it because life orders me to set off a death with a life, that is, with good (a word also employed in its usual sense), to balance death with life? But if I delight in examining evil and dead or dying things, how could I be implementing life? And as for the homage which I think I am rendering Jean when I grieve, when I weep, isn't it because I bring my state a little nearer his, because everything within me grows desolate and his solitude less great, a solitude that death accords with a suddenness that may chill the dead person's heart? That world without gaiety or beauty which I draw from myself slowly with the intention of organizing it as a poem that I offer to Jean's memory, that world lived within me, in a sunless, skyless, starless landscape. It does not date from today. My deep disgust and sadness have been wanting to express themselves for a long time, and Jean's death has finally given my bitterness a chance to flow out. Jean's death has made it possible for me, by virtue of the words that enable me to talk about it, to become more sharply aware of my shame about the following error: my thinking that the realms of evil were fewer than those of good and that I would be alone there. A few pages hence, Jean's death will continue to confront me with relations that seem to exist between, on the one hand, evil and death and, on the other, life and good. We know the command contained in my grief: do what is good. My taste for solitude impelled me to seek the most virgin lands. After my disappointing setback in sight of the fabulous shores of evil this taste obliges me
to turn back and devote myself to good. I am disturbed by the encounter with these two pretexts that are offered me for departing from a path I had taken out of pride, out of a preference for singularity, but this book is not finished.

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Ever since I began writing this book, which is completely devoted to the cult of a dead person with whom I am living on intimate terms, I have been feeling a kind of excitement which, cloaked by the alibi of Jean's glory, has been plunging me into a more and more intense and more and more desperate life, that has been impelling me to greater boldness. And I feel I have the strength not only to commit bolder burglaries but also to affront fearlessly the noblest human institutions in order to destroy them. I'm drunk with life, with violence, with despair.

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The age has accustomed us to such rapid transformations of gangsters into policemen and vice versa that the reader will not be surprised to learn that one of the gravediggers, after coming, took a gun from his pocket and aimed it at the girl, while the other, who had been playing for some moments with the pair of handcuffs, slapped them on her wrists. The maid felt no fear. She thought that everything that was happening to her was what usually happens in cemeteries and was reserved for persons in mourning who stayed behind after the burial and sat down on tombstones. All she said was:

“May I lace my shoe, sir?”

But the two bandits pushed her along and insulted her. They called her a cheap whore and a little hypocrite.
They kept poking and punching her until they reached the door of one of those miniature temples, little chapels whose architecture recalls (at least the architecture of this one did) that of the Law Court, on a very reduced scale. It was the vault of the Chemelats-Rateau family. The two men made the girl go inside and then they shut the door. She was a prisoner. She realized it. Before sitting down on the tombstone she should have looked at the cap of one of the gravediggers. On it was the silver star of prison guards. She had not thought of taking her hat, but she was still wearing the star-shaped wreath set at an angle on her head. Informing was a familiar practice at the time. This comment prompts me to say a few words about myself in the middle of the period. I love Parisians, who look deliriously beautiful as they deliver themselves from the Boches. Man is beautiful when he delivers himself (I'm substituting the word “beautiful” for “great,” which I wrote first). This beauty lasted only a very brief moment, for a few days of danger and faith during which love prevailed. The Germans had already legalized informing, and when General Koenig drove them out, he recommended it in posters that were stuck up all over Paris. It's impossible for this frame of mind not to correspond to the propensities of an entire age. One rather likes “to squeal” and “sell out.” One puts an honest hand on one's heart and talks. Speech kills, poisons, mutilates, distorts, dirties. I would not complain about it if I had decided to accept honesty for myself, but having chosen to remain outside a social and moral world whose code of honor seemed to me to require rectitude, politeness, in short the precepts taught in school, it was by raising to the level of virtue, for my own use, the opposite of the common virtues that I thought I could attain a moral solitude where I would never be joined. I chose to be a
traitor, thief, looter, informer, hater, destroyer, despiser, coward. With ax and cries I cut the bonds that held me to the world of customary morality. At times I undid the knots methodically. I monstrously departed from you, your world, your towns, your institutions. After being subjected to your legal banishment, your prisons, your interdicts I discovered more forsaken regions where my pride felt more at ease. After that labor—still only half-finished—which required so many sacrifices as I persisted more and more in the sublimation of a world that is the underside of yours, I now know the shame of being approached painfully, by people lame and bleeding, on a shore more populous than Death. And the people I meet there came easily, without danger, without cutting anything. They are as at home in infamy as a fish is in water, and all I can do to attain solitude is turn back and adorn myself with the virtues of your books. In the face of such misfortune there remain tears or anger. The maid was a captive.

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But that life in the apartment to which I was admitted had its drawbacks. The day I was invited, Jean's mother dressed and preened with the slovenly precision of women who are too stout and well-to-do. Her hatred for the maid had not left her by noon. She was waiting for Erik, who was dawdling in his room.