Funeral Rites (2 page)

At present, I am horrified with myself for containing—having devoured him—the dearest and only lover who
ever loved me. I am his tomb. The earth is nothing. Dead. Staves and orchards
*
issue from my mouth. His. Perfume my chest, which is wide, wide open. A greengage plum swells his silence. The bees escape from his eyes, from his sockets where the liquid pupils have flowed from under the flaccid eyelids. To eat a youngster shot on the barricades, to devour a young hero, is no easy thing. We all love the sun. My mouth is bloody. So are my fingers. I tore the flesh to shreds with my teeth. Corpses do not usually bleed. His did.

He died on the barricades of August 19, 1944, but his staff had already stained my mouth with blood in May, in the orchards. When he was alive, his beauty frightened me, as did the chastity and beauty of his language. At the time, I wanted him to live in a grave, in a dark, deep tomb, the only dwelling worthy of his monstrous presence. It would be lit by candle, and he would live in it on his knees or crouching. He would be questioned through a slit in the slab. Is that the way he lives inside me, exhaling through my mouth, anus, and nose the odors that the chemistry of his decaying accumulates within me?

I still love him. Love for a woman or girl is not to be compared to a man's love for an adolescent boy. The delicacy of his face and the elegance of his body have crept over me like leprosy. Here is a description of him: his hair was blond and curly, and he wore it very long. His eyes were gray, blue, or green, but extraordinarily clear. The concave curve of his nose was gentle, childish. He held his head high on a rather long, supple neck. His small mouth, the lower lip of which had a distinct curl, was almost always closed. His body was thin and flexible, his gait rapid and lazy.

My heart is heavy and succumbs to nausea. I puke on my white feet, at the foot of the tomb which is my unclothed body.

Erik had sat down in a chair with his back to the window draped with long, white lace curtains. The air was dense, painful. It was obvious that the windows were always kept closed. The soldier's legs were spread, so that the wooden front of the chair on which he put his hand was visible. The blue workman's trousers he was wearing were too tight for his thighs and behind. Perhaps they had been Jean's. Erik was handsome. I don't know what suddenly made me conceive the notion that his sitting on a straw-bottomed chair cramped his
"oeil de Gabès.”
*
I remembered an evening on the Rue des Martyrs, and in a few seconds I relived it. Between the dizzying cliffs of the houses the street climbed uphill toward a stormy sky that paid heed to the melody of the gait and gestures of the group of three kids and a
bataillonnaire,
who were all delighted with a story the soldier was telling. As they went by, the shopping bags of the bareheaded women hit against their calves.

“. . . that was all I wanted, so I stuck my finger in his eye.”

The
Joyeux
pronounced
oeil
(eye) like
ail
(garlic). The three youngsters, who were walking at the same pace, with their heads down and shoulders slightly bent and their hands in their pockets pressing against the muscles of their taut thighs, were a bit winded by the climb. The
Joyeux's
story had a fleshy presence. They said nothing.
Within them hatched an egg from which emerged an excitement charged with cautious love-making under a mosquito net. Their muteness allowed the excitement to make its way quiveringly to their very marrow. It would have taken very little for the kind of love that was developing within them for the first time to escape from their mouths in the guise of a song, poem, or oath. Embarrassment made them curt. The youngest walked with his head high, eye pure, lips slightly parted. He was nibbling his nails. Because of his weakness he was not always able to be calm or self-controlled, but he felt deeply grateful to those who brought him peace by dominating him.

He turned his head a little. His open mouth was already a fissure through which all his tenderness passed and through which the world entered to possess him. He gazed docilely at the
Joyeux.
The sensitive
Joyeux
understood and was pained by the excitement he had aroused. He drew his head back proudly. His little foot, which was surer, mastered a conqueror. He snickered a bit:

“. . . In the oye, I'm tellin’ ya, in the oyye!”

He came down hard on the
o
so as to let the
yye
stream out. Then, a slight silence. And he ended the sentence so bombastically that the story became the relation of a deed witnessed in the land of the gods, at Gabès,
*
or at Gabès in the broiling, sumptuous country of a lofty disease, of a sacred fever. Pierrot stumbled over a stone. He said nothing. Without moving the fists in his pockets, the soldier again threw back his round little burned head, which was as brown as a pebble of the wadis, and added with his hoarse laugh, in which the blue tattooed dot at the outer angle of his left eyelid seemed to be painted:

“. . . of Gabès! In the eye of Habès! And bango!”

It is not a matter of indifference that my book, which is peopled with the truest of soldiers, should start with the rarest expression that brands the punished soldier, that most prudent being confusing the warrior with the thief, war with theft. The
Joyeux
likewise gave the name “bronze eye” to what is also called the “jujube,” the “plug,” the “onion,” the “meanie,” the “tokas,” the “moon,” the “crap basket.” Later, when they return to their hometowns, they secretly preserve the sacrament of the Bat-d'Af, just as the princes of the Pope, Emperor, or King glorified in having been, a thousand years ago, simple brigands in a heroic band. The
bataillonnaire
thinks fondly of his youth, of the sun, of the blows of the guards, of the prison queers, of the prickly-pear trees, the leaves of which are also called the
Joyeux's
wife; he thinks of the sand, of the marches in the desert, of the flexible palm tree whose elegance and vigor are exactly those of his prick and his boy friend; he thinks of the grave, of the gallows, of the eye.

The veneration I feel for that part of the body and the great tenderness that I have bestowed on the children who have allowed me to enter it, the grace and sweetness of their gift, oblige me to speak of all this with respect. It is not profaning the most beloved of the dead to speak, in the guise of a poem whose tone is still unknowable, of the happiness he offered me when my face was buried in a fleece that was damp with my sweat and saliva and that stuck together in little locks of hair which dried after love-making and remained stiff. My teeth went at it desperately at times, and my pupils were full of images that are organizing themselves today where, at the back of a funeral parlor, the angel of the resurrection of the death of Jean, proud, aloft in the clouds, dominated in his fierceness
the handsomest soldier of the Reich. For at times it is the opposite of what he was that is evoked by the wonderful child who was mowed down by the August bullets, the purity and iciness of which frighten me, for they make him greater than I. Yet I place my story, if that is what I must call the prismatic decomposition of my love and grief, under the aegis of that dead boy. The words “low” and “sordid” will be meaningless if anyone dares apply them to the tone of this book which I am writing in homage. I loved the violence of his prick, its quivering, its size, the curls of his hairs, the child's eyes, and the back of his neck, and the dark, ultimate treasure, the “bronze eye,” which he did not grant me until very late, about a month before his death.

On the day of the funeral, the church door opened at four in the afternoon on a black hole into which I made my way solemnly or, rather, was borne by the power of the grand funeral to the nocturnal sanctuary and prepared for a service which is the sublime image of the one performed at each grieving of the fallen prick. A funereal flavor has often filled my mouth after love.

Upon entering the church:

“It's as dark here as up a nigger's asshole.”

It was that dark there, and I entered the place with the same slow solemnity. At the far end twinkled the tobacco-colored iris of the
"oeil de Gabès,”
and, in the middle of it, haloed, savage, silent, awfully pale, was that buggered tank-driver, god of my night, Erik Seiler.

Despite the trembling of the tapers, from the black-draped church door there could be discerned on Erik's chest, as he stood on top of an altar supporting all the flowers of a stripped garden, the location of the mortal hole that will be made by a Frenchman's bullet.

My staring eyes followed Jean's coffin. My hand played
for a few seconds with a small matchbox in the pocket of my jacket, the same box that my fingers were kneading when Jean's mother said to me:

“Erik's from Berlin. Yes, I know. Can I hold it against him? One's not responsible. One doesn't choose one's birthplace.”

Not knowing how to answer, I raised my eyebrows as if to say, “Obviously.”

Erik's hand, which was between his thighs, was pressed against the wood of the chair. He shrugged and looked at me with somewhat anxious eyes. Actually I was seeing him for the second time, and I had long known that he was Jean's mother's lover. Since his force and vigor compensated for what (despite great austerity) was too frail in Jean's grace, I have ever since made great efforts to live his life as a Berlin youngster, but particularly when he stood up and went to the window to look into the street. With a gesture of needless caution he held one of the double, red velvet curtains in front of his body. He stood that way for a few seconds, then turned around without letting go of the curtain, so that he was almost completely wrapped in its folds, and I saw an image of one of the young Nazis who paraded in Berlin with unfurled flags on their shoulders, wrapped in folds of red cloth buffeted by the wind. For a second, Erik was one of those kids. He looked at me, again turned his head with a brief movement toward the closed window from which the street could be seen through the lace, then let go of the curtain so that he could raise his wrist and see the time. He realized that he no longer had a watch. Jean's mother was standing quietly by the sideboard and smiling. She saw his gaze—I did too—and the three of us immediately looked in the direction of a small table near a couch where two wristwatches were lying side by side.

I blushed:

“Look, your watch is over there.”

The mother went to get the smaller one and brought it to the soldier. He took it without a word and put it into his pocket.

The woman did not see the look he gave her, and I myself did not understand the meaning of it. He said:

“It's all over.”

I thought that everything was over for him, me, and Jean's mother. Nevertheless, I said:

“Not at all, nothing's over.”

This was an obvious answer, but I hardly thought about what I was saying, since, inspired by the image of Erik in the folds of the curtain, I was in the process of going back to his childhood, of living it in his stead. He sat down on the chair again, fidgeted, stood up, and sat down a third time. I knew that he had hated Jean, whose severity did not allow for indulging his mother. Not that he condemned her, but the child who went all over Paris with valises full of guns and anti-German pamphlets had no time to smile. He also realized that the slightest truckling, the slightest witticism, might relax his attitude, which he wanted to keep rigid. I even wonder whether he felt any tenderness toward me.

On the sideboard in a frame adorned with flowers and shellwork foliage was a portrait-photograph of him. When I went to see him at the morgue, I was hoping that his perfectly scrubbed, clean, naked, white skeleton, which was composed of very dry scraped bones, of a skull admirable in shape and matter, and particularly of thin finger joints that were rigid and severe, had been laid out on a bed of roses and gladiolas. I had bought armfuls of flowers, but they were at the foot of the trestle that supported the coffin. They were stuck in a roll of straw and
formed, with the oak or ivy leaves that had been added, ridiculous wreaths. I had got my money's worth, but the fervor with which I myself would have strewn the roses was lacking. It was indeed roses that I had wanted, for their petals are sensitive enough to register every sorrow and then convey them to the corpse, which is aware of everything. A huge straw cushion, lastly, decorated with laurel leaves, was leaning against the coffin. Jean had been taken from the refrigerator. The reception room of the morgue, which had been transformed into a mortuary chapel, was thronged with people walking through it. Jean's mother, who was sitting next to me veiled in crape, murmured to me:

“Before, it was Juliette. Now it's my turn.”

Four months earlier, Juliette had lost a new-born baby, and the fact that Jean was its father had infuriated his mother. She had cursed them, foolishly, and now she herself was a child weeping over her son's death.

“It's hardly . . . ,” she added.

The phrase was completed by a tremendous sigh, and though my thoughts were far away I gathered that she meant: “Hardly worth my being in charge of the funeral.”

My grief did not prevent me from seeing beside me the young man I had met beside the tree near which Jean had died. He was wearing the same fur-lined leather coat. I was sure he was Paulo, Jean's very slightly older brother. He said nothing. He was not crying. His arms hung at his side. Even if Jean had never spoken about it, I would have recognized his nastiness. It gave great sobriety to all his gestures. He had a tendency to put his hands into his pockets. He stood there without moving. He was shutting himself up in his indifference to evil and unhappiness.

Despite the crowd, I bent forward to contemplate the
child who, by the miracle of machine-gun fire, had become that very delicate thing, a dead youth. The precious corpse of an adolescent shrouded in cloth. And when the crowd bent over him at the edge of the coffin, it saw a thin, pale, slightly green face, doubtless the very face of death, but so commonplace in its fixity that I wonder why Death, movie stars, touring virtuosi, queens in exile, and banished kings have a body, face, and hands. Their fascination is owing to something other than a human charm, and, without betraying the enthusiasm of the peasant women trying to catch a glimpse of her at the door of her train, Sarah Bernhardt could have appeared in the form of a small box of safety matches. We had not come to see a face but the dead Jean D., and our expectation was so fervent that he had a right to manifest himself, without surprising us, in any way whatever.