Funeral Rites (29 page)

“Don't be angry with me if I don't do it well, but it's the first time.”

Standing against a tree, the executioner made Erik face him, and he put his member between the kid's thighs. Riton's arms grabbed Erik's disheveled head and pressed the strong, famous neck, which bent forward, Erik's head finally touched the pale face, which was an utter appeal, a dying concert. Riton's arms quivered around the captured neck and enclosed it in a basket of tenderness and roses, of children's frills, of lace, and the kid's voice murmured against the ear of the half-naked warrior:

“All right now. Come in, it's time.”

In passing through all his flesh, the memory of the executioner obliged Erik to greater humility toward the child. All his excitement receded. The executioner's hideous but hard face and sovereign build and stature, which he could see in his mind's eye, must be feeling freer, either the thought of them gave him greater pride in buggering Riton and caused him to beat and torture him so as to be surer of his freedom and his own strength and then take revenge for having been weak, or else he had remained humiliated by past shame and finished his job with gentler movements and reached the goal in a state of brotherly anguish. Riton, surprised at the respite
of love, wanted to murmur a few very mild words of reproach, but the vigor of the movements gave him the full awareness that great voluptuaries always retain in love. He said, almost sobbingly:

“You won't have me! No, you won't have me!” and at the same time impaled himself with a leap.

"Einmal.
. . .
"

With my head bent back, I observed the solitude of the chimney, alone against the starry sky, like a cape outlined in the sea. They—the chimney and the cape—seemed to me to be conscious of their beauty and driven to despair by that consciousness. The whole member entered in, and Riton's behind touched Erik's warm belly. The joy of both of them was great, as was their confusion, since that joy had been attained. In the kind of swing which is in the form of a closed cage, the kind you see at country fairs, two kids pool their efforts. The cage goes up. Each oscillation acquires greater amplitude, and when the cage reaches the zenith after describing a semicircle, it hesitates before falling in order to complete its perfect curve. For two seconds it is motionless. During that moment the kids are upside down. It is then that their faces come together and their mouths kiss and their knees get entangled. Beneath them, the crowd, whose heads are inverted, looks on. Riton became even more tender. He murmured as one prays:

“Say, listen, see if you can't get it all in!”

For Erik this sentence was only a graceful song. He answered with an equally lovely sentence and in an equally hoarse tongue. And Riton:

“You're right, try.”

Then suddenly Erik's body arches a little.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

When the grave of the housemaid's child was filled, the hearse left the cemetery. The choirboys ran off among the graves. They laughingly scaled the wrought-iron railings and made a few rips in the lace of their surplices. Suddenly stopping face to face, they looked each other in the eye. For a moment they did not move, and suddenly they burst out laughing and, with their cheeks flushed, fell on each other in the grass, under the cypresses, where the roses known as “chiffon roses” twined. The younger escaped from the other's embrace with his hair mussed, and dashed to the cemetery wall and climbed over it. In the distance, the empty hearse was on its way back to the garage. The kid turned around and shaded his eyes with his hand, and what he saw hurled him down from the wall. His friend was naked in the black cassock, which was open on a muscular body. He got a hard-on. I approached and lay down near Erik. A tornado of petals came down on our heads from the roses twined about the cypresses. Only two sturdy arms struggling in the position that sailors call “an iron arm” survived that avalanche. He made Erik stay there without moving so as to be completely aware of being possessed in the silence of immobility. Only white roses could emerge from Erik's member to enter the bronze eye. They flowed out slowly with each quick but regular pulsation of the prick, as round and heavy as cigar smoke rings from pursed lips. Riton felt them rising within him by a path swifter than that of the intestines all the way up to his chest, where their fragrance spread in layers, though surprisingly it did not perfume his mouth. Now that Riton is dead, killed by a Frenchman, if one perhaps opened his chest would one find, caught in the trellis of the thorax, a few of those slightly dried roses?

Erik covered the sweating face with kisses. The perforating
tool so hurt the child that he longed for an increase of pain so to be lost in it.

"Ich
. . . .
"

Erik's mouth was speaking, breathing on the kid's shoulder. And his back kept thrusting. His eyes, which he had kept closed, opened on those of Riton. It's banal to say: “Those eyes have beheld death.” Yet such eyes do exist, and after the ghastly encounter, the gaze of the men who possess them retains an unwonted hardness and brilliance. Without wanting to speak too long in this tone about the eye of Gabès and create a confusion close to punning, I wish to say that Jean's eye became funereal to me. When I stretched out on his back, when I went farther down, I sharpened my tongue to a very fine point so as to burrow neatly into that crack which was as narrow as the eye of a needle. I felt myself being (I've got him by the ass!) . . . I felt myself being there. Then I tried hard to do as good a job as a drill. As the workman in the quarry leans on his machine that jolts him amidst splinters of mica and sparks from his drill, a merciless sun beats down on the back of his neck, and a sudden dizziness blurs everything and sets out the usual palm trees and springs of a mirage, in like manner a dizziness shook my prick harder, my tongue grew soft, forgetting to dig harder, my head sank deeper into the damp hairs, and I saw the eye of Gabès become adorned with flowers, with foliage, become a cool bower which I crawled to and entered with my entire body, to sleep on the moss there, in the shade, to die there.

In my memory, that purest of eyes was decked out with jewels, with diamonds and pearls arranged in the form of a crown. It was limpid. Erik's eyes: Erik had known the snows of Russia, the cruelty of hand-to-hand fighting, the bewilderment of being the only survivor of
a company; death was familiar to his eyes. When he opened them, Riton saw their brilliance despite the darkness. Remembering all of Erik's campaigns, he also thought very quickly: “He's been face to face with death.” Erik had stopped work. His eyes kept staring; his mouth was still pressed against Riton's. “I now have the impression I love you more than before.” This phrase was offered to me three months ago by Jean, and I put it in the mouth of a militiaman whom a German soldier has just buggered. Riton murmured:

“I now have the impression that I love you more than before.” Erik did not understand.

No tenderness could have been expressed, for as their-love was not recognized by the world, they could not feel its natural effects. Only language could have informed them that they actually loved each other. We know how they spoke to each other at the beginning. Seeing that neither understood the other and that all their phrases were useless, they finally contented themselves with grunts. This evening, for the first time in ten days, they are going to speak and to envelop their language in the most shameless passion. A happiness that was too intense made the soldier groan. With both hands clinging, one to the ear, the other to the hair, he wrenched the kid's head from the steel axis that was getting even harder.

“Stop.”

Then he drew to him the mouth that pressed eagerly to his in the darkness. Riton's lips were still parted, retaining the shape and caliber of Erik's prick. The mouths crushed against each other, linked as by a hyphen, by the rod of emptiness, a rootless member that lived alone and went from one palate to the other. The evening was marvelous. The stars were calm. One imagined that the trees were alive, that France was awakening, and more
intensely in the distance, above, that the Reich was watching. Riton woke up. Erik was sad. He was already thinking of faraway Germany, of the fact that his life was in danger, of how to save his skin. Riton buttoned his fly in a corner, then quietly picked up the machine gun. He fired a shot. Erik collapsed, rolled down the slope of the roof, and fell flat. The soldiers in the hideout neither heard the fall nor noticed the oddness of the shot. For ten seconds, a joyous madness was mistress of Riton. For ten seconds, he stamped on his friend's corpse. Motionless, with his back against the chimney and his eyes staring, he saw himself dancing, screaming, jumping about the body and on it and crushing it beneath his hobnailed heels. Then he quietly came to his senses and slowly made his way to other rooftops. All night long, all the morning of August 20, abandoned by his friends, by his parents, by his love, by France, by Germany, by the whole world, he fired away until he fell exhausted, not because of his wounds but with fatigue, as sweat glued desperate locks of hair to his temples. For a moment, he was so afraid of being killed that he thought of suicide. The Japanese, according to the papers, advised their-soldiers to fight on even after death so that their souls could sustain and direct the living. . . . The beauty of that objurgation (which shows me a heaven bursting with a
potential
activity and full of dead men eager to shoot) impels me to make Riton utter the following words:

“Help me die.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The little maid returned to her room. It was nighttime. She did not let anyone know.

She sat down on her cot, still wearing her wreath at a
rakish angle. Sleep crept up on her as she sat there holding her faded daisy and rocking her leg. When she woke up, late in the night, a moonbeam was shining through the window and brightening a patch of the threadbare rug. She stood up and quietly, piously, laid the daisy on that grave. Then she undressed and slept until morning.

* “Staves and orchards” renders an untranslatable play on words:
les verges et les vergers. Verge is
the zoological word for penis.

—Translator's note.

* A few French terms have been retained in this and the following paragraphs.
L'oeil de Gabès
("the eye of Gabès") was African Batallion slang for the anus. A member of the Batallion, which was referred to familiarly as the Bat-d'Af (Bataillon d'Afrique) was a
bataillonnaire
or, familiarly, a
Joyeux
(a Merry Boy).

—Translator's note.

* Gabès is in southern Tunisia.

—
Translator's note.

* The French word
ânte
means both “soul” and “bore” of a gun.

—Translator's note..

* There is a play here on the words
scie
(saw) and
ici
(here).

—Translator's note.

* A play on the words
corbillard
(hearse) and
corbeille
(basket).

—Translator's note.

* French slang for Paris.

— Translator's note.