Funeral Rites (3 page)

“They don't go in for style these days,” she said.

Heavy and gleaming, like the most gorgeous of dahlias, Jean's mother, who was still very beautiful, had raised her mourning veil. Her eyes were dry, but the tears had left a subtle and luminous snail track on her pink, plump face from the eyes to the chin. She looked at the pine wood of the coffin.

“Oh, you can't expect quality nowadays,” replied another woman in deep mourning who was next to her.

I was looking at the narrow coffin and at Jean's leaden face, which was overlaid with flesh that was sunken and cold, not with the coldness of death, but the iciness of the refrigerator. At twilight, accompanied by the muted fanfares of fear, almost naked and knowing I was naked in my corduroy trousers and under my coarse, blue, V-necked shirt, the sleeves of which were rolled up above my bare arms, I walked down silent hills in sandals, in the simple posture of the stroller, that is,
with one hand closed in my pocket and the other leaning on a flexible stick. In the middle of a glade, I had just offered funereal worship to the moon that was rising in my sky.

An assistant brought in the lid of the coffin and I was torn apart. It was screwed on. After the rigidity of the body, the ice of which was invisible, breakable, even deniable, this was the first brutal separation. It was hateful because of the imbecility of a pine board, which was fragile and yet absolutely reliable, a hypocritical, light, porous board that a more depraved soul than Jean's could dissolve, a board cut from one of the trees that cover my slopes, trees that are black and haughty but frightened by my cold eyes, by the sureness of my footing beneath the branches, for they are the witnesses to my visits on the heights where love receives me without display. Jean was taken away from me.

“It has no style.”

It was an agony for me to see the boy go off in the dissolution of a ceremony whose funereal pompousness was as much a mocking as familiarity would have been. The people walked around the coffin and left. The undertaker's assistants took the coffin, and I followed the black-clad family. Someone loaded the hearse with wreaths the way one garners bundles of hay. Each action wounded me. Jean needed a compensation. My heart was preparing to offer him the pomp that men refused him. No doubt the source of this feeling was deeper than defiance of the shallow sensitivity indicated by men's acts, but it was while I was following the coffin that friendship rose within me as the star of the dead rises at night in the sky. I stepped into the hearse. I gave the chauffeur twenty francs. Nothing was preventing the inner revelation of my friendship for Jean. The moon was more solemn that
evening and rose slowly. It spread peace, but grief too, over my depopulated earth. At a crossing, the hearse had to stop so that an American convoy could pass, and it took another street, when suddenly the silence, contained amidst the houses, welcomed me with such nobility that I thought for a moment death would be at the end of the street to receive me and its valets would lower the running board. I put my right hand to my chest, under my jacket. The beating of my heart revealed the presence within me of a tribe that dances to the sound of the tom-tom. I was hungry for Jean. The car turned. Undoubtedly I was made aware of my friendship by the grief that Jean's death was causing me, and little by little I became terribly afraid that since the friendship would have no external object on which to expand itself it might consume me by its fervor and cause my death. Its fire (the rims of my eyelids were already burning) would, I thought, turn against me, who contain and detain Jean's image and allow it to merge with myself within me.

“Monsieur! Monsieur! Hey! Monsieur, please stay with the men!”

Of course. I must stay with the men. The director of the funeral was wearing knee breeches, black stockings, a black dress coat, and black pumps and was carrying an ivory-headed cane entwined with a black silk cord at the end of which was a silver tassel. Someone was playing the harmonium.

Paulo was walking stiffly in front of me. He was a monolithic block, the angles of which must have scraped space, the air, and the azure. His nastiness made one think he was noble. I was sure that he felt no grief at his brother's death, and I myself felt no hatred for that indifference against which my tenderness was about to crash.

The procession stopped for a second, and I saw the
profile of Paulo's mouth. I mused upon his soul, which cannot be defined better than by the following comparison: one speaks of the bore of a gun,
*
which is the inner wall—less than the wall itself—of the gun. It is the thing that no longer exists, it is the gleaming, steely, icy vacuum that limits the air column and the steel tube, the vacuum and the metal; worse: the vacuum and the coldness of the metal. Paulo's soul was perceptible in his parted lips and vacuous eyes.

The procession stirred, then got under way again. Paulo's body hesitated. He was his brother's chief mourner, as a king is a king's, and led the cortège like a caparisoned horse charged with a nobility of fire, silver, and velvet. His pace was slow and heavy. He was a lady of Versailles, dignified and unfeeling.

When Jean had diarrhea, he said to me, “I've got the trots.” Why did that word have to come back to me just as I was watching Paulo's solemn and almost motionless backside, why did I have to call that barely indicated dance the trots?

Roses have the irritability, curtness, and magnetic edginess of certain mediums. It was they who were performing the actual service.

The coffin was slid onto the catafalque through an opening at one end. This sudden theatrical stunt, the conjuring away of the coffin, greatly amused me. Acts without overtones, without extension, empty acts, were reflecting the same desolation as the death being reflected on the black-draped chairs, on the little trick of a catafalque, on the
Dies Irae.
Jean's death was duplicating itself in another death, was making itself visible, was projecting itself upon
trappings as dark and ugly as the details with which interments are surrounded. It seemed to me an inane, doubly useless act, like the condemnation of an innocent man. I deeply regretted that processions of handsome boys, naked or in underpants, sober or laughing—for it was important that his death be an occasion for play and laughter—had not accompanied Jean from a bed of state to his grave. I would have loved to gaze at their thighs and arms and the backs of their necks, to have imagined their woolly sex under their blue woolen underpants.

I had sat down. I saw people kneeling. Out of respect for Jean, I suppose, and in order not to attract attention, I wanted to kneel too. I mechanically put my hand into my jacket pocket and encountered my little matchbox. It was empty. Instead of throwing it away, I had inadvertently put it back into my pocket.

“There's a little matchbox in my pocket.”

It was quite natural for me to recall at that moment the comparison a fellow prisoner once made while telling me about the packages which the inmates were allowed to receive:

“You're allowed one package a week. Whether it's a coffin or a box of matches, it's the same thing, it's a package.”

No doubt. A matchbox or a coffin, it's the same thing, I said to myself. I have a little coffin in my pocket.

As I stood up in order to kneel, a cloud must have passed in front of the sun, and the church was darkened by it. Was the priest censing the catafalque? The harmonium played more softly, or so it seemed, as soon as I was on my knees, with my head between my hands. This posture immediately brought me into contact with God.

“Dear God, dear God, dear God, I melt beneath your gaze. I'm a poor child. Protect me from the devil and
God. Let me sleep in the shade of your trees, your monasteries, your gardens, behind your walls. Dear God, I have my grief, I'm praying badly, but you know that the position is painful, the straw has left its mark on my knees. . . .”

The priest opened the tabernacle. All the heralds in blazoned velvet jerkins, the standard-bearers and pike-men, the horsemen, the knights, the S.S., the Hitler Youth in short pants paraded through the Fuhrer's bedroom and on into his quarters. Standing near his bed, with his face and body in the shadow and his pale hand leaning on the flounced pillow, he watched them from the depths of his solitude. His castration had cut him off from human beings. His joys are not ours. Out of respect, the parade performed in the deep silence reserved for the sick. Even the footsteps of the stone heroes and the rumbling of the cannons and tanks were deadened by the woolen rugs. At times, a slight rustling of cloth could still be heard, the same sound that is made in the darkness by the stiff, dry cloth of the uniform of American soldiers when they move fast on their rubber soles.

“. . . Dear God, forgive me. You see me as I am, simple, naked, tiny.”

I was praying spontaneously, from my heart and lips. This attitude estranged me from Jean, whom I was betraying for too lofty a personage. I seized upon this pretext of a delicate sentiment to avoid creasing my trousers. I sat down and thought about Jean with far greater ease. The star of my friendship rose up larger and rounder into my sky. I was pregnant with a feeling that could, without my being surprised, make me give birth to a strange but viable and certainly beautiful being, Jean's being its father vouched for that. This new feeling of friendship was coming into being in an odd way.

The priest said:

“. . . He died on the field of honor. He died fighting the invader. . . .”

A shudder ran through me and made me realize that my body was feeling friendship for the priest who was making it possible for Jean to leave me with the regrets of the whole world. Since it was impossible for me to bury him alone, in a private ceremony (I could have carried his body, and why don't the public authorities allow it? I could have cut it up in a kitchen and eaten it. Of course, there would be a good deal of refuse: the intestines, the liver, the lungs, the eyes with their hair-rimmed lids in particular, all of which I would dry and burn—I might even mix their ashes with my food—but the flesh could be assimilated into mine), let him depart then with official honors, the glory of which would devolve upon me and thus somewhat stifle my despair.

The flowers on the catafalque grew exhausted from shedding their brightness. The dahlias were drooping with sleep. Their stomachs were glutted when they left the funeral parlor. They were still belching.

I followed the priest's oration:

“. . . this sacrifice is not wasted. Young Jean died for France. . . .”

If I were told that I was risking death in refusing to cry
"Vive la France”
I would cry it in order to save my hide, but I would cry it softly. If I had to cry it very loudly, I would do so, but laughingly, without believing in it. And if I had to believe in it, I would; then I would immediately die of shame. It doesn't matter whether this is due to the fact that I'm an abandoned child who knows nothing about his family or country; the attitude exists and is intransigent. And yet, it was nice to know that France was delegating its name so as to be represented at Jean's funeral. I was so overwhelmed with the sumptuousness
of it all that my friendship went to my head (as one says: reseda goes to my head). Friendship, which I recognize by my grief at Jean's death, also has the sudden impetuousness of love. I said friendship. I would sometimes like it to go away and yet I tremble for fear it will. The only difference between it and love is that it does not know jealousy. Yet I feel a vague anxiety, a weak remorse. I am tormented. It is the birth of memory.

The procession—where could that obscure child have made so many friends?—the procession left the church.

The matchbox in my pocket, the tiny coffin, imposed its presence more and more, obsessed me:

“Jean's coffin could be just as small.”

I was carrying his coffin in my pocket. There was no need for the small-scale bier to be a true one. The coffin of the formal funeral had imposed its potency on that little object. I was performing in my pocket, on the box that my hand was stroking, a diminutive funeral ceremony as efficacious and reasonable as the Masses that are said for the souls of the departed, behind the altar, in a remote chapel, over a fake coffin draped in black. My box was sacred. It did not contain a particle merely of Jean's body but Jean in his entirety. His bones were the size of matches, of tiny pebbles imprisoned in penny whistles. His body was somewhat like the cloth-wrapped wax dolls with which sorcerers cast their spells. The whole gravity of the ceremony was gathered in my pocket, to which the transfer had just taken place. However, it should be noted that the pocket never had any religious character; as for the sacredness of the box, it never prevented me from treating the object familiarly, from kneading it with my fingers, except that once, as I was talking to Erik, my gaze fastened on his fly, which was resting on the chair with the weightiness of the pouch of Florentine costumes that
contained the balls, and my hand let go of the matchbox and left my pocket.

Jean's mother had just gone out of the room. I uncrossed my legs and recrossed them in the other direction. I was looking at Erik's torso, which was leaning slightly forward.

“You must miss Berlin,” I said.

Very slowly, ponderously, searching for words, he replied:

“Why? I'll go back after the war.”

He offered me one of his American cigarettes, which the maid or his mistress must have gone down to buy for him, since he himself never left the small apartment. I gave him a light. He stood up, not straight but leaning slightly forward, so that in drawing himself up he had to throw his torso backward. The movement arched his entire body and made his basket bulge under the cloth of his trousers. He had at that moment, despite his being cloistered, despite that sad, soft captivity among women, the nobility of a whole animal which carries its load between its legs.

“You must get bored.”

We exchanged a few more trivialities. I could have hated him, but his sadness made me suddenly believe in his gentleness. His face was slightly lined with very fine wrinkles, like those of twenty-five-year-old blonds. He remained very handsome, very strong, and his sadness itself expressed the lasciviousness of the whole body of this wild animal that was reaching maturity.