Our Lady of the Flowers (23 page)

“Who is it?”

“It's me.”

“But who?”

“Oh, shit! Don't you recognize me? Let me in, Divine.”

She opened the door. The odor, even more than the sight of the Negro, informed Our Lady.

“What a stink! You got a tenant. Not bad. Say, I've got to get some sleep. I'm pooped. Got room for me?”

Gorgui had awakened. He was embarrassed at finding himself with a hard-on, the kind one has in the morning. He was naturally modest, but the whites had taught him immodesty, and in his zeal to be like them, he outdid them. Fearing lest his gesture seem ridiculous, he did not draw back the covers. He simply offered his hand to Our Lady, whom he did not know. Divine introduced them.

“Would you like a cup of tea?”

“All right.”

Our Lady was sitting on the bed. He was getting used to the odor. While Divine prepared the tea, he unlaced his shoes. The laces were knotted. One might think that he put his shoes on and took them off without any light. He took off his jacket and tossed it on the rug. The water was about to boil. He tried to take off his shoes and socks with the same movement, for his feet were sweating and he was afraid they might smell in the room. He didn't quite manage it, but his feet didn't smell. He refrained from glancing at the Negro, and he thought: “Am I going to have to snooze next to Snow-ball? I hope he's going to beat it.” Divine was not very sure about Gorgui. She did not know whether or not he was one of the many stool pigeons of the vice squad. She did not question Our Lady. All in all, Our Lady was his usual self. Neither his eyes nor the corners of his mouth were tired; only his hair was a little mussed. A few strands over his eyes. All the same, a bit of a hangover
look. He was waiting on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees and was scratching his head.

“Your water cooking?”

“Yes, it's boiling.”

On the little electric stove the water was boiling away. Divine poured it over the tea. She prepared three cups. Gorgui had sat up. He was being gradually impregnated with objects and beings, and first of all with himself. He felt himself being. He emitted a few timid ideas: heat, an unfamiliar fellow, I got a hard-on, tea, spots on his nails (the face of the American girl who did not want to shake hands with one of his friends), ten after eight. He did not remember Divine's having spoken to him about this unfamiliar fellow. Whenever she introduces him, Divine says: “A friend,” for the murderer has strongly advised her never to call him Our Lady of the Flowers in front of a stranger. As things turn out, this has no importance. Gorgui looks at him again. He sees his slightly turned profile and the back of his head. It's the very same head that's pinned to the wall with a safety pin. But he looks better in the flesh, and Our Lady, turning slightly toward him, says:

“Say, pal, going to make room for me? I didn't sleep a wink all night.”

“Oh! go right ahead, my boy. I'm getting up.”

We know that Our Lady never excused himself. It seemed, not that everything was due him, but that everything was bound to happen (and happened in due course), nothing was addressed to him, no special attention, no mark of esteem, that, in short, everything occurred according to an order with only one possibility.

“Say, Divine, will you hand me my shirt?” said the Negro.

“Wait, you're going to have tea.”

Divine handed one cup to him and one to Our Lady. So once again begins the three-cornered life in the garret
which looks out over the dead, the cut flowers, the drunken gravediggers, the sly ghost torn by the sun. Ghosts are composed of neither smoke nor opaque or translucent fluid; they are as clear as air. We pass through them during the day, particularly during the day. Sometimes they are outlined in pen strokes on our features, on one of our legs, crossing their thighs on ours, in one of our gestures. Divine spent several days with the airy Marchetti who ran off with Our Lady, and led him astray–and almost murdered him–and whose ghost Our Lady did not always pass through without carrying off in his movement sparkling shreds, invisible to Darling and his great friend (perhaps he wanted to say “my good pal” and one day he said “my pretty pal"). He takes a cigarette. But it is Marchetti who, with a roguish flick, shoots it from the pack. Shreds of the Marchetti ghost cling all over Our Lady. They disguise him beyond recognition. These ghostly tatters do not become him. He really looks disguised, but only like poor little peasant lads at Carnival time, with petticoats, shawls, wristlets, button boots with Louis XV heels, sunbonnets, fichus stolen from the closets of grandmothers and sisters. Little by little, petal by petal, Our Lady of the Flowers plucks off his adventure. True or false? Both. With Marchetti, he robbed a safe that was hidden in an antique cabinet. As he cut the electric wire connecting it with a bell in the watchman's quarters, Marchetti (a thirty-year-old, handsome blond Corsican, a Greco-Roman wrestling champion) put a finger to his lips and said:

“Now it's quiet.”

Squatting, probably on a rug, they sought the number and found it after having entangled themselves to the point of despair in combinations which jumbled up their age, their hair, the smooth faces of their love, with multiples and sub-multiples. Finally, this diabolic tangle was organized into a rosette and the door of the cabinet
opened. They pocketed three hundred thousand francs and a treasure in fake jewels. In the car, on the way to Marseilles (for even if one isn't thinking of leaving, after that kind of job, one always goes to a port. Ports are at the end of the world), Marchetti, for no other reason than nervousness, struck Our Lady on the temple. His gold signet ring drew blood. Finally (Our Lady learned of it later, through Marchetti's confessing it to a pal), Marchetti thought of bumping him off. In Marseilles, after dividing the swag, Our Lady entrusted him with all of it, and Marchetti beat it, abandoning the child.

“He's a son of a bitch, Divine, ain't he?”

“You were crazy about him,” said Divine.

“Aw, go on, you're nuts.”

But Marchetti was handsome. (Our Lady talks about the sweater that shows his figure, like velvet. He feels that it envelops the charm that subjugates, the iron hand in the velvet glove.) Blond Corsican with eyes . . . of blue. The wrestling was . . . Greco-Roman. The signet ring . . . of gold. On Our Lady's temple, the blood flowed. In short, he owed his life to· the one who, having just murdered him, resurrected him. Marchetti, by his grace, restored him to the world. Then, in the garret, Our Lady became sad and joyous. One might think he was singing a song of death to the air of a minuet. Divine listens. He is saying that, if caught, Marchetti will be transported. He will be shipped off. Our Lady does not exactly know what transportation is, for all he has ever heard of it is what a youngster once said to him, in speaking of the courts: “Transportation's a rough deal,” but he suspects that it will be frightful. For Divine, who is familiar with prisons and their pensive hosts, Marchetti is going to prepare himself in accordance with the rites, as she explains to Our Lady, perhaps as was done by a man condemned to death who in one night, from twilight to dawn, sang all the songs he knew. Marchetti will sing
songs with the voice of Tino Rossi. He will pack up. Will pick the photos of his prettiest girl friends. Also his mother's. Will kiss his mother in the visitor's room. Will leave. Afterwards, it will be the sea, that is, the devil's isle, Negroes, rum distilleries, coconuts, colonials wearing Panamas. The Beauty! Marchetti will play the Beauty! He will
be
the Beauty! I am touched at the thought of it and could weep with tenderness over his handsome muscles, submissive to the muscles of other brutes. The pimp, the lady killer, the hangman of hearts, will be queen of the labor gang. Of what use will his Greek muscles be? And he will be called “Flash” until a younger hoodlum arrives. But no. And does God take pity on him? A decree no longer allows the departure for Cayenne. The hardened offenders remain to the end of their days in the huge state prisons. The Beauty's chance, his hope, has been abolished. They will die nostalgic for the homeland that is their true homeland, which they have never seen, and which is denied them. He is thirty. Marchetti will remain between four white walls to the end of ends, and so as not to waste away with boredom, it will be his turn to elaborate these imaginary lives, never realized and without hope of ever being realized. It will be the death of Hope. Well-to-do captives of a dice-shaped cell. I am very glad of it. Let this arrogant and handsome pimp in turn know the torments reserved for the weakly. We occupy our minds with giving ourselves splendid roles through luxurious lives; we invent so many that we remain enfeebled for a life of action, and if one of them came, by chance, to be realized, we would be unable to be happy in it, for we have exhausted the dry delights (and many a time recalled the memory of their illusion) of the thousand possibilities of glory and wealth. We are blasé. We are forty, fifty, sixty years old; we know only petty, vegetative misery, we are blasé. Your turn, Marchetti. Don't invent ways of making a fortune,
don't buy knowledge of a sure way of smuggling, don't look for a new trick (they're all used up, more than used up) to fool jewelers, to rob whores, to bamboozle priests, to distribute phony identity cards, for if you don't have the heart to try to escape, resign yourself to the possibility of suddenly getting the right break (without specifying to yourself exactly what it may be): the one that gets you out of trouble forever, and enjoy it as you can, deep in your cell. For I hate you lovingly.

DIVINARIANA
(
continued
)

Despite the abjection in which you may hold her, Divine still reigns on the boulevard. To a newcomer (perhaps fifteen years old) in shabby linen, who winks mockingly, a pimp says, shoving her aside:

“Her, she's Divine. You, you're a slob.”

Divine has been seen at the market at about eight in the morning. Shopping bag in hand, she was discussing the price of vegetables, violets, eggs.

The afternoon of the same day, five friends at tea: “Behold, my darlings, behold Divine wedded to God. She rises at cock's crow to go to communion, the Quite-Repentant.”

The chorus of friends:

“Pitah, pitah, for Divine!”

The following day:

“My dear, they made Divine strip at the police station. She was all bruised. She'd been biffed. Her Darling's been beating her.”

The chorus of friends:

“Woo, woo, woo, Divine's getting licked!”

Now, the fact is that Divine wore next to her skin a
clinging hair shirt, unsuspected by Darling and the clients.

Someone is talking to Divine (it's a soldier who wants to re-enlist):

“What can I do to get along? I have no money.”

Divine:

“Work.”

“You can't find work right away.”

He tries to tempt Divine and persists:

“So?”

He hopes she will answer, or think: “Steal.” But Divine dared not reply, because, musing on what she would have done. in such a case, she saw herself holding out to the birds her crumbs of hunger, and she thought: “Beg.”

Divine:

“We have seen cyclists, wrapped in the garlands of the song they whistled, going dizzily down the celestial slope of the hills. We awaited them in the valley, where they arrived in the form of little pats of mud.”

Divine's cyclists awake in me an ancient terror.

It is absolutely essential that I come back to myself, that I confide in a more direct way. I wanted to make this book out of the transposed, sublimated elements of my life as a convict. I am afraid that it says nothing about the things that haunt me. Although I am striving for a lean style, one that shows the bone, I should like to address to you from my prison a book laden with flowers, with snow-white petticoats and blue ribbons. There is no better pastime.

The world of the living is never too remote from me. I remove it as far as I can with all the means at my disposal. The world withdraws until it is only a golden point in so somber a sky that the abyss between our world and the other is such that the only real thing that
remains is our grave. So I am beginning here a really dead man's existence. More and more I prune that existence, I trim it of all facts, especially the more petty ones, those which might readily remind me that the real world is spread out twenty yards away, right at the foot of the walls. Among my concerns, I rule out those most apt to remind me that they were necessitated by an established social practice: for example, tying my shoelaces with a double bow would remind me too sharply that, in the world, I used to do that to keep them from coming undone during the miles of walking I did. I don't button my fly
.
To do so would oblige me to check on myself again in the mirror or when I leave the can. I sing what I would never have sung out there, for example, that frightful: “We're the ones who are mopey and lousy and tough . . . ,” which, ever since I sang it at La Roquette when I was fifteen, comes to mind every time I go back to prison. I read things I would never read elsewhere (and I believe in them): the novels of Paul Féval. I believe in the world of prisons, in its reprehended practices. I accept living there as I would accept, were I dead, living in a cemetery, provided that I lived there as if I were really dead. But the diversion must be based not on the difference between the occupations, but on their essence. I must do nothing clean or hygienic: cleanliness and hygiene are of the earthly world. I must feed on the gossip of the law courts. Must feed on dreams. Must not be dandyish and bedeck myself with new adornments, other than a tie and gloves, but must give up being smart and trim. Must not want to be good-looking: must, want something else. Must use another kind of speech. And must think that I've been imprisoned once and for all, and for eternity. That's what is meant by “building a life”: giving up Sundays, holidays, concern about the weather. I was not surprised when I discovered the practices of prisoners, the practices that make of
them men on the margin of the living: cutting up matches lengthwise, making cigarette lighters, smoking ten to a butt, walking round and round the cell, and so on. I think that hitherto I bore that life within me secretly and that all I needed was to be put into contact with it for it to be revealed to me, from without, in its reality.