Our Lady of the Flowers (28 page)

Taraboom ti-ay!

Taraboom ti-ay!

The air was cool. The coldness of the Paris morning froze his shoulders and fluttered his dress from top to bottom.

“You're cold,” said Gorgui looking at him.

“And how!”

Without anyone's taking notice, Seck's arm went around Our Lady's shoulders. Behind them, Divine arranged her face and gestures so that, upon turning around, they both thought her preoccupied with a very practical inventory. But neither of the two seemed to care whether Divine was absent or present. They heard the morning angelus, the rattle of a milk can. Three workmen went by on bicycles along the boulevard, their lamps lit, though it was day. A policeman on his way home, where perhaps he would find an empty bed (Divine hoped so, for he was young), passed without looking at them. The garbage cans smelled of sink and cleaning women. Their odor clung to the white Valenciennes lace of Our Lady's dress and to the festoons on the flounces of Divine's pink. jacket. Our Lady continued to sing
and the Negro to smile. Suddenly they were at the brink of despair, all three of them. The marvelous road was traveled. Now it was the flat and banal asphalt boulevard, the boulevard of everybody, so different from the secret path they had just cleared in the drunken dawn of a day, with their perfumes, silks, laughter, songs, across houses whose guts were hanging out, houses cleft down the front, where, continuing their naps, suspended in sleep, were old people, children, pimps–pimple-dimple-girly-flowers–barmen, so different, I repeat, from that out-of-the-way path that the three children approached a taxi in order to escape the vexation of a commonplace return. The taxi anticipated them. The driver opened the door and Our Lady stepped in first. Gorgui, because of his position in the group, ought to have got in first, but he moved aside, leaving the opening free for Our Lady. Bear in mind that a pimp never effaces himself before a woman, still less before a faggot (which, however, with respect to him, Our Lady had that night become); Gorgui must have placed him quite high. Divine blushed when he said:

“Get in, Danie.”

Then, instanly, in order to think more nimbly, Divine again became the Divine she had left behind while going down the Rue Lepic. For, though she felt as a “woman,” she thought as a “man.” One might think that, in thus reverting spontaneously to her true nature, Divine was a male wearing make-up, disheveled with make-believe gestures; but this is not a case of the phenomenon of recourse to the mother tongue in times of stress. In order to think with precision, Divine must never formulate her thoughts aloud, for herself. Doubtless there had been times when she had said to herself aloud: “I'm just a foolish girl,” but having felt this, she felt it no longer, and, in saying it, she no longer thought it. In Mimosa's presence, for example, she
managed to think “woman” with regard to serious but never essential things. Her femininity was not
only
a masquerade. But as for thinking “woman” completely, her organs hindered her. To think is to perform an act. In order to act, you have to discard frivolity and set your idea on a solid base. So she was aided by the idea of solidity, which she associated with the idea of virility, and it was in grammar that she found it near at hand. For if, to define a state of mind that she felt, Divine dared use the feminine, she was unable to do so in defining an action which she performed. And all the “woman” judgments she made were, in reality, poetic conclusions. Hence, only then was Divine true. It would be curious to know what women corresponded to in Divine's mind, and particularly in her life. No doubt, she herself was not a woman (that is, a female in a skirt); she was womanly only through her submission to the imperious male; nor, for her, was Ernestine, who was her mother, a woman. But all of woman was in a little girl whom Culafroy had known when he was a kid, in the village. Her name was Solange. On broiling days they would sit curled up on a white stone bench, in a delicate little patch of shade, narrow as a hem, with their feet tucked under their smocks so as not to wet them with sun; they felt and thought in common in the shelter of the snowball tree. Culafroy was in love, since, when Solange was sent to a convent, he made pilgrimages. He visited the Grotto Rock. Mothers used that granite rock as a bogy, peopling its cavities, to terrify us, with evil creatures, sandmen, and vendors of shoelaces, pins, and charms. Most of the children paid no heed to the stories dictated by the mothers’ prudence. Only Solange and Culafroy, when they made their way there–as often as possible–had the sacred terror in their souls. One summer evening, which was heavy with gathering storm, they approached it. The rock advanced like
a prow through a sea of golden crops with glints of blue. The sky descended upon earth like a blue powder in a glass of water. The sky was visiting the earth. A mysterious and mystic air (imitated from temples) which only a landscape set off from the village could preserve in all seasons: a pond inhabited by salamanders and framed by little groves of firs which were idealized in the green water. Firs are amazing trees which I have often seen in Italian paintings. They are meant for Christmas mangers and are thus involved in the charm of winter nights, of the magi, of gypsy musicians and vendors of postcards, of hymns and kisses given and received at night, barefooted on the rug. Culafroy always expected to find in their branches a miraculous virgin, who, so that the miracle might be total, would be made of colored plaster. He had to have this hope in order to tolerate nature. Hateful nature, anti-poetic, ogress swallowing up all spirituality. As ogrish as beauty is greedy. Poetry is a vision of the world obtained by an effort, sometimes exhausting, of the taut, buttressed will. Poetry is willful It is not an abandonment, a free and gratuitous entry by the senses; it is not to be confused with sensuality, but rather, opposing it, was born, for example, on Saturdays, when, to clean the rooms, housewives put the red velvet chairs, gilded mirrors, and mahogany tables outside, in the nearby meadow.

Solange was standing at the top of the rock. She leaned back very slightly, as if she were inhaling. She opened her mouth to speak and remained silent. She was waiting for a thunderclap or for inspiration, which were not forthcoming. A few seconds passed in a tangle thick with fright and joy. Then, she uttered, in a pale voice:

“In a year, a man will throw himself from the rock.”

“Why in a year? What man?”

“You're an idiot.”

She described the man. He was stout, wore gray trousers
and a hunting jacket. Culafroy was as upset as if he had been told that a suicide had just been committed there and that a body still warm was lying in the brambles under the rock. The emotion entered him in light, short waves, invading him, and escaped through his feet, hands, hair and eyes, gradually drifting throughout nature as Solange went on to relate the phases of the drama, which was as complicated and cunning as I imagine a Japanese drama must be. Solange took great pains with it, and she had chosen the tone of tragic recitative, in which the voice never joins the tonic.

“He's a man who comes from afar, no one knows why. He's probably a pig dealer returning from the fair.”

“But the road's far away. Why does he come here?”

“To die, you innocent. You can't kill yourself on the road.”

She shrugged her shoulders and tossed her head. Her lovely curls struck her cheeks like leaded whips. The little pythoness had crouched. Seeking on the rock the carved words of the prophecy, she resembled a mother hen scratching around in the sand to find the grain that she will show to her chicks. Thereafter, the rock became a place that is visited, haunted. They went there as one goes to a grave. That piety for one of the future dead hollowed out in them a kind of hunger or one of those weaknesses which resist fever.

One day Culafroy thought to himself: “That was nine months ago, and Solange is returning in June. So, in July she'll be here to see the climax of the tragedy of which she's the author.” She returned. At once he realized that she belonged to a world different from his. She was no longer part of him. She had won her independence; this little girl was now like those works that have long since dropped away from their author: no longer being directly flesh of his flesh, they no longer benefit from his maternal tenderness. Solange had become
come like one of those chilled excrements which Culafroy used to deposit at the foot of the garden wall among the currant bushes. When they were still warm, he took a tender delight in their odor, but he spurned them with indifference–at times with horror–when they had too long since ceased to be part of himself. And if Solange was no longer the chaste little girl taken from his rib, the little girl who used to pull her hair into her mouth to nibble at it, he himself had been charred by living near Alberto. A chemical operation had taken place within him, giving birth to new compounds. The past of both youngsters was already as old as the hills. Neither Solange nor Culafroy found the games and words of the year before. One day they walked to the hazel trees, which the summer before had been the scene of their wedding, of a baptism of dolls and a banquet of hazelnuts. Upon once again seeing the spot, which the goats always kept in the same condition, Culafroy remembered the prophecy of the Grotto. He wanted to speak of it to Solange, but she had forgotten. To be exact, it was thirteen months since she had announced the violent death of the pig dealer, and nothing had happened. Culafroy saw another supernatural function fade away. A measure of despair was added to the despair which was to accompany him until his death. He did not yet know that the importance of any event in our life lies only in the resonance it sets up within us, only in the degree to which it makes us move toward asceticism. As for him, who receives only shocks, Solange on her rock had not been more inspired than he. In order to show off, she had played a role; but then, though one mystery was thereby disposed of, another and denser one rose up: “I'm not the only one,” he thinks, “who can play at not being what they are. So I'm not an exceptional creature.” Then, finally, he suddenly detected one of the facets of feminine glitter. He was disappointed, but above all he
was filled with another love and with a certain pity for the too pale, delicate, and distant little girl. Alberto had attracted to him, like a fork of lightning, all the marvel-ousness of the external. Culafroy told Solange a little about snake fishing, and he knew, like a knowing artist, how to confess and suppress. She was sweeping the ground with a hazel branch. Certain children have in their hands, without anyone's suspecting it, inherent powers of sorcery, and people who are naive are astonished at the perturbations in the laws of animals and families. Solange had formerly been the fairy of the morning spiders–Grief, says the chronicle. I interrupt myself here to observe, “this morning,” a spider that is weaving in the darkest corner of my cell. Destiny has artfully directed my gaze to it and its web. The oracle manifests itself. I can only bow without cursing: “You are your own fate, you have woven your own spell.” Only one misfortune can befall me, that is, the most terrible. Here am I, reconciled with the gods. The arts of divination do not make me set myself questions, since they are divine. I should like to come back to Solange, to Divine, to Culafroy, to the sad. drab creatures I sometimes desert for handsome dancers and hoodlums; but even the former (especially the former) have been far away from me since I received the shock of the oracle. Solange? She listened like a woman to Culafroy's confidences. For a moment she was embarrassed and laughed, and her laugh was such that a skeleton seemed to be frisking about on her close-set teeth and hammering them with sharp blows. In the heart of the countryside she felt herself a prisoner. She had just been bound. Jealous, the girl. She had difficulty finding enough saliva to ask: “You like him?” and her swallowing was painful, as if she were swallowing a package of pins. Culafroy hesitated to answer. The fairy ran the danger of oblivion. At the moment when it had to be done, when the answer was a
“yes” suspended whole and visible, ready to explode, Solange dropped the hazel wand and in order to pick it up bent down, in a ridiculous position, just as the fatal cry fell, the nuptial “yes,” with the result that it was mingled with the sound of the sand which she scraped; it was thereby stifled, and the shock to Solange was absorbed. Divine never had any other experience with woman.

Near the taxi, no longer obliged to think, she became Divine again. Instead of getting in (she had already grasped between two fingers the ruffle of her black dress and lifted her left foot), as Gorgui, already settled, was inviting her in, she let out a burst of strident laughter, festive or mad, turned to the driver and. laughing in his face, said:

“No, no. With the driver. I always get in with the driver, so there.”

And she became kittenish.

“Does the driver mind?”

The driver was a regular fellow who knew his business (all taxi drivers are procurers and traffic in snow). The fan in Divine's fingers did not unfold. Besides, Divine did not take the fan to throw people off the track; she would have been mortified at seeing herself mistaken for those horrible titty females. “Oh! those women,” she would say, “those wicked, wicked things, those vile sailors’ tarts, those tramps, those dirty nasties. Oh! those women, how I hate them!” The driver opened the door of his own seat and, smiling pleasantly, said to Divine:

“Come, get in, baby.”

“Oh, that driver, he's he's . . .”

Cracklings of taffeta riddled the driver's splendid thigh.

The day was wide-awake when they reached the garret,
but the darkness made by the drawn curtains, the odor of tea and, even more, the odor of Gorgui, engulfed them in a night of magic. As was her wont, Divine slipped behind the screen to take off her mourning dress and put on a pair of pajamas. Our Lady sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette (at his feet, the mossy mass of the lace of his dress made for him a kind of rustling base), and, with his elbows on his knees, watched–chance having accepted and instantly organized them–Gorgui's evening jacket, white satin vest, and pumps assume before him on the rug the form of the evidence that a ruined gentleman leaves on the banks of the Seine at three in the morning; Gorgui went to bed naked. Divine reappeared in green pajamas, because, for the room, the green of the cloth was becoming to her ocher-powdered face. Our Lady had not yet finished his cigarette.