Our Lady of the Flowers (33 page)

It will be very difficult for me to explain precisely and describe minutely what took place inside Our Lady of the Flowers. It is hardly possible to speak in this connection of gratitude toward the more soft-spoken of the detectives. The easing of the strain that Our Lady felt as a result of the phrase “There's not much harm done"–no, it's not quite that. The detective said:

“The thing that got him sore was your dummy.”

He laughed and inhaled a mouthful of smoke. Gargled
it. Did Our Lady
fear
a lesser punishment? First, there came from his liver, right up against his teeth, the confession of the old man's murder. He didn't make the confession. But the confession was rising, rising. If he opens his mouth, he'll blurt it all out. He felt he was lost. Suddenly he gets dizzy. He sees himself on the pediment of a not very high temple. “I'm eighteen. I can be sentenced to death,” he thinks very quickly. If he loosens his fingers, he falls. Come, he pulls himself together. No, he won't say anything. It would be magnificent to say it, it would be glorious. No, no, no! Lord, no!

Ah! he's saved. The confession withdraws, withdraws without having crossed.

“I killed an old man.”

Our Lady has fallen from the pediment of the temple, and instantly slack despair lulls him to sleeep. He is rested. The detective has hardly moved.

“Who, what old man?”

Our Lady comes back to life. He laughs.

“No, I'm kidding. I was joking.”

With dizzying speed he concocts the following alibi: a murderer confesses spontaneously and in an idiotic way, with impossible details, to a murder so that they'll think he's crazy and stop suspecting him. Wasted effort. They start torturing him again. There's no use screaming that he was only joking. The detectives want to know. Our Lady knows that they will know, and because he's young, he thrashes about. He is a drowning man who is struggling against his gestures and upon whom, nevertheless, peace–you know, the peace of the drowned–slowly descends. The detectives are now mentioning the names of all men murdered during the last five or ten years whose murderers have not been caught. The list lengthens. Our Lady has the needless revelation of the extraordinary ignorance of the police. The violent deaths unroll before his eyes. The detectives mention
names, more names, and whack him. Finally, they're on the verge of saying to Our Lady: “Maybe you don't know his name?” Not yet. They mention names and stare at the child's red face. It's a game. The guessing game. Am I getting warm? Ragon? . . . His face is too upset to be able to express anything comprehensible. It's all in disorder. Our Lady screams:

“Yes, yes, it's him. Leave me alone.”

His hair is in his eyes. He tosses it back with a jerk of his head, and this simple gesture, which was his rarest precosity, signifies to him the vanity of the world. He wipes away some of the drool that is flowing from his mouth. Everything grows so calm that no one knows what to do.

Overnight, the name of Our Lady of the Flowers was known throughout France, and France is used to confusion. Those who merely skim the newspapers did not linger over Our Lady of the Flowers. Those who go all the way to the end of the articles, scenting the unusual and tracking it down there every time, brought to light a miraculous haul; these readers were school-children and the little old women who, out in the provinces, have remained like Ernestine, who was born old, like Jewish children who at the age of four have the faces and gestures they will have at fifty. It was indeed for her, to enchant her twilight, that Our Lady had killed an old man. Ever since she had started making up fatal tales, or stories that seemed flat and trivial, but in which certain explosive words ripped the canvas, showing, through these gashes, a bit of what went on, as it were, behind the scenes, people were staggered when they realized why she had talked that way. Her mouth was full of stories, and people wondered how they could be born of her, who every evening read only a dull newspaper: the stories were born of the newspaper, as mine are born of cheap novels. She used to stand behind
the window, waiting for the postman. As the time for the mail approached, her anguish would heighten, and when finally she touched the gray, porous pages that oozed with the blood of tragedies (the blood whose smell she confused with the smell of the ink and paper), when she unfolded them on her knees like a napkin, she would sink back exhausted, utterly exhausted, in an old red armchair.

A village priest, hearing the name of Our Lady of the Flowers float about him, without having received a pastoral letter concerning the matter, one Sunday, from the pulpit, ordered prayers and recommended this new cult to the particular devotion of the faithful. The faithful, sitting in their pews, quite startled, said not a word, thought not a thought.

In a hamlet, the name of the flower known as “queen of the fields” made a little girl who was thinking of Our Lady of the Flowers ask:

“Mommy, is she someone who had a miracle?”

There were other miracles that I haven't time to report.

The taciturn and feverish traveler who arrives in a city does not fail to go straight to the dives, the red-light districts, the brothels. He is guided by a mysterious sense that alerts him to the call of hidden love, or perhaps by the bearing of, the direction taken by, certain habitués, whom he recognizes by sympathetic signs, by passwords exchanged between their subconscious minds, and whom he follows on trust. In like manner, Ernestine went straight to the tiny lines of the short crime items, which are–the murders, robberies, rapes, armed assaults–the “Barrios Chinos” of the newspapers. She dreamed about them. Their concise violence, their precision left the dream neither time nor space to filter in: they floored her. They broke upon her brutally, in vivid, resounding colors: red hands placed on a dancer's face, green faces,
blue eyelids. When this tidal wave subsided, she would read all the titles of the musical selections listed in the radio column, but she would never have allowed a musical air to enter her room, for the slightest melody corrodes poetry. Thus, the newspapers were disturbing, as if they had been filled only with columns of crime news, columns as bloody and mutilated as torture stakes. And though the press has very parsimoniously given to the trial, which we shall read about tomorrow, only ten lines, widely enough spaced to let the air circulate between the overviolent words, these ten lines–more hypnotic than the fly of a hanged man, than the words “hempen collar,” than the word “Zouave"–these ten lines quickened the hearts of the old women and jealous children. Paris did not sleep. She hoped that the following day Our Lady would be sentenced to death; she desired it.

In the morning, the sweepers, impervious to the sweet, sad absences of those sentenced to death, whether dead or not, to whom the Criminal Court gives asylum, stirred up acrid dust, watered the floor, spat, blasphemed, and joked with the court clerks who were setting out the files. The hearing was to begin at exactly twelve forty-five, and at noon the porter opened the doors wide.

The courtroom is not majestic, but it is very high, so that it gives a general impression of vertical lines, like lines of quiet rain. Upon entering, one sees on the wall a big painting with a figure of justice, who is a woman, wearing big red drapings. She is leaning with all her weight upon a saber, here called a “glaive,” which does not bend. Below are the platform and table where the jurors and the presiding judge, in ermine and red robe, will come to sit in judgment on the child. The name of the presiding judge is “Mr. Presiding Judge Vase de Sainte-Marie.” Once again, to attain its ends, destiny resorts to a low method. The twelve jurors are twelve decent men suddenly become sovereign judges. So, the
courtroom had been filling up since noon. A banquet hall. The table was set. I should like to speak sympathetically about the courtroom crowd, not because it was not hostile to Our Lady of the Flowers–I don't mind that–but because it is sparkling with a thousand poetic gestures. It is as shuddering as taffeta. At the edge of a gulf bristling with bayonets, Our Lady is dancing a perilous dance. The crowd is not gay; its soul is sad unto death. It huddled together on the benches, drew its knees and buttocks together, wiped its collective nose, and attended to the hundred needs of a courtroom crowd that is going to be weighed down by so much majesty. The public comes here only insofar as a word may result in a beheading and as it may return, like Saint Denis, carrying its severed head in its hands. It is sometimes said that death hovers over a people. Do you remember the skinny, consumptive Italian woman that it was for Culafroy, and what it will later be for Divine? Here death is only a black wing without a body, a wing made with some remnants of black bunting and supported by a thin framework of umbrella ribs, a pirate banner without a staff. This wing of bunting floated over the Court, which you are not to confuse with any other, for it is the Court of Law. The wing enveloped it in its folds and had detailed a green crepe de Chine tie to represent It in the courtroom. The tie, which lay on the judge's table, was the only piece of evidence. Death, visible here, was a tie, and this fact pleases me: it was a light Death.

The crowd was ashamed of not being the murderer. The robed lawyers were carrying briefs under their arms and smiled as they greeted each other. They occasionally approached the Little Death quite closely and most pluckily.

The newspapermen were with the lawyers. The delegates of the Church Youth Centers were speaking in whispers among themselves. They were disputing a soul.
Was it necessary to throw dice for it in order to send it to the Vosges? The lawyers, who, despite their long silken robes, do not have the gentle and death-driven bearing of ecclesiastics, kept coming together in little groups and then breaking up. They were very near the platform, and the crowd could hear them tuning up their instruments for the funeral march. The crowd was ashamed of not dying. The religion of the hour was to await and envy a young murderer. The murderer entered. All one could see was strapping Republican Guards. The child emerged from the flanks of one of them, and the other unchained his wrists. Reporters have described the movements of the crowd when a famous criminal enters. I therefore refer the reader, if I may, to their articles, as my role and my art do not lie in describing mob behavior. Nevertheless, I shall make so bold as to say that all eyes could read, graven in the aura of Our Lady of the Flowers, the following words: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” The lack of light and air in his cell had made him neither too pale nor too puffy; the lines of his closed lips were the lines of a sober smile; his clear eyes knew nothing of Hell; his entire face (but perhaps he stood before you like the prison, which, as that woman walked by singing in the darkness, remained for her an evil wall, whereas all the cells were secretly taking flight, flown by the hands, which were beating like wings, of the convicts who were electrified by the singing), his image and his gestures released captive demons or, with several turns of a key, locked in angels of light. He was wearing a very youthful, gray flannel suit, and the collar of his blue shirt was open. His blond hair kept falling over his eyes, you recall the toss of the head with which he drove it back. Thus, when he had everyone in front of him, Our Lady, the murderer, who in a little while would be dead, murdered in turn, tossed his head slightly, while blinking
his eyes, which made his curly lock, that fell close to his nose, bound back to his head. This simple scene transports us, that is, it lifts up the moment, as the fakir's oblivion to the world lifts him up and holds him suspended. The moment was no longer of the earth, but of the sky. Everything gave grounds for fear that the hearing might be chopped up into those cruel moments that would pull away trap doors from under the feet of the judges, lawyers, Our Lady, and the guards, and, for an eternity, would leave them lifted up as fakirs, until the moment when slightly too deep a breath would restore the suspended life.

The guard of honor (members of the colonial troops) entered noisily with their hobnailed boots and rattling bayonets. Our Lady thought it was the firing squad.

Have I mentioned the fact that the audience was made up mostly of men? But all of them, darkly dressed, with umbrellas on their arms and newspapers in their pockets, were shakier than a bower of wisteria, than the lace curtain of a crib. Our Lady of the Flowers was the reason why the courtroom, all invaded by a grotesque, dressed-up crowd, was a May hedgerow. The murderer was sitting on the criminal's bench. The removal of the chains enabled him to put his hands deep into his pockets. Thus he seemed to be anywhere, that is, rather in the waiting room of an employment bureau, or on a park bench, watching from afar a Punch and Judy show in a kiosk, or perhaps even in church, at Thursday catechism. I swear he was waiting for anything. At a certain moment, he took one hand out of his pocket and, as a while before, flicked back, with, at the same time, a toss of his pretty little head, the blond curly lock. The crowd stopped breathing. He completed his gesture by smoothing back his hair, down to the nape of the neck, and I am thereby reminded of a strange impression: when, in a person who has been dehumanized by glory,
we discern a familiar gesture, a vulgar feature (there you have it: tossing back a lock of hair with a jerk of the head) that breaks the hardened crust, and through the crevice, which is as lovely as a smile or an error, we glimpse a patch of sky. I had once noted this in the case of one of Our Lady's thousand forerunners, an annunciatory angel of this virgin, a blond young boy ("Girls blond as boys . . .” I shall, indeed, never weary of this phrase, which has the charm of the expression: “a French guardswoman") whom I used to watch in gymnasium groups. He depended upon the figures that he helped to form and, thus, was only a sign. But whenever he had to place one knee on the floor and, like a knight at a coronation, extend his arms at the word of command, his hair would fall over his eyes and he would break the harmony of the gymnastic figure by pushing it back, against his temples, and then behind his ears, which were small, with a gesture that described a curve with both his hands, which, for an instant, enclosed, and pressed like a diadem, his oblong skull. It would have been the gesture of a nun pushing aside her veil, if at the same time he had not shaken his head like a bird preening itself after drinking.