Our Lady of the Flowers (35 page)

“I so swear.”

“What do you know about the accused?” asked the judge.

“I've known him for a long time, your Honor, but nevertheless I can say that I think he's very naïve, very childlike. I've always regarded him as being very sweet. He could be my son.”

She went on to tell, with a great deal of tact, how they had lived together for a long time. There was no mention of Darling. Divine was at last the grown-up she had not been allowed to be anywhere else. By God! here he is again, the witness, who has finally emerged from the child Culafroy whom he had never ceased to be. If he
never performs any simple act, it is because only a few old men can be simple, that is, pure, purged, simplified as a diagram, which is perhaps the state of being of which Jesus said: “. . . like unto little children” (though no child is ever like that), which a life-long withering labor does not always achieve. Nothing about him was simple, not even his smile, which he liked to draw out with the right corner of his mouth or spread across his face, with his teeth clenched.

The greatness of a man is not only a function of his faculties, of his intelligence, of whatever gifts he may have; it is also made up of the circumstances that have elected him to serve them as support. A man is great if he has a great destiny; but this greatness is of the order of visible, measurable greatness. It is magnificence seen from without. Though it may be wretched when seen from within, it is then poetic, if you are willing to agree that poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible. Culafroy had a wretched destiny, and it is because of this that his life was composed of those secret acts, each of which is in essence a poem, as the infinitesimal movement of the finger of a Balinese dancer is a sign that can set a world in motion because it issues from a world whose multifarious meaning is unavowable. Culafroy became Divine; he was thus a poem written only for himself, hermetic to whoever did not have the key to it. In short, this is his secret glory, like the one I have decreed upon myself so as to obtain peace at last. And I have it, for a fortuneteller in a fair-booth assured me that some day I would be famous. With what sort of fame? I tremble at the thought. But this prophecy is enough to calm my old need for thinking I have genius. I carry within me, preciously, the words of the augury: “Some day you will be famous.” I live with it in secret, like families, in the evening. by the lamp, and always,
if they have one, with the shining memory of their kinsman who was sentenced to death. It illuminates and horrifies me. This quite virtual fame ennobles me, like a parchment that no one can decipher, an illustrious birth kept secret, a royal bar sinister, a mask or perhaps a divine filiation, the kind of thing Josephine must have felt, she who never forgot that she had given birth to the child who was to become the prettiest woman in the village, Marie, the mother of Solange–the goddess born in a hovel who had more blazons on her body than Mimosa had on her buttocks and in her gestures, and more nobility than a Chambure. This kind of consecration had kept the other women of her age (the others, mothers of men) away from Josephine. In the village, her situation was akin to that of the Mother of Jesus among the women of the Galilean village. Marie's beauty made the town illustrious. To be the human mother of a divinity is a more disturbing state than that of divinity. The Mother of Jesus must have had incomparable emotions while carrying her son, and later, while living and sleeping side by side with a son who was God–that is, everything and herself as well–who could make the world not be, His Mother, Himself not be, a God for whom she had to prepare, as Josephine did for Marie, the yellow corn mush.

Moreover, it was not that Culafroy, as child and Divine, was of exceptional finesse. But exceptionally strange circumstances had chosen him as their place of election, without informing him, had adorned him with a mysterious text. He served a poem in accordance with the whims of a rhyme without rhyme or reason. It was later, at the hour of his death, that, in a single wonder-struck glance, he was able to reread, with his eyes closed, the life he had written upon his flesh. And now Divine emerges from her inner drama, from that core of the tragic which she bears within her, and for the first time in her life
is taken seriously in the parade of humans. The prosecuting attorney stopped the parade. The witnesses had left by the open door. Each having appeared for but a second, they burned up as they passed; the unknown whisked them away. The true centers of life were the witness room–a Court of Miracles–and the chamber of the jury. It was there that the room of the foul crime, with all its accessories, was reconstructed. The amazing thing was that the necktie was still there, crouching on the green table, paler than usual, soft, but ready to dart forth, as a slouching hoodlum on the bench in a police station might dart forth. The crowd was as restless as a dog. Someone announced that Death had been delayed by a derailment. It grew dark all at once. Finally, the judge called upon the expert alienist. It was he who, really and truly, sprang up through an invisible trap door of an invisible box. He had been sitting among the audience, which had not suspected him. He stood up and walked to the bar. He read his report to the members of the jury. From the winged report dropped such words as the following: “Unbalanced . . . psychopathy . . . inter-relation . . . splanchnic system . . . schizophrenia . . . unbalanced, unbalanced, unbalanced, unbalanced . . . equilibrist,” and all at once, poignant, bleeding, “the sympathetic nerve.” He did not pause: “. . . Unbalanced . . . semi-responsibility . . . secretion . . . Freud . . . Jung . . . Adler . . . secretion . . .” But the perfidious voice was caressing certain syllables, and the man's gestures were struggling against enemies: “Father, watch out on the left, on the right.” Certain words finally ricocheted on the perfidious voice (as in pig Latin words where you have to unscramble other words that may be naïve or nasty: edbay, oorday). One understood the following: “What is a malefactor? A tie dancing in the moonlight, an epileptic rug, a stairway going up flat on its belly, a dagger on the march since the beginning
of the world, a panicky phial of poison, gloved hands in the darkness, a sailor's blue collar, an open succession, a series of benign and simple gestures, a silent hasp.” The great psychiatrist finally read his conclusions: “That he (Our Lady of the Flowers) is psychically unbalanced, non-affective, amoral. Yet, that in any criminal act, as in any act, there is an element of volition which is not due to the irritating complicity of things. In short, Baillon is partly responsible for the murder.”

Snow was falling. About the courtroom, all was silence. The Criminal Court was abandoned in infinite space, all alone. It had already ceased to obey the laws of the earth. Swiftly it flew across stars and planets. It was, in the air, the stone house of the Holy Virgin. The passengers no longer expected help from the outside world. The moorings had been cut. It was at that moment that the frightened part of the courtroom (the crowd, the jurymen, the lawyers, the guards) should have dropped to their knees and broken out into hymns of praise, when the other part (Our Lady), freed from the weight of carnal labors (to put someone to death is a carnal labor), had organized itself as a couple and sung: “Life is a dream . . . a charming dream . . .” But the crowd does not have the sense of grandeur. It does not obey this dramatic injunction, and nothing was less serious than what followed. Our Lady himself felt his pride softening. He looked at Judge Vase de Sainte-Marie for the first time with the eyes of a man. It is so sweet to love that he could not keep from dissolving into a feeling of sweet, trusting tenderness for the judge. “Maybe he ain't a louse!” he thought, and at once his sweet insensitivity collapsed, and the relief it afforded him was like the release of urine from the penis after a night of continence. Remember that when Darling used to wake up. he would find himself on earth after he had pissed. Our
Lady loved his executioner, his first executioner. He was already granting a kind of wavering, premature pardon to the icy monocle, the metallic hair, the earthly mouth, the future sentence delivered according to frightful Scriptures. Exactly what is an executioner? A child dressed as a Fatal Sister, an innocent isolated by the splendor of his purple rags, a poor, a humble fellow. Someone lit the chandeliers and wall lights. The prosecuting attorney took the floor. Against the adolescent murderer, who had been cut out of a block of clear water, he said only things that were very fair, within the scope of the judge and jurors. That is, it was necessary to protect rentiers, who sometimes live all the way upstairs, beneath the roof, and to put to death children who slaughter them. . . . It was all very reasonable, spoken in a very sagacious and at times noble tone. With an accompaniment of his head:

“. . . It is regrettable (in a minor key; then, continuing in the major) . . . it is regrettable . . .”

His arm, pointing at the murderer, was obscene.

“Strike hard!” he cried. “Strike hard!”

The prisoners referred to him as “The Blowhard.” At that formal session, he illustrated very accurately a poster nailed to a huge door. An old marquise, lost in the darkness of the crowd, thought to herself: “The Republic has already guillotined five of us. . . .” But her thought went no deeper. The tie was still on the table. The jurors still had not got over their fear. It was just about then that the clock struck five. During the indictment, Our Lady had sat down. The courthouse seemed to him to be situated between apartment buildings, at the rear of the kind of well-shaped inner courtyard on which all the kitchen and toilet windows look out, where uncombed housemaids lean forward and, with their hands cupped over their ears, listen and try to miss nothing of the proceedings. Five stories and four faces. The maids
are toothless and spy on each other behind them. Through the gloom of the kitchen, one can make out the gold or plush spangles in the mystery of the opulent apartments where ivory-headed old gentlemen watch with tranquil eyes the approach of murderers in slippers. For Our Lady, the courthouse is at the bottom of this well. It is small and light, like the Greek temple that Minerva carries in her open hand. The guard at his left made him stand up, for the judge was questioning him: “What do you have to say in your defense?” The old tramp who was his cellmate in the Santé Prison had prepared a few suitable words for him to say to the Court. He looked for them but was unable to find them. The phrase “I didn't do it on purpose” took shape on his lips. Had he said it, nobody would have been surprised. Everyone expected the worst. All the answers that occurred to him came forward in slang, and a feeling for the proprieties suggested to him that he speak French, but everyone knows that in trying moments it is the mother tongue that prevails. He had to be natural. To be natural, at that moment, was to be theatrical, but his maladroitness saved him from ridicule and lopped off his head. He was truly great. He said:

“The old guy was washed up. He couldn't even get a hard-on.”

The last word did not pass his jaunty little lips. Nevertheless, the twelve old men, all together, very quickly put their hands over their ears to prevent the entry of the word that was as big as an organ, which, finding no other orifice, entered all stiff and hot into their gaping mouths. The virility of the twelve old men and of the judge was flouted by the youngster's glorious immodesty. Everything was changed. Those who were Spanish dancers, with castanets on the fingers, became jurors again, the sensitive painter became a juror again, the old man of cloth became a juror again, so did the old
grouch, so did the one who was pope and the one who was Vestris. You don't believe me? The audience heaved a sigh of rage. With his beautiful hands the judge made the gesture that tragic actresses make with their lovely arms. Three subtle shudders ruffled his red robe as if it were a theater curtain, as if there clung to the Hap, at the calf, the desperate claws of a dying kitten, the muscles of whose paws had been contracted by three little death throes. He nervously ordered Our Lady to behave with decorum, and the lawyer for the defense took the floor. With mincing little steps under his robe (which were really like little farts), he came to the bar and addressed the Court. The Court smiled, that is, with the smile imparted to the face by the austere choice (already made) between the just and the unjust, the royal rigor of the brow that knows the dividing line–that has seen clear and judged–and that condemns. The Court was smiling. The faces were relaxing from the tension; the flesh was softening up again; little pouts were ventured, but, quickly startled, withdrew into their shells. The Court was pleased, quite pleased. The lawyer was doing his utmost. He spoke volubly, his sentences went on and on. One felt that they had been born of lightning and would peter out in tails of comets. He was mingling what he said were his childhood memories (of his own childhood, in which he himself had been tempted by the devil) with notions of pure law. Despite such contact, pure law remained pure and, in the gray drool, retained its hard, crystal brilliance. The lawyer spoke first of being brought up in the gutter, the example of the street, of hunger, of thirst (my God, was he going to make of the child a Father de Foucauld or a Michel Vieuchange?); he spoke also of the almost carnal temptation of the neck, which is made the way it is in order to be squeezed. In short, he was off the track. Our Lady esteemed this eloquence. He did not yet believe what
the lawyer was saying, but he was ready to undertake anything, to assume anything. Yet, a feeling of uneasiness, the meaning of which he understood only later, indicated to him, by obscure means, that the lawyer was undoing him. The Court was cursing so mediocre a lawyer, who was not even according it the satisfaction of overcoming the pity it should normally have felt while following the speech for the defense. What game was this idiotic lawyer playing? If only he would say a word, a trifling or crude word, that would make the jurors, for at least the space and time of a murderous leer, be smitten with an adolescent corpse and, thus avenging the strangled old man, feel that they, in turn, had the soul of a murderer (sitting comfortably in the warm room, without any risks, except merely the little Eternal Damnation). Their pleasure was disappearing. Would they have to acquit because the lawyer was a blockhead? But did anyone think that this might have been the supreme foxiness of a poet-lawyer? Napoleon is said to have lost Waterloo because Wellington committed a blunder. The Court felt that it had to sanctify this young man. The lawyer was drooling. He was speaking, at the moment, of possible re-education–in their reserved stall, the four representatives of the Church Youth Centers then played poker dice to settle the fate of the soul of Our Lady of the Flowers. The lawyer was asking for an acquittal. He was imploring. They no longer understood him. Finally, as with a promptness for sensing the one moment in a thousand for saying the crucial word, Our Lady, gently as always, screwed up his face and said, though without thinking it: