Funeral Rites (15 page)

“Ah!” she said.

She was holding a small handkerchief and rolling it into a little ball to mop her forehead. She took my hand and said, “It's so hot!” Whereupon she leaned on Erik's shoulder. He turned his head and looked at her with a tender smile.

I had sat down. I took a bar of American chocolate from my pocket and handed it to them, but instead of moving toward Jean's mother, my arm went in Erik's direction.

“I was able to get this. . . .”

Erik took it.

“Oh, that's awfully nice of you! We. . . .” And suddenly, as her back was to the half-open window, she spun around, pushing Erik aside. “It's mad,” she exclaimed in a choked voice.

It was then that I realized why Erik was not wearing shoes, why they spoke in a low tone, why the room was dark and fear was in the air.

“You're the only one we trust.”

Erik glanced at me, then at her, then at the bar of chocolate he was holding, and finally at her again, and there was more tenderness in his gaze than there had been a little while before.

“You don't know the kind of life we live here. I tell Juliette to say that I'm not well, and I don't go out any
more. She does the shopping. Paulo too. If only we can run away some night. He (she pointed to Erik) would like to leave. He really feels he's in danger. But where can he go? They're arresting everyone. Have you been to the cemetery?”

“I have. The grave is all right.”

“Is it? My poor little Jean!”

She turned to the photograph of Jean which was on the buffet, and looked at it for quite a while.

“I'll have to make arrangements for the winter. Winter will be coming with all its sadness.”

Jean didn't give a damn about having a well-tended grave, about even having a grave. I think he would have preferred a nonreligious funeral.

“Of course, I know that very well, but a mother's a mother.”

Although her manner at the moment was very simple, a pathetic veil inflated the last word: “mother.”

“And besides, there's the family. There had to be a funeral.”

I thought to myself: “Why not bedbugs,” for the word funeral is used the same way the word is by the people of Marseilles, who exclaim: “Ugh! A funeral,” or, in the same tone: “A bedbug.”

I had already stopped a feeling that I was profaning his memory and ventured a grim joke with regard to him.

“What has to be has to be.”

“What has to be?”

She looked at me with a touch of surprise.

“Well . . . there had to be a Mass . . . the emblem. . . .”

The escutcheon with a capital D embroidered in silver had been, for a day, the family's coat of arms.

“That would have given him a laugh.”

“You think so? Yes, you're right. He wasn't a believer.”

She hesitated a second and said, “He didn't like money.” Jean did not believe. He did not believe enough. Yet his mind, which submitted to Marxist disciplines, could not keep from trembling a little about the very things he mocked.

“Is Paulo in?”

“No, he went to get groceries. I wonder what he'll bring. If only they don't kill him, him too!”

“Oh, why would they?”

It was Erik who asked the question as he shrugged slightly and put down the chocolate beside a glass on the table. It was then I felt that Paulo could not die, for nothing could destroy the kind of hardness he was made of. The sight of the wine glass reminded me of him. The last time I had seen him in that same room, he was removing four wine glasses from the table—the kind of glass that's called a “snifter.” He picked them all up with only one hand, but in such a way that three of them in a triangle were the only ones touched by his fingers, while in the middle the fourth was supported simply by the edges of the three others. It was chance that arranged them in that way, and also the fortuitous precision of the hand that took away the four glasses being carried by three stems. For a second or two, Paulo achieved the state of balance, but in order to maintain it he had to summon up extraordinary skill, which itself required undivided attention. Tight-lipped and with fixed gaze, he looked at that light, fragile crystal rose. Sitting upright at the table, rigid as a bar of iron, attempting to get my balance, I was amazed to see that essentially evil nature refuse the help of its other hand but, with exquisite skill, maintain the transparent flower of air and water in two fingers and carry it very carefully from the table to the sink before the eyes of the smiling Erik. One of
those glasses was there in front of me and reminded me that it was more than anything the youngster's elegance that had made me aware of his inviolable hardness and endurance.

Puny, ridiculous little fellow that I was, I emitted upon the world a power extracted from the pure, sheer beauty of athletes and hoodlums. For only beauty could have occasioned such an impulse of love as that which, every day for seven years, caused the death of strong and fierce young creatures. Beauty alone warrants such improper things as hearing the music of the spheres, raising the dead, understanding the unhappiness of stones. In the secrecy of my night I took upon myself—the right way of putting it if one bears in mind the homage paid to my body—the beauty of Gérard in particular and then that of all the lads in the Reich: the sailors with a girl's ribbon, the tank crews, the artillerymen, the aces of the Luftwaffe, and the beauty that my love had appropriated was retransmitted by my hands, by my poor puffy, ridiculous face, by my hoarse, spunk-filled mouth to the loveliest armies in the world. Carrying such a charge, which had come from them and returned to them, drunk with themselves and with me, what else could those youngsters do but go out and die? I put my arm around Paulo and turned my body so that we faced each other, and I smiled. I was a man. The text of my stern gaze was inscribed on Paulo. That sternness of gaze corresponded to an inner vision, an amorous preoccupation; it signified attention to a kind of constant desire, in short to covetousness, in accordance with our arrangements straight out of a novel, it indicated that this little fellow never left to itself the living, gesticulating image of its double that stood at the tribune in Nuremberg. Paulo's teeth were clean. My mustache was now near him, and he could see
it hair by hair. It was not only a sign—harmless or dangerous—of the pale, nocturnal blazon of a race of pirates, it was a mustache. Paulo was frightened by it. Could it be that a simple mustache composed of black hair—and dyed perhaps—meant: cruelty, despotism, violence, rage, foam, asps, strangulation, death, forced marches, ostentation, prison, daggers?

“Are you scared?”

With his whole inner being trembling, that being which vainly sought, by fleeing, to drag along the flesh-and-blood being whose prisoner it was, Paulo replied, with a lump in his throat, “No.”

The sonority of the word and the strange sound of his own voice made him more aware of the danger that lies in daring to enter dreams with one's actual flesh and blood, to have a private conversation with the creatures of night—a night of the heart that was poured out over Europe—with the monsters of nightmares. He felt a very slight throbbing at his temples—which I saw—a throbbing as clear as the vibration of crystal, and he yearned for an awakening, that is, for France. Then, the remoteness of France immediately gave him the same feeling of being abandoned that he would have felt had his mother died. Ramparts or rifles, cannons, trenches, electric currents, separated him from the world in which he was loved. Cunning and treacherous radios were lulling his friends to sleep, were denying the rumor of his death, were turning off his appeal, were consoling France for her loss. He felt he was a prisoner, that is, alone with destiny. He was sorry for France, and his sorrow included the following more particular regret: “I won't be able to tell the boys that I saw Hitler,” and the inner fluttering that accompanied this regret was the finest tribute, the most touching poem addressed to the Fatherland.

Nevertheless, I smiled. I was awaiting death. I knew it was bound to come, in violent form, at the end of my adventure. For what could I desire in the end? There is no rest from conquest; one enters immortality standing up. I have already considered every possible kind of death, from the death by poison that an intimate friend pours into my coffee to being hanged by my people, crucifixion by my best friends, to say nothing of natural death amidst honors, brass bands, flowers, speeches, and statues, death in combat, by stabbing, bullets, but above all I dream of a disappearance that will astound the world. I shall go off to live quietly on another continent, observing the progress of, and the harm done by, the legend of my reappearance among my people. I have chosen every sort of death. None of them will surprise me. I have already died often, and always in splendor.

I sensed the child's distress, and, despite my delicacy, I could think of nothing to say that would reassure him.

“You're very good-looking,” I said.

Paulo smiled wanly, with that extremely weary smile in which the teeth are not even bared. He did not take his eyes off mine, which had grown gentle. The gentleness that he could see in my gaze thrust me deeper into the region of foulness. I was a figure emerging from a silent cave. I seemed unhappy in the open, and it was evident from my attitude that I wanted to go back to my darkness. I think of that lair, the eye of Gabès.

“You're very good-looking,” I repeated.

But I felt that the sentence did not have the amorous ring that would shatter the youngster's fear. And my graciousness found the following: I placed my two hands on his eyes, obliging his eyelids to close. I waited ten seconds, then I said, “Are you less afraid?”

I was laughing wildly, and at the same time my left
hand was pressing Paulo's shoulder, forcing him to sit down on the bed. I paused to contemplate the folds of his ear, the head part of which was shiny, polished. My laughter widened his smile and made him show his teeth. That wider smile in which the teeth got a breath of air and the light infused a bit of intelligence into Paulo, banished his fear and some of the mortal beauty with which that fear covered up his fate. He was less close to death, less dominated by the rites that the heart devises for the killing, but his body thereby gained a little well-being, a slight relief. Anyway, the first gesture of a man and not of a shadow that he made—laying his cap on the rug—led him a little farther into the light. The deep silence in the room, which was no doubt insulated by cork, reassured him, for the slightest noise, even that of an alarm clock or of water dripping from a tap, would have been suspect to him and have meant invisible, hence supernatural, dangers. I took him by the neck, and our faces were against each other. I kissed him on the corner of his mouth. An anxiety of another order—though brief-came over him: although respect naturally froze him, advised him not to venture any intimate gesture, any caress, or even a too tender abandon, a quivering of the muscles or a contraction that would have brought his thighs close to mine, he wondered whether too tense an attitude might not wound the Master of the World. This thought made his smile, which saddened slightly, close slowly over his teeth and thereby take on the gentleness contained in all sadness. A touch of trust melted him, and he responded to my stroking his hair with an equally gentle caress on my shoulder, which, squeezed by the gabardine tunic, suddenly seemed to him as strong as a counterfort of the Bavarian Alps. Meanwhile he was thinking, word for word:

“But this bimbo's just a little old guy of fifty, after all.”

However, he dared not continue the caress or the thought. He withdrew his hand, and this single shy token of kindness magnified my gratitude. I eagerly kissed his throat, temples, and the back of his neck—having made him turn around, with, for the first time, sovereign authority and self-assurance on my part. As we had been sitting on the edge of the bed, this movement left Paulo with his belly on the same edge, his face against the velvet, and his back supporting the German pasha. He found himself in that posture for the first time in his Me. No longer supported or directed by my gaze, he was panting with unsatisfied pleasure. Like that of a drowning man, his whole life passed before his eyes. The sacred thought of his mother flashed upon him. But he realized the impropriety of such a posture for meditating upon a mother, father, or love affair. He thought of Paris, of the cafés, of the automobiles. The presence above him was total and tumultuous: his thighs, his legs had their exact burden of thighs and legs. His limbs accepted the domination, they rested in it. His body was compressed by the soft ridge of the bed. In an attempt to disengage himself he made a slight movement that raised his rump, and I responded to the summons with greater pressure. A new pain forced Paulo to repeat his movement, to relieve his stomach, and I shoved harder. He did the same thing again, and I squeezed him tighter. Then sharper and cleaner thrusts unleashed the surge that had been aroused by a misunderstanding. I went at him again ten times, and, though his stomach was being crushed, Paulo stopped. He had a hard-on, and when, a second later, I grabbed his hand and squeezed it tenderly, that big, broad, thick hand became tiny, docile, and quiet and murmured, “Thank you.” My hand and I understood that
language, for no sooner did I hear the words than I detached myself from the child's back. He had a feeling of relief because his guts had calmed down and were at ease again, but he suffered at being confronted with his regained wholeness, his free and lonely personality, the solitude of which was revealed to him by the detachment of God himself. Then and there he felt a pang that could be translated by the following question, which I ask in his stead: “What can you do now, without Him?”

His anguish was quickly destroyed by amazement. I gave him a push and roughly laid him down on his back. Paulo smiled at my smile. The mustache, the wrinkles, and the lock of hair suddenly took on human proportions, and, by the grace of an unequalled generosity, the fabulous emblem of Satan's chosen people descended to inhabit that simple dwelling, the puny body of an old queen, a “faggot.”

I was about to—I mean that there was no visible sign of my intention, though the latter had already made me more masterful by describing the movement from beginning to end within me and thus making me feel a lightness that would have enabled me to go backward in time—as I was saying, I was about to jump on the bed, but I immediately checked myself and, very deliberately, I lay down beside Paulo. I had made that brisk movement, which had remained an inner one and which I had and had not controlled, because my soul had meant to put itself on the level of Paulo's and my gestures to be those of someone his age. It was then that, in order to free my buttonholes, I had to turn my body slightly toward Paulo and push up his belly and then that my forelock, which was mysteriously composed of hair, grazed the nose of Paulo, who dared to raise the lock delicately with his fingertip, which had a black, bitten nail. Hitler was resplendent.