Funeral Rites (26 page)

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Riton went out alone. He wandered from one café to another, drinking a few glasses of dark beer, as one does in Germany. An uneasiness as delicate and fragile as a myosotis blossom—though quite perceptible—had flowered within him. He was carrying the sprouted sorrow of that morning's act. He finally felt calm toward evening, in the subway, leaning against Erik's warm belly. When they got to the street, the tank driver drew the kid to him with one arm, kissed him on an eye (thereby scraping his mouth on the edge of the tilted beret) and disappeared into the night. A terrible emptiness filled Riton, who returned to the barracks, alone with his solitude in the midst of himself.

“Maybe it's the cat that made me like that,” he thought to himself.

He heard a murmuring at his ear, in the darkness:

“You're a dead man.”

And it was the very same anguish that was about to come down on me, to make me give up, when, at night, I chanced upon riderless horses browsing on the frozen grass of the ditch. What soldiers could have abandoned them there, what lovers? No doubt to wander about near an old monastery at the edge of a torrent, I had assumed the form of Erik, his grim face, and I camouflaged myself in the mist that always emanates from a gloomy hero. I felt protected by the fabulous power of the Reich. Nevertheless, I was aware of the sharp, luminous presence within me of Jean Genet, mad with fear. But perhaps I had never been so aware of myself as at such moments. When I kept Jean clinging by the teeth to the muzzle of my revolver, fear also shrank my center of consciousness by making it more acute. The fear of firing was combating the fear of not firing. Jean was living his last seconds more than I. Anyway, Riton's peace was definitely restored one morning, ten days later, when he was called
to the guardroom. Someone wanted to see him right away. It was a civilian.

“Oh! Paulo!”

They embraced each other like two brothers, two children. They immediately moved away from the men on duty and spoke in low voices.

“You're out?”

“Yes, how're things going? Anything cooking?”

“Me? Nothing.”

Riton thought that Paulo didn't know about Erik. And suddenly he asked:

“You talk German?”

“No, why?”

“Nothing.”

Paulo shrugged.

“Things got you down, huh?”

I know the answer. I miss neither Mettray, which was at the time as frightful to me as the camp to Paulo, nor the state prison. Those years of unhappiness carpet the depths of our memory with a kind of moss and shadow into which I sometimes let myself sink, where I feel I can find a refuge when life gets rough, but innumerable confused desires also arise out of those disrupted depths, desires which, if one knows how to go about it, can be formulated so as to compose a group of movements which will make one's life beautiful and violent. I venture an image. Those years deposit within us a mud in which bubbles form. Each bubble, which is inhabited by an individual will to
be,
develops and changes, alone and in accordance with the other bubbles, and becomes part of an iridescent, violent whole that manifests a will issuing from that mud. In my fatigue between waking and sleeping, between pain and what combats it (a kind of will to peace, I think), I am visited by all the characters
of whom I have spoken and others too who are not clear to me. They seem to emerge from limbo, that is, from a region where bodies are imperfect, misshapen, somewhat plastic, like clay figures in the hands of children . . . “to emerge from limbo.” It's worse, they have just emerged from one of those chapels that surmount burial vaults in cemeteries. I am not asleep. I know that they are informed of Jean's doings out there, in his death. They live in the tomb to which they return.

*

* *

Let us continue the account of the events on the rooftops. Anxiety prevented the sergeant from sleeping. He got up during the night and made the rounds of the apartment. In the bedroom, the three soldiers were sleeping on the bed in a tangle that the most indulgent of men would have regarded as scandalous, but it was fatigue alone that thus entangled the soldiers at the edge of the grave. He entered the dining room, carefully directing the beam of his flashlight. At his feet he saw the sight I have depicted. Riton was sleeping with his arm out and his hand almost entirely buried in the trousers of the sleeping Erik.

At daybreak, when they were awakened, caution obliged the soldiers to remain sitting where they were lest their walking make a sound that would worry the tenants on the floor below. Nevertheless, they would have liked to explore the conquered rooms that were still warm with the life of the occupants who had fled. Apartments offer themselves to the burglar with painful immodesty. Without looking for them, we find the very personal habits of the bourgeois, and I can say for a fact that I have opened drawers in which there were underpants with
shit stains, and hard, dried, crumpled socks that emitted their sad fragrance when spread out. I have even found abandoned fragments of shit in the drawers of elegant commodes. For a long time I thought that women are the dirtier, but actually men are. As for the imagination of both, it's on a par with that of the police. If they have hidden the hundred francs in a fold of the window curtain, under a pile of sheets, or behind a frame, their mind is at rest. At rest, except for the mortal anxiety that is the very stuff of their life when they are more than fifty feet away from the hoard. But who am I to talk, since I piss in the sink, I forget turds that I leave in old newspapers in the wardrobes of hotel rooms, and I don't have the guts to leave my money in my room for an hour. I walk with it, I steal with it, I sleep with it.

The soldiers did not wash themselves. Nothing came out of the taps. The lack of water made them panicky. There was hardly any left in their canteens. The sergeant allowed them to talk in an undertone, for the noises of day drowned out their murmuring. Their blond hair was in their eyes, and at the comer of their eyelids were bits of white mucus. It was a miserable awakening. The apartment seemed the domain of death to the soldiers. It was as disturbing to be there as in certain regions where the land is mined, where snakes bulge their delicate throats, where rose-laurels grow. We were afraid. Not of the danger but of the accumulation of fateful signs. At each window the sergeant posted a man who could fire on the insurgents. Then he divided the day's food into eight equal parts. Although he did not want to talk about it, he twice made smiling remarks about Riton to Erik, which showed that he knew what had happened. Erik smiled and, in the presence of his joking comrades, admitted the night's adventure. There was no scandal.
They laughed a little and were silently amused as they looked at the kid whose beauty was suddenly revealed to them. He was squatting on the bed and eating bread with chocolate. Riton bit into the chocolate and took a canteen in order to drink, but Erik snatched it from his hands. The child's astonished eyes looked into his. Erik murmured with a gentle laugh as he handed the canteen back to him without having drunk:

“I'm German.”

Riton smiled back. Erik pointed a finger at him:

“You're French,” and he laughed a little more loudly.

And I can understand polygamy when I realize how quickly the charms of a boy-girl are exhausted and how much more slowly those of a boy-male disappear. Erik tried to act as if he were joking about that pretension, but the fact that it was already stated, even though in an ironic tone, indicated sufficiently that it was at the basis of his relations with Riton. The pride which he sensed, instead of saddening Riton, afforded him a kind of repose. Five Germans were in the room. Erik was standing behind the bed. His comment distracted the attention of the soldiers, who spoke about something else, but a soldier smilingly stroked Riton's tousled hair as he walked by him. The kid was filled with surprise and then anxiety. He tossed his head to shake off the hand, but he didn't dare make a gesture or scowl, not even frown. And immediately he realized, from the soldiers’ looks and laughter, that they knew. He thought they were mocking contemptuously. He blushed. Not having been able to wash, his face shined and the blush seemed sparkling, then warm. One of the soldiers saw him in the mirror, and, without showing the kid that he had noticed the blush, revealed it smilingly to Erik, who gently went up behind Riton, took him by the neck,
pulled him back a little, and kissed him very sweetly on the hair, in the presence of his comrades and the sergeant. Nobody commented on the gesture, which was natural and charming. Riton smiled, for, though he pretended not to care, he was so in love with Erik, whose sovereign person had just compelled everyone's recognition by that quiet kiss, that he was willing to announce his marriage.

Then Riton suddenly felt he was falling over a precipice. Did Erik really love him? He would have liked to tell him that at the hour of their death in each other's arms, the most human thing was to grant each other the greatest happiness. But that was hard to say. He did not know German. He felt like crying. For a moment they all looked at one another gravely, in silence. The soldiers who had been posted at the half-open windows with instructions to shoot were lying flat on their stomachs on the rug so as not to be seen from the houses opposite. When they assumed that position, the sun was hardly up. The light was gray, though the weather promised to be fine. They saw nothing on the boulevard, which was slightly blurred by a light mist. They were watching listlessly. Erik cleaned his revolver and Riton his machine gun. The others dozed off. An hour later, the sun had driven off the mist, and when Riton went to the window, behind a tulle curtain with lace designs, after a moment of amazement the strangest emotion took hold of his mind and body, twisted him, and left him in tatters. He did not cry. The whole boulevard was decked with two rows of French flags. He solemnly bade France farewell. The flags were out for his treason. He was being thrown out of his country, and upon awakening, every Frenchman waved at his window the flag of freedom regained, of purity recaptured. He was going
to the realm of the dead that day, and it was a fête on earth, in the sun, in the blue air. He was in the realm of the dead. He did not cry. But he realized that he loved his country. Just as it was on the day Jean died that I knew I loved him, so it was on losing France that he knew he loved her. The English and American flags were at the windows along with the French. A tri-colored shit and spew was dripping from everywhere. Riton realized the meaning of the house's silent activity. All night long the whole city had been spinning yards of red, white, and blue cotton fabric. And that morning, the
Marseillaise,
weary of flying over Paris, had dropped to the streets, torn and exhausted. That miracle had taken place on the day of his death. For a second Riton thought he could still go down the stairs without the Boches’ knowing it (the Boches—the word clearly shows that grief invents a whole symbolism whereby one hopes to act mystically: I hesitated to write the word Boche with a capital B, out of contempt, in order to make it a
common
noun—the Boches and the Militiamen killed Jean, whom I revere, and as I see it this is the finest story of Boche and Militiaman, which I offer up to his memory. Erik has my favor). Or spring from the balcony to the street. He would not hurt himself, for this was the day when to wish for a miracle sufficed for it to take place. The Fritzes would no doubt shoot, and he then thought very seriously of running the risk of death from a German bullet. A feeling of purification, of redemption, was involved in the idea, bringing to his eyelids a tear that did not flow. He had betrayed France, but he would be dying for her. He very nearly performed a heroic act, a tailspin among the three colors.

“What the hell do I care about France? They're all jerks. Fuck ‘em all on foot and on horseback.”

He was bound to think that. But he was still too young for his face to remain serene, and the corners of his puffy little mouth drooped painfully at the thought of what France was doing to him, at the thought of the joy he was losing, and also because, despite its force, the bitterness of losing the things of the world always accompanies the gravest joy of marvelous expeditions in forbidden lands. He made a face. It did not occur to him that he had gambled and lost and that he was paying. What he felt was not comparable to the pain caused by turning up the wrong card. It was due mainly to the decision taken by France, his friends, his family: to expel him from joy, from play, from pleasures, and to display the flags in honor of that exile. His mouth was still pasty after the bread and chocolate. It was dark in the room where the Germans were sleeping. He was not combed. Hairs from combs and brushes were strewn all over the bedroom. An untidy soldier whose belt was unbuckled and whose shirt was half out of his trousers, playing the role of a bare-headed girl getting out of bed, went from the bedroom to the living room. Riton sniffled. A drop of snot had just started dripping from his nose. He would never again wash his face. He tried to clean the corner of his somewhat rheumy eyes with his fingernail. A slight breeze stirred all the flags.

It's bright and gay!

Good morning, swallows, it's bright and gay!

He whistled a measure of the tune between his teeth. The first car that passed in the street was white and had a red cross on the roof. There were more wounded Frenchmen. He had fired. A slight pride at the thought of it cheered him. He had killed young men on the barricades.
He had wounded others with the machine gun. With Mademoiselle. Girls were looking after the wounded, were kissing them. France would make speeches. France. France, France, forever. He had Erik. Then and there that love did not fill him enough. There was a place for regret in him. The Germans suddenly—for a great sorrow gives you extraordinary lucidity, things which do not go together dovetail, and others that appeared to be decked in splendid cloths look scraggy in their bony nakedness—the Germans seemed to him to be what they were: monsters. It was not because they shot Frenchmen. Riton did not regret those they had killed. He regretted not being able to be near those who sniveled for them. The Germans did their job. Everything about them was monstrous, that is, was opposed to the joy of the French. The Germans were dismal, black, but the others were green. In that room they had the gravity of people whose destiny is only pain. Riton was not good at thinking, nevertheless he ventured the following reflection to himself: