Funeral Rites (6 page)

“I'll be going.”

“But you'll stay and have dinner with us. You're not going off just like that.”

“I've got to go home.”

“Is it urgent?”

“Yes, I've got to go home.”

“But you'll come again. Come and see us again. Erik will be delighted to see you. All this war and killing is so unfortunate.”

The maid was in the entryway. She opened the door for me to leave and looked at me without saying anything. In
order to open it, she had to lift up a worn hanging that concealed it, and her hand grazed that of Jean's mother, who drew back and said, apropos of so trivial a thing:

“Do watch what you're doing.”

She too knew that the father of Juliette's child was not Jean but a former sergeant in the regular army who was now a captain in the Militia.

The maid opened the door. She neither smiled nor said good-by, and I dared not speak to her about Jean.

I left. Jean had hardly spoken to me about his brother, who had gone off to Germany, then Denmark, and then Germany again. Yet, within me, I followed Paulo's adventures very attentively, waiting, so as to record them, in order for them to take on a particular meaning that would make them interesting, that is, capable of expressing me. My despair over Jean's death is a cruel child. It's Paulo. Let the reader not be surprised if in speaking of him the poet goes so far as to say that his flesh was black, or green with the greenness of night. Paulo's presence had the color of a dangerous liquid. The muscles of his arms and legs were long and smooth. One imagined his joints to be perfectly supple. That suppleness and the length and smoothness of his muscles were the sign of his meanness. I mean by “sign” that there was a connection between his meanness and his visible features. His muscles were elegant and distinguished. So was his meanness. His head was small and was set on a massive neck. The fixity of his gaze, which was worse than that of Erik, was that of an implacable judge, of a soldier, of an officer stupid to the point of sublimity. His face never smiled. His hair was smooth, but the locks overlapped. Or to put it another way, he seemed never to comb his hair but only to slick it down with his wet hands. Of all the little guys I like to stick into my books, he's the meanest. Abandoned
on my bed, naked, polished, he will be an instrument of torture, a pair of pincers, a serpentine dagger ready to function, functioning by its evil presence alone and springing up, pale and with clenched teeth, from my despair. He is my despair embodied. He made it possible for me to write this book, just as he granted me the strength to be present at all the ceremonies of memory.

That visit to the home of Jean's mother left me in a state of exhaustion. To restore my peace of mind I had to organize and carry on the lives which I had fractured for a moment and integrate them into mine, but I was too weary to do it then. I had dinner in a restaurant, then went to a movie.

Suddenly the audience burst out laughing when the narrator said: “No, indeed, fighting on the rooftops doesn't fill a man's belly,” for a militiaman had just appeared on the screen, a kid of sixteen or seventeen, frailer than Paulo. I said to myself: “He's frailer than Paulo,” and this reflection proves that the adventure had got off on the right track. The kid was skinny but good-looking. His face had suffered. It was sad. It was trembling. One would have thought it expressionless. His shirt was open at the neck. There were cartridge loops on his belt. He was walking in socks too big for him. His head was down. I felt he was ashamed of his black eye. In order to look more natural, to deceive the paving stones in the street, he ran his tongue over his lips and made a brief gesture with his hand which was so closely related to that of his mouth that it traced his whole body, puckered it with very subtle waves, and immediately made me think the following:

“The gardener is the loveliest rose in his garden.”

The screen was then filled by a single arm, which was fitted with a broad, heavy, very beautiful hand, then by
a young French soldier who was shouldering the little traitor's rifle. The audience applauded. Then the militiaman reappeared. His face was trembling (particularly the eyelids and lips) from the cuffs he had received a few feet away from the camera. The audience was laughing, whistling, stamping. Neither the world's laughter nor the inelegance of caricaturists will keep me from recognizing the sorry grandeur of a French militiaman who, during the insurrection of Paris against the German army in August 1944, took to the rooftops with the Germans and for several days fired to the last bullet—or next-to-last—on the French populace that had mounted the barricades.

In the fierce eyes of the crowd, the disarmed, dirty, bewildered, stumbling, dazed, emptied, cowardly (it's amazing how fast certain words flow from the pen to define certain natures and how happy the author feels at being able to talk that way about his heroes), weary kid was ridiculous. A woman in light-colored rayon was thrashing about at my side. She was foaming at the mouth and bouncing her behind on her seat. She yelled:

“The bastards, rip their guts out!”

Confronted with the face of the little traitor (which was luminous just because the film had been shot against the sun), whose youth, caught in a deadly trap, was dazzling the screen, the woman was odious. I thought to myself that little fellows like him were being killed so that Erik might live. The audience was like the woman. It hated evil. My hatred of the militiaman was so intense, so beautiful, that it was equivalent to the strongest love. No doubt it was he who had killed Jean. I desired him. I was suffering so because of Jean's death that I was willing to do anything to forget about him. The best trick I could play on that fierce gang known as destiny, which
delegates a kid to do its work, and the best I could play-on the kid, would be to invest him with the love I felt for his victim. I implored the little fellow's image:

“I'd like you to have killed him!”

If one of my hands holds the lighted cigarette and the other clutches the armrest, they clasp each other even though they do not move. This gesture gives greater vigor to my wish, which is charged with a will and a forceful summons to transform itself into an invocation.

“Kill him, Riton, I'm giving you Jean.”

My only gesture was to put my lighted cigarette to my lips, and my clasped fingers clenched each other to the breaking point. Scented with peril, my prayer rises to my head from the pit of my stomach, spreads beneath the vaulted ceiling of my skull, comes down again, emerges from my mouth, and turns my cry into a wail whose value I recognize—I mean something like musical value—and an “I love you, oh” issues from me. I don't hate Jean. I want to love Riton. (I can't tell why I
spontaneously
call the unknown young militiaman Riton.) I plead again as one crawls on one's knees over flagstones.

“Kill him!”

A frightful rending tore out my fibers. I would have liked my suffering to be greater, to rise to the supreme song, to death itself. It was ghastly. I did not love Riton, all my love was still for Jean. On the screen, the militiaman was waiting. He had just been picked up. What can one do to beauty that's so glaringly obvious? One cuts off its head. That's how the fool takes revenge on a rose he has plucked. The cop dares to say of a young thief he brings back in his clutches:

“I just plucked him on the pavement!”

So don't be surprised that I see Riton as a flower of the mountaintops, a gentle edelweiss. A movement of his
arm showed that he was wearing a wristwatch, but the movement was rather feeble, unlike those of Jean. However, it might have been one of Paulo's, though more effective. I was going to take off from that idea, and I realized more and more that Riton completed Paulo, but for my work of sorcery I needed perfect attention and had to make use of everything to achieve my end. The audience was whistling and yelling.

“He ought to be torn to bits!”

“Ought to give him another shiner!”

A soldier must have hit the militiaman, for he trembled and seemed to be trying to protect himself. His face clouded over. The beauty of the lily lies similarly in the amazing fragility of the little hood of pollen that trembles at the top of the pistil. A gust of wind, a clumsy finger, a leaf, can break and destroy the delicate equilibrium that holds beauty in balance. That of the child's face wavered a moment. Ruffled as it was, I feared it might not gain its composure. He was haggard. I looked at him closely and more quickly (one can, without taking one's eyes off an object, look very quickly. At that moment, my “gaze” swooped down on the image). In a few seconds he would disappear from the screen. His beauty and his gestures were the opposite of Jean's. I was at once lit up, with an inner light. A bit of love passed over to Riton. I really had the impression that love was flowing from me, from my veins to his. I called out inwardly:

“Riton, Riton, you can kill him, my child! My darling! Kill him!”

He turned his head a little. A colonel in front of me dared to say: “If I get my mitts on him. . . .” Riton's gestures were killing Jean's, were killing Jean. Suddenly the people who were yelling and jeering ceased to be ridiculous. They were ugly with grief. The furious colonel
and the woman in tallow who was mad with rage and crimson under her bleached yellow locks were being tracked down by the vengeance that compelled them to honor savagely, though with grandeur, by laughter, the death of a brother or son or lover. Nobody was ridiculous. Their invectives were an additional ovation to Riton's glory. The vise in which I was caught tightened. Another image (a marching army) was on the screen. I closed my eyes. A third silent invocation rose up from me and drew me out of myself:

“Bump him off, I'm letting you have him.”

Another wave of love surged from my bent, still body slouching in the seat, and poured first on the face and then on the neck, chest, and entire body of Riton, confined in my closed eyes. I squeezed my eyelids tighter. I attached myself to the captive militiaman's body, which was violent despite its weariness. Beneath his debility, he was hard, fierce, and ever new, like a skillfully made machine. My inner gaze remained fixed on the image of him which I reconstructed in its natural violence, hardness, and ferocity. An unbroken flow of love passed from my body to his, which started living again and regained its suppleness.

I added:

“Go ahead. You can pick him off.”

This time the very cast of the formula indicated that my will was going into action all by itself, was refusing the help of invocation. I kept my eyes shut. The same rivers of love poured over Riton, yet not a drop was withdrawn from Jean. I was preserving both youngsters under the double ray of my tenderness. The game of murder in which they will engage is rather a war dance in which the death of one of them will be accidental, almost involuntary. It is an orgy carried to bloodshed. I closed my eyes
tighter. My gaze was glued to the militiaman's fly, the image of which was within me, and made it live, gave it weight, filled it with a vigorous monster that was swollen with hatred, and my gaze was the beam on which Riton rose up and returned to the rooftops. I loved him. I was going to marry him. It would perhaps be enough for me to be dressed in white, for the wedding, though with a decoration of large black crape cabbage rosettes at each joint, at the elbows, the knees, the fingers, the ankles, the neck, the waist, the throat, the prick, and the anus. Would Riton accept me dressed that way and in a bedroom decked with irises? For the wedding celebration would then merge with my mourning and all would be saved. Was it necessary that I feel the victor's hardness in my hands? Though he was at the brink of the grave, I knew he was alive. Despite the walls, the streets, the calls, the breathing, the waves, and the automobile headlights, despite his flight to the back of the screen, my mind found him once again. He looked at me. He smiled. “

I killed him, you see. You're not sore at me?”

Had I uttered the words, “You did the right thing,” I would have felt so ashamed of myself, of the excessively searing injustice of it all, that I would have rejected the adventure and lost what I'd won in the game. I replied to his image, which was now sharp and almost as firm to my eyes as a muscular body is to one's fingers.

“I gave him to you, Riton. Love him dearly.”

I opened my eyes again. The orchestra was playing the national anthem of an ally. A heavier, richer odor was enveloping me. The glands between my thighs and those of my armpits and perhaps my feet had been working intensely. If I so much as stirred, that slightly acrid smell which I had been imprisoning for ten minutes would have escaped and poisoned the audience. I slipped a finger into the opening of my fly; the edges of my thighs
were damp with sweat. I had just discovered how and in whose company Erik had spent the first five days of the Paris revolt before being able to shack up with his mistress. Riton will meet Erik, will fight at his side on the rooftops, but he first has to know Paulo. I'm trying to present these characters to you in such a way that you see them lit up by my love, not for their sake but for Jean's, and particularly in such a way that they reflect that love.

After seeing Paulo go off on his bike, I went home. When I got there, darkness had fallen. These early September days are still very warm. I went up to my room. Jean had come to see me there one evening, two months before, to bring me the first pears of the year. The next morning, he left for the provinces with a valise full of guns. We chatted. When he thought of going home, it was late.

“You can stay if you like.”

He hesitated, looked at me with a faint smile, and said:

(Until now I have been speaking of one of the dead, that is, of a god or an object, but now that I'm about to repeat his words, to describe his gestures, and recapture the modulations of his voice, I'm seized with terror, not that I'm afraid of remembering incorrectly and betraying Jean but, on the contrary, because I'm sure I'll recall him so accurately that he may come rushing in, in answer to my call. If the fifty foregoing pages are a disquisition on a statue of ice with the feet of an insentient god, the lines that follow are intended to open that god's bosom and that statue and liberate a twenty-year-old youngster. These lines are the key that opens the tabernacle and reveals the Host, and the three raps in the theater which announce the rising of the curtain are the very slightly stylized use of my heartbeats before I make Jean speak.)