Our Lady of the Flowers (24 page)

But now I am afraid. The signs pursue me and I pursue them patiently. They are bent on destroying me. Didn't I see, on my way to court, seven sailors on the terrace of a café, questioning the stars through seven mugs of light beer as they sat around a table that perhaps turned; then, a messenger boy on a bicycle who was carrying a message from god to god, holding between his teeth, by the metal handle, a round, lighted lantern, the flame of which, as it reddened his face, also heated it?
So pure a marvel that he was unaware of being a marvel. Circles and globes haunt me: oranges, Japanese billiard balls, Venetian lanterns, jugglers’ hoops, the round ball of the goalkeeper who wears a jersey. I shall have to establish, to regulate, a whole internal astronomy.

Fear? And what worse can happen to me than what will happen? Apart from physical suffering, I fear nothing. Morality clings to me only by a thread. Yet, I am afraid. Did I not suddenly realize, on the eve of the trial, that I had been awaiting that moment for eight months, during which time I never gave it a thought? Few are the moments when I escape from horror, few the moments when I do not have a vision, or some horrifying perception of human beings and events. Even, and especially, of those commonly judged to be the most beautiful. Yesterday, in one of those narrow cells in the “Mousetrap” where you wait until it's time to go up to the chambers of the examining magistrate, there were twelve of us, standing, crowded together. I was at the back, by the latrines, near a young Italian who was laughing and relating some trivial experiences. But owing
to his voice and his accent and his French, these adventures vibrated with pathos. I took him for an animal that had been metamorphosed into a man. I felt that, in the presence of this privilege which I thought he possessed, he could, at any given moment, turn me, by his simple wish, even unexpressed, into a jackal, a fox, a guinea hen. Perhaps I was hypnotizing myself in the presence of this privilege which I thought he possessed. At one point, he exchanged a few naïve and mortal remarks with a child-pimp. He said, among other things: “I skinned the gal,” and in the narrow cell he was suddenly so close to me that I thought he wanted to love me, and so fierce that I thought he meant: “I skinned the woman” in the sense that one says of a rabbit: “I skinned it,” that is, carved it up. He also said: “The warden says to me straight off: “You're a funny egg,’ and I answer back: ‘Let me tell you, eggs like me are worth just as much as eggs like you.’ “ I think of the word “egg” in the mouths of babies. It's horrible. The marvelous horror was such that when I remember those moments (it had to do with crap games), it seems to me that the two kids were suspended in air, without support, their feet off the floor, and that they were shooting remarks at each other in silence. I am so certain of remembering that they were in the air that in spite of myself my intelligence tries to figure out whether they didn't have some gadget that enabled them to lift themselves up, a hidden mechanism, an invisible spring, under the floor, some kind of plausible device. But as nothing of the sort was possible, my memory strays into the sacred horror of the dream. Frightful moments–which I seek out–when you cannot contemplate either your body or heart without disgust. I encounter everywhere a trivial incident, seemingly innocuous, which plunges me into the foulest horror: as if I were a corpse being pursued by the corpse that I am. It's the odor of the latrines. It's the hand of the man condemned to
death, the hand with its wedding ring, which I see when he puts it outside the grating of his cell to take the soup tin from the assistant: since he himself remains invisible to me, the hand is like the hand of the god of a trick temple, and that cell, in which the light is kept on day and night, is the Space-Time amalgam of the anteroom of death–a vigil of arms which will last for forty-five times twenty-four hours. It's Darling with his trousers down, sitting on the white enamel toilet seat. His face is contracted. When the hot lumps, suspended for a moment, drop from him, a whiff apprises me that this blond hero was stuffed with shit. And the dream swallows me with one gulp. It's the fleas biting me, and I know they're malicious and that they're biting me with an intelligence that at first is human, and then more than human.

Do you know some poison-poem that would burst my cell into a spray of forget-me-nots? A weapon that would kill the perfect young man who inhabits me and makes me give asylum to a whole agglomeration of animals?

Swallows nest beneath his arms. They have masoned a nest there of dry earth. Snuff-colored velvet caterpillars mingle with the curls of his hair. Beneath his feet, a hive of bees, and broods of asps behind his eyes. Nothing moves him. Nothing disturbs him, save little girls taking first communion who stick out their tongues at the priest as they clasp their hands and lower their eyes. He is cold as snow. I know he's sly. Gold makes him smile faintly, but if he does smile, he has the grace of angels. What gypsy would be quick enough to rid me of him with an inevitable dagger? It takes promptness, a good eye, and a fine indifference. And . . . the murderer would take his place. He got back this morning from a round of the dives. He saw sailors and whores, and one of the girls has left the trace of a bloody hand on his cheek. He may go far away, but he is as faithful as a pigeon. The other night, an old actress left her camellia in his button hole.

I wanted to crumple it; the petals fell on the rug (but what rug? my cell is paved with flat stones) in big, warm, transparent drops of water. I hardly dare look at him now, for my eyes go through his crystal flesh, and all those hard angles make so many rainbows there that that is why I cry. The end.

It may not seem like much to you, yet this poem has relieved me. I have shat it out.

Divine:

“By dint of saying that I'm not alive, I accept the fact that people stop thinking about me.”

Though Darling's personal relations had dwindled as a result of his betrayals, Divine's had increased. In her date book, famous for its oddness, where every other page was strewn with a jumble of penciled spirals, which intrigued Darling until Divine once confessed that these were the pages of cocaine days, where she noted her accounts, fees, and appointments, we already read the names of the three Mimosas (a Mimosa dynasty had been reigning over Montmartre since the triumphs of Mimosa the Great, the fluffy-wuffy of high thievery), of Queen Oriane, First Communion, Duckbill, Sonia, Clairette, Fatty, the Baroness, Queen of Rumania (why was she called Queen of Rumania? We were once told that she had loved a king, that she was secretly in love with the King of Rumania, because his mustache and black hair gave him a gypsy look. That in being sodomized by one male who represented ten million, she felt the spunk of ten million men flowing into her, while one tool lifted her like a mast to the midst of the suns), of Sulphurous, Monique, Sweet Leo. At night they haunted narrow bars which had not the fresh gaiety and candor of even the shadiest dancehalls. They loved each other there, but in fear, in the kind of horror we experience in the most
charming dream. There is a sad gaiety in our love, and though we have more wit than Sunday lovers by the water's edge, our wit attracts misfortune. Here laughter springs only from trouble. It is a cry of pain. At one of these bars: as she does every evening, Divine has placed on her head a little coronet of false pearls. She resembles the crowned eagle of the heraldists, with the sinews of her neck visible beneath the feathers of her boa. Darling is facing her. Sitting about at other tables are the Mimosas, Antinea, First Communion. They are talking about dear absent friends. Judith enters and, in front of Divine, bows to the ground:

“Good evening, Madame!”

“What an ass!” exclaims Divine.

“Die Puppe hat gesprochen,” says a young German.

Divine bursts out laughing. The crown of pearls falls to the floor and breaks. Condolences, to which malicious joy gives rich tonalities: “The Divine is uncrowned! . . . She's the great Fallen One! . . . The poor Exile!” The little pearls roll about the sawdust-covered floor, and they are like the glass pearls that peddlers sell to children for a penny or two, and these are like the glass pearls that we thread every day on miles of brass wire, with which, in other cells, they weave funeral wreaths like those that bestrewed the cemetery of my childhood, rusted, broken, weathered by wind and rain, with just a tiny little pink blue-winged porcelain angel, attached to a thin blackened wire. In the cabaret, all the faggots are suddenly on their knees. Only the men stand upright. Then, Divine lets out a burst of strident laughter. Everyone pricks up his ears: it's her signal. She tears her bridge out of her open mouth, puts it on her skull and, with her heart in her throat, but victorious, she cries out in a changed voice, with her lips drawn back into her mouth:

“Dammit all, Ladies, I'll be queen anyhow!”

When I said that Divine was composed of a pure
water, I ought to have made clear that she was hewn of tears. But making her gesture was a slight thing compared to the grandeur of soul required for the other: taking the bridge from her head, putting it back into her mouth, and fastening it on.

And it was no slight matter for her to parody a royal coronation. When she was living with Ernestine in the slate house:

Nobility is glamorous. The most equalitarian of men, though he may not care to admit it, experiences this glamor and submits to it. There are two possible attitudes toward it: humility or arrogance, both of which are explicit recognition of its power. Titles are sacred. The sacred surrounds and enslaves us. It is the submission of flesh to flesh. The Church is sacred. Its slow rites, weighed down with gold like Spanish galleons, ancient in meaning, remote from spirituality, give it an empire as earthly as that of beauty and that of nobility. Culafroy of the light body, unable to escape this potency, abandoned himself to it voluptuously, as he would have done to Art had he known it. The nobility has names as heavy and strange as the names of snakes (already as difficult as the names of old, lost divinities), strange as signs and escutcheons or venerated animals, totems of old families, war cries, titles, furs, enamels–escutcheons that closed the family with a secret, as a signet seals a parchment, an epitaph, a tomb. It charmed the child. Its procession in time, indistinct and yet certain, and present, a procession of rough warriors, of whom he was, so he thought, the final issue, therefore they themselves–a procession whose sole reason for being had been to arrive at the following result: a pale child, prisoner of a village of thatched cottages–moved him more than an actual and visible procession of weather-beaten soldiers, of whom he might have been chief. But he was not noble. Nobody in the village was noble, at any rate nobody bore the traces of
nobility. But one day, among the rubbish in the attic, he found an old history book by Capefigue. In it were recorded a thousand names of barons and knights-at-arms, but he saw only one: Picquigny. Ernestine's maiden name was Picquigny. No doubt about it, she was noble. We quote the passage from Monsieur Capefigue's
Constitutional and Administrative History of France
(page 447):

“. . . a preliminary and secret meeting of the Estates, which was organized by Marcel and the municipal magistrates of Paris. It was carried out as follows. Jean de Picquigny and several other men-at-arms went to the castle where the King of Navarre was held captive. Jean de Picquigny was governor of Artois. The men-at-arms, who were burghers of Amiens, set up ladders under the walls and took the guards by surprise, but they did not harm them . . .”

In order to get precise information about this family, he read all through Capefigue's history. Had they been available, he would have ransacked libraries, worked his way through books of gramarye, and that is how scholarly vocations are born, but all he discovered was that islet emerging from a sea of glamorous names. But then why didn't Ernestine have a nobiliary particle in her name? Where was her coat of arms? Indeed, what was her coat of arms? Did Ernestine know of this passage in the book and of her own nobility? Had he been less young and dreamy, Culafroy would have noticed that the corner of page 447 had been worn away by the sweat of fingers. Ernestine's father had known the book. The same miracle had opened it at the same place and had shown him the name. It pleased Culafroy that the nobility belonged to Ernestine rather than to himself, and in this trait we may already see a sign of his destiny. To be able to approach her, to enjoy her intimacy, her special favors, was agreeable to him, just as many persons are more pleased to be the favorite of a prince than the prince himself, or
a priest of a god than the god, for this way they can receive Grace. Culafroy could not keep from telling about his discovery, and, not knowing how to raise the question with Ernestine, he blurted out to her:

“You're noble. I saw your name in an old history of France.”

He was smiling ironically, so as to give the impression of scorning the aristocracy, the vanity of which our schoolmaster spoke of sumptuously whenever reference was made in class to the night of August 4th. Culafroy thought that scorn indicates indifference. Children, and particularly her own child, intimidated Ernestine almost as much as a servant intimidates me. She blushed and thought she had been found out, or thought she had been found out and blushed, I don't know which. She too wanted to be noble. She had put the same question to her father, who had blushed in the same way. This
History
must have been in the family for a long time, playing as best it could the role of title of nobility, and perhaps it was Ernestine who, exhausted by a lavish imagination that made of her an impoverished countess, a marquise, or even several, all of them laden with blazons and crowns, had relegated it to the attic, out of her sight, in order to escape its magic; but she did not realize that in placing it above her head she would never be able to free herself from it, the only effective means being to bury it in loamy earth, or to drown it, or burn it. She did not reply, but, could Culafroy have read within her, he would have seen the ravages wrought there merely by that unrecognized nobility, of which she was uncertain and which, in her eyes, put her above the villagers and the tourists from the cities. She described the blazon. For she was now familiar with heraldry. She had gone all the way to Paris to ferret in d'Hozier's
Genealogy.
She had learned history from it. As we have said, scholars hardly act otherwise or from other motives. The philologist
does not admit (besides, he doesn't realize it) that his taste for etymology comes from the poetry (so he thinks, or might think, for it is a carnal potency that incites him) contained in the word
esclave
(slave), in which are found, if he likes, the word
clé
(key), and the word
genou
(knee). It is because a young man one day learns that the female scorpion devours her male that he becomes an entomologist, and another becomes a historian when he happens to read that Frederick the Second of Germany made children be brought up in solitude. Ernestine tried to avoid the shame of this confession (her lust for nobility) by the quick confession of a less infamous sin. This is an old trick, the trick of partial confessions. Spontaneously I confess a little, the better to keep more serious things hidden. The examining magistrate told my lawyer that if I was putting on an act, I was giving a great performance; but I didn't put it on throughout the investigation. I multiplied errors of defense, and it was lucky I did. The court clerk looked as though he thought I was simulating ingenuousness, which is the mother of blunders. The judge seemed rather inclined to accept my sincerity. They were both wrong. It is true that I drew attention to compromising details that they had been unaware of. (A number of times I had said: ("It was at night,” a circumstance that aggravated my case, as the judge told me, though he also thought that a crafty delinquent would not have confessed this; I therefore must have been a novice. It was in the judge's chambers that it occurred to me to say that “it was at night,” for there were things about that night that I had to keep hidden. I had already thought of parrying the accusation with a new offense, namely nighttime, but since I had left no trace, I attached no importance to it. Then the importance shot up and grew–I don't know why–and I said mechanically: “At night,” mechanically, but insistently. But during a second interrogation
I suddenly realized that I was not confusing facts and dates sufficiently. I was calculating and foreseeing with a rigor that disconcerted the judge. It was all too clever. I had only my own case to think about; but he had twenty. So he questioned me, not about things he ought to have examined and would have, had he been shrewder or had more time, and about which I had planned my answers, but about rather obvious details to which I hadn't given a thought because it hadn't occurred to me that a judge might think of them.) Ernestine did not have time enough to invent a crime; she described the coat of arms: “It's argent and azure of ten pieces, over all a lion gules membered and langued. On the crest, Melusina.” It was the arms of the Lusignans. Culafroy listened to this splendid poem. Ernestine had at her finger tips the history of this family, which numbered kings of Jerusalem and princes of Cyprus. Their castle in Brittany was supposed to have been built by Melusina, but Ernestine did not dwell on this; it was in the legend, and her mind, in order to build the unreal, wanted solid materials. Legend is twaddle. She did not believe in fairies, who are creatures fabricated for the purpose of diverting dreamers of bold allegories from their straight path, but she had her great thrills when she came across a historic phrase: “The overseas branch . . . The singing arms . . .”