Funeral Rites (18 page)

I squeezed a little harder. Erik did not stir, but I was sure he wasn't sleeping, because the regular sound of his breathing had stopped. Then I ventured a stroke over the cloth, and then another, and each time my gesture was more precise. Erik didn't make a move, he didn't say a word. Hope filled me with a boldness that amazed even me. I slipped the tip of my forefinger into one of the little interstices between the buttons. Erik was wearing neither jockey shorts nor boxer shorts. My finger first felt the hairs. It moved over them, then over the cock, which was as hard as wood, but alive. The contact thrilled me. In the state of ecstasy there is also an element of fear with respect to the divinity or his angels. The prick I was touching with my finger was not only my lover's but also that of a warrior, of the most brutal, most formidable of warriors, of the lord of war, of the demon, of the exterminating angel. I was committing a sacrilege and was conscious of it. That prick was also the angel's weapon,
his dart, a part of those terrible devices with which he is armed. It was his secret weapon, the V-1 on which the Führer relies. It was the ultimate and major treasure of the Germans. The prick was fiery. I wanted to stroke it, but my finger was not free enough. I feared lest my nail hurt it if I pressed. Erik had not moved. In order to make me think he was sleeping, he resumed his regular breathing. Motionless at the center of a state of perfect lucidity—so extraordinary that he feared for a moment lest the purity of his vision radiate outside him and illuminate Riton—he let the kid alone and was amused by his playing. I withdrew my finger and very skillfully succeeded in undoing two buttons. This time I put my whole hand in. I squeezed, and Erik recognized, I don't know how, that I was squeezing tenderly. He didn't stir.

The moon was veiled. Barefoot, I first walked on tiptoe, then I ran, I went up steps, I scaled houses so as to reach the most dangerous crossroad of the Albaïcin. Everybody in Granada was asleep. The few Gypsies who were prowling about in the darkness could not catch a glimpse of me. I was still swept up in my course, but as there was no way out of the square my movement continued in a silent whirl, on tiptoe. I felt, however, that a Gypsy had just awakened: ten houses away perhaps, beneath a porch. His big sleeping body had stirred in the brown woolen blanket. He was crawling. He grazed walls, went through alleys, stood up, walked over to meet me, finally leaped into the darkness. We were alone on the square. The moon was still veiled, but very thinly so. The Gypsy seized me by the waist, broke me, tossed me up, and then caught me smoothly and silently in his arms. The embroidery and white lace of my petticoats whirled in the darkness. With a flip of his cock the Gypsy tossed me up into the sky. From the whole land of
Andalusia, from every ornament, from every lock there welled up a music that caressed me. It all took place in the morning. A few streaks of dawn kept watch on the hills. Their blue songs were still sleeping rolled up in the throats of the herdsmen. I fell astride the Gypsy's prick. The flounces of my skirts spread over the countryside like moss. It was April, and the moon lit up a vast stretch of flowering almond trees around Granada.

Anyway, completely reassured by Erik's immobility, I jerked him off quickly. He was no doubt thinking of that girl's head which surmounted the strong and delicate body that held a tunic of bullets suspended over the frightened city. He beguiled the time by reconstructing her face in his imagination. The greatest happiness was granted him, since it was the kid himself who answered his secret call and came running up to impale himself. The old hallucination of my childhood obtruded itself, and I can render it only by the following image:
still rivers that do not mingle,
though they have a single source, rush into his mouth, which they spread and fill. One of the soldiers made a slight noise. Fearing that Riton might remove his hand, Erik took hold of it, pressed it down, and made it stay. There was another noise. They waited a moment.

I have killed, pillaged, stolen, betrayed. What glory I've attained! But let no run-of-the-mill murderer, thief, or traitor take advantage of my reasons. I have gone to too great pains to win them. They are valid only for me. That justification cannot be used by every Tom, Dick, and Harry. I don't like people who have no conscience.

The Führer sent his finest-looking men to death. It was his only way to possess them all. How often I have wanted
to kill those handsome boys who annoyed me because I didn't have enough cocks to ream them all at one time, not enough sperm to cram them with! A pistol shot would, I feel, have calmed my desire-ridden, jealousy-ridden heart and body. Germany was a fiery stake that had been set up for Riton, a stake more beautiful than one of flames, cloth, and paper. In fits and snatches, without regularity, the flames, embers, and brands were earning their living and their death, were biting, here and there, were menacing Hitler. A very slight displacement—ridding it of irony by means of words—is sufficient for humor to reveal the tragedy and beauty of a fact or of a soul. The poet is tempted by the game. Before the war, cartoonists caricatured Hitler as a Maid with clownish features and a movie comedian's mustache. “He hears voices,” said the captions. . . . Did the cartoonists feel that Hitler was Joan of Arc? They had been aware of the resemblance, and they noted it. Thus, the starting point of the features they gave him was that great similarity, since they had thought of it, whether clearly or confusedly, in making their drawings and comments. I regard that recognition as more of a tribute than a mockery. Their irony was the laughter you force for its arrow in order to puncture the agitation that would make you weep in certain moments of overpowering emotion. Hitler will perish by fire if he has identified himself with Germany, as his enemies recognize. He has a bleeding wound at the same level as Joan's on her prisoner's robe.

Like all the other boys of the Reich, Erik's face had retained something of the spatters of a royal sperm—a kind of shame, of deflowering, and at the same time a luster both bright and cloudy (like that of the pearl), precious and triumphant, opaline, the memory of which I thought I discerned in the beads of sweat on his forehead,
which I took for tears of transparent sperm. No doubt it was owing to Nazism that Erik wore that thin veil of shame and light, but the executioner once actually did discharge in his face, and Erik was already overcome with dizziness and was sinking into the idea whose pressure was drowning him:

“He's darkening my sky!”

We were in bed. At the sight of the jet a very brief admiration coursed through him, perhaps with a bit of fear in regard to me whose oak, instead of being struck by lightning, issued the lightning, but when the drops, which were still warm, touched his cheek and torso, I saw a gleam of hatred in his eyes.

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The usual image appeared in the Führer's eyes: a fancy white cradle. But at the very moment that he saw the lace and the muslin puffs, he noticed, around the pillow and covering it, the garland of white roses and ivy with which it had been adorned, since it contained a dead child. Hitler stood up. He wiped his fingers on his handkerchief. As always when he finished playing, he thought of his executioner, who must not be confused with the criminal executioner, the headsman, for we are referring to his private executioner, a killer with a revolver. It was by this male, who was, in short, the natural excrescence of a cruel animal, the poison-gland and the dart, that he had had most of his victims executed—whether political victims or others—but every time that he had dealings with him, and even more often, he thought with anguish that there perhaps existed a list or a notebook with baffling information which this killer, in order to kill time, kept up to date.

After buttoning his fly, the Führer went to the conference room, where the generals, the admiral, and the cabinet ministers were waiting for him. Hitler's gracious and simple life was going to unleash terrible acts on the world, acts that would give rise to the most prodigious flowering of nightmares that a man has ever generated all by himself. High dignitaries, very noble ones, whose heads and shoulders were covered with gold, surrounded him, preserved him as priests preserve the gold of a relic. Hitler had secrets. Master magician that he was, he could float on carpets through several rooms whose walls were pierced by holes for the barrels of rifles.

“I'm just an old fossil,” he thought, on his way back from the conference. He felt himself being a dusty fossil. Love-making had drained him. He dared not wipe his nose or even put a finger into it. Am I quite sure I
command
the world?

Riton will not kill himself . . . unless. . . . We shall see. I am keen on his continuing until the last fraction of a second, by destruction, murder—in short, evil according to you—to exhaust, and for an ever greater exaltation—which means elevation—the social being or gangue from which the most glittering diamond will emerge; solitude, or saintliness, which is also to say the unverifiable, sparkling, unbearable play of his freedom. To anyone who may point out that Riton is not alone since he is in love, I wish to say that were it not for that love he would not have gone freely to the very top. It was necessity itself that made the militiamen—and especially our militiaman—fire on Frenchmen, but the only thing that counts is this: solitude being given and accepted. Rejection of it when it is inevitable is despair, a sin which is in conflict, I believe, with the second theological virtue. In any case, I am writing this book and proposing these things, and I
climb limpingly and often tumble on my way up to my rock of solitude when, along with my eroticism, my friendship for the purest and most upright of adolescents, a saint according to men, conjures up the image of a haloed traitor. It is under the sway of the still-young death of Jean, red with that death and with the emblem of his party, that I am writing this book. The flowers that I wanted to be in profusion on his little grave which was lost in the fog are perhaps not faded, and I already recognize that the most important character glorified by the account of my grief and of my love for him will be that luminous monster who is exposed to the most splendid solitude, the one in whose presence I experience a kind of ecstasy
because
he discharged a burst of machine-gun fire into his body.

Riton continued his unhappy destiny which will never bring him out of a frightful misery contained in a very beautiful vase. When he joined up, he was still good-looking, and yet his life was ugly. Bear in mind that, weary, sweating, and livid, he took down the cat and put it into a canvas bag, which he closed; then, with all his might, he hammered away at that grotesque, mysterious, and plaintive mass. The cat was still alive. When Riton assumed that the head was smashed, he removed the still quivering animal. Finally, he attached it to the nail in the wall that I mentioned earlier and cut it up. The work took a long time. Hunger, which had disappeared for a moment, returned to Riton's stomach. The cat was still warm and steaming when he cut off the two legs and boiled them in a pot. With the mutilated remains before him, the skin of which was turned inside out like a glove and covered with blood, he ate a few pieces which were almost raw, and which were insipid, for he had no salt, and ever since that day Riton has been
aware of the presence within him of a feline that marks his body and, to be more precise, his stomach, like the gold-embroidered animals on the gowns of ladies of former times. Either because the torn was sick, or had become sick—and had gone almost mad—as it was being tortured, or because its meat had not yet cooled, or also because the battle had unsettled the kid, Riton had pains during the night in his stomach and head. He thought he had been poisoned, and he offered up ardent prayers to the cat. The next day he joined the Militia. It pleases me to know that he is marked thus, in his inmost flesh, with the royal seal of hunger. His movements were so nimble and sometimes so nonchalant that he himself thought occasionally that he was actuated by the cat he carried within him, and was already carrying when Erik met him. Later, Erik will confess to me that in Berlin the dogs growled at him when he was in a state of restrained or manifest anger.

“Dogs come sniffing at me. They jump all around me and try to bite me.”

If, because of his anger, Erik became as disturbing an animal to dogs as the hedgehog or toad, the cat's presence in Riton could make him think he had been transformed, deformed, that he exuded a feline smell.

“The guy,” he thought, when he felt Erik's chest against his back, “the guy must realize. . . . His eyes were so bright that they looked black.”

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The funeral procession continued on its way. When it reached the open grave, the priest said a few more prayers, and the choirboys made the responses. Then the gravediggers lowered the little coffin. The hole was filled
quickly. The hearse left with the priest. The choirboys withdrew a bit and sat down in the grass behind a granite vault to eat a ham sandwich. The only ones who stayed on were the two gravediggers and the little maid. She stood for a moment facing the grave in the same posture as the warbler when it remains suspended in mid-air, supported by the rapid flutter of its wings, with its body motionless in the strange flight that immobilizes it on a level with the branch and facing the nest where its young are chirping away as it watches them. A great tenderness startles it. “It could be caught by a bird of prey.” Thus thought the little maid. She was flying. She was teaching to fly. A quivering prayer shook her soul and transported her “on the wings of prayer,” as they say. She was sweetly advising her daughter to be bold, was calling her to the edge of the nest. She broke up the movements of her wings, thus giving the dead child the first lesson. Then she took off her hat, laid it on the ground, and sat down on the tombstone next to the grave. As she was not crying, the gravediggers did not think that she was the mother. One of them said: