Funeral Rites (20 page)

“A maid! A maid!” she muttered. “After all, damn it, what's it to me if Jean knocked her up? I'm Madame.”

She had set the table with a white cloth on which were placed white porcelain plates with a thin gold edging and, in front of the plates, wine glasses with flowers cut into the crystal. She was now placing the silverware. She
heard a knock at the door of the kitchen. It was the boy from Gaillard's. Before he set down his two baskets on the white wooden table, she screamed at him, “What about bread? You never bring bread. Go get it.” She was frightened by her own voice. A rage against a dead son that immobilized her for ten seconds, that made her as cutting as glass, took possession of her: it was rage at not having the power to give the storekeepers a week in jail. She pulled herself together little by little.

“I'm going to be nervous at the table,” she said to herself.

She went back to the bedroom, the window of which she had not opened all morning, and she was lying in bed a few moments, in her lace, freeing all her winds, which spread, forming thicker and thicker layers and changing their smell as they aged. Suddenly she heard someone walking in the dining room and footsteps approaching the bedroom. In a twinkling she realized that her lover had found the door open. She was panic-stricken at the thought that he would smell the odor when he came in.

“He'll back out in disgust.” She saw him in her mind's eye holding his nose and staggering out of the room, pretending to be asphyxiated. She heard him say: “They're dropping like flies.” She thought, also very fast, of sprinkling perfumes about, but the time it would take to get them . . . and they might not destroy the smell. The key was inside. Jean's mother leaped to the door and threw herself against it just as Erik, after knocking, was turning the knob.

“Don't come in! No, don't come in!” she screamed.

She pressed against the door with her foot, shod in a pink satin mule.

“But, darling . . . open up . . . open up . . . it's me.”

Her pushing lover kept forcing, but the mother held out and turned the key.

“I don't understand. . . . I don't understand why . . . what's happening, my God, what's happening?”

Behind the door Erik was uttering the same words I uttered in the presence of the sacred corpse. Death had shut the door. Though I questioned myself and questioned death with all kinds of precautions in my voice, that giant and yet ideal door was keeping a secret and allowing to escape only a very light but sickening smell over which the corpse drifted, a smell of astonishing delicacy which again made me wonder what games are played in the chambers of the dead. If death turned the key, what would one find? The seconds went by. Erik could have cried. He felt death in his love. He heard a window being opened and almost immediately after that the key turning in the lock. He pushed the door violently, surged into the room, which had been sprinkled with eau de Cologne and dashed to the open window in order to see the back if not the face of his fleeing rival. The street was empty except for a little girl who was carrying a loaf of bread in her arm. Erik leaned farther out. He suspected a bend as deep as a bowl of concealing the guilty one, and then, more disappointed than reassured, with the feeling of having been fooled, he straightened up and went back to his mistress. She was standing by the bed, inhaling the pure air through her nostrils, mortally anxious lest he still be able to smell the odor and understand the whole mechanism of the scene, and the thought really made her look like a guilty woman. He moved forward:

“Why didn't you open the door?”

The woman huddled against her lover's chest in such a way as to put her fragrant head of hair by his nose. The scene ended the way all scenes created by suspicion end: with the confusion of the jealous party. There were suddenly the classic embrace, the desperate body, the mouths
caught in each other, the knotted arms, the crushed bosoms, the genitals hampered by their violence and surging. The mother opened her eyes. She looked at her lover. She was victorious. Then she took him by the arm, stepped a little away from him, and gravely said, “Well, darling. . . .”

He did not answer.

Juliette was a witness, though she felt no envy, to what went on between Erik and her mistress. She grieved for neither Jean nor her daughter. She simply slept. When lunch was ready, she did not come and sit down at our table. She served us.

“Perhaps it's a good thing for the girl that her child died. She wouldn't have been able to bring it up.”

The voice of Jean's mother was meant to be sweetly compassionate. As she was the only woman at lunch, it was up to her to display deep feeling. And she used the word
child
for what she thought of in private as “the
lousy brat.
" Her lover listened to her. Was it a canticle of the fairest love that the gestures of his mistress sang to him? Her way of rolling the macaroni around her fork, of swallowing, the slight sniffling of a constantly moist nostril, the quickness with which she caught the napkin that slid off her lap, in short, everything, did it all compose a hymn in his honor, a song?

“In short, do I love her enough? God,” he secretly invoked, “tell me whether I love her enough.”

They spoke of the maid again. Paulo did not defend her. I noted the impassiveness of his features and his mean look. The mother opened her mouth, and noodles fell out onto her plate.

“Anyway, today she didn't spit in the food.”

“Gisèle!”

It makes no difference which of the two men uttered
that cry of revolt, for the other would have made it with the same vigor.

“In the fried eggs. Don't defend servants. They spit in the food.”

There is no telling whether Juliette heard her or not. She seemed indifferent to our talk and indifferent to the strange impression she created. It was enough that she be there for the most magnificent landscape to become as dismal as a heath in winter. And her mere presence in that little dining room stripped all the trees of their leaves. All that remained was sloes and withered red berries on black branches. The sky was overcast. One could wet one's feet in the muddy water of the swamps which that cunning fairy traversed in her veils of sadness. When she came in with a dish of steaming cabbage, the deep monotone that welled up from each of Erik's gestures and even from his immobility seemed to rise over the Breton moors from the puddles in the clay that reflected a frozen azure, gorse, and a bush with thorns. In Erik's vicinity, that whole landscape, winged as dead hair, loosed a slow but lordly music. The maid was singing. She put the dish on the table. There were still swamps around us, but elves were dashing through them. Paulo was a silent and impassive witness of that fête, and had I wished to participate, I had only to shed a tear.

“And I can tell,” added the mother as she raised her fork to the level of her voice. “I can tell when she spits. I recognize the bitter taste, the taste of a maid's mouth, the bitter taste of all the bitterness accumulated in the bottom of the stomachs of all high-class servants. . . .”

Paulo shrugged. He was eating his noodles and bread. His mother swallowed a mouthful and continued, as she watched her lover:

“. . . a high-class servant is a servant who's really low,
that is, more and more of a servant. That's why when you tell them to keep quiet they shut up, so that you can't smell the foulness of their guts. I hate. . . .” She opened her mouth wide, and, a mouthful being ready on the end of her fork, she stuck it in. With her mouth full:

“Servants. Their bodies have no consistency. They pass. They are passed. They never laugh, they cry. Their whole Me cries, and they soil ours by daring to mingle in it by way of what ought to be most secret, hence most unavowable.”

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In the dangerous darkness, a song seemed to merge Erik and Riton. Each of them would have wished to writhe to happiness, to kiss, to squirm with pleasure, but other sounds, along with the waiting, caused weariness and sleep to leave them unsatisfied, bound to each other in the darkness by Riton's hand.

Was it true that every child, little girl, and old woman in Paris was a soldier in disguise? Erik was seized with fear at being alone with his weapons amidst a people of monsters mysteriously armed with knives and charms and knowing an art of camouflage that reduced to child's play the one used by German soldiers to disguise themselves as lizards, as zebras, as tigers, as moving, vertical graves that preserved a fresh, light-footed, blue-eyed blond corpse. He could not shake off the memory of a soldier wearing flesh-colored silk stockings and a pink dress, of a fifteen-year-old soldier dressed up as a journeyman baker, or that of a tank beset by strange warriors whom he had often brushed against in the street, bare-legged warriors in sweaters and often sneakers, warriors with delicate faces pale and drawn by the will to kill Boches,
with terrible hands whose delicacy drew tears. All the glory of nations was for a long time revealed by the splendor of military apparel, by the red, gold, and azure of glittering ranks, by white gloves, handsome eyes behind lacquered visors, noble shoulders, twisted torsos, horses, croups, and sabers whose very arrogance bespoke loyalty. Falling into rank, the virtue of chameleons became the greatest virtue of the soldier. Deceit and hypocrisy (in technical language, camouflage) were so perfected as to give France the quiet, friendly look of a vicarage garden. The Germans, knowing they were the masters of costumed war, did not think that one could transform one's face, wear a wig, paint one's eyes, dress up as a girl, undress, be reamed by the male, and, without even wiping one's pussy or bronze eye, slit his throat when he dozed off. I'm amused by this game of recording here the shame of a country to which I belong by virtue of language and of the mysterious threads that bind me to its heart and that bring tears to my eyes when it suffers. It pleases me that France has chosen the charming disguise of a hideous religious whore so as, no doubt like Lorenzaccio, the better to kill her pimp.

Standing sadly at the summit of the Bavarian Alps in the glass cage of a fortified chalet, Hitler towered over history. Nobody approached him. At times he would go to the edge of the great esplanade that separated him from a void bristling with the highest peaks in the world.

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Jean! Young tree with thighs of water! Blazoned bark! Endless and amazing revels took place in the hollow of your elbow. The shoulder of the Parthenon. A black clover. I am a wad of tow pierced with gold pins. The
taste of your mouth: deep within a silent vale a mule made its way in a yellow cassock. Your body was a fanfare into which water wept. Our love! Remember. We lit up the barn with a chandelier. We woke the shepherds dressed for their Mass. Listen to their songs merged in a light blue breath! I fished in your eye! The sky opened its gates. Thin out my sleep on the brow of stillborn children, thin out our love over the world, thin out the world on our beds. Leave in your veiled wagons. I sleep beneath your door. The wind sleeps standing up. All these are themes with which my voice could go in quest of you! Jean, I'm abandoning you. The firs are moving by themselves. You live elsewhere, stronger than I who am here among the dead still unborn. All day yesterday I adorned a dog with my tenderness for you; a kind of St. Bernard, very white and very strong. I feared for a moment that I did not have enough tulle and roses. The box of matches was easier. Today you will be a branch of holly that I found, no doubt broken by a young monk on a flat, mossy stone. I haven't put you into a vase or behind a frame, but with the help of one of the lace curtains I made a kind of altar on the night table and put you there. I realize that this book is merely literature, but let it enable me so to glorify my grief that it emerges by itself and ceases to be—as fireworks cease to be when they have exploded. The main thing is for Jean or me to gain thereby. My book will serve perhaps to simplify me. I want to make myself simple, that is, to be like a diagram, and my being will have to gain the qualities of crystal, which exists only by virtue of the objects that can be seen through it. Rags, poverty, even a careless or untidy way of dressing, enable pathos to enter easily, more easily, into daily life. To be buttoned. Faultlessly. Apparently inaccessible. If I desire saintliness, let it come wholly from
within! A torrent flowing into me from head to heart and circulating. A very simple ribbon. I would hate a crease, a silk pocket handkerchief, a badly pressed crease, a down-at-heel shoe to allow me the slightest self-pity, the simplest casualness with respect to strictness, to make disobedience easier. Where I was heavy with so many furs! Where the snow isolated each of us—we who lived, nevertheless, in the same thick darkness of a tank—in the middle of a vast plain of silence.

“They tortured women and children.”

The French papers say that about us. In Russia I planted patches of forest between women's teeth. We had to make the Russian girls and their brother (seventeen years old) talk. There were four of us: the lieutenant, the corporal, a fellow private, and I. The girls were silent. The boy too.

The lieutenant said to me, “Slap him.”

I was already smiling a bit because the officer was held in check by those Russians, and it was with a broader smile that I gave the kid a big, thick smack on the cheek. He made a faint, very faint move to hit back. He didn't dare.

“Talk.”

He remained silent. Still smiling, I gave him another slap. He was still silent. I turned to the officer. The corporal and the other private also smiled, probably because I was smiling.

“Do the same to the girls.”

I slapped them. They staggered, and one of them fell. The brother didn't bat an eyelash.

“The young man isn't very chivalrous,” said the lieutenant.

We laughed, and all three of us laughingly indulged in a merry slapping game. We were in a transport of joy. We knocked the girls down and kicked them with our
heels. We were amused at their ridiculous postures, at their rumpled hair, at their losing their combs, at their groans. We tore their clothes. The girls and the boy were naked. Within my joyous drunkenness I felt the very grave presence of a touch of sadness. I felt it so precisely that I knew it could become
the sorrow of not being able to indulge in pity.
I kept punching away, but with a smile that was no longer the same: it was now the motionless sign of a joy stained with a misfortune that had to be hidden. Because of that smile our game continued to be a game, and was to seem harmless to us. We tore out tufts of hair, the women's pubic hair, we pinched, twisted the brother's balls. Our three partners had joined the game; they were not laughing, but their dances and grimaces were worse than laughter: they were the counterpart of our drunkenness, an apparent despair at the heart of which was contempt. And I knew that they had to indulge in those grimaces because their contempt was in danger of becoming
indifference to evil, to the point of their feeling pity for those who commit it,
and no doubt the officer, who was standing behind the table and watching us with a smile, knew it too. I hardly had time to feel all that, as it swept me along, as it governed me, but the officer had time to take it all in. He was there to know that we would perhaps be dead the next day. He was also the representative of so many heroic deaths, of so many smoking homes, ruins, griefs, miseries, he knew that that day we could indulge in joyous despair. And we invented very funny pranks that made us laugh. . . .