Funeral Rites (23 page)

If I am relating the inner adventures of a Catholic priest, do not think that I am satisfied with probing the secrets of the mechanism of religious inspiration. My goal is God. I am aiming at Him, and since He hides Himself in the jumble of the various faiths more than elsewhere, it seems clever of me to pretend that I am trying to track Him down there. Priests think that they are with God. Let us assume that they are with Him, and let us see ourselves in them. Despite his devoutness, the captain was infuriated at the interruption. Nevertheless, he stood up. The priest made a gesture of peace with his right hand. He said:

“Remain seated, captain.”

His breathlessness made him actually say “main seated.”

The captain was standing behind his desk, at the right of the glass cabinet containing the French flag, the silk cloth of which was double, heavy, and motionless.

“In case of trouble,” he thought, “I'll wrap myself in its folds.”

His pale clenched hands were pressing against the black wooden desk over which his body was bent. A sunbeam, coming from the window like grace from heaven, separated him from the priest, whose face was enough for him to understand the significance of the priest's behavior, thus justifying his casualness. He said:

“Monsieur l'abbé. . . .”

The abbé had already taken a paper from his cuff, but he did not use it. “Is the captain baptized?” he wondered. “Where are the baptismal certificates?” He saw the roster on the wall. . . . “Join up. . . .”

“Captain, what I have to do would be painful if it were not ordered by God. . . .” He stopped, embarrassed by the beginning of the sentence. The solemnity of the order and the majesty of Him who had given it were too great for him, were not in keeping with the place, with the posters, the pencils, the ordnance survey maps. He looked at the officer.

“It was in the crapper, in the form of shit. . . .”

The captain's cold eyes stared at the bridge of the abbé's nose. Beneath that gaze, which was visibly ready for anything, even for the most dangerous weapon, irony, the priest had a burst of courage and wild hope. Still winded by his tirade, he cried out with a sputter, in a high-pitched voice:

“. . . God. . . .”

Uttered in such a tone, that burning and desperate
name, which was now outside of him, could have been a threat, an appeal, an invocation. It emerged from the priest's mouth amidst a spray of spit that crossed the field of blond light from the panes and became the golden rays of an extremely delicate sun in which the name appeared suddenly glorious, alone, and so intimately mingled with those tenuous rays that it scattered itself in droplets which sprinkled the captain's clothes with an invisible and perhaps dangerous constellation. The captain did not move under the onslaught. Thanks to the fixity of his eyes, he was master of the situation. There was a moment of silence. It was a July morning. Each guarded within himself a treasure that was his strength and behind which he took shelter. The priest had God since he spat Him out piecemeal as a tubercular spits out his lungs. France and, better than France, a tricolored banner of thick silk embroidered and fringed with gold were a magnificent cope for the captain.

“Tell me about it,” said the captain, who immediately thought to himself with gravity, “You could have wiped your ass.”

“It's . . . very grave. . . . It's. . . . I know . . . today, this very morning. . . .”

The captain had regained his self-possession. Fully absorbed in higher contemplation of the disaster, he was master of the moment. He pulled himself together, and this betrayed him, for he replied haughtily and arrogantly:

“What do you mean?”

The admission was in the tone.

“Captain, what I know . . . if. . . .”

“If what? . . . If what?”

“Save those children. I have. . . .”

“What? . . .”

“Proof.”

“You have proof? What proof?”

“I'll strike. I'm a priest and God is my strength. . . .”

All the same, the captain began to be afraid, but it was a fear of the moment and not of social and official consequences. Anything was possible with a man dressed as a woman, in a black robe beneath which were no doubt hidden at night, clinging to the hairs on the balls, to the balls themselves as to the rocks of the Sierra, armies of policemen with muscular thighs who might at any moment open the cassock and handcuff him and extradite him from
public barracks.
He overcame this idiotic fear and said:

“That paper of yours. . . .”

The priest, who had just held the paper out, tossed it on the desk, and the captain saw a cartoon of a soldier teasing a servant girl.

“Revelation. . . . Revelation. . . . Revelation. . . .”

Once the word appeared, it proliferated in the ecclesiastic's head with an abundance that left no room for any idea. Threatened by a military man who seemed very self-possessed, the priest had no time to think, but he was suddenly struck, with lightning speed, by the following: “God
reveals
himself to me who
reveals the sin of others.
" The word revelation meant both glory and its exact opposite. God was backing away from France but was thereby triumphing over it.

“My son. . . .”

The abbé put out his hands, and his arms, which for a few seconds were parallel, motionless, and stiff as marionettes, then crossed on his chest. The captain walked around his desk and kneeled before the priest, who blessed him and left the room, murmuring:

“Compose yourself. God needed that admirable sin.”

A Militia company had put down the prison rebellion. Riton was not a member of it. He was among those who were chosen—or picked at random—to execute the twenty-eight victims. When he learned that hoodlums were to be shot, nothing within him rebelled. On the contrary, he was filled with a kind of gladness. His eyes gleamed. We can be sure that none of the following ideas occurred to him, but I am trying to explain why he was joyful. Fed by the gutter, the entire soul of the gutter would be in him until he died. He liked hoodlums and respected the strong and despised the weak. It was hunger that had made him a militiaman, but hunger would not have been enough. He had learned from pals of his who had joined up earlier that the Militia recruited from among riffraff. They were birds of a feather that would never include squares who wore glasses, noncoms of the destroyed army, hollow-chested bureaucrats, but only former thugs from Marseilles and Lyons. The Militia was hated by the bourgeois before it was formed. Its purpose was to spread fear, to spread disorder. It seemed the materialization of what every thief desires: that organization, that free, powerful society, which was ideal only in prison, in which each thief—and even each murderer—would be openly appreciated for no reason other than his worth as a thief or murderer. The police make associations of felons impossible, and the great gangs that are not fantasies of journalists and policemen are quickly broken up. The thief and the murderer know camaraderie only in jail, where their worth is finally recognized, accepted, rewarded, and honored. The “underworld” no longer exists, except that of pimps, who are stool pigeons. The burglar and the killer are alone, but they sometimes have friends. Though pals may hang out together, you must always be on guard, must always give vague answers: “Oh, I manage,”
must never give any publicity to jobs, which are veritable jewels, except when you're nabbed. But the great happiness of knowing your name is under a photo, of thinking that the pals are jealous of that glory, is paid for with freedom and often with life, with the result that every job, every burglary or murder, will be a wonder of art, for from the last one of all will come your death and your glory. The felon is a Chinese, a Burmese, who prepares his funeral all his life. He works on the coffin, splendid lacquers, skillful paintings, gold and blood-red lanterns, cymbals. He invents processions of Laotian priests wrapped in their white linen bands. He pays embalmers. He organizes his glory. Each act is a phrase of our overlong funeral. Though the police serve order and the Militia disorder, they cannot be compared socially. The fact remains that the latter also did the work of the former. It was at the ideal point where the thief and the policeman meet and merge. They achieve the following exploit: fighting the cop and the thief. In like manner, the Gestapo. On June 23, Riton and one of his cronies were summoned to the captain's office. The chief was sitting on the edge of his typist's table and smoking a cigarette. When the two lads entered, he turned his chest a little. The new leather of a complicated outfit (belts, holsters, cross-belts, etc.) creaked.

“I've had my eye on both of you. You feel up to an expedition?”

“Yes, I do, chief.”

“Okay, load your guns.”

The two boys felt the presence of the seated woman. She was blonde, commonplace, but her make-up was fresh and quite became her. Had she not been there, the captain would have handled the two rookies better. Flowing from her deep, limpid eyes, from her smile, from each
of her gestures, or given off, rather, like the smell from a flower, that corolla of black silk in which her pink crossed legs were knotted stigmata, the femininity of that pink, clever doll spread through the office and disconcerted the males. None of the three was quite in possession of himself. Their quivering created around each of them an aura of desire, pride, and vanity that became tangled in that of the other two. They had stage fright as the motionless typist stared at them. The two kids gravely took their revolvers from the leather holsters, and Riton said:

“Mine's ready, chief.”

“So's mine, chief.”

“All right. Okay then?”

“Right, chief.”

They answered at the same time, whereupon the captain swept up with one hand two pairs of handcuffs lying on the table and with the same quick gesture tossed one to Riton and the other to his pal.

“Put them in your pocket. They're for later. All right. Stick around, I'll send for you.”

As they left, the handcuffs in Riton's hand made the metallic sound that for years had been for him the sound of misfortune, and immediately a tremendous sadness clouded his heart. Handcuffs are the indispensable accessory of an arrest. They are so powerful a symbol of it that the sight of them in even the friendly hands of certain cops is enough to make me feel, not fear, but, as it were, the reflection of a great grief. Riton felt like running away. Since the handcuffs were open in his free hands, it was, so it seemed for two seconds, because he was released from them. For the first time, the victim held and was frightened by the knife of the sacrificer. This ambiguity did not last. A great force hardened him. The feel of
that contrivance in his hand, in the presence of a woman, made a little man of him. He put the handcuffs in his pocket, saluted, and left without any betrayal of his emotion. The kids had the courage not to stop when they got outside, but Riton's walk grew heavier, his strides were slower and longer. Though he had just received an investiture, the sign had, above all, metamorphosed him into his own enemy.

Riton had become the man who can arrest and also the man who cannot be arrested, since he is himself the one who arrests. That steel object was booty taken from the enemy, a trophy. His hand was clutching the handcuffs, which were in the pocket of his breeches, and he walked with a heavy step to keep his joy from being visible. And the force conferred by the handcuffs gave him the authority of men who are armed or rich, an authority that is almost always manifested by a heavier gait. Hoodlums themselves say, “He's a guy with authority” or “a guy that has weight.” At a bend in the corridor his pal took out his gadget.

“Nice toy! Let's see if the moonlight bounces off it!”

Riton took out his pair.

“Look at that, I can't believe it.”

He was pensive for a moment, not listening to the other say:

“Who'll we stick ‘em on? Got any ideas? Say, your mind's wandering. . . .”

Riton looked at the handcuffs. He had locked up one of his wrists.

He said: “I can't count how many times they slapped the bracelets on me! It's my turn now. I'd like to stick ‘em on a cop.”

“It'll probably be a Jew. Don't you think?”

Actually, it was a matter of arresting two patriots who
had made their way out of the underground for a moment in order to go to Paris for instructions, but Riton did not learn this until the following morning, after the arrest of the two men, one a chap of twenty-three and the other of twenty-four. They refused him the fierce and exalting joy he expected of the adventure, and all he had was a furious satisfaction. They were arrested quite simply, in a hotel room. And when, though proud to see that their victims were older than they, the kids, with a bluffness stolen from genuine cops, imprisoned the four sturdy, dark, hairy wrists in a pale steel retreat, the captives, strong with the live force of forests, with the sap of an eternal April, with verdant violence at liberty, glanced at the handcuffs with such a look of contempt that the three hunters felt a shame which expressed itself at once by bullying. The captain put his gun back into its holster so as to confront them more squarely with his hostile humanity, to fight them with his enraged flesh, which was thereby more relieved. He looked at them angrily. He said coldly:

“You bastards, you don't expect to get away with it, do you? I was waiting for you. We knew you were coming. Someone ratted on you. There are stool pigeons among you.”

While the elder of the two smiled, the other dared say:

“Sir, it's wrong of you to insult us and to insult the patriots. Furthermore, it's not for you to pass judgment. Your function is simply that of a policeman.”

The captain hesitated. For a moment the prisoners and the militiamen saw anguish not painted but sculpted on his face: he was mentally seeking, very fast, and was in a panic at not finding, deep down in his throat, a tone of voice of unheard-of force and violence, one that had hitherto never been used, a voice calling upon all his
vigor and every part of his body, which he would have exhausted, so that it would have remained alone, vomited out until it dragged along the bones and muscles, and the whole body would have been charged with hatred in the vomit so as to give him the strength to blot out the two impertinent ones. The captain, bewildered, wild with rage, plunged into himself. He explored his depths, but the voice did not go down far enough. He put his hand to his throat. His anguish was visible. His eyes were rolling wildly. Rendering secret tribute to poetry, to the Word, he felt obscurely that men must be dominated only by the voice but, unaware of the wondrous ways of language, he sought the tone that confounds. After ten seconds, weary and exhausted by the quest in the depths of his cavern, he said quietly, his mouth dry: