Funeral Rites (25 page)

After leaving the amphitheater, I tried hard to maintain within me the tone of my conversation with Jean, but though I managed a few reasonable reflections I felt the fragile crust being threatened by the surge of a terrible muffled grief that was rumbling in the profoundest depths of my misery and that awaited only a lapse of my attention to burst into sobs and despair. Nobody, nothing would prevent the fête's taking place that evening, the delicate and private feast at which I would sit down alone
around
the corpse. The back room of a store would do. Mirrors, gilding, stucco, became unnecessary. The sacrifices most acceptable to God are offered up on a makeshift altar. I will, without respect, undo the blood-stained
white cloth on the body lying on the pinewood table. First a sheet, then a long white linen shirt. Body and cloth were frozen. They had just come out of the refrigerator. There were three holes in the chest. I did not recognize the body. I took the stiff arms out of the sleeves. I removed the pins at the bottom of the shirt which made a bag of it. Jean's bare feet, legs, thighs, and belly appeared, frozen. What bread the feast brings me! In my memory, his prick, which used to discharge so calmly, assumes the proportions and at times the serene appearance of a flowering apple tree in April. Even when eating one's friends, one has to cook them, prepare the fire, the pots. It was a long time before I sat down to table with a fork, like Riton with the cat. And now you are only that thorny branch which tears my gaze. What could I do to the holly that you have become for a day? In the past, I would have stroked your delicate cheeks with it until they bled. Its points would have caught in your skin and hair, they would have ripped your breath and perhaps the holly would have clung to it. Today I dare not touch you. Your very immobility claws the void. Those stiff, glazed leaves are the color of spitefulness. I must put on my gloves to place you in the garbage can. For you were also, for a few minutes, a garbage can on the edge of a sidewalk, full of a heap of rubbish, broken bottles, eggshells, wet bread crusts, wine, combings of hair, bones in evidence of the feasting on the upper floors, leek tops. On the edge of it, down to the foot of the garbage can that stood in the spilled ashes, flowed a violent disorder of withered chrysanthemums, one of which, spotting, ripping, wounding the side of that privileged garbage can, adorned it with a sumptuous order. With my pious hands, I spread my tenderness and veneration, letting them come to rest rather than setting them
down, like the veil of a blonde or a brunette, and, lest the wind blow them away, with the delicate and fluttering gestures of the wardrobe mistress of a star I kept them in place with wreaths of flowers and laurel. I placed my foot and some huge blocks of stone, that had come running when I called, on the torn ends of these veils. The ash can, thus decked out, had the charm of living-room chandeliers that are protected against flies by a sheet of muslin knotted at the bottom, or of a face behind a veil, of a sick prick wrapped in lint bandages, of a bread crust under cobwebs and dust. Yet it was not without danger that I introduced such an emotional charge into that metal can which my fervor transformed into an infernal machine. It exploded. The most beautiful pyrotechnical sun, developed by the soul of Jean, scattered a spray of glass, hair, stumps, peels, feathers, gnawed cutlets, faded flowers, and delicate eggshells. And yet in the twinkling of an eye everything was in earthly order, except that I was left in that kind of depression that follows the act of love, a great sadness, and I felt as if I were an alien in my own country. I am coming out of a dream that I cannot relate. A dream cannot be set down. It flows, and each of its images is constantly transformed since it exists in time and not in space. Then, oblivion, confusion. . . . But what I can tell is the impression it made on me. When I awoke, I knew I was emerging from a dream in which I had done evil (I don't know by what act: murder, theft?) but I had done evil and I had the feeling that I knew the depths of Me. Somewhat as if the world had a surface on which we slide (the good) and a thickness into which one sinks only rarely, more rarely than one thinks (I note at once that the dream was about a stay in jail). I think that this rejection of the world by the world can produce humility or pride, can oblige one to seek new rules of conduct, that
this new universe enables one to see
the other world.
It would be hard to explain why the funeral procession of all the kings of the earth went through the yard of that prison. Yet this is no time for being imprecise. Actually, each king, each queen, each royal prince, all of whom were wearing trailing court cloaks of black velvet and closed gold crowns and most of whom were veiled with crape, were in mourning for all the other kings. Almost all the kings in the world—which means those of Europe—had already passed by her when the maid saw a gilded carriage drawn by white horses draped in black coming toward her. A queen was in it, with a scepter in her hand and her hand on her lap. She was dead. Another queen, whose face was veiled, was following on foot. They could not be recognized. One could tell they were kings, queens, and princes by their crowns and the somewhat shy stiffness of their gait. Despite the dignity and forced remoteness that life requires of them, these monarchs seemed very close to the maid, who watched them file by. She was astonished but was no more afraid or wonderstruck than if she had been watching a flock of geese led by a gander. The procession really gave an impression of wealth. There was a profusion of mourning jewels, though there was not a flower or any foliage, except what was embroidered in silver on black. The Queen of Spain, who could be recognized by her fan, wept abundantly. The King of Rumania was skinny, almost fleshless, and white. All the German princes were following him. And each member of the procession was alone, captured in a block of solitude from which he could see nothing but himself and the exceptional splendor, not of a destiny, but of the trail of the destiny that he continued. Their solitude and indifference made it possible for the maid to be
mistress of herself
in the presence of those lofty personages.
She watched them the way her employer stood on her balcony and watched marriage processions go by on Saturdays.

I am suddenly alone because the sky is blue, the trees green, the street quiet, and because a dog, who is as alone as I am, is walking in front of me. I am moving slowly but with a firm step. I think it is nighttime. The landscapes I discover, the houses with advertisements on them, the posters, the shopwindows I pass as a sovereign, are of the same stuff as the characters of this book, of the visions I discover when my mouth and tongue are occupied in the hairs of a bronze eye, visions in which I think I recognize a recurrence of my childhood love of tunnels. I bugger the world.

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When it came to the second murder, Riton was calmer. He thought he was getting used to it, whereas they had just done the greatest harm. He was already dead to pain and quite simply dead, since he had just killed his own image.

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Before being assigned to Paris, Erik spent several weeks in a château in Loiret which he occupied with five men from his battery. They were five young Germans. The grounds were always closed. Nobody looked after them. The soldiers took their midday and evening meals at the mess hall in town, which was a half-mile away. They ate and then returned to the château where an observation post had been established. All the disorder in that Me, which could have been quiet, in the heart of an estate
in France, was brought about by Erik, the handsomest and boldest of the five, a kind of delegate of Evil among us. The château slept during the day and came alive at night. The relations of the five young men became strange. They went in and out of the drawing rooms, library, attic, and up and down the stairs in accordance with a mechanism of love, formalities, and hatreds that were even more complicated than that which governs, binds, and unbinds palaces. Their youth, beauty, solitude, night Me, and the strictness of their laws, being active, charged the château with a violence that succeeded in making people think it was damned. At one of the windows, the noblest, floated the red banner with the swastika. The photo of Hitler was pasted on a mirror in the main drawing room. The one of Goering, on the opposite wall, stared at it. That double presence interfered with the love affairs and exasperated them. When the soldiers went out in the evening with their friends in the town, they got drunk, and when they returned to the château, the mirrors in the entrance hall reflected sparkling images of warriors lit up by wine. The first evening, Erik, drunk with wine, drunk with being in his own presence, looked at himself in the hall with curiosity. The seven bulbs of the chandelier and the four wall lights were lit. Erik, black beneath his hair and his tank driver's uniform, was standing, alone and stiff, in a fire of live coals that was the center of the night. He stepped back a little. His image in the mirror moved away from him. He put out his arm to draw it to him, but his hand encountered nothing. He felt, despite his drunkenness, that he had only to move forward to make his reverse image come to him, but he also felt that, being only an image, it had to obey his wishes. He became impatient. His red face in the mirror became tragic and so handsome that Erik doubted that it
was his own. At the same time, he demanded that he master such a male, one which was that strong, that solid. He was dead set on doing so and took a step back. The image stepped back. A hoarse, inarticulate cry of rage took shape in his throat and reverberated in the corridors and empty drawing rooms. The beast in the mirror tossed its head, the forage cap fell off, and the blond curls scattered over the face, the lower jaw of which became slack. Erik trembled. With drunkenness helping him founder, he was within an ace of losing his reason in his own beauty. Mechanically, that is, in a way that was surer and more skillful than if it had been apparently deliberate, he took a firm stand, with one leg tensed and itself tensing the black cloth of the trousers, his left hand pushing back the locks of hair over the left temple, and his right hand, leaning, resting, on the yellow leather holster. The gesture begun by Erik was continued by the image with set eyes. Its left hand opened the holster and took out the revolver, aimed it at Erik, and fired. A burst of laughter burst with the shot. It came from the five others who were returning. A salvo resounded. All five shot at their images. The same orgy was repeated every evening, but whereas they aimed at the heart, Erik fired at his sex and sometimes at that of the others. Before long, all the mirrors in the foyer, drawing rooms, and bedrooms were pitted with rimy stars. Killing a man is the symbol of Evil. Killing without anything's compensating for that loss of Me is Evil, absolute Evil. I rarely use the word absolute because it frightens me, but it seems imperative here. Now, as metaphysicians will tell you, absolutes cannot be added to each other. Once the absolute has been attained as a result of murder—which is its symbol—Evil makes all other bad acts morally useless. A thousand corpses or
only one, there's no difference. It is the state of mortal sin from which one cannot be saved. One can line up the bodies if one's nerves are strong enough, but the repetition will calm them. One can then say that the sensibility is blunted, as it is whenever an act is repeated, except in the act of creating. For the last time the thirty-five militiamen lowered their rifles and stood with arms at rest. They were in groups of five, each group ten feet away from the next, facing the twenty-three-foot wall. Seven groups commanded by only a lieutenant. A sergeant fired the coup de grâce. The prison assistants carried off a first batch of seven corpses. On the same spot, on the blood of the first, the next seven were set up and awaited their turn, astounded by the game at the wall so early in the morning. Astounded by the white label at heart level. Their faces remained surprised. They were taken away. Seven others came up, standing, shivering with cold, anxious about the result. Fire! . . . They died. Finally, the last seven. The thirty-five men of the firing squad were pale. They tried to march away, and their wobbly legs could hardly support them. Several were haggard, and none of them would ever in his life forget the eyes or periwinkle faces of the twenty-eight murdered men. If they were still on their feet, it was because of the block they formed. When they reached the circular drive each was given half a glass of rum. They swallowed it in silence. The rum wasn't theirs but that of the condemned men, and they felt that all the importance of the adventure was being taken away from them for the benefit of the twenty-eight innocents. The main door of the prison was open. The chief ordered:

“Attention!”

The militiamen brought their heels together and drew themselves up. The immobility unsettled their eyes and
minds even more. On a boat rushing to the abyss they were being made to perform so stupid a gesture as polishing their shoes or saluting a corporal.

“Forward, march!”

A sunbeam gilded the top of the wall. And the militiamen entering that Sunday whose threshold led out to death went through the doorway. They were given the day off. They went into town, stern in body and gaze, just as I am now.

Pimps offer me a very fine example of sternness. I want to retain that apparent vigor of bearing, not that I am afraid, as they are, of being drawn into nonchalance, of succumbing to it, but because that attitude appeals to me aesthetically, it seems to me beautiful, even if it contains a wily, suppler, more sinuous moment or some very soft magma to which it gives form. Impelled by a single—aesthetic—motive I vainly provoke the erection of a tough, handsome being, although writing often embarrasses me. Writing and, before writing, taking possession of that state of grace which is a kind of levity, of detachment from the ground, from what is firm, from what is generally called reality—writing involves me in a kind of bizarreness of attitude, of gesture, and even of language. Thieving—and even living among thieves—requires a flesh-and-blood presence, a positive mental presence which manifests itself by gestures that are brief, deliberate, sober, necessary, practical. If I displayed that flightiness among thieves, that waiting for the angel and the gestures that summon him and try to win him over, I would no longer be taken seriously. If I submit to their gestures, to their precise speech, I shall stop writing, I shall lose the grace that has enabled me to seek news from heaven. I must choose or alternate. Or be silent.