Our Lady of the Flowers (17 page)

“. . . You understand, there were guys that called me . . .”

Darling held on to his hand. With his eyes, he was drawing the confession toward him:

“It's coming, it's coming.”

During the entire operation, he did not take his eyes off the eyes of his friend. From beginning to end, he smiled with a motionless smile that was fixed on his mouth, for he felt that the slightest emotion on his part, the slightest sign or breath, would destroy . . . It would have broken Our Lady of the Flowers.

When the name was in the room, it came to pass that the murderer, abashed, opened up, and there sprang forth, like a Glory, from his pitiable fragments, an altar on which there lay, in the roses, a woman of light and flesh.

The altar undulated on a foul mud into which it sank: the murderer. Darling drew Our Lady toward him, and, the better to embrace him, struggled with him briefly. I would like to dream them both in many other positions if, when I closed my eyes, my dream still obeyed my will. But during the day it is disturbed by anxiety about my trial, and in the evening the preliminaries of sleep denude the environs of my self, destroy objects and episodes, leaving me at the edge of sleep as solitary as I was one night in the middle of a stormy and barren heath. Darling, Divine, and Our Lady flee from me at top speed, taking with them the consolation of their existence, which has its being only in me, for they are not content with fleeing; they do away with themselves, dilute themselves in the appalling insubstantiality of my dreams, or rather of my sleep, and become my sleep; they melt into the very stuff of my sleep and compose it. I call for help in silence; I make signals with the two arms of my soul, which are softer than algae, not, of course, to some friend firmly planted on the ground, but to a kind of crystallization of the tenderness whose seeming hardness makes me believe in its eternity.

I call out: “Hold me back! Fasten me!” I break away for a frightful dream which will go through the darkness of the cells, the darkness of the spirits of the damned, of the gulfs, through the mouths of the guards, the breasts of the judges, and will end by my being swallowed very very slowly by a giant crocodile formed by the whiffs of the foul prison air.

It is the fear of the trial.

Weighing upon my poor shoulders are the dreadful weight of legal justice and the weight of my fate.

How many policemen and detectives, with their teeth on edge, as is so aptly said, for days and nights, were making relentless efforts to unravel the puzzle I had set? And I thought the affair had been shelved, whereas they kept plugging away, busying themselves about me without my being aware of it, working on the Genet material, on the luminous traces of the Genet gestures, working away on me in the darkness.

It was a good thing that I raised egoistic masturbation to the dignity of a cult! I have only to begin the gesture and a kind of unclean and supernatural transposition displaces the truth. Everything within me turns worshiper. The external vision of the props of my desire isolates me, far from the world.

Pleasure of the solitary, gesture of solitude that makes you sufficient unto yourself, possessing intimately others who serve your pleasure without their suspecting it, a pleasure that gives to your most casual gestures, even when you are up and about, that air of supreme indifference toward everyone and also a certain awkward manner that, if you have gone to bed with a boy, makes you feel as if you have bumped your head against a granite slab.

I've got lots of time for making my fingers fly! Ten years to go! My good, my gentle friend, my cell! My sweet retreat, mine alone, I love you so! If I had to live
in all freedom in another city, I would first go to prison to acknowledge my own, those of my race, and also to find you there.

Yesterday I was summoned by the examining magistrate. From the Santé to the Law Court, the jolting and the smell of the police van had nauseated me. I appeared before the judge as white as a sheet.

As soon as I entered his chambers, I was struck by the gloom, despite the dusty, secret flowering of the criminal files, caused by the presence of the smashed violin that Divine also saw. And, because of that Christ, I was open to pity. Because of it and of the dream in which my victim came to forgive me. In fact, the judge smiled at me very kindly. I recognized my victim's smile in my dream and recalled, or realized again, that he himself was supposed to have been both a judge on the bench, whom I confused perhaps intentionally with the examining magistrate, and an examining magistrate. Knowing that I had been pardoned by him, feeling tranquil and sure, not with a certainty resulting from logic, but out of a desire for peace, a desire to return to the life of men (the desire that makes Darling serve the police so as to return to his place among human beings through having served order, and at the same time to depart from the human through deliberate baseness), sure that everything had been forgotten, hypnotized by the pardon, with a sense of confidence, I confessed.

The clerk recorded the confession, which I signed.

My lawyer was stupefied, staggered. What in the world had I done? Who tricked me? Heaven? Heaven, dwelling of God and his Court.

I went back through the underground corridors of the Court and returned to my dark, icy little cell in the “Mouse-trap.” Ariadne in the labyrinth. The most alive of worlds, human beings with the tenderest flesh, are made of marble. I strew devastation as I pass. I wander
dead-eyed through cities and petrified populations. But no way out. Impossible to retract the confession, to annul it, to unravel the thread of time that wove it, and to make it unwind and destroy itself. Flee? What an idea! The labyrinth is more tortuous than the summing-up of judges. What about the guard leading me? A guard of massive bronze to whom I am chained by the wrist. I quickly concoct a scheme of seducing him, of kneeling before him, first laying my forehead on his thigh, devoutly opening his blue pants. . . . What folly! I'm done for. Why didn't I steal a tube of strychnine from a pharmacy, as I had meant to? I could have kept it on me and concealed it while I was being searched. One day, utterly weary of the land of the Chimeras–the only one worth inhabiting, “the nothingness of human things being such that, save for the being who is by himself, nothing is beautiful, but that which is not” (Pope)
¹
–I would, without any vain ornamentation surrounding the act, have poisoned myself. For, my good friends, I am ripe for the Send-off.

There are times when we suddenly understand the hitherto unperceived meaning of certain expressions. We live them and mutter them. For example: “I felt the earth giving way beneath me.” This is a phrase that I have read and said a thousand times without living it. But it was enough, when I awoke, to linger over it for ten seconds as I was being visited by the memory of my arrest (the remains of last night's nightmare), for the dream element that created the expression to envelop me, or rather to give me the sensation of internal, visceral emptiness that is also caused by the precipices from which one falls at night with a feeling of certainty. I felt that way last night. No outstretched, merciful arm
tries to catch me. A few rocks might perhaps offer me a stony hand, but just far enough away for me to be unable to grab it. I was falling. And in order to delay the final shock–for the feeling of falling caused me that intoxication of absolute despair, which is akin to happiness during the fall, but it was also an intoxication fearful of awakening, of the return to things that are–in order to delay the shock at the bottom of the gulf and the awakening in prison with my anguish at the thought of suicide or jail, I accumulated catastrophes, I provoked accidents along the verticality of the precipice, I summoned up frightful obstacles at the point of arrival. It was the very next day that the influence of this un-dissipated dream made me pile up details, all of them serious, in the confused hope that they were staving off the inevitable. I was slowly sinking.

Yet, back in my 426, the sweetness of my work entrances me. The first steps I take, with my hands on my hips, which seem to be pitching, make me feel as if Darling, who is walking behind, were passing through me. And here I am again in the soothing comfort of the elegant hotel which they will have to leave, for twenty thousand francs is not eternal.

During his stay at the hotel, Darling had not been to the garret. He had left Divine without any news. Our dearest was dying of anxiety. So, when Our Lady and he ran out of money, he thought about going back. Dressed like fake monarchs, they returned to the attic, where, with blankets stolen from cars, they arranged a bed for the murderer on the rug. He slept there, near Divine and Darling. When she saw them enter, Divine thought she had been forgotten and replaced. Not at all. We shall see later the kind of incest that bound the two lads together.

Divine worked for two men, one of whom was her own.

Until then, she had loved only men who were stronger
and just a little, a tiny bit older, and more muscular than herself. But then came Our Lady of the Flowers, who had the moral and physical character of a flower; she was smitten with him. Something different, a kind of feeling of power, sprang up (in the vegetal, germinative sense) in Divine. She thought she had been virilified. A wild hope made her strong and husky and vigorous. She felt muscles growing, and felt herself emerging from a rock carved by Michelangelo in the form of a slave. Without moving a muscle, though straining within herself, she struggled internally just as Laocoön seizes the monster and twists it. Then, bolder still, she wanted to box, with her arms and legs of flesh, but she very quickly got knocked about on the boulevard, for she judged and willed her movements not in accordance with their combative efficiency but rather in accordance with an esthetic that would have made of her a hoodlum of a more or less gallant stripe. Her movements, particularly a hitching of the belt and her guard position, were meant, whatever the cost, at the cost of victory itself, to make of her not the boxer Divine, but a certain admired boxer, and at times several fine boxers rolled into one. She tried for male gestures, which are rarely the gestures of males. She whistled, put her hands into her pockets, and this whole performance was carried out so unskillfully that in the course of a single evening she seemed to be four or five characters at the same time. She thereby acquired the richness of a multiple personality. She ran from boy to girl, and the transitions from one to the other–because the attitude was a new one–were made stumblingly. She would hop after the boy on one foot. She would always begin her Big Scatterbrain gestures, then, suddenly remembering that she was supposed to show she was virile so as to captivate the murderer, she would end by burlesquing them, and this double formula enveloped her in strangeness,
made her a timid clown in plain dress, a sort of embittered swish. Finally, to crown her metamorphosis from female into tough male, she imagined a man-to-man friendship which would link her with one of those faultless pimps whose gestures could not be regarded as ambiguous. And to be on the safe side, she invented Marchetti. It was a simple matter to choose a physique for him, for she possessed in her secret, lonely-girl's imagination, for her nights’ pleasure, a stock of thighs, arms, torsoes, faces, hair, teeth, necks, and knees, and she knew how to assemble them so as to make of them a live man to whom she loaned a soul–which was always the same one for each of these constructions: the one she would have liked to have herself. The invented Marchetti had a few adventures with her, in secret. Then, one night, she told him that she was tired of Our Lady of the Flowers and that she was willing to let Marchetti have him. The agreement was sealed with a male handshake. The dream was as follows: Marchetti comes breezing into the place with his hands in his pockets.

“Hello, kid,” he says to Divine.

He sits down and they have a man-to-man talk about the grind. Our Lady arrives. Shakes hands with Marchetti. Marchetti kids him a bit about his girl's puss. As for me (Divine is talking to herself in secret), I pretend not to see them. But I'm sure that now, thanks to me, Our Lady is going to tear off a quickie with Marchetti (he has too nice a name to need a given name). I busy myself for three minutes about the room. I manage it so that my back is turned to them. I turn around. I see them billing and cooing, and Marchetti's fly is open. The love-making begins.

Divine had not become virile; she had aged. An adolescent now excited her, and that was why she had the feeling of being old, and this certainty unfurled within her like the hangings formed by the wings of bats. That
evening, undressed and alone in the garret, she saw with fresh eyes her white, hairless body, smooth and dry, and, in places, bony. She was ashamed of it and hastened to put out the lamp, for it was the ivory body of Jesus on an eighteenth-century crucifix, and relations with the divinity, even a resemblance to it, sickened her.

But along with this desolation, a new joy was being born within her.

The joy that precedes suicides. Divine was afraid of her daily life. Her flesh and soul were turning sour. There came for her the season of tears, as we speak of the season of rains. Once she has switched off the light and created darkness, for nothing in the world would she take a step out of bed, where she thinks she is safe, but in the same way that she thinks she is safe in her body. She feels rather protected by the fact of being in her body. Outside reigns terror. One night, however, she dared open the door of the garret and take a step out on the dark landing. The stairway was filled with the wails of sirens calling her to the bottom. They were not exactly wails or songs, nor exactly sirens either, but they were quite clearly an invitation to madness or to death by falling. Mad with fright, she went back to the garret. It was the moment before alarm clocks start ringing. If she was spared fears, during the day she knew another torture: she would blush. For the veriest trifle, she would become the Very Crimson, the Purplish One, Her Eminence. It must not be thought that she was ashamed of her profession. She had known too well and too early how to penetrate steadily to the depths of despair not to be, at her age, dead to all sense of shame. Calling herself an old whorish whore, Divine simply forestalled mockery and insults. But she blushed about little things which seemed trivial, which we think insignificant, until the moment when, observing more closely, she realized that the blush had spread just when someone was humiliating
her unwittingly. A mere trifle humiliated Divine. The kind of humiliation which–she was again Culafroy–laid her lower than the ground, by the mere power of words. Words again took on for her the magic of boxes empty, when all is said and done, of everything that is not mystery. When closed words, sealed, hermetic words, open up, their meanings escape in leaps and bounds that assault and leave us panting. Brew, which is a word from sorcery, led me to the home of the old maid who grinds coffee, mixes in some chicory, and brews; through coffee grounds (this is a trick of hocus-pocus), it leads me back to sorcery. The word Mithridate: one morning Divine suddenly comes upon it again. It had once opened up and revealed to Culafroy its virtue, and the child, going back up the centuries to the fifteen hundreds, buried himself in the Rome of the Pontiffs. Let us take a look at this period in Divine's life. As aconite was the only poison he could procure, every night, in a long, stiff-pleated dressing gown, he would open the door of his room, which was on a level with the garden, would step over the railing–gesture of a lover, burglar, dancer, somnambulist, mountebank–and jump into the vegetable garden, which was bounded by a hedge of elders, mulberries, and black thorns, but where someone had laid out, between the vegetable beds, borders of reseda and marigolds. Culafroy would gather a bunch of Napel aconite leaves. He would measure them with a six-inch ruler, increase the dose each time, roll them up, and then swallow. But the poison had the double virtue of killing and raising from the dead those it killed, and presto! it would act. The Renaissance would take possession of the child through the mouth, just as the Man-God does of the little girl who, sticking out her tongue, though piously, swallows the host. The Borgias, Astrologers, Pornographers, Princes, Abbesses, and Condottieri would receive him naked on their knees, which were hard beneath
the silk; he would tenderly place his cheek against an erect penis, stony beneath the silk, of stone as un-yielding as the chests of Negro jazzmen must be beneath the shiny satin of their jackets.