Our Lady of the Flowers (22 page)

“Cula!”

The mason was calling.

“Sh! Don't shout in church.”

The two cries made a huge crevice in the edifice of the silence, the silence of cottages that are being robbed. The double curtains of the tabernacle did not quite come together, and from the slit, as obscene as an unbuttoned fly, protruded the little key that keeps the door shut. Culafroy's hand was on the key when he regained consciousness, only to lose it again immediately. The miracle! Blood will flow from the hosts if I take one! Idle stories about Jews, about Jews biting into the Holy Species, stories of prodigies, in which hosts falling from the mouths of children stain the floor and cloths with blood, stories about simoniacal brigands, had all prepared this agonizing moment. It cannot be said that Lou's heart beat faster–on the contrary, a kind of foxglove (foxglove is known as Virgin's finger in those parts) slowed down its rhythm and force–nor that his ears buzzed–silence emerged from them. A wild silence. He had risen on his toes and found the key. He had stopped breathing. The miracle. He expected to see the plaster statues come tumbling down from their niches and crush him; he was certain they would. As far as he was concerned, it was already done before being done. He awaited damnation with the resignation of a man condemned to death; knowing it was imminent, he awaited it in peace. Thus, he acted only after the act had virtually been performed. The silence (it was squared, cubed) was on the point of blowing up the church, of turning the things of God into fireworks. The ciborium was there. He had opened it. The act seemed to him so outlandish that he was curious enough to watch himself do it. The dream almost collapsed. Lou-Culafroy seized the three hosts and let them fall to the carpet. They descended hesitantly, drifting like leaves that fall in calm weather. The silence rushed
at the child, bowled him over like a team of boxers, pinned his shoulders to the floor. He let go of the ciborium, which made a hollow sound as it fell on the wool.

And the miracle occurred. There was no miracle. God had been debunked. God was hollow. Just a hole with any old thing around it. A pretty shape, like the plaster head of Marie-Antoinette and the little soldiers, which were holes with a bit of thin lead around them.

Thus I lived in the midst of an infinity of holes in the form of men. I slept on a mattress that lay on the floor, as there was only one bed, in which Clément slept. I would watch him from below, stretched out, as on a bench, on the stone of the altar. He would move only once during the entire night, to go to the latrine. He performed this ceremony with the greatest mystery. In secret, in silence. Here is his story as he told it to me. He was from Guadeloupe and had been a nude dancer at the
Viennese Dreamland.
He lived with his Dutch girlfriend, whose name was Sonia, in a little flat in Montmartre. They lived there the way Divine and Darling lived, that is, a splendid and casual life, a life that a breath might shatter–so think the bourgeois, who sense the poetry of the lives of creators of poetry–dancers, Negroes, boxers, prostitutes, soldiers–but who do not see that these lives have an earthly tie, since they are big with terror. Early in May, 1939, there took place between them one of those typical scenes between whores and pimps, for the take had been insufficient. Sonia spoke of leaving. He slapped her. She screamed. She insulted him in German, but as the tenants of the building were very tactful folk, no one heard. Then she decided to get her valise, which was hidden under the bed, and she quietly began to gather her underthings which were scattered about. The big Negro went over to her. His hands were in his pockets.

“Stop that, Sonia,” he said.

Perhaps he had a cigarette in his mouth. She continued stuffing her valise with silk stockings, dresses, pajamas, towels.

“Stop it, Sonia.”

She stuffed away. The valise was lying on the bed. Clément pushed her on to it. She lost her balance, and as she fell back, her feet, which were still wearing silver shoes, flew up to his nose. The girl uttered a tiny cry. The Negro grabbed her by the ankles, and, lifting her up like a tailor's dummy, with a dazzling gesture, a sunlike gesture, swinging rapidly on his heel, he broke her head on the post of the little brass bed. Clément told me the story in his soft Creole speech, in which the r's are dropped and the ends of phrases are drawled out softly.

“You und'stand, Missie Jean. Ah hit huh head theah. Huh head theah smacked on the brass bed.”

He was holding in his fingers a little soldier whose symmetrical face expressed only foolishness and caused that feeling of malaise which we also get from primitive drawings, from the same drawings that prisoners carve on prison walls and scribble in library books, and on their chests which they are going to tattoo, and which show the profiles with an eye in full-face. Clément finally told me of the anguish into which he had been thrown by the rest of the episode: the sun, he said, was coming through the window of the little apartment, and never before had he noticed a certain quality of the sun, namely, malevolence. It was the only living thing. It was more than an accessory–it was a triumphal, insidious witness, important as a witness (witnesses are almost always for the prosecution), jealous as actors at not having top billing. Clément opened the window, but then it seemed to him that he had just publicly confessed his crime; the street came crowding into the room, upsetting the order and disorder of the drama so that it could take part in it
too. The fabulous atmosphere lasted quite a while. The Negro leaned out the window; at the far end of the street he saw the sea. I do not know whether, in attempting to reconstitute the state of mind of the criminal who surmounts the disastrous horror of his act, I am not secretly trying to ascertain what the best method will be (the one most in keeping with my nature) in order not to succumb likewise to horror when the time comes. Then, all the possible ways of getting rid of Sonia occurred to him at once, grouped, interlaced, crowding each other, offering themselves to his choice as on a street stand. He did not remember ever having heard about walling up a corpse, and yet this was the means he felt had been singled out before he chose it.

“So Ah locked the do’. Ah put key in m'pocket. Ah took the valise f'm off the bed, ah pulled back the blankets. Ah put Sonia in bed. Funny thing, Missie Jean, held Sonia theah. Blood stuck on huh cheek.”

And then there began that long life of heroism which lasted an entire day. By a powerful effort of will, he escaped banality–maintaining his mind in a superhuman region, where he was a god, creating at one stroke a private universe where his acts escaped moral control. He sublimated himself. He made himself general, priest, sacrificer, officiant. He had commanded, avenged, sacrificed, offered. He had not killed Sonia. With a baffling instinct, he made use of this artifice to justify his act. Men endowed with a wild imagination should have, in addition, the great poetic faculty of denying our universe and its values so that they may act upon it with sovereign ease. Like someone who overcomes his fear of water and the void which he is about to enter for the. first time, he breathed deeply, and, bringing himself to a point of icy determination, he became insensible and remote. Having gone through with the irremediable, he resigned himself to it and came to terms with it. Then he tackled the remediable.
As of a cloak, he divested himself of his Christian soul. He sanctified his acts with a grace that owed nothing to a God Who condemns murder. He stopped up the eyes of his spirit. For a whole day, as if automatically, his body was at the mercy of orders that did not come from here below. It was not so much the horror of the murder that terrified him: he was afraid of the corpse. The white corpse disconcerted him, whereas a black corpse would have disturbed him less. So, he left the apartment, which he locked with extreme care, and went off at daybreak to a construction yard to get twenty pounds of cement. Twenty pounds was enough. In a distant neighborhood, around the Boulevard Sebastopol, he bought a trowel. In the street, he had regained his man's soul; he acted like a man, giving his activity a commonplace meaning: that of making a little wall. He bought fifty bricks and had them hauled to a street near his own, where they were left in a hired wheelbarrow. It was already noon. Getting the bricks into the apartment was quite a job. He made ten trips from the wheelbarrow to his home, carrying five or six each time and concealing them under a coat that he carried on his arm. And when all the materials were ready in the room, he returned to his empyrean. He uncovered the corpse; then he was alone. He set the body against the wall, near the fireplace. His plan was to immure it standing up, but it had already curled; he tried to straighten the legs, but they had the hardness of wood and had assumed their final form. The bones snapped like a bunch of firecrackers. So he left it squatting there at the foot of the wall, and he set to work. Works of genius owe a great deal to the collaboration of circumstances and workman. When his job was done, Clément saw that he had given it, with marvelous exactness, the form of a bench. That suited him. He worked like a sleepwalker, preoccupied and determined; he refused to see the gulf in order to escape
from dizzying madness, the same dizziness which, later, a hundred pages later, Our Lady of the Flowers did not resist. He knew that if he flinched, that is, if he relaxed that attitude, an attitude as severe as a bar of steel, he would have sunk. Sunk, that is, run to the police station and melted into tears. He understood this and kept repeating it to himself as he worked, mixing exhortations with invocations. As he told the tale, the little lead soldiers ran rapidly between his big light fingers. I paid close attention. Clément was handsome. You know from
Paris-Soir
that he was killed during the jailbreak at Cayenne. But he was handsome. He was perhaps the handsomest Negro I have ever seen. How lovingly I shall caress, with the memory of him, the image I shall compose, thanks to it, of Seck Gorgui. I want him too to be handsome, nervous, and vulgar. Perhaps his destiny heightened his beauty, like those silly songs to which I listen here in the evening and which grow poignant because they reach me across cells and cells of guilty convicts. His faraway birth, his dancing at night, his crime, were elements which enveloped him in poetry. His forehead, as I have said, was round and smooth; he had laughing eyes, with long curved lashes. He was gentle and proud. In a eunuch's voice, he would hum old songs of the islands. Finally the police got him, though I don't know how.

The little soldiers continued their work of invasion, and one day the foreman brought the soldier that was one too many. Village whimpered to me:

“Ah've had enough, Missie Jean. Look, anotha so'dja.”

From that day on, he grew more taciturn. I knew that he hated me, though without my being able to understand why and also without our comradely relations suffering thereby. He began, however, to manifest his hatred and irritation by all kinds of acts of petty meanness, about which I could do nothing, for he was invulnerable.
One morning, after waking up, he sat down on his bed, looked around the room, and saw it full of stupid-looking figurines that were lying about everywhere, as mindless and mocking as a race of fetuses, as Chinese torturers. The troops rose up in sickening waves to attack the giant. He felt himself capsizing. He was sinking into an absurd sea, and the eddies of his despair were sucking me into the shipwreck. I grabbed hold of a soldier. They were all over the floor, everywhere, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand! And though I was holding the one I had picked up in the warm hollow of my palm, it remained icy, without breath. There was blue everywhere in the room, blue mud in a pot, blue spots on the walls, on my nails. Blue as the apron of the Immaculate Conception, blue as enamels, blue as a standard. The little soldiers whipped up a swell that made the room pitch.

“Jes’ look at me.”

Clément was sitting on the bed and uttering sharp little cries. His long arms would rise and drop heavily on his knees (women carry on like that). He was weeping. His lovely eyes were swollen with tears that ran down to his mouth. “Oh! Oh!” But I, here, all alone, remember only the elastic muscle he dug into me without using his hand. I remember that live tool to which I would like to raise a temple. Others were taken by it. And Divine by Seck Gorgui, and others by Diop, by N'golo, by Smaïl, by Diagne.

With Gorgui, Divine was very quickly all at sea. He played with her like a cat with a mouse. He was ferocious.

As she lies with her cheek on his black chest (her wig is on firmly), Divine thinks about that tongue of his which is so strong while hers is so soft. Everything about Divine is soft. Softness or firmness is only a matter of tissues in which the blood is more or less abundant, and Divine is
not anemic. Divine is she-who-is-soft. That is, whose character is soft, whose cheeks are soft, whose tongue is soft, whose tool is supple. With Gorgui, all is hard. Divine is amazed that there can be any relationship among these various soft things. Since hardness is equivalent to virility . . . If Gorgui had only one hard thing . . . and since it is a matter of tissue. The explanation eludes Divine, who has stopped thinking anything except: ‘'I'm the Quite-Soft.”

So Gorgui lived in the garret, flying over the rows of graves, the columns of tombs. He brought his linen, guitar, and saxophone. He would spend hours playing homely melodies from memory. At the window, the cypresses were attentive. Divine felt no special tenderness toward him. She prepared his tea without love, but as her savings were running out, she went back to working the streets, and that kept her from being bored. She would sing. To her lips came unformed melodies in which tenderness blended with pompousness, as in primitive songs which are the only kind that can stir emotion, as do certain orisons and psalms, as do sober and solemn attitudes dictated by a code of primitive liturgy from which pure and blaspheming laughter is banished, although they are still all soiled with the desires of the divinities: Blood, Fear, Love. Darling used to drink inexpensive pernods, but Gorgui drinks cocktails composed of costly liquors; on the other hand, he eats little. One morning, it might have been eight o'clock, Our Lady knocked at the door of the garret. Divine was curled up in the shadow (as fragrant perhaps as a savanna) of the Negro who was sleeping candidly on his back. The knocking awoke her. We know that for some time she had been wearing pajamas at night. Gorgui continued napping. She crawled over his hot naked belly, hitting against his moist but firm thighs as she climbed over him, and asked: