Our Lady of the Flowers (25 page)

She knew she was lying. In trying to make herself illustrious through an ancient lineage, she was succumbing to the call of darkness, of the earth, of the flesh. She was seeking roots. She wanted to feel, trailing at her feet, the dynastic force, which was brutal, muscular, fecundating. In effect, the heraldic figures illustrated it.

The sitting posture of Michelangelo's
Moses
is said to have been necessitated by the compact form of the block of marble he had to work with. Divine is always being presented with odd-shaped marbles that make her achieve
masterpieces. Culafroy, in the public park, the time he ran away, had had the same good luck. He had been strolling through the lanes; when he reached the end of one of them, he saw that he would have to turn around so as not to walk on the lawn. As he watched himself moving, he thought: “He spun about,” and the word “spun,” immediately caught on the wing, made him about-face smartly. He was about to begin a dance with restrained, barely indicated gesticulations, everything to be merely suggested, but the sole of his yawning shoe dragged over the sand and made such a shamefully vulgar sound (for this also should be noted: that Culafroy or Divine, they of the delicate, that is, finical, in short, civil tastes–for in imagination our heroes are attracted, as girls are, by monsters–have always found themselves in situations that repel them). He heard the sound of the sole. This reminder made him lower his head. He assumed with utter naturalness a meditative posture and sauntered back slowly. The strollers in the park watched him go by. Culafroy saw that they noticed his paleness, his thinness, his lowered eyelids, which were as round and heavy as marbles. He bowed his head more deeply, his pace grew even slower, so much so that all of him was the very image of vocative fervor and that he–not thought–but whispered aloud a cry:

“Lord, I am among Thy elect.”

For a few steps, God carried him off toward His throne.

Divine–let us get back to her–was leaning against a tree on the boulevard. All the youngsters knew her. Three of these hooligans approached her. First, they came up laughing about something or other, perhaps about Divine; then they said hello and asked how the grind was going. Divine was holding a pencil, the pencil played mechanically over her fingernails and drew an irregular piece of lace and then, more consciously, a
diamond shape, a rosette, a holly leaf. The little tramps started teasing her. They said that pricks must hurt, that old men . . . that women had more charm . . . that they themselves were pimps . . . and other things, which they no doubt say without meaning any harm but which hurt Divine. She feels more and more uncomfortable. They're just young little hoodlums, whereas she's thirty. She could shut them up with the back of her hand. But
they
are males. Still very young, but tough-looking and with tough muscles. And all three of them there, dreadfully inflexible, like the Fates. Divine's cheeks are burning. She pretends to be seriously occupied with the drawings on her nails and occupied with that only. “Here's what I might say,” she thought, “to make them think I'm not upset.” And holding out her hands to the children, with the nails up, she smiles and says:

“I'm going to start a fashion. Yes, yes, a new fashion. You see, it's pretty. The we-women and the they-women will have lace drawn on their nails. We'll send for artists from Persia. They'll paint miniatures that you'll have to look at with a magnifying glass! Oh God!”

The three hoodlums felt foolish, and one of them, speaking for the others as well, said:

“Jesus, she's the limit.”

They left.

The fashion of decorating fingernails with Persian miniatures dates from this episode.

Divine thought that Darling was at the movies and that Our Lady, who was a prospector of display cases, was in a department store. Wearing American-style shoes, a very soft hat and a gold chain-bracelet on his wrist, Darling, toward evening, went down the stairs. As soon as he was outside, his face lost its steel-blue glints, its statue-like hardness. His eyes grew softer and softer, until there was no gaze left, until they were merely two holes through which the sky passed. But he still walked
with a sway. He went to the Tuileries and sat down in an iron chair.

Coming from God knows where, whistling in the wind, with a lock of hair standing straight up, Our Lady arrived and installed himself in a second chair. It began:

“Where are you up to?”

“I won the battle, naturally. So I'm at a big party. You understand, the officers are giving a big party in my honor, and I deserve it. So I'm handing out decorations. What about you?”

“All right . . . I'm still only the King of Hungary, but you're fixing it to get me elected Emperor of the West. Get it? It'll be great, Darling. And Yours Truly stays with you.”

“Sure thing, mug.”

Darling put his arm around Our Lady's neck. He was going to kiss him. Suddenly eight savage young men leaped forth from Our Lady; they seemed to be detaching themselves from him in flat layers as if they had formed his thickness, his very structure, and they jumped on Darling as if to cut his throat. It was a signal. He disengaged Our Lady's neck, and the garden was so calm that it let bygones be bygones and forgave. The conversion continued on its royal and imperial way. Our Lady and Darling were winding their two imaginations into one another; they were entwining like two violins unreeling their melodies, as Divine wound her lies into those of her clients, to the point of creating a jumble denser than a thicket of creepers in the Brazilian forest, where neither of them was sure that he was pursuing his own theme rather than that of the other. These games were carried on consciously, not for the purpose of deceiving, but of enchanting. Begun in the shadow of the boulevard promenade, or as they sat with cups of coffee that had grown lukewarm, they were continued up to the desk of the shady hotel. There one utters one's name
discreetly and shows one's papers, discreetly; but the clients always drowned in that pure and perfidious water which was Divine. Without trying to, she would undo the lie with a word or a shrug, with a blink of her eye; she would thereby cause a delightful agitation, something like the emotion I feel when I read a thrilling phrase or see a painting or hear a musical motif, in short, when I detect a poetic state. It is the elegant and sudden, the luminous and clear solution of a conflict in my depths. I have proof of it in the peace that follows my discovery. But this conflict is like the kind of knot that sailors call the whore's knot.

How are we to explain that Divine is now thirty and more? For she really must be my age so that I can appease my need to talk about myself, simply. I feel such a need to complain and to try to win a reader's love! There was a period, from the age of twenty to twenty-seven, when Divine, though appearing among us at irregular intervals, pursued the complicated, sinuous, looped existence of a kept woman. She cruised the Mediterranean, then went even farther, to the Sunda Isles, in a white yacht. She was always forging ahead of herself and of her lover, a young American, modestly proud of his gold. When she returned, the yacht touched at Venice, where a film director took a fancy to her. They lived for a few months through the huge rooms, fit for giant guards and horsemen astride their mounts, of a dilapidated palace.

Then it was Vienna, in a gilded hotel, nestling beneath the wings of a black eagle. Sleeping there in the arms of an English lord, deep in a canopied and curtained bed. Then there were rides in a heavy limousine. Back to Paris. Montmartre and the sisters of the neighborhood. And off again to an elegant Renaissance castle, in the company of Guy de Roburant. She was thus a noble chatelaine. She thought of her mother and of Darling.
Darling received money orders from her, sometimes jewels, which he would wear for one evening and quickly resell so that he could treat his pals to dinner. Then back to Paris, and off again, and all in a warm, gilded luxury, all in such comfort that I need merely evoke it from time to time in its snug details for the vexations of my poor life as prisoner to disappear, for me to console myself, console myself with the idea that such luxury exists. And, though it is denied me, I evoke it with such desperate fervor that at times (more than once) I have really believed that a trifle would be enough–a slight, imperceptible displacement on the plane on which I live–for this luxury to surround me, to be real, and really mine; that a slight effort of thought would be enough for me to discover the magic formulas opening the flood gates.

And I invent for Divine the cosiest apartments where I myself wallow.

When she returns, she mingles more in the faggots’ life. She is to be found in all the tiny bars. She preens herself, ruffles her feathers, and, in the midst of all our gestures, thinks she is tossing, strewing them about her, petals of roses, rhododendra, and peonies, as, in the village, little girls strew them along the paths of the Corpus Christi. Her great friendly enemy is Mimosa II. In order to understand her, here are some “Mimosariana.”

To Divine:

“I like my lovers to be bow-legged, like jockies, so they can grab me around the thighs better when they ride me.”

At
The Tabernacle,
the queens:

One, Marquis de? . . . :

“Mimosa II has had the coat-of-arms of the Count
of A . . . painted on her buttocks. Thirty-six quarters of nobility on her ass, with colored inks.”

Divine has introduced Our Lady to her. Some days later, showed her, decent girl that she was, a little “photomatic” photo of the murderer.

Mimosa takes the photo, puts it on her outstretched tongue, and swallows it.

“I simply adore that Our Lady of yours. I'm communioning her.”

About Divine, to First Communion.

“Just imagine, Divine's carrying on like a great actress. She knows how to play her cards. If the façade collapses, she shows her profile. If that goes, then she turns her back. Like Mary Garden, she makes her bit of noise in the wings.”

All the queens of
The Tabernacle
and the neighboring bars, about Mimosa:

“She's a plague.”

“The Evil One.”

“A tart, my dears, a tart.”

“A she-devil.”

“Venenosa.”

Divine lightly accepts this moth's life. She gets tipsy on alcohol and neon light, but especially on the headiness of their Quite-Quite gestures and their dazzling remarks. “This life in a whirl is driving me mad,” and she said “in a whirl” as one says hair “in bangs,” a beauty patch “à la Pompadour,” tea “Russian style.” But, Darling's absences from the garret were growing more and more frequent. He would remain away for nights on end. A whole street of women, the Rue de la Charbonnière, had recaptured him, then, afterward; one
woman alone. His bulky prick was working wonders, and his lacy-fingered hands were emptying the bawd's bag. He had stopped robbing show cases; he was being kept. Then it was Our Lady's turn to disappear, but him we shall soon find again.

What would the destiny of the splendid Marchettis matter to Divine and me if it did not call to mind what I suffered upon returning from my adventures, in which I magnified myself, and if it did not remind Divine of her impotence? To begin with, the tale of Our Lady of the Flowers lulls present time, for the very words the murderer uses are the magic words that equally handsome hoodlums spat out like so many stars, like those extraordinary hoodlums who pronounce the word “dollar” with the right accent. But what is to be said of one of the strangest of poetic phenomena: that the whole world–and the most terribly dismal part of it, the blackest, most charred, dry to the point of Jansenism, the severe, naked world of factory workers–is entwined with marvels, the popular songs lost in the wind, by profoundly rich voices, gilded and set with diamonds, spangled or silky; and these songs have phrases which I cannot think of without shame if I know they are sung by the grave mouths of workers which utter such words as: succumb . . . tenderness . . . ravishing . . . garden of roses . . . cottage . . . marble steps . . . sweethearts . . . dear . . . love . . . jewels . . . crown . . . oh my queen . . . dear stranger . . . gilded room . . . lovely lady . . . flowered basket . . . treasure of flesh . . . golden waning . . . my heart adores you . . . laden with flowers . . . color of the evening . . . exquisite and pink . . . in short, those fiercely luxurious words, words which must slash their flesh like a ruby-crested dagger. They sing them, perhaps without giving them much thought. They whistle them too, with their hands in their pockets. And poor, shameful me, I shudder at the thought that the toughest of
workers is crowned at all times of the day with one or another of these garlands of flowers: mignonette, and roses which have bloomed among the rich, gilded, jeweled voices, maidens all, simple or sumptuous, shepherdesses or princesses. See how beautiful they are! All of them, their bodies busked by machines, like a locomotive being inaugurated, are adorned, as the solid body of the hundred thousand hoodlums one meets is also adorned with moving expressions, for a popular literature, light because unwritten, light and flitting from mouth to mouth, in the wind, says of them: “My little monkey-face,” “little tramp,” “cute little bastard,” “little louse” (note that the word “little,” if applied to me or to some object dear to my heart, overwhelms me; even if someone says to me, “Jean, your
little
hairs” or “your
little
finger,” it turns me inside out). These expressions certainly have a melodic relationship with young men, the glamor of whose superhuman beauty derives from the uncleanness of dreams, a beauty so potent that we penetrate it in one swoop, and so spontaneously that we have the feeling of “possessing” it (in both senses of the word: of being full of it and of transcending it in an external vision), of possessing it so absolutely that there is no room, in this absolute possession, for the slightest question. In like manner, certain animals, by their gaze, make us possess at one swoop their absolute being: snakes, dogs, in the twinkling of an eye we “know them” and to such a degree that we think it is they who know, and we therefore feel a certain uneasiness mixed with horror. These expressions sing. And the little tramps, cute bastards, little bastards, sweet monkey-faces, are sensitive, as is crystal to the finger, to those musical inflections (they should be noted here to be well rendered), which, I think when I see them coming in the song of the streets, are going to pass unperceived by them. But on seeing their bodies undulate or contract, I recognize
that they have quite caught the inflection and that their entire being shows their relationship.