Our Lady of the Flowers (31 page)

“Bend down.”

He bent. The guard looked at his anus and saw a black spot.

“. . . eeze,” he cried. Darling sneezed. But he had misunderstood. It was “squeeze” that the guard had cried. The black spot was a rather big lump of dung, which got bigger every day and which Darling had already several times tried to pull away, but he would have had to pull the hairs out with it, or take a hot bath.

“You've sure been shitting,” said the guard. (Now, to be shitting also means to be scared, and the guard did not know this.)

Darling of the noble bearing, of the swaying hips, of the motionless shoulders! At the reformatory, an inspector (he was twenty-five years old and wore fawn-colored leather boots up to his thighs which were no doubt hairy)
had noticed that the youngsters’ shirttails were stained with shit. Every Sunday morning, when we changed linen, he therefore made us hold out our dirty shirts by the outspread sleeves. With the thin end of his whip he would lash the face, already tortured by humiliation, of the boy whose shirttail was doubtful. We no longer dared to go to the toilet, but, when we were driven to it by a case of the gripes, after wiping our fingers on the white-washed wall (there was no paper) which was already yellow with piss, we took good care to lift up our shirt-tails (I now say “we,” but at the time each kid thought he was the only one who did it), and it was the seat of the white pants that was soiled. On Sunday mornings we felt the hypocritical purity of virgins. Larochedieu was the only one who, toward the end of the week, got tangled up in his shirttails and dirtied them. Though the matter was not serious, the three years that he spent in the penitentiary were poisoned by the preoccupation with those Sunday mornings–which I now see decorated with garlands of little shirts flowered with light touches of yellow shit, before mass–with the result that on Saturday evenings he would rub the corner of his shirt on the whitewash of the wall to try to whiten it. Passing in front of him–the boy drawn and quartered, already in the pillory, crucified at fifteen–the leather-booted inspector, his eyes tawny and gleaming, remained motionless. Without any preconceived cleverness on his part, there passed over his harsh features (the feelings which we shall say were painted there, because of that harshness, like a charge) disgust, contempt, and horror. With his body erect, he spat right in Larochedieu's marble face, which awaited only this spit. We who read this can imagine that the inspector's shirttails and the seat of his underpants were shitty. Thus, Darling Daintyfoot could divine the soul of a bum like Larochedieu on whose behind one spits. But he paid little attention to these momentary exchanges
of souls. He never knew why, after certain shocks, he was surprised to find himself back in his skin. He did not say a word. The guard and he were alone in the locker room. His chest was bursting with fury. Shame and fury. He left the room, trailing after him that noble behind–and it was by his behind that one could tell that he would have made a brilliant bullfighter. He was locked in a cell, and finally, under lock and key, he felt free and washed; with his fragments glued together again, he was once more Darling, gentle Darling. His cell might be anywhere. The walls are white, the ceiling is white, but the filthy black floor sets it down on the floor and situates it there, precisely, that is, between a thousand cells which crush it, though they are light, on the fourth floor of the Fresnes Prison. We are now there. The longest detours finally lead me back to my prison, to my cell. Now, almost without trimmings, without transposition, without any intermediary, I could tell of my life here. My present life.

In front of all the cells runs an inner balcony onto which each door opens. We stand behind our door waiting for the guard and fall into poses that identify us; for instance, a certain bum indicates, by standing with his cap in his extended hand, that he usually begs in front of churches. When he returns from the walk and waits for the guard, each prisoner, if he leans forward, cannot help hearing some guitar serenade, or feel, at this rail, that the big vessel is lurching wildly beneath the moon and is about to go down. My cell is an exactly cubic box. In the evening, as soon as Darling stretches out in bed, the window carries the cell off toward the west, detaches it from the masoned block and flies off with it, hauling it like the basket of a balloon. In the morning, if a door opens–they're all closed at that time and this is a deep mystery, deep as the mystery of number
in Mozart or the use of the chorus in tragedy– (in prison, more doors are opened than closed) an elastic draws it back from the space in which it had been hovering and sets it in place again; that is when the prisoner has to get up. He pisses, straight and solid as an elm, into the bowl of the latrine, then gives his limp tool a shake or two; the relief that comes from the flowing urine restores him to active life, places him on earth, though delicately, carefully, unties the bonds of night, and he gets dressed. With the whisk broom he sweeps up ashes and dust. The guard comes by, opening the doors for five seconds to give the men time to put out the sweepings. Then he shuts them again. The prisoner is not quite over the nausea that comes from waking with a start. His mouth is full of pebbles. The bed is still warm. But he does not lie down again. He must grapple with the daily mystery. The iron bed fastened to the wall, the shelf fastened to the wall, the wooden chair fastened to the wall by a chain–this chain, residue of a very ancient order, in which prisons were called keeps and dungeons, in which prisoners, like sailors, were galley slaves, dims the modern cell with a romantic Brest or Toulon fog, carries it back through time and makes Darling shudder subtly at the suspicion that he is in the Bastille (the chain is a symbol of a monstrous power; weighted with a ball, it used to shackle the numb feet of His Majesty's Galley Slaves)–the dry kelp mattress, narrow as the bier of an Oriental queen, the bare hanging bulb, are as rigid as a precept, as bones and exposed teeth. When he returns home, to the attic, Darling will never again, if he sits or lies down, or has tea, be able to forget that he is resting or sleeping on the framework of an armchair or sofa. The iron hand in the velvet glove is a reminder. Let the veil be lifted. Alone in the cell, in almost breastlike rhythm (it beats like a mouth), the white tile latrine gives its comforting breath. It alone is human.

The Darling-Block walks with little swaying steps. He is alone in his cell. From his nostrils he plucks acacia and violet petals. With his back to the door, where an anonymous eye is always spying, he eats them, and with the back of his thumb, where he has let the nail grow long, like that of a scholar, he hunts for others. Darling is a fake pimp. The schemes he devises suddenly peter out in poetical meanderings. Almost always he walks with a regular and casual step: he is haunted by a memory. Today he is pacing to and fro in his cell. He is unoccupied, which is very rare, for he is almost constantly at work, in secret, but with fidelity to his curse. He goes to the shelf and raises his hand to the level where, in the garret, on a piece of furniture, the revolver lies. The door opens with a great rattling, as of locks being forged, and the guard yells out:

“Quick, the towels.”

Darling stands rooted there, holding in his hands the clean towels he has been given for the dirty ones. Then he continues by fits and starts the gestures of the drama which he is unaware he is acting out. He sits down on his bed; he rubs his hand over his forehead. He hesitates to . . . Finally he gets up and, in front of the little two-penny mirror nailed to the wall, he pushes aside his blond hair and, without realizing what he is doing, looks for a bullet wound at his temple.

Night unlooses Darling from his tough rind of determined pimp. In his sleep he grows tender, but all he can do is clutch at the pillow, cling to it, lay his cheek tenderly on the rough cloth–the cheek of a kid about to burst into tears–and say: “Stay. Please, my love, stay.” In the hearts of all the “men” is enacted a five-second tragedy in verse. Conflicts, cries, daggers, or prison which resolves; the liberated man has just been the witness and
matter of a poetic work. For a long time I thought that the poetic work posed conflicts: it cancels them.

At the foot of the prison walls, the wind is kneeling. The prison draws along all the cells where the prisoners are asleep; grows lighter and slips away. Run, censors, the thieves are far. The second-story men are mounting. By stairwell or elevator. Subtly they spirit away. They steal. And steal away. On the landing, the midnight bourgeois, overwhelmed by the dread of the mystery of a child who steals, of an adolescent jimmying doors, the robbed bourgeois dares not cry out, “Stop thief!” He hardly turns his head. The thief makes heads turn, houses pitch, castles dance, prisons fly.

Darling is asleep at the foot of the wall. Sleep, Darling, stealer of nothing, stealer of books, of bell ropes, of horses’ manes and tails, of bikes, of fancy dogs. Darling, tricky Darling, who can rob women of their compacts; and, with a limed stick, priests of the money in the collection box; the devout taking communion at low mass of the bags they leave on the prayer stool; the pimps of their beat; the police of their inside tips; concierges of their sons or daughters; sleep, sleep, hardly has the day dawned when a ray, on your blond hair, of the oncoming sun locks you in your prison. And the days that follow make your life longer than broad.

When it is time to get up, a prisoner runs all the way around the balcony and bangs once on each door. One after the other, with the same gestures, three thousand prisoners disturb the heavy atmosphere, get up, and do the little morning jobs. Later a guard will open the grate of cell 329 to hand out the soup. He looks and doesn't say a word. In this story, the guards also have their job. They are not all fools, but they are all purely indifferent to the game they play. They haven't the slightest notion of the beauty of their function. Recently they have been wearing a dark blue uniform which is an exact copy of
aviators’ outfits, and I think, if they are high-minded, that they are ashamed of being caricatures of heroes. They are aviators fallen from the sky, smashing the glass of the ceiling. They have escaped into prison. On their collars there still cling stars which, from close up, seem white and embroidered, because it is daytime when we can see them. One imagines that they threw themselves from their planes in terror (the wounded child Guynemer fell curled with fear; he fell with his wing shattered by the hard air it had to cleave, his body bleeding a benzine rainbow, and that is what is meant by falling into a heaven of glory); they are at last in a world which does not surprise them. They have the right to walk by all the cells without opening them, to look at the humble, gentle-hearted hoodlums. No. They do not think of doing so because they have no desire to. They fly in the air: they have no desire to open the gates and, through the diamond-shaped opening, take by surprise the familiar gestures of murderers arid thieves, take them by surprise when they are washing their linen, tucking in their bedclothes for the night, sealing their windows, as a matter of good housekeeping, with their big fingers and a pin slitting matches in two or in four, and to make a trivial–hence human–remark to them to see whether they are not transformed at once into lynxes or foxes. They are guardians of tombs. They open the doors and shut them again, unconcerned about the treasures they protect. Their honest (beware of the word “noble” and the word “honest” which I have just used), their honest faces, pulled downward, smoothed by the vertical fall without parachutes, are not altered by rubbing shoulders with racketeers, crooks, pimps, fences, forgers, killers, and counterfeiters. Not a flower bespatters their uniform, not a crease of dubious elegance, and if I could say of one of them that he walked on velvet feet, it was because a few days later he was to betray, to go over to the opposite
camp, which is the thieving camp, to go straight back up into the sky, with the cash box under his armpit. I had noticed him at mass, in the chapel. At the moment of communion, the chaplain left the altar and went up to one of the first cells (for the chapel is also divided into five hundred cells, standing coffins), carrying the host to a prisoner who was supposed to wait for it on bended knees. Hence, this turnkey–who, wearing his cap, was in a corner of the altar platform, with his hands in his pockets, his legs spread, in short, assuming the posture in which I so enjoyed seeing Alberto again–smiled, but in a pleasantly amused way, which I would never have thought possible in a turnkey. His smile accompanied the Eucharist and the return of the empty ciborium, and I thought that, while rubbing his balls with his left hand, he was jeering at the worshiper. I had already wondered what would come of the meeting of a handsome young guard and a handsome young criminal. I took delight in the following two images: a bloody and mortal shock, or a sparkling embrace in a riot of spunk and panting; but I had never taken special notice of any guard, until finally I saw him. From my cell, which was in the last row, I could hardly make out his features and so I was able to give him those of a young, cowardly Mexican half-breed whose face I had cut out of the cover of an adventure novel. I thought: “You little rat, I'll give you a communion all right.” My hatred and horror of that breed must have given me a still stiffer hard-on, for I felt my tool swelling under my fingers–and I shook it until finally . . . –without taking my eyes off the guard, who was still smiling pleasantly. I can tell myself now that he was smiling at another guard or at a murderer and that, since I was between them, his luminous smile passed through me and decomposed me. I could believe the turnkey was vanquished and grateful.

In the presence of the guards, Darling felt like a little boy. He hated and respected them. All day long he smokes until he rocks on his bed. In his nausea, light spots form islands: the gesture of a mistress; the face, smooth and beardless as a boxer's, of a girl. He flings his butts away for the pleasure of the gesture. (One can expect anything of a pimp who rolls his cigarettes because this gives his fingers a certain elegance, who wears crepe-soled shoes so as to take the people he passes by surprise, people who will look at him with more astonishment, will see his tie, will envy his hips, his shoulders, the back of his neck, who, without knowing him, will create for him, despite his incognito, from one passerby to the next, a procession strewn and interrupted with homage, will accord a discontinuous and momentary sovereignty to this stranger, and the result of all these moments of sovereignty will be that, all the same, he will, at the end of his days, have gone through life like a sovereign.) In the evening, he gathers up the scattered tobacco and smokes it. Lying in bed on his back, with his legs spread, he flicks the cigarette ash with his right hand. His left hand is under his head. It is a moment of happiness, made up of Darling's delightful aptitude for being that which, by virtue of his pose, is profoundly that, and which this essential quality makes live again there with its true life. Lying on a hard bed and smoking, what could he be? Darling will never suffer, or will always be able to get out of a tight spot by his ease in taking on the gestures of some fellow he admires who happens to be in the same situation, and, if books or anecdotes do not provide him with any, in creating them–thus, his desires (but he realized it too late, when there was no longer time to recede) were neither the desire to be a smuggler, king, juggler, explorer, or slave trader, but the desire to be one of the smugglers, one of the kings, jugglers, etc., that is, as if . . . In the most woeful
of postures, Darling will be able to remember it was also that of one of his gods (and if they never assumed it, he'll force them to have assumed it), and his own posture will be sacred and thereby even better than merely bearable. (In this way, he is like me who create those men–Weidmann, Pilorge, Socaly–in my desire to be them; but he is quite unlike me in his faithfulness to his characters, for I have long since resigned myself to being myself. But the fact is that my longing for a splendid imaginary destiny has, as it were, condensed the tragic, purple elements of my actual life into a kind of extremely compact, solid, and scintillating reduction, and I sometimes have the complex face of Divine, who is herself, first and at times simultaneously, in her features and gestures, the imaginary and yet so real creatures of election with whom, in strict privacy, she has contentions, who torture and exalt her but who allow her no rest and give her, by subtle contractions of wrinkles and the quiverings of her fingers, that disquieting air of being multiple, for she remains silent, as shut as a tomb and, like a tomb, peopled by the unclean.) Lying on a hard bed and smoking, what could he be? “That which, by virtue of his pose, is most profoundly that, that is, a jailed pimp smoking a cigarette, that is, himself.” You will therefore understand to what degree Divine's inner life was different from Darling's inner life.