Our Lady of the Flowers (36 page)

“Ah no, not the Corrida, it ain't worth it. I'd rather croak right away.”

The lawyer stood there dumbfounded; then quickly, with a cluck of his tongue, he gathered his scattered wits and stammered:

“Child, see here, child! Let me defend you.”

“Gentlemen,” he said to the Court (he might, without any harm, as to a queen, have said “Madame"), “he's a child.”

At the same time, the judge was saying to Our Lady:

“See here, see here, what are you saying? Let's not rush matters.”

The cruelty of the word stripped the judges and left them with no other robe than their splendor. The crowd cleared its throat. The presiding judge did not know that in slang the Corrida is the reformatory. Sitting motionless on his wooden bench, squarely and solidly, between his guards in their yellow leather girths and their boots and helmets, Our Lady of the Flowers felt himself dancing a light jig. Despair had shot through him like an arrow, like a clown through the tissue paper of a hoop; despair had gone beyond him, and all that remained was the laceration, which left him there in white rags. Though he was not intact, he held his ground. The world was no longer in the room. That's how it should be. It all has to end. The Court was reentering. The rapping of the rifle butts of the guard of honor gave the alarm. Standing bareheaded, the monocle read the verdict. It uttered for the first time, following the name Baillon, the words: “Known as Our Lady of the Flowers.” Our Lady was given the death penalty. The jury was standing. It was the apotheosis. It's all over. When Our Lady of the Flowers was given back to the guards, he seemed to them invested with a sacred character, like the kind that expiatory victims, whether goat, ox, or child, had in olden times and which kings and Jews still have today. The guards spoke to him and served him as if, knowing he was laden with the weight of the sins of the world, they had wanted to bring down upon themselves the benediction of the Redeemer. Forty days later, on a spring evening, the machine
was set up in the prison yard. At dawn, it was ready to cut. Our Lady of the Flowers had his head cut off by a real knife. And nothing happened. What would be the point? There is no need for the veil of the temple to be ripped from top to bottom because a god gives up the ghost. All that this can prove is the bad quality of the cloth and its deterioration. Though it behooves me to be indifferent, still I would not mind if an irreverent scapegrace kicked through it and ran off shouting, “A miracle!” It's flashy and would make a very good framework for the Legend.

I have reread the earlier chapters. They are now closed, rigorously, and I note that I have given no smile to Culafroy, Divine, Ernestine, or the others. The sight of a little boy in the visitor's room makes me aware of this and makes me think of my childhood, of the ribbons on my mother's white petticoats. In each child I see–but I see so few–I try to find the child I was, to love him for what I was. But when I saw the minors during the medical examination, I looked at those two little mugs, and I left feeling deeply moved, for that was not what I had been like, too white a child, like an under-baked loaf of bread; it is for the men they will be that I love them. When they passed before me, rolling their hips and with their shoulders erect, I already saw at their shoulder blades the hump of the muscles covering the roots of their wings.

All the same, I would like to think that I was like that one. I saw myself again in his face, especially in his forehead and eyes, and I was about to recognize myself completely when, bang, he smiled. It was no longer I, for in my childhood I could no more laugh, or even smile, than in any other period of my life. When the child laughed, I crumbled, so to speak, before my very eyes.

Like all children, adolescents, or mature men, I smiled readily, I even laughed heartily, but as my life rounded out a cycle, I dramatized it. Eliminating the elements of mischievousness, levity, and prankishness, I have retained only those which are properly tragic: Fear, Despair, unhappy Love . . . and I free myself from them only by declaiming those poems which are as convulsed as the faces of sybils. They leave my soul clarified. But if the child in whom I think I see myself laughs or smiles, he breaks up the drama which had been constructed and which is my past life when I think back to it; he destroys it, falsifies it, at least because he manifests an attitude which the character could not have had; he tears to bits the memory of a harmonious (though painful) life, forces me to see myself becoming another, and on the first drama grafts a second.

DIVINARIANA
(
conclusion
)

So here are the last Divinariana. I'm in a hurry to get rid of Divine. I toss off helter-skelter, at random, the following notes, in which you, by unscrambling them, will try to find the essential form of the Saint.

Divine, in thought, pushes mimicry to the point of assuming the exact posture that Darling had assumed in that very spot. Thus, her head is in place of Darling's head, her mouth in place of his mouth, her member in place of his, etc., then she repeats, as exactly as possible–hesitantly, for it must be done with studied refinement (refinement alone, by its difficulty, makes one aware of the game)–the gestures that were Darling's gestures. She occupies, successively, all the space he occupied. She follows him, fills continually all that contained him.

Divine:

“My life? I'm desolate, I'm a Valley of Desolation.”

And it is a valley similar–with pines black beneath the storm–to the landscapes I have discovered during my imaginary adventures beneath the brown, lice-infested blankets of prisons everywhere and which I called Valley of Desolation, of Consolation, Vale of Angels.

She (Divine) did not act, perhaps, in accordance with Christ. She was reproached for this. But she: “Does Lifar dance home from the Opera?”

Her detachment from the world is such that she says: “What does it matter to me what X... thinks of the Divine I was? What do
I
care about the memory he has of me? I am another. Each time I will be another.” Thus, she fought against vanity. Thus, she was always ready for some new infamy, without feeling the fear of opprobrium.

She cut off her lashes so as to be even more repulsive. Thinking she is thus burning her boats.

She lost her mannerisms. She managed to attract attention by dint of discretion. Freezing her face. Formerly, when insulted, she could not keep from twitching her muscles. Anguish drove her to that so that it might be slightly beguiled; the puckering of her face produced a grimace in the form of a smile. Frozen, her face.

Divine, of herself: “Lady of High Pansiness.”

Divine could not bear hearing on the radio, the
March from the Zauberflöte.
She kisses her fingers, and then, unable to bear it any longer, she turns the dial.

Her pale, celestial voice (a voice I would like to imagine being that of movie actors, a voice of an image, a flat voice) telling me, as she pointed to my ear:

“But Jean, you've got another hole there.”

She strolls in the street. She is spectral. A young cyclist walks by, holding his machine by the handlebar.

Quite near, Divine makes an airy gesture (with arm rounded) of enlacing him about the waist. The cyclist suddenly turns to Divine, who finds herself actually enlacing him. He looks at her for a fraction of a second, astounded, says not a word, jumps on his bike, and flees.

Divine retreats into her shell and regains her inner heaven.

In the presence of another handsome young man, a brief desire:

“It's the Again that has clutched me by the throat.”

She will go on living only to hasten toward Death.

The swan, borne up by its mass of white feathers,
cannot
go to the bottom of the water to find mud, nor
can
Jesus sin.

For Divine, to commit a crime in order to free oneself from the yoke of the moral powers is still to be tied up with the moral. She will have nothing to do with a fine crime. She sings that she is buggered out of taste.

She robs and betrays her friends.

Everything concurs to establish about her–despite her–solitude. She lives simply in the privacy of her glory, of the glory she has made tiny and precious.

“I am,” she says, “Bernadette Soubiroux in the Convent of Charity long after her vision. Like me, she lived an ordinary life with the memory of having spoken familiarly with the Holy Virgin.”

At times a regiment goes into the desert and–for purposes of tactics–a small column of men detaches itself and goes off in a different direction. The fragment may advance thus for some time, quite near the regiment, for an hour or more. The men of the two sections could speak. together, see one another, and they do not speak
together, they do not see one another: no sooner did the detachment take a step in the new direction than it felt a personality being born to it. It knew that it was alone and that its actions were its action.

Divine has repeated a hundred times that little gesture for detaching herself from the world. But, however far she may depart from it, the world calls her back.

She has spent her life hurling herself from the top of a rock.

Now that she no longer has a body (or she has so little left, a little that is whitish, pale, bony, and at the same time very flabby), she slips off to heaven.

Divine, of herself:

“Madame née Secret.”

The saintliness of Divine.

Unlike most saints, Divine had knowledge of it. There is nothing surprising in this, since saintliness was her vision of God and, higher still, her union with Him. This union did not occur without difficulty (pain) on both sides. On Divine's side, the difficulty was due to her having to give up a stable, familiar, and comfortable situation for too wondrous a glory. To retain her position, she did what she thought fitting: she made gestures. Her whole body was then seized with a frenzy to remain behind. She made some gestures of frightful despair, other gestures of hesitation, of timid attempts to find the right way, to cling to earth and not rise to heaven. This last sentence seems to imply that Divine made an ascension. That is not so. Rising to heaven here means: without moving, to leave Divine for the Divinity. The miracle, occurring in privacy, would have been ferocious in its horror. She had to stand her ground, whatever the cost. Had to hold her own against God, Who was summoning her in silence. Had to keep from answering. But had to attempt the gestures that will keep her on earth, that
would replant her firmly in matter. In space, she kept devising new and barbaric forms for herself, for she sensed intuitively that immobility makes it too easy for God to get you in a good wrestling hold and carry you off. So she danced. While walking. Everywhere. Her body was always manifesting itself. Manifesting a thousand bodies. Nobody was aware of what was going on and of Divine's tragic moments as she struggled against God. She assumed poses as astounding as those of certain Japanese acrobats. You might have taken her for some mad tragic actress who, unable to re-enter her own personality, keeps trying, trying. . . . Finally, one day, when she wasn't expecting it, as she lay still in bed, God took her and made her a saint. Let us mention, however, a characteristic event. She wanted to kill herself. To kill herself. To kill my kindness. The following brilliant idea therefore occurred to her, and she carried it out: her balcony, which was on the ninth floor of an apartment house, looked down on a paved court. The iron railing was latticed, but across it was stretched a wire netting. One of her neighbors had a two-year-old baby girl to whom Divine used to give candy and who occasionally came to visit her. The child would run to the balcony and look at the street through the netting. One day, Divine made up her mind: she detached the netting and left it leaning against the railing. When the little girl came to see her, she locked her in and ran downstairs. When she got to the yard, she waited for the child to go and play on the balcony and lean against the railing. The weight of her body made her fall into the void. From below, Divine watched. None of the child's pirouettes was lost on her. She was superhuman, to the point of–without tears or cries or shudders–gathering with her gloved fingers what remained of the child. She was given three months of preventive custody for involuntary man-slaughter, but her goodness was dead. For: “What good
would it do me to be a thousand times good now? How could this inexpiable crime ever be redeemed? So, let us be bad.”

Indifferent, so it seemed, to the rest of the world, Divine was dying.

For a long time, Ernestine did not know what had become of her son, whom she had lost sight of when he ran away a second time. When she finally did hear from him, he was a soldier. She received a somewhat sheepish letter asking her for a little money. But she did not see her son, who had become Divine, until quite some time later, in Paris, where she had gone for an operation, as do all women from the provinces. Divine was then living in rather grand style. Ernestine, who knew nothing about her vice, guessed it almost instantly and thought to herself, “Lou's got an El Dorado between his buttocks.” She made no comment to him. It hardly affected her opinion of herself to know that she had brought forth a monstrous creature, neither male nor female, scion or scioness of the Picquignys, ambiguous issue of a great family, of which the siren Melusina was mother. Mother and son were as remote as if they had been at a distance, looking into emptiness: a grazing of insensitive skins. Ernestine never said to herself, “He is flesh of my flesh.” Divine never said to herself, “All the same, she's the one who spawned me.” But Divine was, for her mother, a pretext for theatrical gestures, as we showed at the beginning. Divine, Out of hatred of that bitch of a Mimosa, who detested her mother, pretended to herself to love and respect her own. This respect pleased Darling, who, like a good pimp, like a real bad boy, had, deep down in his heart, as they say, “a little spot of purity dedicated to an old mama” whom he did not know. He obeyed the earthly injunctions that govern pimps. He loved his mother, just as he was a patriot and a Catholic. Ernestine came to see Divine die. She brought some sweets, but, by signs that
country women recognize–signs that tell more surely than crape–she had known that Divine was leaving.