Funeral Rites (10 page)

“The bastard.”

The scene was silent from beginning to end. Riton struggled in silence against the silence which was also teeming with the desperate, criminal thoughts of the child and the terror of the cat, which seemed to become the Enemy because of its furious will to live, despite everything, the skill with which its body avoided the blows, its fur, which was full of animal softness and tenderness that protected the animal but were also radiated outward by the fur and reached Riton's very soul. The sea was filling the room, the roar of the waves was making the boy dizzy. The cat was a big gray torn that he would have liked to stroke. I can very well see the kid picking up the cat, which would climb to his shoulder and keep mournful vigil beside his face. It would sit and purr.

The thought of strangling the cat, which was born at the same time as that of murdering it with the hammer, grew more precise, but Riton did not want to let go of the animal and look for a rope. He unbuckled his belt, pulled it through the loops of his trousers, and, using only one hand, he made a running loop. The cat waited in silence. Riton put his foot on the little head and pulled the end of the belt, but he did not strangle the animal, which was as supple and lively as ever. Riton was wrapped in the folds of a repulsively soft sleep. He attached the belt to a nail and hanged the cat, which,
getting its strength back, clawed the wall, trying to climb up it. Suddenly a great shudder shook the boy's body, a shudder that deepened and grew more definite, as the thought dawned on him that the neighbors were standing at the door, listening through the walls, aware of the murder not because they heard the cries and moans and prayers of the victim, but because murder itself charged the room, like a Crookes tube, with subtle emanations that pierced the walls better than X rays. Then he realized the absurdity of the thought and continued to hammer away with one hand while holding up his falling trousers with the other. The cat was living more intensely, its life was exalted by danger, suffering, and fear. There was no blood yet, and Riton was pooped. Then he was worried again that the animal might be the devil, who sometimes changes into a cat, in order to enter people's homes more easily.

“If it's the devil, I'm a goner!”

He thought of taking it down, but he was afraid the devil might stand up and slit open his belly with a hooked finger. Stories have it that if you throw three drops of holy water on the cat, the devil will assume his human form. There was no holy water in the room, not even a branch of box, not even a first communion photo. What if he made the sign of the cross? The devil would remain hanging and perhaps retain, though assuming human form, the cat's size. What was to be done with the corpse of a devil of such dimensions? So Riton didn't dare make a gesture lest he involuntarily make the sign of the cross over the cat.

He heard a merry-go-round in the distance, on the boulevard.

“It's the caterpillar.”

The noise seemed to be going on in the child's head.

The movement of the merry-go-round passed its climax and slowed down perceptibly, then slowed down more. It seemed utterly exhausted, as a hand is by long drawn-out masturbation that is about to end in orgasm. The merry-go-round discharged like a vigorous boy.

On the balcony, his gestures were hindered only slightly by his equipment, for though the straps of the machine gun had been tied around his chest tightly, his breathing had quickly eased the strain a little and freed his thorax. He reached into the pocket of his breeches for a cigarette. He found only a few butts, and his disappointment restored the lucidity that fatigue and adventure had swept away. Fatigue was numbing his anxiety so that he could rest.

“No question about it, they're the last butts. And the Fritzes don't have a damn thing. Not much grub left. Nothin’ to smoke. Nothin’ to eat. Not even shoes.”

He felt his barefootedness on the iron of the balcony. His stomach was rumbling. The bareness of his feet and their delicacy and the flesh of his arms made the German soldiers green with jealousy as they watched him, made them think of an animal with an extremely fragile body that emerges from a few holes in its protective shell. He was in Ménilmontant, on the hill, not far from his own street, entwined from his belt to his neck in the mutely glittering coils that the Fritzes made him wear. When they left the cellar of the house, which until the insurrection had been used as barracks by the decimated platoon, the Boche sergeant had decided that the militiaman would not do any shooting. They wrapped him in bullets. His bare arms and legs were suddenly clad with sovereign gentleness and elegance, that is, the elegance and gentleness of a sovereign when he emerges for a moment from armor that is only slightly more glittering than his majesty. He insisted on keeping his machine gun.

“Come on, sarge, lemme keep my putt-putt.”

He looked at the German out of the corner of his eye, and, though he was joking, his whorish gaze was so imploring—one sees that look in the gaze of certain dogs when the gravity of the circumstances, the proximity of death or danger, impart to their eyes a gleam of appeal (a signal light)—that the sergeant smiled with amusement at the contrast between the eyes and the mouth. Like a shot, Riton's legs carried him back two yards, near the wall where the machine gun was lying, but the torso, from which two bare arms emerged, like cabin boys emerging from the hatchways of a battleship, responded to the agility of the legs with lordly slowness and heaviness, and it was then that it occurred to Riton to look at himself in the mirror. He turned to the wall instinctively: there was no mirror. Then he felt his body. He ran his hands over the surface of the metal, grazing the shudder of the bullets. Projectiles were raining all around the house and bursting against the wall, fragments of which could at times be heard falling to the ground. In the cellar, the seven German soldiers were busily preparing their escape. (It was impossible to defend the house. They had to beat a retreat, to try to get to the roofs. What was left of the platoon had escaped by the sewers.) They were continually obsessed by the secret thought of a danger greater than the combat of which they were the center. They spoke very little among themselves and hardly ever helped one another. As Riton saw them, they were seven young men whose only fault was cocksuredness.

Standing motionless in front of the soldiers, he was as fragile, and elegant too, as a hazel stick that has been placed—and abandoned by the hand of a young cowherd who has just entered a cabaret—against the horns and slobbery muzzles of a pair of motionless,
subjugated
oxen.

The sergeant had told him to take off his shoes. Since
then, he has been barefoot. And that night on the balcony, at sea in Ménilmontant, with his machine gun lying beside him, he thought:

“All the same, it's gorgeous.”

Had he been the target of a whole army of soldiers, he would have loved to show himself to them at dawn, standing on a roof in that gleaming array that the Boches had tied around him. He took his machine gun and sat for a few seconds without moving. A shot rang out, perhaps from a roof, perhaps from below.

“What if it was someone alone? It would be pretty lousy. Poor guy.”

He thought fleetingly of the militiaman alone on a roof, but alone with his weapon. Alone, one is only one's self. With a weapon, solitude is shared. One is one's self and one's duty. Self and . . . another character who is invisible but present and who changes name depending on the case. Self and . . . triumph or death. Alone, one manages. Either one surrenders or one gets away without being bothered since one is unarmed. The enemy pursues not so much the warrior as what makes the warrior: his weapon. It's not true that one can easily throw away one's rifle, machine gun, or knife and slip off. If the exchange of charms between the weapon and the warrior has taken place in accordance with the rites, if it was consecrated by combat and the prestige of a chief, bonds are formed between the weapon and the warrior, bonds that it is harder for a man to cut if he is valorous himself, and his valor—I'm so glad—leads him to his death.

“Who can it be? Maybe it's a guy I know. No way of telling. The hell with it. He's doing what I'm doing, he's in the shit and doing what he can.”

Riton was going from one painful idea to another idea, like a monk who, at night, near a torrent that runs along
the stations of the cross, rushes from station to station and kneels before the rocks that shimmer in the faint light of a lantern. The landscapes in which Riton and the monk are moving are identical: stones through which the barrel of a rifle may be peering, black thorns gleaming with black eyeballs, the devastating roar of a torrent.

In order to be sure of himself and the better to shake off his flabby thoughts, he put a fist on his hip and tried to arch his calf, but he was standing on bare heels. However, his fist struck his carapace and that was enough to make him more keenly aware of the value of the moment. He felt that beneath the armor he had a heart of bronze, and he wanted to die, for bronze is immortal. This time he was handsomer than the fellow in the underground whom he and his captain had arrested. In the darkness, looking out on the city that was palpitating with such a beautiful day but was still uncertain of the consequences of the victory, he had an extraordinary consciousness of his transformation into one of those terrifying, sharp-eyed characters whose gestures have long been prepared for combat and whose knees and elbows bristle with blades. A dragon. A chimera. His hair was poisonous. His stomach surged with repressed farts which he dared not unleash, for he heard the soldiers who were nearby in the darkness organizing for the night. He smiled over Paris as he thought that he would have driven mothers mad with terror by stroking a child's cheek.

“I'd like to be the one who makes mothers cry!”

That remark had once been made to him by the former
bataillonnaire,
Paulo's friend, who had brought it back from Africa. He was alone on that sixth-floor balcony despite the presence of the German soldiers. He felt a slight itching between his legs and was obliged to scratch. As his exceptional situation distorted the slightest circumstance,
his member and its surrounding bush suddenly seemed to him to be a kind of stone at the bottom of the sea, encrusted, among the algae, with tiny shellfish that made it even harder, and his mind went back to the sight of Erik making the same gesture, then to Erik's tool in the black breeches which he assumed was another mossy megalithic monument studded with gray, hard-shelled parasites.

“When the shootin’ starts, there'll be hell to pay,” he thought, in a slightly somnolent state that unsteadied him. He woke up in surprise. He got his bearings in the twinkling of an eye.

“Sure thing, I'm in a hole,” he said to himself.

He realized his sorry state. Down below, beneath his feet, beneath the spit—he spat on the trees—was the ground where Frenchmen could circulate, though they had to be somewhat careful.

“All the same, they're my brothers.”

In order to think, he used the word “brothers,” which belongs to the sentimental language of hoodlums. He felt that this thought was the center, the ideal point of his solitude. Although it lost some precision in revolving, it remained at the origin of his discouraging situation.

The following took shape around it: “I've abandoned my brothers, my family, my friends. I run around. I run in the streets. I escape to the roofs. I kill Frenchmen whenever I can. They try to kill me. I shoot at everything that served me. This evening I ought to serve for love's sake. I've sided with the monsters, with the Kings. I'm going to be killed, I'm a traitor. I'm already an outcast and condemned. I'm alone on the bridge of a sinking ship. The whole city hates me. The stones, the walls, the railing on which I'm leaning can come loose and kill me. I'm at home in a foreign country. This apartment is an
enemy's, the home of a Frenchman with whom I went to school. I'm losing the benefit of all the games, of all the girls. I'm alone. My mother wants to pick me off. She's aiming at one of my eyes. I'm fighting for Germany.” As a result of revolving and thereby showing all its sides, which the speed blurred, the initial remark had become as dim as a top, light as a trail of mist, and, as the speed of the whirling made it disappear, Riton was conscious for a moment only of his solitude, of his height on the balcony. His right arm pressed his black, intelligent, crafty machine gun against his hip. He was holding it with one hand. With the other he stroked his torso, which felt lithe and fragile under its copper breastplate.

One morning, when the captain entered the militiamen's barracks before they were up, he held his nose and shouted:

“It reeks of modesty here!”

Riton thought, blushing:

“Maybe the modesty's me.”

“Eh!”

He jumped. He had thought someone was talking to him.

“I'm hearing voices. I'm like Joan of Arc.”

A girl may be a Maid, but she nevertheless has her periods. The evening before her execution, Joan put on the white robe of the doomed. The blood ran down her joined thighs. In the darkness of her cell, she washed herself gropingly in the bucket from which she drank. Having no other linen, she tore her shift to make a kind of pad, which she attached between her legs. While the left hand pulled up her white robe, the other one wrote sacred signs on the darkness, signs of the cross that merged with pentacles (or continued with them), with sketches of exorcisms. Weary, exhausted, panic-stricken
by the blood that had been shed in the course of a tragedy in which the murderer and the victim remain invisible, she lay down on the straw. She modestly covered her legs with her robe and prayed, interspersing her invocations to God, Mary, and her saints with magical phrases addressed to the infernal spirits as she had been advised to do by the witches of Lorraine. She lay still, but as the pad did not stop the blood, the robe, which was already spotted with more or less definite stains and which sagged in the hollow of the prudently joined legs, was adorned in the middle with an enormous bloodstain. The following day, in the presence of the gilded bishops and the men-at-arms carrying satin banners and steel lances, Joan of Arc mounted the stake through a narrow opening between the faggots and stood exposed with that rusty rose at cunt level.