Funeral Rites (13 page)

“It's awful to lose a child. And they make me bury her. At least my kid's
someone,
she's a colonel's daughter.”

“Is it still far to the cemetery, sir?” She put this question to the wind, to the sun, to the stones, to nothing. There was nobody around her. The procession was going down a hill which hid it from us. The maid was alone.

“They're at table. No one's waiting on them. Oh, I'm so, so tired! It's annoying that kids die and have to be buried. Why not make soup of them? It would boil down into stock and make a nice meat soup.”

The maid was telling her beads, each black pellet of which was vermiculated. The markings in relief made the object look like a toy, like the least serious of toys. Is it quite certain that grief is greater if one is more conscious of it? One is conscious of grief when the mind is focused
on it, when one examines it with unflagging tension: it then withers you like a sun that you look in the face, its fire so devours you that for a long time I felt my eyelids burning. But grief can also disintegrate the faculties, tear the mind apart. The fellows from those parts also have an expression to designate a man who has gone to pieces under too great a suffering: “He's turning into a pair of balls.” We suffer at being unable to look at our grief steadily; our acts are wrapped in an aura of weariness and regret that makes the acts seem false—only a tiny bit false, true on the whole, but false since they do not fully satisfy us. An uneasiness accompanies them all. A slight shift could, we feel, we think, destroy the uneasiness and make everything hang together. All that is needed is that they be performed—or that we see them performed—in the world where the person for whom they are performed lives, the person without whom they no longer have meaning if love did not oblige you one day to dedicate them to him secretly. Grief caused the maid to fall apart. She rarely thought of her daughter, but she suffered at being unable to make a gesture that would satisfy her completely. She walked by a farmhouse, the gate of which was ajar. The dog took her for a beggar or a tramp, for she was limping. He came up and sniffed at her and then barked.

“If the dog throws a stone at me,” she said to herself, “I'll bring it back in my mouth.”

Spinning around, she made a sweeping gesture with her arms, frightening the dog which ran off yelping even louder. This first violent attempt to fit into life almost mechanically entailed the gesture of catching her veil, which had risen from her bosom and bellied like a sail during her spin. Her whole body was somehow comforted by the effort. She extended her calf, and felt like taking off her hat to relax. As she walked, she put her hand to
it, removed it, and was immediately overcome by a wave of fatigue, for, without further thought on that account of her daughter's death or her own sorrow, she had the sudden feeling that these acts were false. They had been performed in the normal, physical, everyday world, whereas she was moving in, of course, that same world, but that world corrected by grief. And, in such cases, only certain symbolic gestures afford us the plenitude of which all others deprive us. The poor thing could no longer think about her baby, which had never been anything but a kind of excrescence of foul ruddy flesh detached from its mother's body. It had died at the age of two weeks. . . . She had not lived for it. A housemaid does not make plans for her daughter. Her grief was mostly physical, it had been caused by that loathsome amputation: the death which tore from your breast the burden of flesh attached to it by the mouth. Her mind brushed away the memory of her child, who appeared to her as a small, shriveled corpse clinging monstrously to one of her boobs by its nails and dead mouth. Thus do I meditate during the walk in the sun to the cemetery, on the road along which a maid who is going to bury her little girl is trudging.

Paulo had watched her calvary without turning a hair.

It was regrettable that the little girl had died no sooner than she was born. The maid would later have taught her the art of two-part singing so as to beg in the street, just as she herself had been taught by her mother. In their little room, near a window that looked out on the yard, they would have gravely learned to sing, in strict time, the touching and bewitching songs that open hearts and purses. Art. Great art.

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Standing on the balcony, with his elbow leaning on the night, Riton waited. Far off, intermittently, the cannon boomed.

“That's the big works. Go to it. I know all about it!”

The disorder in his intestines, the bubbles of gas he heard fizzing inside him added to his monstrousness. The awareness, in the midst of that infernal solitude, of what that solitude had made of him—a barbaric divinity of all-out war looking down at the city it condemns—filled him with an evil joy, the joy of being joyous and handsome in a desperate situation which he had evilly got himself into, out of hatred for France (which he rightly confused with Society), the day he signed up for the Militia, the day his contempt for his “brothers” impelled him to choose gestures more beautiful than anything.

I have the soul of Riton. It is natural for the piracy, the ultra-mad banditry of Hitler's adventure, to arouse hatred in decent people but deep admiration and sympathy in me. One day, when I saw German soldiers firing at Frenchmen from behind a parapet, I was suddenly ashamed of not being with the former, shouldering my rifle, and dying at their side. I mention also that at the center of the whirlwind that precedes—and almost envelops—the moment of orgasm, a whirlwind more intoxicating at times than the orgasm itself, the loveliest, the gravest erotic image, that toward which everything tended, an image prepared by a kind of inner fête, was offered me by a German soldier in the black uniform of the tank driver. But though, in the depths of the eye of Gabès, Erik was sustained by grim music and the fragrance of dawn as he galloped on his horse of light (with an ax, swathed in crape, at the side of his saddle), the sweating executioner was naked, having arrived from Germany after crossing rivers, forests, and towns in a
single day: dark, hairy, and muscular, in trim, spangled tights, the sky-blue jersey of which delicately molded the detail of the soft, heavy prick and balls. The ridges of my brow were crushed against Jean's behind, and a momentary but severe headache sharpened my vision, exacerbated it. The delights there where the iron soldier was entwining himself with the azure executioner came swarming in. My tongue burrowed more deeply. My eyes were devoured by suns, by the steel teeth of a circular saw. My temples were throbbing. Riton was standing on the footbridge.

Not far away, a shot rang out from the Belleville area. A voice whispered in Riton's ear:

"Komm schlafen, Ritône.”
Someone gently took hold of his right arm. He turned around in terror. The ship had gone down. Without realizing it, he had just sunk to the bottom of the sea and was already hearing the language that is spoken there. He could not break away. He was the prisoner of an emotional tangle, which is worse than a mechanism of locks or laws. In that darkness, at the end of his reverie, he thought he was hearing, close to his ear, his own voice for the first time. It was attached to no human branch and seemed to be uttering the words of a language that can be spoken only in the depths of what is a fabulous element, namely any enemy family and people. He turned his head to the right. Erik was at his left, and his arm was around the boy's shoulder.

Erik felt strong, and tender. The thought that all was lost impelled him to kindness for the first time.

His beauty dictated his proud attitudes, and he would have died standing, offering himself, without witnesses, to the bullets—not in order to compose an image of gallantry for the final hour, but because his physical beauty, being proud, allowed him only such gestures as: raising
his head or torso, crying no, tossing a grenade or a stone as a last projectile, crushing a face beneath his heel, etc., gestures which were in keeping with his gaze and also with the harmonious model of his whole body and of his features. His heroism was not a pose, nor was it assumed so that he would be worthy of his beauty—so as to heighten it, for example—for he forgot about it in action. Rather, he was heroic because that beauty (of the face and body) acted, without his realizing it, in all his acts, commanded them, filled them.

Though he tried to take advantage of the war to break away from the executioner, in moments of sadness—that is, when he was resting in the rear lines or immobilized in snow and mud—a great need for tenderness and protection made him turn toward his friend, who would then appear to him (so far away, in the center of the capital) in the role of an imperturbable dispenser of justice whose life and function were becoming more and more of a mystery to him.

He plundered France, shipped to Germany furniture stolen from museums, and paintings, carpets, cloth, gold. He wanted his destiny to be carried out quickly and death to take him without his regretting anything. With icy cruelty, he was pursuing his ascesis. For the same reason that made him choose his linen with great care and buy leather goods and English cloth, that is, in order to keep his feet on the ground, with desperate eagerness he sought a pretext that would justify his social life—and found it. In short, he had given himself an aim, and a most frivolous one, for he had no faith that might have enabled him to choose serious ones.

“That's all I can do, be a pivot (which is what I am) and surround myself with the rarest ornaments in the world so that I don't covet anything. With luxury and
money I'll be free.” He had to fulfill himself in the easiest way. And to see himself for only one day. To know for only one day that he was complete would be enough for him. There is a book entitled
I'll Have a Fine Funeral.
We are acting with a view to a fine funeral, to formal obsequies. They will be the masterpiece, in the strict sense of the word, the major work, quite rightly the crowning glory of our life. I must die in an apotheosis, and it doesn't matter whether I know glory before or after my death as long as I
know
that I'll have it, and I shall have it if I sign a contract with a firm of undertakers that will attend to fulfilling my destiny, to rounding it off.

"Komm, mein Ritône.”

Perhaps because he had to muffle his voice, he uttered the words so tenderly that Riton was flooded with disgust. He was being torn from his proud solitude. No doubt he knew he could never maintain it, but they could at least let him enjoy that beautiful moment which he thought he had artfully prepared a long time before. Let him and the moment remain alone together, in a sublimity that would end only with daylight.

With the speed of a man falling, he again became a fleeing soldier who runs off exhausted. He said:

“Yes yes, I'm coming.” But he did not move. An added gush of bitterness sickened him. While trying so cleverly to pride himself on having accepted, alone and light-heartedly, the fact of being abandoned by an entire people, he was secretly hoping for the faint excuse of a threat, of pressure exerted by the Germans, for one does not escape as easily as one thinks from a country that sticks to you, that clings to your hands and feet, if you pull them, in cables of molasses impossible to break. Threats and blows would have helped Riton break free.
Instead of gripping him firmly, the German, his comrade-in-arms, spoke to him in the tone in which one speaks to the dying. Anyway, Riton had a right to count on the Germans’ disgust with a Frenchman who goes over to the enemy. By increasing his solitude, such disgust would have made him stronger, harder, more capable of putting up with it. Since the first day's fighting he had lost all hope of saving himself. Perhaps a few more flights over the rooftops, a few bursts of machine-gun fire, but there was little chance of getting out of it, since the sergeant and his men refused to surrender. If he himself surrendered, he would be shot. In any case, barring a miracle, he had little time left. A whole lifetime would be too long for him to take the risk of accepting it with utter contempt, but at least let them not diminish his sacrifice by offering him ridiculous tenderness.

Riton thought of the German soldiers and his friends who had escaped by the sewers. They were leading, in another darkness, a life which was the subterranean replica of his life up in the sky. They were somewhat like our reflections at the bottom of muddy ponds when we are on the shore. “The poor guys, they must be with the rats. I ate cat and they're eating rat. If we see each other again, we'll start fighting. . . .” He felt in his flesh the presence of a cat, a cat so well assimilated that at times he was afraid it could be heard miaowing and purring. He was also afraid that it might emerge from him and go off in its new form (of cat or devil) with part of his flesh. He kept peering into the darkness with his hand on his gun, and Erik thought he was aiming at something. He himself looked around suspiciously and whispered:

“You, want shoot?”

He stopped talking.

A deep modesty suddenly prevented him from wanting to know any more or say any more about himself. He saw himself in an iron darkness, in the presence of a strange, barefoot creature on the balcony, a creature with arms of flesh who was emerging from a heavy, dripping corset and was dressed in a complete weapon as if he had dwelt in the barrel of the machine gun and bullets had shot from his mouth. We know the power of the muzzle of a gun. When I heard that Jean had gone to a party despite his oath, I put my gun into my pocket and left with the kid. We went down to the Seine. It was dark. There was nobody around. We were near the parapet, under the trees. My arm was around his neck.

“My darling.”

My mouth was on his ear, and my tongue and lips got busy. He shuddered with pleasure. I got a hard-on. I put my right hand into my pocket and very cautiously took out my gun. My anger was softened by my excitement and loosened its hold. The air was mild. The most serene music descended from the sky to the water and from the trees to us. I whispered in Jean's ear: