Funeral Rites (28 page)

“A seashell doesn't have feet,” she said to herself. “How am I going to get home?”

She had had no news of Jean for a long time. He shifted from one underground group to another and no longer came home. It was she who occasioned my love for Erik. I had been at the home of Jean's mother for some minutes, chatting with the Fritz, when I tried to cover up a yawn.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“A little.”

He stood up, opened the door, and through the opening I caught sight of Juliette, who was walking through the other room. She was wearing a gray apron over a short black dress, so that my whole image of that vision is gray and sad. Her hair was uncombed, and there were a few tufts of wool or bits of fluff in it. Had she perhaps just been cleaning the bedroom? So the most palpable remains of Jean, his fiancée, were in the likeness of a dirty, unkempt housemaid. What was there about Jean that had made him love so unlovely a creature? Had he chosen her out of excessive humility, because he himself was equal to assuming the beauty of the couple? Erik had pushed open the door with his foot and then kept it open with his big arm, so that it was beneath that arch that I saw the maid go by and disappear. The sadness I felt did not lessen my love for Jean, but I felt furious with him for leaving me that girl with the hideous function as memento of him. I felt abandoned, weary, wretched. Erik called out:

“What time is it?”

His voice was heavy and hollow. I looked at his face, which I saw in profile, for his head was turned, and my anguish latched on to the hard, long muscle that bulged in his neck. The sight of the maid had just opened my heart to weariness. My muscles themselves were numbed, and my mouth and throat were clogged with a wad of
dirty hair. Had I been smoking too much, or was Erik's presence acting thus, by that indirect means, so that I would love the deserter?

Never would I have the strength to bear my love for Jean if I leaned on that wretched girl. On the other hand I could indulge myself completely if I were supported by Erik. My heart had been opened by disgust, and love swept into it. A transport swept me toward the Boche. I clung to him in thought, grafted my body to his, so that his beauty and hardness would give me strength to bear and repress my nausea. I loved Erik. I love him. And as I lay in the Louis XV bed, Jean's soul enveloped the bedroom in which the naked Erik was operating with hard precision. I turned away from Paulo. With my head in the hollow of his legs, my eyes sought the sacred crabs, and then my tongue, which tried to touch that precise and tiny point: a single one of them. My tongue grew sharper, pushed aside the hairs very delicately, and finally, in the bushes, I had the joy of feeling beneath my papillae the slight relief of a crablet. At first, I dared not remove my tongue. I stayed there, careful to keep the joy of my discovery at the top of my tongue and of myself. Finally, having been granted sufficient happiness, I let my head and closed eyes roll into the hollow of the valley. My mouth was filled with tremendous tenderness. The insect had left it there, and the tenderness descended into me by the throat and flowed through my body. My two arms were still encircling Erik, and my hands were gently grazing his back and the root of his buttocks, and I thought I was stroking the hairy slopes of a wondrously large crab, which I would have worshiped. “A louse,” I said to myself, “would have transported and fixed my love better. It's bigger, has a more beautiful shape, and, when enlarged a hundred thousand times, its features are
more harmonious.” Unfortunately, Jean had not left me any lice. Then, with my teeth pressing hard on the muscle of the inner thigh, I tried to mark off a sacred area, a garden even more precise and precious than the rest of the forest. My hands, which were in back of Erik, dug into his buttocks and helped my head, which was slightly cramped by Erik's belly and cock. I felt in my mouth the presence of the insect that was the bearer of Jean's secrets. I felt it getting bigger. I heard a noise. I turned around. Paulo was entering. His rifle was slung across his back. We were already friendly enough for him to shake my hand. He did so casually.

“How goes it?”

“All right, and you?”

“All right.”

He said nothing to Erik. He went to the window and looked into the street without removing his gun, which intrigued me. Paulo could no doubt have joined the liberators of Paris, but I could not keep from thinking that he was tied up with the Germans, and I included him among the militiamen who, at the beginning of the insurrection, had joined the French Resistance. They fought at the side of sincere Frenchmen, but within the ranks they continued their struggle. Though almost all of them realized that the German card had lost, they kept playing it on the sly. They sped through Paris and France in cars that sent out volleys of bullets and were described in posters on all the walls. I am still amazed at the thought of that riffraff carrying on an underground struggle on behalf of a fallen master for whom they never felt any love. But Paulo seemed, under his dirt, to be fighting for freedom. Erik had shut the door again. The sight of Paulo beneath that burden and in that posture, which defined his avenging activity, made me feel a little ashamed of loving a Boche. I said:

“The Germans had better behave with Paulo around.”

I was smiling, but I felt like being spiteful, and Erik sensed it. He looked at me. He was pale. No doubt my spitefulness was meant mainly to cover up my love. My comment wounded Erik. He said nothing. I added:

“Aren't you scared?”

Paulo had heard the first sentence; he had come in. With his gun over his shoulder, he was leaning on the table with both hands and watching us. I mechanically took a pack of cigarettes out of my pocket. I took one and handed the pack to Erik. He shook his head and said, “No, thanks.”

“You want one?” I asked, turning to Paulo.

He moved his hand. His gesture, which was contained in the whole bearing of his body, was about to unfold, to unroll, to emerge from those eyes, from that body, from that arm, and to extend all the way to me. . . .

“Me? Oh, no!”

He shook his head just as Erik had done.

“No, no,” he said, “I don't want one.”

I put the pack back into my pocket and lit the cigarette that was in my mouth. I was less annoyed at their refusing my offer than at discovering to what degree Paulo secretly loved Erik, since, unwilling to leave him there alone, he was bent on sharing his solitude. I did not think I could declare my love to Erik yet, nor to Paulo either. For he had never made any allusion to my affair with Jean. The maid opened the door and said:

“It's a quarter past twelve.”

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The German soldiers and Riton had gone back to the roof. They felt they were being pursued less by the tenants of the building than by fear. They were fleeing from
it. Slowly, in broad daylight, following the least exposed slopes of the roof, they got to a corner formed by three chimneys. The hiding place was narrow. It could hardly contain them, though they squatted together in a kind of cluster from which the notion of the individual disappeared. No thought was born of that armed mass, but rather a somnolence, a dream whose chief and mingled themes were a feeling of dizziness, the act of falling, and nostalgia for the Vaterland. No longer worried about being heard, they spoke aloud. Riton was caught in Erik's legs. They crouched against each other, and they spent the day that way, crushed by the five soldiers who at times overflowed onto the sky. There were potshots all around them, but they could see nothing, not a single patch of street, or a single window of an apartment. The heat was overpowering. Toward evening, the mass of males was loosened by a little elasticity. Numbed limbs came to life again. Erik and Riton awoke. Beneath the shelter of the chimneys, the sergeant divided the remaining food and they ate their last meal. The general idea was to get down under cover of darkness and make their way to the Bois de Vincennes. There was much less shooting. Evening was imposing its calm. There was nothing visible on the rooftops; yet they felt that every windowsill, every balcony, concealed a danger, the side of every chimney was capable of being a soldier's shield and the other side that of his enemy. The sergeant and the men crawled off to explore. Two Germans remained in the hideout with the weapons and water. They were to shoot only in case of emergency. Erik and Riton went around the chimney and sat down at the foot of that cliff, with the machine gun between Riton's legs. Erik was weary. His springy blond beard softened his face, which was hollowed by fatigue. Neither of them spoke.
They were coming out of their tangled sleep. Their eyes were dim, their mouths slack. The visibility was a little better from their observatory and they could see a few housefronts and windows. Opposite them, about two hundred yards away, one of the windows lit up with a faint, shifting light. A man's silhouette stood out in the rectangle. Riton aimed and then fired a burst. The silhouette moved back into the shadow. Erik's firm, imperious hand came down on Riton's.

“Don't.”

Riton pulled away impatiently and his nervous finger let loose a second burst.

“Don't,” Erik repeated hoarsely in a scolding but low tone.

He was again traversed by rivers of green anger. They were sailing at night, beneath a sky streaked with heat lightning, down a river full of alligators. On the shore where ferns grew, the savage moon-worshipers were dancing around a fire in the forest. The tribe that had been invited to the feast was reveling in the dance and in anticipation of the young body that was cooking in a caldron. It is nice and comforting to me, among the men of a black, disrupted continent whose tribes eat their dead kings, to find myself again with the natives of that country of Erik's so that I can eat the flesh of the tenderest body without danger of remorse, so that I can assimilate it to mine, can take the best morsels from the fat with my fingers, keep them in my mouth, on my tongue, without disgust, feel them in my stomach, and know that their vitals will become the best of myself. The boredom of the preparations was spared me, although the dancing helped the cooking, the digestion, and the efficacity of the virtues of the boiling child. I was dancing, blacker than the blacks, to the sound of the tom-tom, I was making my
body supple, I was preparing it to receive the totemic food. I was sure that I was the god. I was God. Sitting alone at the wooden table, I waited for Jean, who was dead and naked, to bring me, on his outstretched arms, his own corpse. I was presiding, with a knife and fork in my hands, over a singular feast at which I was going to consume the privileged flesh. There were no doubt a halo around my head and a nimbus around my whole body: I felt I was shining. The blacks were still playing the bamboo flute and the tom-tom. Finally, Jean appeared from somewhere or other, dead and naked. Walking on his heels, he brought me his corpse, which was cooked to a turn. He laid it out on the table and disappeared. Alone at the table, a divinity whom the negroes dared not gaze at, I sat and ate. I belonged to the tribe. And not in a superficial way by virtue merely of my being born into it, but by the grace of an adoption in which it was granted me to take part in the religious feast. Jean D.’s death thus gave me roots. I finally belong to the France that I cursed and so intensely desired. The beauty of sacrifice for the homeland moves me. Before my eyes smart and my tears flow, it's by my beard that I become aware of the first manifestation of my emotion: a kind of gooseflesh that is made more sensitive by the presence in the epidermis of the rough hairs of my beard, which suddenly gives me the sensation of being a field of reaped rye—of stubble-over which two bare little feet are running. Perhaps my chin trembled like those of sorrowful children. I have my dead who died for her, and the abandoned child is now entitled to the freedom of the city. The lovely moon was motionless in the clear sky.

“Don't.”

Erik uttered the word more calmly, more gently, he seemed to be roaring from a deeper, more mysterious part
of the forest. His hand remained, preventing Riton from continuing to shoot.

“Not . . . (Erik hesitated, trying to find the word) not . . . now.”

Riton's hand lost its will power and Erik's became more friendly. Gently, with the other hand, the German took the machine gun and put it down at his side. He had not let go of Riton, in fact he made his hug more affectionate. He drew the kid's head to him. He kissed him.

“Up. . . .”

This single word had the curtness of an order, but Riton was already used to Erik's ways. He stood up. Leaning back against the brick monument, facing a Paris that was watching and waiting, Erik buggered Riton. Their trousers were lowered over their heels where the belt buckles clinked at each movement. The group was strengthened by leaning against the wall, by being backed up, protected by it. If the two standing males had looked at each other, the quality of the pleasure would not have been the same. Mouth to mouth, chest to chest, with their knees tangled, they would have been entwined in a rapture that would have confined them in a kind of oval that excluded all light, but the bodies in the figurehead which they formed looked into the darkness, as one looks into the future, the weak sheltered by the stronger, the four eyes staring in front of them. They were projecting the frightful ray of their love to infinity. That sharp relief of darkness against the brick surface was the griffin of a coat of arms, the sacred image on a shield behind which two other German soldiers were on the lookout. Erik and Riton were not loving one in the other, they were escaping from themselves over the world, in full view of the world, in a gesture of victory. It was thus that, from his room in Berlin or Berchtesgaden, Hitler, taking a firm stand, with
his stomach striking their backs and his knees in the hollows of theirs, emitted his transfigured adolescents over the humiliated world. But Erik's fatigue was already, and more obstinately, drawing him back. He was re-entering himself, was recapturing his youth, his first marriage with the executioner in the shrubbery when each of his hands, which were equally skillful in wielding the ax, unbuttoned a fly, pushed aside a shirt, took out a prick, and Erik raised his frightened eyes to those of the brute and said to him sweetly: