Our Lady of the Flowers Read online

  “Our males have turned us into a garden of rheumatics.”

  When Mimosa left the garret, Darling tried to pick a quarrel with Divine so he could leave her. He found nothing to quarrel about. That made him furious with her. He called her a bitch and left.

  So Divine is alone in the world. Whom shall I give her for a lover? The gypsy I am seeking? The one whose figure, because of the high heels of his Marseilles pumps, resembles a guitar? About his legs there coil and climb, the better to hug him coldly at the buttocks, the trousers of a sailor.

  Divine is alone. With me. The whole world that stands guard around the Santé Prison knows nothing, has no desire to know anything, of the distress of a little cell, lost amidst others, which are all so much alike that I, who know it well, often mistake it. Time leaves me no respite; I feel it passing. What shall I do with Divine? If Darling comes back, it will not be long before he leaves again. He has tasted divorce. But Divine needs a few jolts which squeeze her, pull her apart, paste her back together, shatter her, till all I have left of her is a bit of essence which I am trying to track down. That is why M. Roquelaure (127, Rue de Douai, an employee of the Municipal Transport Company), when he went down at seven A.M. to get the milk and the morning paper for himself and Mme. Roquelaure, who was combing out her hair in the kitchen, found in the narrow hallway of the house, on the floor, a trampled fan. The plastic handle was encrusted with fake emeralds. He kicked at the rubbish boyishly and kept shoving it out onto the sidewalk and then into the gutter. It was Divine's fan. That very evening Divine had met Darling quite by chance and had gone with him, without reproaching him for his flight. He listened to her, whistling as he did, perhaps a bit contrite. They happened to run into Mimosa. Divine bent to the ground in a deep bow, but Mimosa, in a voice that sounded male to Divine for the first time, screamed:

  “Get the hell out of here, you dirty whore, you dirty cocksucker!”

  It was the milkman. . . . This is not an unfamiliar phenomenon, the case of the second nature that can no longer resist and allows the first to break out in blind hatred. We wouldn't mention it were it not a matter of showing the duplicity of the sex of fags. We shall see the same thing happen again in the case of Divine.

  So it was quite serious. Here again, Darling, with magnificent cowardice (I maintain that cowardice is an active quality, which, once it assumes this intensity, spreads like a white dawn, a phantasm, about handsome young cowards who move within it in the depths of a sea), did not deign to take sides. His hands were in his pockets.

  “Go on, kill each other,” he said with a sneer.

  The sneer, which still rings in my ears, was uttered one evening in my presence by a sixteen-year-old child. This should give you an idea of what satanism is. Divine and Mimosa fought it out. Leaning against the wall of a house, Divine gave little kicks and beat down on the air with her fists. Mimosa was the stronger and hit hard. Divine managed to break away and run, but Mimosa caught her just as she reached the half-open door of a house. The struggle continued in the hallway with hushed voices and pulled punches. The tenants were asleep; the concierge heard nothing. Divine thought: “The concierge can't hear anything because her name is Mme. Muller.” The street was empty. Darling, standing on the sidewalk with his hands still in his pockets, was gazing thoughtfully at the garbage in the can that had been put outside. Finally, he made up his mind and left.

  “They're both frigging idiots.”

  On the way, he thought: “If Divine's got a shiner, I'll spit in her dirty mug. Boy, fags are rough.” But he came back to live with Divine.

  So Divine found her pimp again, and her friend Mimosa. And resumed her life in the garret, which was to last another five years. The garret overlooking the dead. Montmartre by night. The Shame-on-Me-Crazy. We're approaching thirty. . . . With my head still under the covers, my fingers digging into my eyes and my mind off somewhere, there remains only the lower part of my body, detached, by my digging fingers, from my rotting head.

  A guard who goes by; the chaplain who comes in and doesn't talk of God. I no more see them than I know that I'm in the Santé Prison. Poor Santé which goes to the trouble of keeping me.

  Darling loves Divine more and more deeply, that is, more and more without realizing it. Word by word, he grows attached. But. more and more neglects her. She stays in the garret alone; she offers up to God her love and sorrow. For God–as the Jesuits have said–chooses a myriad of ways to enter into souls: the golden powder, a swan, a bull, a dove, and countless others. For a gigolo who cruises the tearooms, perhaps He has a way that theology has not catalogued, perhaps He chooses to be a tearoom. We might also wonder, had Churches not existed, what form the sanctity (I am not saying her path to salvation) of Divine and of all the other Saints would have taken. We must realize that Divine does not live with gladness of heart. She accepts, unable to elude it. the life that God makes for her and that leads her to Him. But God is not gilt-edged. Before His mystic throne, useless to adopt artful poses, pleasing to the Greek eye. Divine is consumed with fire. I might, just as she admitted to me, confide that if I take contempt with a smile or a burst of laughter, it is not yet–and will it some day be?–out of contempt for contempt, but rather in order not to be ridiculous, not to be reviled, by anything or anyone, that I have placed myself lower than dirt. I could not do otherwise. If I declare that I am an old whore, no one can better that, I discourage insult. People can't even spit in my face any more. And Darling Daintyfoot is like the rest of you; all he can do is despise me. I have spent whole nights at the following game: working up sobs, bringing them to my eyes, and leaving them there without their bursting, so that in the morning my eyelids ache, they feel hard and stony, as painful as a sunburn. The sob at my eyes might have flowed into tears, but it remains there, weighing against my eyelids like a condemned man against the door of a cell. It is especially then that I realize how deeply I suffer. Then it's the turn for another sob to be born, then another. I swallow them all and spit them out in wisecracks. So my smile, which others may call my whistling in the dark, is merely the inordinate need to activate a muscle in order to release an emotion. We are, after all, familiar enough with the tragedy of a certain feeling which is obliged to borrow its expression from the opposite feeling so as to escape from the myrmidons of the law. It disguises itself in the trappings of its rival.

  To he sure, a great earthly love would destroy this wretchedness. but Darling is not yet the Chosen One. Later on. there will come a soldier, so that Divine may have some respite in the course of that calamity which is her life. Darling is merely a fraud ("an adorable fraud,” Divine calls him), and he must remain one in order to preserve my tale. It is only on this condition that I can like him. I say of him, as of all my lovers, against whom I butt and crumble: “Let him be steeped in indifference, let him be petrified with blind indifference.”

  Divine will take up this phrase and apply it to Our Lady of the Flowers.

  This movement makes. Divine laugh with grief. Gabriel himself will tell us how an officer who loved him, unable to do better, used to punish him.

  Our Lady of the Flowers here makes his solemn entrance through the door of crime. a secret door. that opens on to a dark but elegant stairway. Our Lady mounts the stairway, as many a murderer, any murderer has mounted it. He is sixteen when he reaches the landing. He knocks at the door; then he waits. His heart is beating, for he is determined. He knows that his destiny is being fulfilled, and although he knows (Our Lady knows or seems to know it better than anyone) that his destiny is being fulfilled at every moment, he has the pure mystic feeling that this murder is going to turn him. by virtue of the baptism of blood, into Our Lady of the Flowers. He is excited as he stands in front of, or behind, the door, as if, like a fiancé in white gloves. . . . Behind the wood, a voice asks:

  “What is it?”

  “It's me,” mutters the youngster.

  Confidently, the door opens and closes behind him.

  Killing is easy, since
the heart is on the left side, just opposite the armed hand of the killer, and the neck fits so neatly into the two joined hands. The corpse of the old man, one of those thousands of old men whose lot it is to die that way, is lying on the blue rug. Our Lady has killed him. A murderer. He doesn't say the word to himself, but rather I listen with him in his head to the ringing of chimes that must be made up of all the bells of lily-of-the-valley, the bells of spring flowers, bells made of porcelain, glass, water, air. His head is a singing copse. He himself is a beribboned wedding feast skipping, with the violin in front and orange blossoms on the black of the jackets, down a sunken April road. He feels himself, youngster that he is, leaping from flowery vale to flowery vale, straight to the mattress where the old man has tucked away his little pile. He turns it over, turns it back, rips it open, pulls out the wool, but he finds nothing, for nothing is so hard to find as money after a premeditated murder.

  “Where does the bastard keep his dough?” he says aloud.

  These words are not articulated, but, since they are only felt, are rather spat out of his throat in a tangled mass. It is a croak.

  He goes from one piece of furniture to the next. He loses his temper. His nails catch in the grooves. He rips fabrics. He tries to regain his composure, stops to catch his breath, and (in the silence), surrounded by objects that have lost all meaning now that their customary user has ceased to exist, he suddenly feels himself in a monstrous world made up of the soul of the furniture, of the objects; he is seized with panic. He swells up like a bladder, grows enormous, able to swallow the world and himself with it, and then subsides. He wants to get away. As slowly as he can. He is no longer thinking about the body of the murdered man, nor the lost money, nor the lost time, nor the lost act. The police are probably lurking somewhere. Got to beat it fast. His elbow strikes a vase standing on a commode. The vase falls down and twenty thousand francs scatter graciously at his feet.

  He opened the door without anxiety, went out on the landing, leaned over, and looked down the silent stairwell, between the apartments, at the glittering ball of cut crystal. Then he walked down the nocturnal carpet and into the nocturnal air, through the silence which is that of eternal space, step by step, into Eternity.

  The street. Life is no longer unclean. With a feeling of lightness, he runs off to a small hotel which turns out to be a dive, and rents a room. There, to assuage him, the true night, the night of the stars, comes little by little, and a touch of horror turns his stomach: it is that physical disgust of the first hour, of the murderer for the murdered, about which a number of men have spoken to me. It haunts you, doesn't it? The dead man is rigorous. Your dead man is inside you; mingled with your blood, he flows in your veins, oozes out through your pores, and your heart lives on him, as cemetery flowers sprout from corpses. . . . He emerges from you through your eyes, your ears, your mouth.

  Our Lady of the Flowers would like to vomit out the carcass. The night, which has come on, does not bring terror. The room smells of whore. Stinks and smells fragrant.

  “To escape from horror, as we have said, bury yourself in it.”

  All by itself the murderer's hand seeks his penis, which is erect. He strokes it through the sheet, gently at first, with the lightness of a fluttering bird, then grips it, squeezes it hard; finally he discharges into the toothless mouth of the strangled old man. He falls asleep.

  To love a murderer. To love to commit a crime in cahoots with the young half-breed pictured on the cover of the torn book. I want to sing murder, for I love murderers. To sing it plainly. Without pretending, for example, that I want to be redeemed through it, though I do yearn for redemption. I would like to kill. As I have said above, rather than an old man, I would like to kill a handsome blond boy, so that, already united by the verbal link that joins the murderer and the murdered (each existing thanks to the other), I may be visited, during days and nights of hopeless melancholy, by a handsome ghost of which I would be the haunted castle. But may I be spared the horror of giving birth to a sixty-year-old corpse, or that of a woman, young or old. I am tired of satisfying my desire for murder stealthily by admiring the imperial pomp of sunsets. My eyes have bathed in them enough. Let's get to my hands. But to kill, to kill you, Jean. Wouldn't it be a question of knowing how I would behave as I watched you die by my hand?

  More than of anyone else, I am thinking of Pilorge. His face, cut out of Detective Magazine, darkens the wall with its icy radiance, which is made up of his Mexican corpse, his will to death, his dead youth, and his death. He spatters the wall with a brilliance that can be expressed only by the confrontation of the two terms that cancel each other. Night emerges from his eyes and spreads over his face, which begins to look like pines on stormy nights, that face of his which is like the gardens where I used to spend the night: light trees, the opening in a wall, and iron railings, astounding railings, festooned railings. And light trees. O Pilorge! Your face, like a lone nocturnal garden in Worlds where Suns spin round! And on it that impalpable sadness, like the light trees in the garden. Your face is dark, as if in broad daylight a shadow had passed over your soul. It must have made you feel slightly cool, for your body shuddered with a shudder more subtle than the fall of a veil of the tulle known as “gossamer-fine tulle,” for your face is veiled with thousands of fine, light, microscopic wrinkles, painted, rather than engraved, in crisscross lines.

  Already the murderer compels my respect. Not only because he has known a rare experience, but because he has suddenly set himself up as a god, on an altar, whether of shaky boards or azure air. I am speaking, to be sure, of the conscious, even cynical murderer, who dares take it upon himself to deal death without trying to refer his acts to some power of a given order, for the soldier who kills does not assume responsibility, nor does the lunatic, nor the jealous man, nor the one who knows he will be forgiven; but rather the. man who is called an outcast, who, confronted only with himself, still hesitates to behold himself at the bottom of a pit into which, with his feet together, he has–curious prospector–hurled himself with a ludicrously bold leap. A lost man.

  Pilorge, my little one, my friend, my liqueur, your lovely hypocritical head has got the ax. Twenty years old. You were twenty or twenty-two. And I am. . . . I envy you your glory. You would have done me in, as they say in jail, just as you did in the Mexican. During your months in the cell, you would have tenderly spat heavy oysters from your throat and nose on my memory. I would go to the guillotine very easily, since others have gone to it, particularly Pilorge, Weidmann, Angel Sun, and Soclay. Besides, I am not sure that I shall be spared it, for I have dreamed myself in many agreeable lives; my mind, which is eager to please me, has concocted glorious and charming adventures for me, made especially to order. The sad thing about it is, I sometimes think, that the greater part of these creations are utterly forgotten, though they constitute the whole of my past spiritual concert. I no longer even know that they existed, and if I happen now to dream one of these lives, I assume it is a new one, I embark upon my theme, I drift along, without remembering that I embarked upon it ten years earlier and that it sank down, exhausted, into the sea of oblivion. What monsters continue their lives in my depths? Perhaps their exhalations or their excrements or their decomposition hatch at my surface some horror or beauty that I feel is elicited by them. I recognize their influence, the charm of their melodrama. My mind continues to produce lovely chimeras, but so far none of them has taken on flesh. Never. Not once. If I now try to indulge in a daydream, my throat goes dry, despair burns my eyes, shame makes me bow my head, my reverie breaks up. I know that once again a possible happiness is escaping me and escapes me because I dreamed it.

  The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spy-glass has a flaw, a blurred spot–the sail he has seen.

  But since what I have never dreamed remains accessible, and as I have never dreamed misfortunes, there remains little for
me to live but misfortunes. And misfortunes to die, for I have dreamed magnificent deaths for myself in war, as a hero, covered elsewhere with honors, and never by the gallows. So I still have something left.

  And what must I do to get it? Almost nothing more.

  Our Lady of the Flowers had nothing in common with the murderers of whom I have spoken. He was–one might say–an innocent murderer. To come back to Pilorge, whose face and death haunt me: at the age of twenty he killed Escudero, his lover, in order to rob him of a pittance. During the trial, he jeered at the court; awakened by the executioner, he jeered at him too; awakened by the spirit of the Mexican, sticky with hot, sweet-smelling blood, he would have laughed in its face; awakened by the shade of his mother, he would have flouted it tenderly. And so Our Lady was born of my love for Pilorge, with a smile in his heart and on his bluish white teeth, a smile that fear, which made his eyes start out of his head, will not tear away.

  One day, while idling in the street, Darling met a woman of about forty who suddenly fell madly in love with him. I sufficiently hate the women who are in love with my lovers to admit that this one powders her fat red face with white face powder. And this light cloud makes her look like a family lamp shade with a transparent, pink muslin lining. She has the slick, familiar well-heeled charm of a lamp shade.