Our Lady of the Flowers Read online

  He· fell asleep, like a drunken harlequin on the stage who sinks into his baggy sleeves and collapses on the grass beneath the violent light of the moon. The following day, he said nothing to Alberto. The fishing and the lolling in the rye at noon were what they were every day. That evening, the idea had crossed Alberto's mind of prowling about the slate house, with his hands in his pockets, whistling as he walked (He had a remarkable way of whistling with metallic stridency, and his virtuosity was not the least of his charms. This whistling was magical. It bewitched the girls. The boys, aware of his power, envied him. Perhaps he charmed the snakes.), but he did not come, for the town was hostile to him, especially if, like an evil angel, he went there at night. He slept.

  They continued making love in the midst of the snakes. Divine remembers this. She thinks it was the loveliest period of her life.

  One night on the boulevard she met Seck Gorgui. The big sunny Negro–though he was only the shadow of the Archangel Gabriel–was on the make.

  He was wearing a gray worsted suit that clung to his shoulders and thighs, and his jacket was more immodest than the form-fitting tights in which Jean Borlin garbed his round balls. He was wearing a pink tie, a cream-colored silk shirt, gold rings with fake or real diamonds (what does it matter!); he had extraordinary fingernails, long and dark, and, at the base, as light as sound, year-old hazelnuts. In a trice, Divine was again the Divine of eighteen, for she thought naïvely, though vaguely, that, being black and a native of a warm country, Gorgui would be unable to tell her age or perceive her wrinkles or wig. She said:

  “My, my! So here you are! Oh! I'm delighted.”

  Seck laughed:

  “Pretty good,” he said, “and you?”

  Divine stuck close to him. He stood firm and straight, though leaning slightly back, motionless and solid, in the position of a kid who braces himself on his nervous knees to piss against nothing at all, or in the pose in which, you will recall, Lou discovered Alberto (Colossus of Rhodes), the most virile pose of sentinels: thighs spread, and their bayonet-guns, which they grip with both hands, planted smack between their boots, right up to their mouths.

  ‘'What have you been doing? Playing the sax?”

  “No, I'm through with that. I'm divorced. I dropped Banjo!” he said.

  “Really? Why? Banjo was rather nice.”

  Here Divine got the better of her good nature. She added:

  “A teenchy bit plump, a trifle round, but really, she had such a good disposition. What about now?”

  Gorgui was free that evening. In fact, he was looking for customers. He needed money. Divine took the blow without flinching.

  “How much, Gorgui?”

  “Five louis.”

  It was precise. He got his hundred francs and followed Divine to the garret. Negroes have no age. Mlle. Adeline could explain to us that when they try to count they get all mixed up in their calculations, for they are quite aware that they were born at the time of a famine, of the death of three jaguars, of the flowering of the almond trees. and these circumstances, mingled with the figures, make it easy for them to go astray. Gorgui, our Negro, was vital and vigorous. A movement of his back shook the room, the way Village, the Negro murderer, shook his prison cell. I have tried to recapture, in the cell where I am now writing, the odor of carrion spread by the proud-scented Negro, and thanks to him I am better able to give life to Seck Gorgui. I have already spoken of my fondness for odors, the strong odors of the earth, of latrines, of the loins of Arabs and, above all, the odor of my farts, which is not the odor of my shit, a loathsome odor, so much so that here again I bury myself beneath the covers and gather in my cupped hands my crushed farts, which I carry to my nose. They open to me hidden treasures of happiness. I inhale, I suck in. I feel them, almost solid, going down through my nostrils. But only the odor of my own farts delights me, and those of the handsomest boy repel me. Even the faintest doubt as to whether an odor comes from me or someone else is enough for me to stop relishing it. So, when I knew him, Clément Village filled the cell with an odor stronger than death. Solitude is sweet. It is bitter. One might think that the head should be emptied there of all past entries (precursory practice of purification), but you are well aware, while reading me, that this is not the case. I was exasperated. The Negro cured me to some extent. It seemed that his extraordinary sexual potency was sufficient to calm me. He was as strong as the sea. His radiance was more restful than a remedy. His presence was conjuratory. I would sleep.

  Between his fingers he would roll a soldier whose eyes are no more than two musical pauses drawn by my pen on his smooth pink face; I can no longer meet a sky-blue soldier without seeing him lying on the Negro's chest, and immediately being irritated by the smell of turpentine that, mixed with his, used to befoul the cell. It was in another French prison, where the corridors and their straight lines, which were as long as those in a king's palace, wove and constructed geometrical patterns on which the gnarled prisoners, tiny in proportion to the scale of the corridors, glided by on felt slippers. As I passed each door, I would read a label indicating the category of the occupant. The first labels read: “Solitary confinement” the next: “Transportation” others: “Hard labor.” Here I received a shock. The penal colony materialized before my eyes. Ceased to be word and became flesh. I was never at the end of the corridor, for it seemed to me to be at the end of the world, at the end of all, and yet it made signs to me, it emitted appeals that touched me, and I too shall probably go to the end of the corridor. I believe, though I know it to be false, that on the doors can be read the word “Death” or perhaps, what is graver still, the words “Capital Punishment.”

  In that prison, which I shall not name, every convict had a little yard, where every brick of the wall bore a message to a friend: “B.A.A. of Sébasto–Jacquot of Topol, known as V.L.F., to Lucien of La Chapelle,” an exhortation, a votive offering to the mother, or a scathing: “Polo of Gyp's Bar is a stool pigeon.” It was also in that prison that the chief guard used to give each of us a gift of a small packet of coarse salt on New Year's Day.

  When I entered my cell, the big Negro was putting blue paint on his little lead soldiers, the biggest of which was littler than his littlest finger. He would seize them by the thigh, the way Lou-Divine used to grab frogs, and slap a coat of light blue over the whole body. Then he would put them down to dry on the floor, where they lay in great disorder, a tiny, irritating confusion, which the Negro heightened by coupling them lasciviously, for the solitude also sharpened his lasciviousness. He greeted me with a smile and a puckering of the brow. He was back from the Clairvaux State Prison, where he had put in five years, and had been here for a year while waiting to be sent to the penal colony. He had killed his girl; then, having sat her down on a yellow silk cushion with little green tufts, had walled her up, arranging the masonry in the form of a bench. He was annoyed that I didn't remember the story, which you must have read about in the papers. Since this misfortune had shattered his life, may it serve his glory, for it is a misfortune worse than being Hamlet and not being a prince.

  “I am Clément,” he said, “Clément Village.”

  I used to think that his big hands with their pink palms tortured the lead soldiers. His round forehead, which was as free of wrinkles as a child's (Gall would have called it a muliebral forehead), would bend over them. “I'm making buck privates.”

  I learned to paint them too. The cell was full of them. The table, shelves, and floor were covered with these tiny warriors, who were as hard and cold as corpses, whose number and inhuman smallness created for them a peculiar kind of soul. At night, I would kick them aside, lay out my straw mattress, and fall asleep in their midst. Like the inhabitants of Lilliput, they tied me down, and to get loose I offered Divine to the Archangel Gabriel.

  During the day, the Negro and I would work in silence. However, I was sure that one day he would tell me his story. I don't like stories of that kind. Despite myself, I can't keep from thinking how often th
e narrator must have told it, and I feel as if it reaches me like a dress that has been handed down until . . . And besides, I have my own stories. Those which spring from my eyes. Prisons have their silent stories, and so do the guards, and even the lead soldiers, which are hollow. Hollow! The foot of one of the lead soldiers broke, and the stump revealed a hole. This certainty of their inner emptiness delighted and distressed me. At home, there used to be a plaster bust of Queen Marie-Antoinette. I lived right next to it for five or six years without noticing it, until the day when its chignon miraculously broke, and I saw the bust was hollow. I had had to leap into the void in order to see it. So what do I care about stories of Negro murderers, when mysteries of this kind, the mystery of the nothing and the no, signal to me and reveal themselves, as they revealed themselves in the village to Lou-Divine? The church played its role of Jack-in-the-box. The services had accustomed Lou to magnificence, and each religious holiday made him uneasy because he would see emerging from some hiding place the gilded candelabra, the white enameled lilies, the silver-embroidered cloths; from the sacristy came the green, violet, white, and black chasubles, some of moire and some of velvet, the albs, the stiff surplices, the new hosts. Unexpected and astounding hymns rang out, among them the most disturbing of all, the Veni Creator, which is sung at marriage ceremonies. The charm of the Veni Creator was that of sugared almonds and wax orange blossoms, the charm of the white tulle (to which is added still another charm, more peculiarly possessed by glaciers–we shall speak of this later), of the fringed armbands of children taking first communion, of the white socks; it was what I am obliged to call the nuptial charm. It is important to speak of it, for it is the one that transported the child Culafroy to seventh heaven. And I cannot tell why.

  Over the gold ring lying on a white linen cloth on the tray which he bears before the bride and groom, the priest makes the sign of the cross with four little shocks of his sprinkler that leave four little drops on the ring.

  The sprinkler is always moist with a tiny droplet, like Alberto's prick which is stiff in the morning and which has just pissed.

  The vaults and walls of the chapel of the Virgin are whitewashed, and the Virgin has an apron as blue as a sailor's collar.

  Facing the faithful, the altar is neatly arranged; facing God, it is a jumble of wood in the dust and spider webs.

  The purses of the usherette who takes up the collection are made of a pink silk left-over of the dress of Alberto's sister. But the objects in the church became more familiar to Culafroy. Before long, only the church in the neighboring town could provide new spectacles for him. Little by little it was abandoned by its gods, who fled at the child's approach. The last question he asked them received a reply as sharp as a slap. One day, about noon, the mason was repairing the porch of the chapel. Perched at the top of a double ladder, he did not seem to Culafroy to be an archangel, for the child could never take seriously the wonderland of the image makers. The mason was the mason. A good-looking fellow, too. His corduroy pants set off his buttocks and hung loosely about his legs. At his open-necked shirt collar, his neck emerged from a bush of stiff hairs, as a tree trunk emerges from the fine grass of the undergrowth. The door of the church was open. Lou passed beneath the rungs of the ladder, lowered his head and eyes beneath a sky inhabited by a pair of corduroy pants and slipped into the choir. The mason, who had seen him, said nothing. He was hoping that the kid would play some trick on the priest. Culafroy's sabots rattled over the flagstones until he reached the spot where the floor was covered with a rug. He stopped beneath the chandelier and kneeled very ceremoniously on a tapestried prayer stool. His genuflections and gestures were a faithful copy of those made by Alberto's sister on this same prayer stool every Sunday. He adorned himself with their beauty. Thus, acts have esthetic and moral value only insofar as those who perform them are endowed with power. I still wonder what is the significance of the emotion that rises up within me when I hear some silly song just as it does when I am in the presence of a recognized masterpiece. This power is delegated to us sufficiently for us to feel it within us, and this is what enables us to bear our having to lower our head in order to step into a car, because when we lower it an imperceptible memory turns us into a movie star, or a king, or a vagrant (but he's another king) who lowered his head the same way (we saw him in the street or on the screen). Rising on the toes of my right foot and raising my right arm to take down my little mirror from the wall, or to grab my mess tin from the shelf, is a gesture that transforms me into the Princess of T . . . , whom I once saw make this movement in order to put back a drawing she had shown me. Priests who repeat symbolic gestures feel themselves imbued with the virtue not of the symbol but of the first executant; the priest who, at Divine's funeral mass, imitated the sly gestures of burglary and theft, was adorning himself, with the gestures, spolia opima, of a guillotined second-story man.

  So, no sooner had Culafroy taken a few drops from the basin of holy water at the entrance than Germaine's hard breasts and buttocks were grafted on to him, as muscles were grafted on at a later time, and he had to carry them in the current fashion. Then he prayed, in pose and mutter, accentuating the bowing of his head and the noble slowness of the sign of the cross. Shadowy calls rang out from all corners of the choir, from all the stalls of the altar. The little lamp was gleaming; at noon, it was seeking a man. The mason whistling under the porch belonged to the world, to Life, and Lou, alone there, felt himself master of the whole works. He must answer the clarion calls, must enter the shadow, which was as dense as a solid. . . . He stood up silently. His sabots moved forward and bore him with infinite caution over the tufted wool of the rug, and the smell of the old incense, poisonous as that of old tobacco in a seasoned pipe, as a lover's breath, desensitized the fears that were born thick and fast with each of his gestures. He moved slowly, with tired muscles, soft as those of a deep-sea diver, numbed by the odor which pushed back the moment so artfully that Culafroy seemed to be neither here nor now. The altar was suddenly within arm's reach, as if Lou had unwittingly taken a giant stride, and he felt himself sacrilegious. The Epistles had fallen down on the stone table. The silence was a peculiar silence, a silence that was present, which sounds from the outside could not penetrate. They squashed against the thick walls of the church like rotten fruit thrown by children. Though they were audible, they in no way disturbed the silence.

  “Cula!”

  The mason was calling.

  “Sh! Don't shout in church.”

  The two cries made a huge crevice in the edifice of the silence, the silence of cottages that are being robbed. The double curtains of the tabernacle did not quite come together, and from the slit, as obscene as an unbuttoned fly, protruded the little key that keeps the door shut. Culafroy's hand was on the key when he regained consciousness, only to lose it again immediately. The miracle! Blood will flow from the hosts if I take one! Idle stories about Jews, about Jews biting into the Holy Species, stories of prodigies, in which hosts falling from the mouths of children stain the floor and cloths with blood, stories about simoniacal brigands, had all prepared this agonizing moment. It cannot be said that Lou's heart beat faster–on the contrary, a kind of foxglove (foxglove is known as Virgin's finger in those parts) slowed down its rhythm and force–nor that his ears buzzed–silence emerged from them. A wild silence. He had risen on his toes and found the key. He had stopped breathing. The miracle. He expected to see the plaster statues come tumbling down from their niches and crush him; he was certain they would. As far as he was concerned, it was already done before being done. He awaited damnation with the resignation of a man condemned to death; knowing it was imminent, he awaited it in peace. Thus, he acted only after the act had virtually been performed. The silence (it was squared, cubed) was on the point of blowing up the church, of turning the things of God into fireworks. The ciborium was there. He had opened it. The act seemed to him so outlandish that he was curious enough to watch himself do it. The dream almost collapsed. Lou-Cula
froy seized the three hosts and let them fall to the carpet. They descended hesitantly, drifting like leaves that fall in calm weather. The silence rushed at the child, bowled him over like a team of boxers, pinned his shoulders to the floor. He let go of the ciborium, which made a hollow sound as it fell on the wool.

  And the miracle occurred. There was no miracle. God had been debunked. God was hollow. Just a hole with any old thing around it. A pretty shape, like the plaster head of Marie-Antoinette and the little soldiers, which were holes with a bit of thin lead around them.

  Thus I lived in the midst of an infinity of holes in the form of men. I slept on a mattress that lay on the floor, as there was only one bed, in which Clément slept. I would watch him from below, stretched out, as on a bench, on the stone of the altar. He would move only once during the entire night, to go to the latrine. He performed this ceremony with the greatest mystery. In secret, in silence. Here is his story as he told it to me. He was from Guadeloupe and had been a nude dancer at the Viennese Dreamland. He lived with his Dutch girlfriend, whose name was Sonia, in a little flat in Montmartre. They lived there the way Divine and Darling lived, that is, a splendid and casual life, a life that a breath might shatter–so think the bourgeois, who sense the poetry of the lives of creators of poetry–dancers, Negroes, boxers, prostitutes, soldiers–but who do not see that these lives have an earthly tie, since they are big with terror. Early in May, 1939, there took place between them one of those typical scenes between whores and pimps, for the take had been insufficient. Sonia spoke of leaving. He slapped her. She screamed. She insulted him in German, but as the tenants of the building were very tactful folk, no one heard. Then she decided to get her valise, which was hidden under the bed, and she quietly began to gather her underthings which were scattered about. The big Negro went over to her. His hands were in his pockets.