Our Lady of the Flowers Read online

  “You want a candy?” (But, Divine noticed, he was already closing the box.)

  She said:

  “No, thanks.”

  A few seconds later, Divine added:

  “You never give me anything in a generous way.”

  “I am generous. If I didn't feel like giving it to you, I wouldn't offer it to you. I never ask you twice when I don't feel like giving.”

  Divine thought with additional shame: “Never has he offered me anything twice.” Now when she went out, she always wanted to be alone. This practice had only one effect: of drawing the Negro and the murderer closer together. The phase that followed was One of violent reproaches. Divine could no longer contain herself. Fury, like speed, sharpened her insight. She exposed intentions everywhere. Or was Our Lady obeying, without realizing it, the game she was directing, and which she was directing to lead her toward solitude and, still more, toward despair? She overwhelmed Our Lady with invective. Like fools who do not know how to lie, he was a dissembler. Caught in the trap, he sometimes blushed; his face lengthened, literally, for the two wrinkles along his mouth strained it, drew it downward. He was pitiable. He did not know what to answer and could only smile. This smile, constipated though it was, relaxed his features, unwrinkled his morale. In a way, like a sunbeam traversing a thorn bush, he had gone through a thicket of invective, and yet he knew how to seem to emerge unscathed, with no blood on his fingers. Then Divine, in a rage, tore into him. She became pitiless, as she could be when she went after someone. But Our Lady hardly felt her arrows (we have told why), and if at times, finding a tenderer spot, the point entered, Divine buried the shaft up to the feathers, which she had smeared with a healing balm. She feared at the same time that if Our Lady were wounded he would get violent, and she was angry with herself for having shown too much bitterness, for she thought, quite wrongly, that Our Lady would be quite happy about that. To each of her poisoned remarks she added a touching restorative. As Our Lady never noticed anything except the good that one seemed to wish him (that's why he was said to be trusting and without guile), or perhaps also because he caught only the ends of her sentences, it was only these ends that struck him and he thought that she was finishing a long compliment. Our Lady cast a spell on the pains Divine took to wound him, but, without his knowing it, he was shot through with evil arrows. Our Lady was happy in spite of Divine and thanks to her. When Our Lady one day admitted to the thing that humiliated him (having been robbed and abandoned by Marchetti), Divine held Our Lady's hands. Though she was overwhelmed and her throat grew tense, she smiled gently so that both of them would not be moved to the point of despair, which would probably have lasted only a few minutes but would have marked them for life, and so that Our Lady would not dissolve in that humiliation. This was exquisitely sweet to her, like the feeling that melted me to tears when:

  “What's your name?” the butler asked me.

  “Jean.”

  and when he called me to the servants’ hall for the first time, he cried: “Jean.” It was so good to hear my first name. I thought I had found a family through the tenderness of the servants and masters. I now confess to you: that I have never felt anything but the appearance of warm caresses, something like a look full of a deep tenderness which, directed to some handsome young creature standing behind me, passed through me and overwhelmed me. Gorgui hardly ever thought, or did not show that he might be thinking. He walked about through Divine's tirades, concerned only with his linens. One day, however, this intimacy with Our Lady, which Divine's jealousy had begotten, caused the Negro to say:

  “We're going to the movies, I've got tickets.”

  Then he caught himself: “Am I an ass! I always think there're only two of us.”

  This was too much for Divine; she resolved to put an end to it. With whom? She knew that Seck enjoyed that happy life; it gave him shelter, food, and friendship, and the timorous Divine feared his anger: he would surely not have abandoned the garret without a Negro's revenge. Finally, she again found herself–after a period of pause–preferring exaggerated virility, and in this respect Seck more than satisfied her. Should she sacrifice Our Lady? What would Gorgui say? She was helped by Mimosa, whom she met in the street. Mimosa, old lady:

  “I've seen her! Ba, Be, By, Bo, Boo, I love that Our Lady of yours. Always just as fresh, always just as Divine. She's the one who's Divine.”

  “You like her?” (Among themselves, the queens always spoke of their sweethearts in the feminine.) “You want her?”

  “My, my, so she doesn't want you any more, my poor dear?”

  “Our Lady gives me a pain in the ass. First of all, she's stupid, and I find her lifeless.”

  “You don't even give her a hard-on any more.”

  Divine thought: “You bitch, I'll fix you.”

  “Well, you're really letting me have her?”

  “All you've got to do is take her. If you can.”

  At the same time, she hoped that Our Lady would not let himself be taken.

  “You know she detests you.”

  “Right right right. First they hate me, and then they adore me. But look, Divine, we can be good pals. I'd like to get hold of Our Lady. Let me have her. One good turn deserves another, my sweet. You can count on me.”

  “Oh! Mimo, of course I know you. You have my confidence, my Quite.”

  “The way you say that! But look, I assure you, at heart I'm a good girl. Bring her over some evening.”

  “And what about your man Roger?”

  “She's leaving for military service. Don't you worry, down there with those cute officers she's going to forget me. Ah! I'll really be the Quite-Widowed! So, I'll take Our Lady and keep her with me. Why, you've got two sweeties. You've got them all!”

  “All right, fine, I'll talk to her about it. Come and have tea with us around five o'clock.”

  “What a nice girl you are, Divine, let me kiss you. You're still pretty, you know. A bit rumpled, nicely rumpled, and so kind.”

  It was in the afternoon. It was perhaps two o'clock. As they walked, they held each other by their two pinkies, curved in the form of hooks. A little later, Divine found Gorgui and Our Lady together. She had to wait until the Negro, who no longer left Our Lady, went to the toilet. Divine prepared Our Lady as follows:

  “Look, Danie, do you want to make a hundred francs?”

  “What's up?”

  “It's like this: Mimosa would like to sleep with you for an hour or two. Roger's going into the army. She's being left alone.”

  “Oh! a hundred, hell, that's not enough. If you're the one who made the price, you didn't knock yourself out.”

  He sneered. And Divine:

  “I didn't make any price. Look, go with her and you'll work it out. Mimosa's not stingy with guys she likes. Of course, you can do whatever you please. I'm just telling you, you can do as you like. At any rate, she's coming to the garret at five o'clock. Only, we'll have to get Gorgui out of the way, you understand, so we can be freer.”

  “We going to fuck in the garret with you?”

  “Oh, don't be silly, no, you'll go to her place. You'll have time to talk the matter over. But don't swipe anything, please, don't swipe anything, or there'll be trouble.”

  “Ah! there's something to swipe? But don't worry, I don't rob pals.”

  “Try to make it last, be a nice little pimp.”

  Divine had very intentionally and very cleverly suggested theft. It was a sure way to manage Danie. And what about Gorgui? When he returned, Our Lady told him what was up.

  “You ought to do it, Danie.”

  All the Negro saw was the hundred francs. But then a suspicion occurred to him; up to now he had thought that the money that Our Lady had in his pockets came from his clients, but the scruple he observed in him today made him think that there was something else. He wanted to know what, but the murderer was suppler than a snake. Our Lady had resumed his cocaine business. In a little cell-shaped bar on the Rue de l'Elysée-des-Beaux-Arts,
every four days he met Marchetti, back in Paris, and broke, who supplied him. The dope was contained in little tissue-paper bags, gram by gram, and these bags were themselves in a bigger one of brown cloth. He had devised the following system: he kept his left hand in the tom pocket of his trousers in order to be able to soothe or stroke his violent member. In this left hand he held a long string from which there swung, inside the trouser leg, the dark bag.

  “If the dicks come along, I let go of the string and the packet falls to the ground without making a riot. Like that, everything's all right.”

  He clung by a string to a secret organization. Every time Marchetti gave him the dope, he would say: “All right, kid” and accompanied the remark by a look that Our Lady recognized, among Corsicans who make use of it among themselves when they brush against one another on the sidewalk and mutter: “Ciao Rico.”

  Marchetti asking Our Lady whether he had guts:

  “It's coming out of my ears!”

  “Brother Bullshit,” someone answered.

  Here I cannot refrain from coming back to those words of argot which stream from pimps’ lips as his farts (pearls) stream from Darling's downy behind. The reason is that one of them, which, more perhaps than all the others, turns me inside out–or, as Darling always says, gnaws at me, for he is cruel–was uttered in one of the cells in the Mousetrap that we call “Thirty-six Tiles,” a cell so narrow that it is the alleyway of a ship. About a husky guard, I heard someone mutter: “the lock-sucker” then, a moment later: “the yard-on.” Now, it so happened that the man who said that had told us that he had been at sea for seven years. The magnificence of such an achievement–impalement by a boom–made me tremble from head to foot. And the same man said a little later: “Or, if you're a fairy, you let down your pants and the judge gets it in the bull's eye. . . .” But this expression was already rather Rabelaisian; it was an unhappy expression and destroyed the charm of the other one, and I regain my footing on the solid basis of joking, whereas poetry always pulls the ground away from under your feet and sucks you into the bosom of a wonderful night. He also said: “Cockassuckeroo!” but it was no better. At times, during my most harrowing moments, when I'm pestered by the guards, I sing within me that poem “The Yard-on!” that I apply to no one in particular but which comforts me and dries unwelled tears as I sail across becalmed seas, a member of the crew we saw around 1700 on the frigate Culafroy.

  Darling wandered from one department store to another. They were the only luxury he could approach at close range, in which he could wallow. He was attracted by the elevator, the mirrors, the carpets (especially the carpets, which muted all the inner workings of the organs of his body; silence entered him through his feet, padded the whole play of his mechanism–in short, he no longer felt himself); he was hardly at all attracted by the sales-girls, for inadvertently certain gestures, though very restrained, certain mannerisms of Divine escaped him. At first, he had dared a few just for the fun of it, but slyly, little by little, they were conquering the stronghold, and Darling did not even notice that he was shedding his skin. It was at a later time–and we shall tell how–that he realized the falseness of what he had blurted out one evening: “A male that fucks another male is a double male!” Before going into Lafayette's Department Store, he unhooked the gold chain that was beating against his fly. As long as he was alone on the sidewalk, struggle was still possible, but in the meshes of all the low lanes that the counters and showcases wove into a shifting net, he was lost. He was at the mercy of the will of “another,” who stuffed his pockets with objects which, when he got to his room and put them on the table, he did not recognize, for the sign which made him choose them at the moment of theft was hardly common to the Divinity and Darling. At the moment of this taking possession by the Other, from Darling's eyes, his ears, his slightly open and even closed mouth, there would flutter out, with a flapping of tiny wings, little gray or red Mercurys with wings on their ankles. Darling the tough, the cold, the irrefragable, Darling the pimp would come to life, like a steep rock from which, at each wet and mossy hollow, a brisk sparrow emerges, flitting about it like a flight of winged pricks. Sooner or later he was bound to take a crack at it, that is at stealing. He had, on several occasions, already engaged in the following game: on a show-case, among the objects on display and in the most inaccessible spot, he would place, as if inadvertently, some trifling object that had been bought and duly paid for at a distant counter. He would let it lie there for a few minutes, ignoring its existence, and examine the surrounding displays. When the object had melted sufficiently into the rest of the display, he would steal it. Twice a store detective had caught him, and twice the management had been obliged to excuse itself, since Darling had the sales’ slip.

  Stealing from showcases is done in several ways, and perhaps each mode of display requires the use of one rather than another. For example, with one hand you can take hold of two small objects (wallets) at the same time, hold them as if there were only one, examine them leisurely, slip one into your sleeve and finally put the other back as if it were not quite what you wanted. In front of piles of silk remnants, you casually put one hand into the pocket (which is slit) of your overcoat. You approach the counter until your stomach touches it and, while your free hand is fingering the cloth, moving it about and throwing the silks into disorder, the hand which is in the pocket goes up to the top of the counter (still on a level with the navel), draws in the cutting at the bottom of the pile and thus slides it, for it is supple, under the overcoat, which hides it. But I am giving recipes that all housewives and purchasers are familiar with. Darling preferred to seize, to make the object describe a prompt parabola from the display case to his pocket. It was bold, but more beautiful. Like falling stars, bottles of perfume, pipes, lighters streamed in a pure, brief curve and swelled out his thighs. It was a dangerous game. Whether it was worth the effort, only Darling could tell. The game was a science that required training, preparation, like military science. You first had to study the layout of the mirrors and their bevels, and also the oblique ones hooked to the ceiling, which reflect you in an upside-down world, but which the detectives, by a stage trick that functions in their brain, quickly turn right side up and orient correctly. You had to watch for the moment when the salesgirl's eyes were elsewhere and when the customers, always traitors, were not looking. Finally, you had to find, like a lost object–or better, like one of those picture-puzzle figures, the lines of which on dessert plates are also those of trees and clouds–the detective. Find the detective. It's a woman. The movies–among other games–teach the natural, a natural made up completely of artifices and a thousand times more deceptive than the real. By dint of succeeding in resembling a delegate to a convention or a midwife, the movie detective has given to the faces of real delegates and real midwives the faces of detectives, and the real detectives, haggard amidst this disorder which mixes up faces, unable to put up with this any longer, have chosen to look like detectives, which simplifies nothing. . . . “A spy who looked like a spy would be a bad spy,” a dancer said to me one day. (One usually says: “a dancer, one evening.”) I don't believe it.

  Darling was about to leave the store. Having nothing better to do, and in order to seem natural, and also because it's hard to shake off that turbulence, a Brownian movement, as dense and mobile, and moving as morning torpor–he lingered, as he passed, to look at the displays, where one sees shirts, bottles of glue, hammers, toy lambs, rubber sponges. In his pockets were two silver lighters and a cigarette case. He was being followed. When he was near the door, which was guarded by a uniformed colossus, a little old woman said to him quietly:

  “What have you stolen, young man?”

  It was the “young man” that charmed Darling. Otherwise he would have made a dash for it. The most innocent words are the most pernicious, they're the ones you have to watch out for. Almost immediately, the colossus was upon him and grabbed his wrist. He charged like a tremendous wave upon the bather asleep on the
beach. Through the old woman's words and the man's gesture, a new universe instantaneously presented itself to Darling: the universe of the irremediable. It is the same as the one we were in, with one peculiar difference: instead of acting and knowing we are acting, we know we are acted upon. A gaze–and it may be of your own eyes–has the sudden, precise keenness of the extra-lucid, and the order of this world–seen inside out–appears so perfect in its inevitability that this world has only to disappear. That's what it does in the twinkling of an eye. The world is turned inside out like a glove. It happens that I am the glove, and that I finally realize that on Judgment Day it will be with my own voice that God will call me: “Jean, Jean!”

  Darling had known too many–as many as I had–of these world's ends for him to lament in rebellion against this one when he regained his footing. A rebellion would have merely made him flip-flop like a carp on a carpet and would have made him ridiculous. Submissively, as on a leash and in a dream, he let himself be taken by the doorman and the female detective to the office of the store's special police superintendent in the basement. He was done for, nabbed. That very evening a police wagon took him to the station, where he spent the night with numerous tramps, beggars, thieves, pickpockets, pimps, forgers, people who had emerged from between the ill-joined stones of houses set up against each other in the darkest blind alleys. The following day Darling and his companions were taken to Fresnes Prison. He then had to tell his name, his mother's name, and the given name, hitherto secret, of his father (he invented: Romuald!). He also gave his age and occupation.