Our Lady of the Flowers Page 26

  “What are you in for?”

  “Pimping. They call me the Pigalle Weasel.”

  “Don't hand me that. You're not dressed for it. At Pigalle there's only fairies. Let's hear it.”

  The Greek child tells that he was caught in the act just as he was removing his hand, which was stuffed with bills, from the cash drawer of a bar.

  “But I'll get even. When I get out, I'm gonna bust all his windows with stones, at night. But I'm gonna put on gloves to pick up the stones with. Because of the fingerprints. Can't muck around with me.”

  I continue my reading of cheap novels. It satisfies my love of hoodlums dressed up as gentlemen. Also my taste for imposture, my taste for the sham, which could very well make me write on my visiting cards: “Jean Genet, bogus Count of Tillancourt.” Amidst the pages of these thick books, in flattened type, marvels appeared. Like straight lilies there surge up young men, who are, thanks in part to me, both princes and beggars. If from myself I make Divine, from them I make her lovers: Our Lady, Darling, Gabriel, Alberto, lads who whistle through their teeth and on whose heads you can, if you look closely, see, in the form of an aureole, a royal crown. I cannot prevent them from having the nostalgic quality of cheap novels with paper as gray as the skies of Venice and London, all marked up with the drawings and fierce signs of convicts: profiles with eyes in full-face, bleeding hearts. I read these works which are idiotic to the sense of reason, but my reason is not concerned with a book from which poisoned, feathered phrases swoop down on me. The hand that launches them sketches, as it nails them somewhere, the dim outline of a Jean who recognizes himself, dares not move, awaiting the one that, aimed at his heart in earnest, will leave him panting. I am madly in love (as I love prison) with that close print, compact as a pile of rubbish, crammed with acts as bloody as linens, as the fetuses of dead cats, and I do not know whether it is stiffly erect pricks which are transformed into tough knights or knights into vertical pricks.

  And after all, is it necessary for me to talk about myself so directly? I much prefer to describe myself in the caresses I reserve for my lovers. The new Jean came very close to becoming Darling. What did he lack? When he farts, with a sharp noise, he makes that gesture of bending on his thighs while keeping his hands in his pockets and turning his torso a little, as though he were screwing it on. It is the movement of a pilot at the helm, and he is the image of Darling, about whom I liked, among other things, the following: when he hummed a java tune, he would do a dance step and place both hands in front of him as if they were holding the waist of a partner (depending on his mood, he made the waist more or less narrow, drawing his always mobile hands apart or together); he therefore seemed also to be holding the sensitive steering wheel of a Delage on an almost straight road; he also seemed to be a nervous boxer protecting his liver with flat, agile hands; thus, the same gesture was common to a number of heroes, whom Darling suddenly became, and it always so happened that this gesture was the one that symbolized most forcefully the most graceful of males. He would make those marvelous gestures which bring us to their knees. Tough gestures that spur us on and make us whimper, like that city whose flanks I saw bleeding streams of statues on the march, advancing to a rhythm of statues borne up by sleep. The battalions advance in their dreams through the streets like a flying carpet or like a tire which falls and rebounds with a slow, heavy rhythm. Their feet stumble in the clouds: then they awake. But an officer says a word: they close their eyes and go on in their sleep, on their boots, which are as heavy as pedestals, the dust being a cloud. Like the Darlings who have passed through us, far away on their clouds. The one thing that makes them different is their steely hips, which can never make crooked, flexible pimps of them. It amazes me that Horst Wessel, the pander, which he was said to be, gave birth to a legend and a ballad.

  Mindless, fecundating as a golden powder, they fell on Paris, which for one whole night repressed the beating of its heart.

  As for us, we shudder in our cells, which sing or complain with forced voluptuousness, for, merely suspecting that debauch of males, we are as excited as if we saw a giant standing with his legs spread and with a hard-on.

  Darling had been in the jug about three months when (at the time I met the minors whose faces seemed to me so willful, so hard, though so young, making my poor white flesh–in which I no longer see anything of the fierce colonist of Mettray–appear flabby, but I do recognize them and fear them) he went downstairs for a medical examination. There a youngster spoke to him about Our Lady of the Flowers. Everything that I tell you here in straightforward fashion, Darling learned in bits and scraps, through words whispered behind a hand spread fanwise, in the course of a number of medical examinations. Throughout his astounding life, Darling, who is up on everything, will never know anything. Just as he will always be ignorant of the fact that Our Lady is his son, so he will not know that, in the story the kid tells him, Pierrot the Corsican is Our Lady under a nickname he used for peddling dope. So, Our Lady was at the home of the kid who is going to talk, when the elevator of the building stopped at the landing. The sound of its stopping marked the moment from which the inevitable must be assumed. An elevator that stops quickens the heartbeat of the one who hears it, like the sound of nails being hammered in the distance. It makes life as brittle as glass. Someone rang. The sound of the bell was less fatal than that of the elevator. It restored a bit of certainty, of the accepted. If the kid and Our Lady had heard nothing more after the sound of the elevator, they would have died of fright. It was the kid who opened the door.

  “Police!” said one of the men, making the familiar gesture of turning back his lapel.

  At present, the image of fatality is, for me, the triangle formed by three men too ordinary-looking not to be dangerous. Imagine that I am walking up a street. All three of them are on the left-hand sidewalk, where I have not yet noticed them. But they have seen me. One of them crosses over to the right side of the street, the second stays on the left, and the last slackens his pace and forms the apex of the triangle in which I am about to be enclosed: it's the Police.

  “Police.”

  They stepped into the anteroom. The whole floor was covered with a rug. Anyone who is willing to mix detective-story adventures into his daily life–a life of shoes to be laced, buttons to sew on, blackheads to remove–has to be a bit fey himself. The detectives walked with one hand on the cocked revolvers in their jacket pockets. At the other end of the kid's studio apartment, the mantelpiece was topped by a huge mirror framed in rocaille crystal, with complicated facets; a few chairs upholstered in yellow silk were scattered about. The curtains were drawn. The artificial light came from a small chandelier; it was noon. The detectives smelled crime, and they were right, for the studio reproduced the stuffy atmosphere in which Our panting Lady, his gestures caught in a form stiff with courtesy and fear, had strangled the old man. There were roses and arum on the mantelpiece, in front of them. As in the old man's apartment, the varnished furniture was all curves, from which the light seemed to well up rather than settle, as on the globes of grapes. The detectives moved forward, and Our Lady watched them move forward in a silence as fearful as the eternal silence of unknown space. They were moving forward, as was he himself then, in eternity.

  They carne at just the right moment. In the middle of the studio, on a big table, a big naked body lay flat on the red velvet cover. Our Lady of the Flowers, who was standing attentively beside the table, watched the detectives approach. At the same time that the ominous idea of murder occurred to them, the idea that this murder was sham destroyed the murder; the awkwardness of such a proposition, the awkwardness of its being both absurd and possible, of its being a sham murder, made the detectives feel uneasy. It was quite obvious that they could not have been in the presence of the dismembering of a murdered man or woman. The detectives were wearing signet rings of real gold, and their neckties had genuine knots. As soon as–and before–they got to the edge of the table, they saw clearly that the corpse was
a tailor's wax dummy. Nevertheless, the idea of murder clouded the simple data of the problem. “You there, I don't like your looks.” The eldest of the detectives said this to Our Lady because the face of Our Lady of the Flowers is so radiantly pure that the idea immediately occurred to everyone that it was false, that this angel must be two-faced, with flames and smoke, for everyone has had occasion to say at least once in his life: “You'd have thought he was a true saint,” and wants at all costs to be foxier than destiny.

  So a sham murder dominated the scene. The two detectives were merely after the cocaine that one of their stool pigeons had tracked down to the kid's place.

  “Hand over the coke, and make it snappy.”

  “We don't have any coke, chief.”

  “Come on, kids, make it snappy. Otherwise, we'll take you in and search the premises. That won't help you any.”

  The kid hesitated a second, three seconds. He knew the ways of detectives, and he knew he was caught. He made up his mind.

  “Here, that's all we have.”

  He held out a tiny packet, folded like a packet of pharmaceutical powder, which he removed from the case of his wristwatch. The detective pocketed it (his vest pocket).

  “What about him?”

  “He don't have any. Honest, chief, you can search.”

  “And what about that? Where does it come from?”

  The dummy. Here we must perhaps recognize Divine's influence. She is present wherever the inexplicable arises. She, the Giddy One, strews traps in her wake, artful pitfalls, deep dungeon cells, even at the risk of being caught in them herself if she does an about-face, and because of her the minds of Darling, Our Lady, and their cronies bristle with ridiculous gestures. With their heads high, they take falls that doom them to the worst of fates. Our Lady's young friend was also a crook, and one night he and Our Lady of the Flowers stole a cardboard box from a parked car. When they opened it, they found it full of the frightful pieces of a wax dummy that had been disassembled.

  The cops were putting on their overcoats. They didn't answer. The roses on the mantelpiece were lovely, heavy, and excessively fragrant. This further unsteadied the detectives. The murder was fake or unfinished. They had come looking for dope. Dope . . . laboratories set up in garret rooms . . . which explode . . . wreckage . . . Does that mean cocaine is dangerous? They took the two young men to the Vice Squad, and that same evening they went back with the Commissioner to make a search that yielded three hundred grams of cocaine. Which did not mean they left the kid and Our Lady in peace. The detectives did all they could to get as much information out of them as possible. They fired questions at them, searched through the darkness to unravel a few threads that might lead to other seizures. They subjected them to modern torture: kicks in the belly, slaps, rulers in the ribs, and various other games, first one and then the other.

  “Confess!” they screamed.

  Finally, Our Lady rolled under a table. Wild with rage, a detective dashed at him, but a second detective held him back by the arm, mumbled something to him, and then said aloud:

  “Let him go, come on, Gaubert. After all, he hasn't committed a crime.”

  “Him, with that baby-doll mug of his? He's capable of it, all right.”

  Trembling with fear, Our Lady came out from under the table. They made him sit down on a chair. After all, it was only a cocaine offense, and in the adjoining room the other kid was being treated less roughly. The officer who had stopped the game of massacre remained alone with Our Lady. He sat down and offered him a cigarette.

  “Tell me what you know. No great harm done. Just a couple of grams of dope. You're not going to get the guillotine.”

  It will be very difficult for me to explain precisely and describe minutely what took place inside Our Lady of the Flowers. It is hardly possible to speak in this connection of gratitude toward the more soft-spoken of the detectives. The easing of the strain that Our Lady felt as a result of the phrase “There's not much harm done"–no, it's not quite that. The detective said:

  “The thing that got him sore was your dummy.”

  He laughed and inhaled a mouthful of smoke. Gargled it. Did Our Lady fear a lesser punishment? First, there came from his liver, right up against his teeth, the confession of the old man's murder. He didn't make the confession. But the confession was rising, rising. If he opens his mouth, he'll blurt it all out. He felt he was lost. Suddenly he gets dizzy. He sees himself on the pediment of a not very high temple. “I'm eighteen. I can be sentenced to death,” he thinks very quickly. If he loosens his fingers, he falls. Come, he pulls himself together. No, he won't say anything. It would be magnificent to say it, it would be glorious. No, no, no! Lord, no!

  Ah! he's saved. The confession withdraws, withdraws without having crossed.

  “I killed an old man.”

  Our Lady has fallen from the pediment of the temple, and instantly slack despair lulls him to sleeep. He is rested. The detective has hardly moved.

  “Who, what old man?”

  Our Lady comes back to life. He laughs.

  “No, I'm kidding. I was joking.”

  With dizzying speed he concocts the following alibi: a murderer confesses spontaneously and in an idiotic way, with impossible details, to a murder so that they'll think he's crazy and stop suspecting him. Wasted effort. They start torturing him again. There's no use screaming that he was only joking. The detectives want to know. Our Lady knows that they will know, and because he's young, he thrashes about. He is a drowning man who is struggling against his gestures and upon whom, nevertheless, peace–you know, the peace of the drowned–slowly descends. The detectives are now mentioning the names of all men murdered during the last five or ten years whose murderers have not been caught. The list lengthens. Our Lady has the needless revelation of the extraordinary ignorance of the police. The violent deaths unroll before his eyes. The detectives mention names, more names, and whack him. Finally, they're on the verge of saying to Our Lady: “Maybe you don't know his name?” Not yet. They mention names and stare at the child's red face. It's a game. The guessing game. Am I getting warm? Ragon? . . . His face is too upset to be able to express anything comprehensible. It's all in disorder. Our Lady screams:

  “Yes, yes, it's him. Leave me alone.”

  His hair is in his eyes. He tosses it back with a jerk of his head, and this simple gesture, which was his rarest precosity, signifies to him the vanity of the world. He wipes away some of the drool that is flowing from his mouth. Everything grows so calm that no one knows what to do.

  Overnight, the name of Our Lady of the Flowers was known throughout France, and France is used to confusion. Those who merely skim the newspapers did not linger over Our Lady of the Flowers. Those who go all the way to the end of the articles, scenting the unusual and tracking it down there every time, brought to light a miraculous haul; these readers were school-children and the little old women who, out in the provinces, have remained like Ernestine, who was born old, like Jewish children who at the age of four have the faces and gestures they will have at fifty. It was indeed for her, to enchant her twilight, that Our Lady had killed an old man. Ever since she had started making up fatal tales, or stories that seemed flat and trivial, but in which certain explosive words ripped the canvas, showing, through these gashes, a bit of what went on, as it were, behind the scenes, people were staggered when they realized why she had talked that way. Her mouth was full of stories, and people wondered how they could be born of her, who every evening read only a dull newspaper: the stories were born of the newspaper, as mine are born of cheap novels. She used to stand behind the window, waiting for the postman. As the time for the mail approached, her anguish would heighten, and when finally she touched the gray, porous pages that oozed with the blood of tragedies (the blood whose smell she confused with the smell of the ink and paper), when she unfolded them on her knees like a napkin, she would sink back exhausted, utterly exhausted, in an old red armchair.

  A village priest, hea
ring the name of Our Lady of the Flowers float about him, without having received a pastoral letter concerning the matter, one Sunday, from the pulpit, ordered prayers and recommended this new cult to the particular devotion of the faithful. The faithful, sitting in their pews, quite startled, said not a word, thought not a thought.

  In a hamlet, the name of the flower known as “queen of the fields” made a little girl who was thinking of Our Lady of the Flowers ask:

  “Mommy, is she someone who had a miracle?”

  There were other miracles that I haven't time to report.

  The taciturn and feverish traveler who arrives in a city does not fail to go straight to the dives, the red-light districts, the brothels. He is guided by a mysterious sense that alerts him to the call of hidden love, or perhaps by the bearing of, the direction taken by, certain habitués, whom he recognizes by sympathetic signs, by passwords exchanged between their subconscious minds, and whom he follows on trust. In like manner, Ernestine went straight to the tiny lines of the short crime items, which are–the murders, robberies, rapes, armed assaults–the “Barrios Chinos” of the newspapers. She dreamed about them. Their concise violence, their precision left the dream neither time nor space to filter in: they floored her. They broke upon her brutally, in vivid, resounding colors: red hands placed on a dancer's face, green faces, blue eyelids. When this tidal wave subsided, she would read all the titles of the musical selections listed in the radio column, but she would never have allowed a musical air to enter her room, for the slightest melody corrodes poetry. Thus, the newspapers were disturbing, as if they had been filled only with columns of crime news, columns as bloody and mutilated as torture stakes. And though the press has very parsimoniously given to the trial, which we shall read about tomorrow, only ten lines, widely enough spaced to let the air circulate between the overviolent words, these ten lines–more hypnotic than the fly of a hanged man, than the words “hempen collar,” than the word “Zouave"–these ten lines quickened the hearts of the old women and jealous children. Paris did not sleep. She hoped that the following day Our Lady would be sentenced to death; she desired it.