Funeral Rites Page 5

  That visit to the home of Jean's mother left me in a state of exhaustion. To restore my peace of mind I had to organize and carry on the lives which I had fractured for a moment and integrate them into mine, but I was too weary to do it then. I had dinner in a restaurant, then went to a movie.

  Suddenly the audience burst out laughing when the narrator said: “No, indeed, fighting on the rooftops doesn't fill a man's belly,” for a militiaman had just appeared on the screen, a kid of sixteen or seventeen, frailer than Paulo. I said to myself: “He's frailer than Paulo,” and this reflection proves that the adventure had got off on the right track. The kid was skinny but good-looking. His face had suffered. It was sad. It was trembling. One would have thought it expressionless. His shirt was open at the neck. There were cartridge loops on his belt. He was walking in socks too big for him. His head was down. I felt he was ashamed of his black eye. In order to look more natural, to deceive the paving stones in the street, he ran his tongue over his lips and made a brief gesture with his hand which was so closely related to that of his mouth that it traced his whole body, puckered it with very subtle waves, and immediately made me think the following:

  “The gardener is the loveliest rose in his garden.”

  The screen was then filled by a single arm, which was fitted with a broad, heavy, very beautiful hand, then by a young French soldier who was shouldering the little traitor's rifle. The audience applauded. Then the militiaman reappeared. His face was trembling (particularly the eyelids and lips) from the cuffs he had received a few feet away from the camera. The audience was laughing, whistling, stamping. Neither the world's laughter nor the inelegance of caricaturists will keep me from recognizing the sorry grandeur of a French militiaman who, during the insurrection of Paris against the German army in August 1944, took to the rooftops with the Germans and for several days fired to the last bullet—or next-to-last—on the French populace that had mounted the barricades.

  In the fierce eyes of the crowd, the disarmed, dirty, bewildered, stumbling, dazed, emptied, cowardly (it's amazing how fast certain words flow from the pen to define certain natures and how happy the author feels at being able to talk that way about his heroes), weary kid was ridiculous. A woman in light-colored rayon was thrashing about at my side. She was foaming at the mouth and bouncing her behind on her seat. She yelled:

  “The bastards, rip their guts out!”

  Confronted with the face of the little traitor (which was luminous just because the film had been shot against the sun), whose youth, caught in a deadly trap, was dazzling the screen, the woman was odious. I thought to myself that little fellows like him were being killed so that Erik might live. The audience was like the woman. It hated evil. My hatred of the militiaman was so intense, so beautiful, that it was equivalent to the strongest love. No doubt it was he who had killed Jean. I desired him. I was suffering so because of Jean's death that I was willing to do anything to forget about him. The best trick I could play on that fierce gang known as destiny, which delegates a kid to do its work, and the best I could play-on the kid, would be to invest him with the love I felt for his victim. I implored the little fellow's image:

  “I'd like you to have killed him!”

  If one of my hands holds the lighted cigarette and the other clutches the armrest, they clasp each other even though they do not move. This gesture gives greater vigor to my wish, which is charged with a will and a forceful summons to transform itself into an invocation.

  “Kill him, Riton, I'm giving you Jean.”

  My only gesture was to put my lighted cigarette to my lips, and my clasped fingers clenched each other to the breaking point. Scented with peril, my prayer rises to my head from the pit of my stomach, spreads beneath the vaulted ceiling of my skull, comes down again, emerges from my mouth, and turns my cry into a wail whose value I recognize—I mean something like musical value—and an “I love you, oh” issues from me. I don't hate Jean. I want to love Riton. (I can't tell why I spontaneously call the unknown young militiaman Riton.) I plead again as one crawls on one's knees over flagstones.

  “Kill him!”

  A frightful rending tore out my fibers. I would have liked my suffering to be greater, to rise to the supreme song, to death itself. It was ghastly. I did not love Riton, all my love was still for Jean. On the screen, the militiaman was waiting. He had just been picked up. What can one do to beauty that's so glaringly obvious? One cuts off its head. That's how the fool takes revenge on a rose he has plucked. The cop dares to say of a young thief he brings back in his clutches:

  “I just plucked him on the pavement!”

  So don't be surprised that I see Riton as a flower of the mountaintops, a gentle edelweiss. A movement of his arm showed that he was wearing a wristwatch, but the movement was rather feeble, unlike those of Jean. However, it might have been one of Paulo's, though more effective. I was going to take off from that idea, and I realized more and more that Riton completed Paulo, but for my work of sorcery I needed perfect attention and had to make use of everything to achieve my end. The audience was whistling and yelling.

  “He ought to be torn to bits!”

  “Ought to give him another shiner!”

  A soldier must have hit the militiaman, for he trembled and seemed to be trying to protect himself. His face clouded over. The beauty of the lily lies similarly in the amazing fragility of the little hood of pollen that trembles at the top of the pistil. A gust of wind, a clumsy finger, a leaf, can break and destroy the delicate equilibrium that holds beauty in balance. That of the child's face wavered a moment. Ruffled as it was, I feared it might not gain its composure. He was haggard. I looked at him closely and more quickly (one can, without taking one's eyes off an object, look very quickly. At that moment, my “gaze” swooped down on the image). In a few seconds he would disappear from the screen. His beauty and his gestures were the opposite of Jean's. I was at once lit up, with an inner light. A bit of love passed over to Riton. I really had the impression that love was flowing from me, from my veins to his. I called out inwardly:

  “Riton, Riton, you can kill him, my child! My darling! Kill him!”

  He turned his head a little. A colonel in front of me dared to say: “If I get my mitts on him. . . .” Riton's gestures were killing Jean's, were killing Jean. Suddenly the people who were yelling and jeering ceased to be ridiculous. They were ugly with grief. The furious colonel and the woman in tallow who was mad with rage and crimson under her bleached yellow locks were being tracked down by the vengeance that compelled them to honor savagely, though with grandeur, by laughter, the death of a brother or son or lover. Nobody was ridiculous. Their invectives were an additional ovation to Riton's glory. The vise in which I was caught tightened. Another image (a marching army) was on the screen. I closed my eyes. A third silent invocation rose up from me and drew me out of myself:

  “Bump him off, I'm letting you have him.”

  Another wave of love surged from my bent, still body slouching in the seat, and poured first on the face and then on the neck, chest, and entire body of Riton, confined in my closed eyes. I squeezed my eyelids tighter. I attached myself to the captive militiaman's body, which was violent despite its weariness. Beneath his debility, he was hard, fierce, and ever new, like a skillfully made machine. My inner gaze remained fixed on the image of him which I reconstructed in its natural violence, hardness, and ferocity. An unbroken flow of love passed from my body to his, which started living again and regained its suppleness.

  I added:

  “Go ahead. You can pick him off.”

  This time the very cast of the formula indicated that my will was going into action all by itself, was refusing the help of invocation. I kept my eyes shut. The same rivers of love poured over Riton, yet not a drop was withdrawn from Jean. I was preserving both youngsters under the double ray of my tenderness. The game of murder in which they will engage is rather a war dance in which the death of one of them will be accidental, almost involuntary. It is
an orgy carried to bloodshed. I closed my eyes tighter. My gaze was glued to the militiaman's fly, the image of which was within me, and made it live, gave it weight, filled it with a vigorous monster that was swollen with hatred, and my gaze was the beam on which Riton rose up and returned to the rooftops. I loved him. I was going to marry him. It would perhaps be enough for me to be dressed in white, for the wedding, though with a decoration of large black crape cabbage rosettes at each joint, at the elbows, the knees, the fingers, the ankles, the neck, the waist, the throat, the prick, and the anus. Would Riton accept me dressed that way and in a bedroom decked with irises? For the wedding celebration would then merge with my mourning and all would be saved. Was it necessary that I feel the victor's hardness in my hands? Though he was at the brink of the grave, I knew he was alive. Despite the walls, the streets, the calls, the breathing, the waves, and the automobile headlights, despite his flight to the back of the screen, my mind found him once again. He looked at me. He smiled. “

  I killed him, you see. You're not sore at me?”

  Had I uttered the words, “You did the right thing,” I would have felt so ashamed of myself, of the excessively searing injustice of it all, that I would have rejected the adventure and lost what I'd won in the game. I replied to his image, which was now sharp and almost as firm to my eyes as a muscular body is to one's fingers.

  “I gave him to you, Riton. Love him dearly.”

  I opened my eyes again. The orchestra was playing the national anthem of an ally. A heavier, richer odor was enveloping me. The glands between my thighs and those of my armpits and perhaps my feet had been working intensely. If I so much as stirred, that slightly acrid smell which I had been imprisoning for ten minutes would have escaped and poisoned the audience. I slipped a finger into the opening of my fly; the edges of my thighs were damp with sweat. I had just discovered how and in whose company Erik had spent the first five days of the Paris revolt before being able to shack up with his mistress. Riton will meet Erik, will fight at his side on the rooftops, but he first has to know Paulo. I'm trying to present these characters to you in such a way that you see them lit up by my love, not for their sake but for Jean's, and particularly in such a way that they reflect that love.

  After seeing Paulo go off on his bike, I went home. When I got there, darkness had fallen. These early September days are still very warm. I went up to my room. Jean had come to see me there one evening, two months before, to bring me the first pears of the year. The next morning, he left for the provinces with a valise full of guns. We chatted. When he thought of going home, it was late.

  “You can stay if you like.”

  He hesitated, looked at me with a faint smile, and said:

  (Until now I have been speaking of one of the dead, that is, of a god or an object, but now that I'm about to repeat his words, to describe his gestures, and recapture the modulations of his voice, I'm seized with terror, not that I'm afraid of remembering incorrectly and betraying Jean but, on the contrary, because I'm sure I'll recall him so accurately that he may come rushing in, in answer to my call. If the fifty foregoing pages are a disquisition on a statue of ice with the feet of an insentient god, the lines that follow are intended to open that god's bosom and that statue and liberate a twenty-year-old youngster. These lines are the key that opens the tabernacle and reveals the Host, and the three raps in the theater which announce the rising of the curtain are the very slightly stylized use of my heartbeats before I make Jean speak.)

  He said:

  “Oh?”

  I realized what he was thinking. There were ten seconds of silence, and he repeated banteringly:

  “Oh?”

  And again, with the same smile and nodding his head:

  “Oh?”

  He snorted.

  “But if I stay, you'll start fucking around.

  “ I won't.

  I said that in a rough tone. And, with a more detached air, I added:

  “Oh, do as you like.”

  “Oh?”

  But as I spoke he stood up, and I thought he was going to leave. He sat down on the bed again.

  “Well? Are you staying? Or are you going?”

  “Will you let me alone?”

  “Shit.”

  “I'll stay.”

  We talked about other things. From the tone of his answers, the slight constraint of his voice, his hesitation, I had been able to tell not only that he was staying but that he would accept this night what he had hitherto refused.

  “Are you getting undressed?”

  It was noticeable that, despite his decision to give himself to me, he was postponing the moment of going to bed, of getting between the sheets, of pressing his body against mine. At last, slowly and as if he were sauntering about the room, he undressed. When he was in bed, I drew him to me. He already had a hard-on.

  “You see, you're not keeping your word. You said you'd let me alone.”

  “Oh, come on, I'm just kissing you. I'm not hurting you.

  I kissed him. Then he said, but in a calm voice:

  “All right.”

  This “all right” indicated that he had just reached a decision, that he was casting himself into the irremediable.

  “All right.”

  Then, finally breathing easily:

  “What if I wanted to, today?”

  “Wanted what?”

  He scowled impatiently. He blurted out:

  “You know very well, but you want me to say it . . . if I was willing to make love.”

  The end of the sentence trailed off for want of breath.

  Jean.

  I stroked his hand.

  “Jean.”

  I didn't know what to say, or to do. He could feel my happiness. He lay still, stretched out on his back. The position released the muscles of his face, but the eyes remained alert and the lids kept up their regular blinking, which indicated that the kid was on his guard in spite of his excitement. I put out the light. Weary and soft, I lay on his back. A moment later, he whispered:

  “Jean, come out.”

  Anxious to spare him the slightest embarrassment of attending to his personal hygiene in my presence, I ran my hands between his buttocks as if I were caressing him there, and he, out of like modesty, fearing lest my prick be soiled with his shit, cleaned it with his free hand. We performed this double act at the same time, under the covers, with the same innocence, as if my hand met his buttocks and his my prick accidentally in the darkness. It was then that he murmured the well-known words:

  “I love you even more than before.”

  I kissed the back of his neck with a warmth that must have reassured him, for he finally dared sigh the following confession into the folds of the pillow:

  “I was afraid you wouldn't love me anymore . . . afterward.”

  My hand, seeking his hair so as to stroke it, grazed his face and stroked his cheek instead.

  Wearing Jean's shirts or his socks wouldn't be enough, nor would loading myself with amulets that he touched, nor weaving bracelets out of his hair or keeping it in lockets. But uttering his name in solitude is somewhat better. If I tried to repeat aloud the words he said, his sentences, the bungling poems he wrote, there would be danger of giving him body within my body.

  Language, that language in particular, expresses the soul (I have chosen this word) and speech. (When one yields up one's soul, it seems that it is this physical breath that is the carrier of speech.) The soul appeared to be only the harmonious unfolding, the extension, in fine and shaded scrolls, of secret labor, of the movements of algae and waves, of organs living a strange life in its deep darkness, of those organs themselves, the liver, the spleen, the green coating of the stomach, the humors, the blood, the chyle, the coral canals, a vermilion sea, the blue intestines. Jean's body was a Venetian flask. I was quite certain that a time would come when that wonderful language which was drawn from him would dimmish his body, as a ball of yarn is diminished as it is used up, would wear it down to the po
int of transparency, down to a speck of light. It taught me the secret of the matter that makes up the star which emits it, and that the shit amassed in Jean's intestine, his slow, heavy blood, his sperm, his tears, his mud, were not your shit, your blood, your sperm.

  I had gone to bed with my memory of Paulo merging with that of Jean. Through the open window of my tiny hotel room I saw the Seine. Paris was not yet asleep. What was Erik doing? It was hard for me to imagine his life with Paulo and his mother, but it was comforting to relive at his side—and at times inside him or Riton—the hours he spent on the rooftops with the militiamen.

  So, two bare arms stood out at first against the dark sky, on the rooftop. They were bright. Joined at the hands, one of the arms was pulling the other toward it. The almost desperate effort of those arms of strong, muscular men made them stiff as rods, and for three seconds they remained in a state of amazingly light immobility, a mortal moment of indecision. Then a charge of will shot through the less strong of the two. There was a slight click of steel at the edge of the zinc. That poster picture of two outstretched arms knotted together in manly and brotherly aid almost tore the sky apart, almost punctured it. The stars were too dim to light the scene sufficiently. The arm which seemed weaker rose up a little toward the body to which it was attached. Hope brought it an armful of courage. Riton's torso bent forward a bit more, and the whole well-knit body, its shape broken by the movement, withdrew quietly and slowly behind the brick chimney to which the hand of his other arm was clinging. The little militiaman finally managed to draw from the void the German soldier who had lost his footing on the slippery zinc of the roof. Both of them were barefoot and bareheaded. Helping himself with one hand, which was still clutching his harmonica, Erik got back onto the roof, flat on his stomach. When he was in a safe position, his raised head was on a level with Riton's knees. He let go of the boy's hand. Riton, who was as pale as he was, wiped his forehead. He was in a sweat. Then he dropped his hand wearily with a defeated gesture. Erik, who was flat on his stomach, immediately took it and squeezed it.