Funeral Rites

  “A boy as pretty as that can make me shoot three times.”

  Anyway, the first shot was the only one that mattered. The child fell as one does in such cases, giving way at the knees and with his face against the ground. I immediately looked at the gun and knew I was truly a murderer, with the muzzle of my revolver like that of the gangsters, the killers, in the comic books of my childhood. The dramatic moment and movement were fortunately not over, for contact with life would have killed me. Everything that bore on the drama continued it. The smoke and the black muzzle, shadowed by the powder, were the main things that riveted my attention on the drama. With my eyes still fixed on them, I lowered my body, not by stooping, but by bending my knees, and, with my left hand, picked up my cap, which lay at my feet. I kept it in my hand and stood up, without losing sight of the muzzle. I knew that my return to earth would be frightful. The last stroke of seven rang out. From the dryness that coated my lips and palate, I realized that my mouth was still open, and I felt the horror of having a physical and magical relationship with a warm corpse. The child must have clenched his teeth, must have cut the column of darkness that was traversed by starlit waves with his incisors; it had probably been broken by the body's falling on the face. Nevertheless, I closed my mouth so as to cut off all contact with the child. Then, I tried to turn around and leave without seeing the result of my first murder. I felt somewhat ashamed of my cowardice. The German columns were on the lookout all around.

  “I will. Why not? Maybe he's only wounded. No, he'd scream. No, they don't always scream. The executioner used to tell me about his ax jobs.”

  “He taught me courage. I will.”

  I shifted my eyes to the outstretched child, but at the same time I raised the revolver so that my gaze would cross and register the muzzle, which was still warm, and include it in the game that had been bagged, where it would perform the function of establishing the continuity of the drama, thus keeping me on a nervous pinnacle of calm and silence where men's fear and their cries and their indignation could not reach me. I looked at my outstretched victim. The astonished dog sniffed at his feet and head. I was surprised that the black puppy did not begin a clever funeral ceremony worthy of a prince by a secret process known to black dogs, that it did not summon a band of angels to come and bring its master back to life or carry him up to heaven. The dog was still sniffing.

  “Luckily it's not howling, it's not wailing. If it wailed, all the angels would come running.” I thought that very fast, as my left foot was simultaneously stepping back. The ground was soft. I sank a little into a small hole and immediately felt I was supported at the waist by the executioner with whom I had been mired in the Tiergarten. Then the thought of my boots occurred to me, and the boots reminded me that I was a German soldier.

  “I'm a German soldier,” I thought. Then, with my eyes still on the scene of the corpse and the dog, I lowered my left arm; the gun, which was both executant and sign of the drama, disappeared from the scene, which I saw in its cold nakedness, in its commonplace abandon, even more lonely in that lovely twilight of peace, as a foul murder discovered at dawn near the slums. Feeling a little stronger and more sure of myself, I noted the details: the child's round behind, his curly head on his bent arm, his bare calves, the surprised black dog, a vague clump of trees. I took a second step back. Suddenly, I was afraid of having that murder at my heels pursuing me through the night. Finally I dared to turn around. Holding my black cap in my left hand, which hung motionless against my body, and the revolver at the end of my outstretched right arm, rather far from my body, I slowly went down into the night in my German boots and my black trousers, which were swollen with sweaty effluvia and curly vapors, and began moving toward the dreadful and comforting life of all men, followed by a procession of helmeted, powdered, flower-bedecked, fragrant warriors, some of them laughing and some severe, some of them naked and some clad in leather, iron, and copper, emerging in a body from the gaping chest of the murdered kid. They were carrying red oriflammes with black symbols and were being led by the solemn march of the world's silence. Trampling on the bleeding vanquished, frightened not by remorse or possible punishment but by his glory, Erik Seiler returned to barracks. He went by roads that ran along a torrent whose roaring filled the darkness. His curls were damp. At the roots of the hair above the forehead were delicate beads of sweat. He felt he was borne up by fear itself and that if it stopped he would not only collapse but be annihilated, for he realized he was now only a very fragile framework of salt that was supporting the undamaged head, with its eyes and hair and its mass of brain that secreted fear. The flesh of his body had all melted away. Only the white, very light frame was left. (Do you know the amusing physical experiment in which a ring that hangs from a thread is supported after the thread is burned? The thread is soaked in very salty water. The ring is then tied to it. Then you burn the thread with a match. The ring stays up, supported by the delicate cord of salt.) Erik felt he was composed of a skeleton as breakable and white as that cord, which was traversed by a shudder from one particle of salt to the next, also like a chain composed of doddering old men. If a shock occurred, if fear itself were lacking, he would crumble beneath the great weight of his head, which was needed to preserve his consciousness of fear. He was walking at the edge of the torrent and heard its roar. The big shadow of the executioner was walking at his right, supported by the bulkier and slightly paler mass of Hitler, who loomed against the starry background of the night as a block of blacker darkness in which one felt there were sharp rocks, and also caverns whose silent call was a danger to Erik who—had he heeded their wailing ever so little—would have been willing to lie down in them and sleep and die, that is, to let himself be caught in the austere reins of remorse and oblivion. The torrent was booming at his left. The noise became almost visible. The soldier's blue scarf shivered in the wind. He thought he recognized a man's breath, the caress of a lock of blond hair, of a finger of light and ivory. His skeleton of salt shuddered. Then calm and flesh returned to him when he realized it was the silk and the wind. I could make out in the darkness a tangle of stiff, mournful branches that loomed against the sky like black Chantilly lace. Its strangeness exceeded ugliness to the point of the most evil intent. I kept walking, though without hesitation. In that nocturnal landscape, near an abbey where I was recopying this idiotic and sacred book, reliving Erik's anguish and giving it life by means of my own, I thought I recognized the dangerous spots where the fellows in the Resistance were on the lookout, and among them, just behind that rock, ready to pick me off, was Paulo, who was enveloped in shadow, silence, and hatred. I also imagined him in the midday sun observing from a distance the funeral of the maid's daughter as the procession very slowly made its way to the cemetery by the white motionless roads of a rocky countryside. The horse that was drawing the hearse was weary. The two choirboys, one of whom was holding a holy-water basin, were whistling a java under their breath. The priest was engaged in a monologue with God. The little maid was perspiring in her black clothes under her veils. She tried for a while to keep up with the procession, but she was soon tired and the hearse outdistanced her. Her shoes hurt her. One of them became unlaced and she dared not tie it, for she was not supple enough to bend down, and on the day of her child's funeral it would not have been proper for her to put her foot on a stone during the procession, for such a gesture, in addition to immobilizing you in the jaunty posture of a very proud lady going up a flight of stairs, distracts you from your grief (or from everything that should signify it, which is even more serious) by interesting you in the things of this world. The rites allow only a few gestures; drying one's tears with a handkerchief. (One can know that one has a handkerchief, although not to know it and to let the tears flow is proof of greater sorrow, but the maid was too weary to weep.) You can also wrap yourself in your crape. On the way from the hospital to the church she let the veil fall over her face, and as she was looking at the world through the transparent black cloth, it seemed
to her that the world was grieved, mourning her sadness, and that touched her. In addition, the veil, by isolating her, endowed her with a dignity she had never known, and the great heroine of the drama was herself. She herself was the dead person who was solemnly walking the road of the living, for the last time exposing herself to everyone's respect, a dead yet living person on the way to the grave. From the hospital to the church, she was that dead person, taking it upon herself to allow—conscious that she was doing so—her daughter to tread the everyday road for the last time. But when she left the city to go to the cemetery in the country, she put the veil behind her by simply turning that fantastically winged hat around her head. Walking then became an act of drudgery, which she piously wanted to perform but the difficulty of which exhausted her. She undid a hook of her corset, and then, a hundred yards farther, another. The procession drew away from her. She was surprised, however, to recognize the fields, the groves, the dry stone walls. “After all, I'm going to the cemetery,” she said to herself, “and now that I'm so far away from my daughter (for she thought she would never catch up with the hearse) I could take a short cut.” She didn't dare. Her shoe was hurting her more and more. Soldiers, using a slang expression, sometimes say during forced marches: “My dogs are barking.” “My dogs are barking,” thought the little maid, but she reproached herself for the thought, which recalled too precisely her relations with a private in an eastern city. She turned her mind to her daughter and, immediately raising her eyes, saw her so far away that she tried to catch up by walking faster: “It's walk or croak.” She thought of the soldiers again and again felt ashamed. All these inner incidents were exhausting her.

  “It's awful to lose a child. And they make me bury her. At least my kid's someone, she's a colonel's daughter.”

  “Is it still far to the cemetery, sir?” She put this question to the wind, to the sun, to the stones, to nothing. There was nobody around her. The procession was going down a hill which hid it from us. The maid was alone.

  “They're at table. No one's waiting on them. Oh, I'm so, so tired! It's annoying that kids die and have to be buried. Why not make soup of them? It would boil down into stock and make a nice meat soup.”

  The maid was telling her beads, each black pellet of which was vermiculated. The markings in relief made the object look like a toy, like the least serious of toys. Is it quite certain that grief is greater if one is more conscious of it? One is conscious of grief when the mind is focused on it, when one examines it with unflagging tension: it then withers you like a sun that you look in the face, its fire so devours you that for a long time I felt my eyelids burning. But grief can also disintegrate the faculties, tear the mind apart. The fellows from those parts also have an expression to designate a man who has gone to pieces under too great a suffering: “He's turning into a pair of balls.” We suffer at being unable to look at our grief steadily; our acts are wrapped in an aura of weariness and regret that makes the acts seem false—only a tiny bit false, true on the whole, but false since they do not fully satisfy us. An uneasiness accompanies them all. A slight shift could, we feel, we think, destroy the uneasiness and make everything hang together. All that is needed is that they be performed—or that we see them performed—in the world where the person for whom they are performed lives, the person without whom they no longer have meaning if love did not oblige you one day to dedicate them to him secretly. Grief caused the maid to fall apart. She rarely thought of her daughter, but she suffered at being unable to make a gesture that would satisfy her completely. She walked by a farmhouse, the gate of which was ajar. The dog took her for a beggar or a tramp, for she was limping. He came up and sniffed at her and then barked.

  “If the dog throws a stone at me,” she said to herself, “I'll bring it back in my mouth.”

  Spinning around, she made a sweeping gesture with her arms, frightening the dog which ran off yelping even louder. This first violent attempt to fit into life almost mechanically entailed the gesture of catching her veil, which had risen from her bosom and bellied like a sail during her spin. Her whole body was somehow comforted by the effort. She extended her calf, and felt like taking off her hat to relax. As she walked, she put her hand to it, removed it, and was immediately overcome by a wave of fatigue, for, without further thought on that account of her daughter's death or her own sorrow, she had the sudden feeling that these acts were false. They had been performed in the normal, physical, everyday world, whereas she was moving in, of course, that same world, but that world corrected by grief. And, in such cases, only certain symbolic gestures afford us the plenitude of which all others deprive us. The poor thing could no longer think about her baby, which had never been anything but a kind of excrescence of foul ruddy flesh detached from its mother's body. It had died at the age of two weeks. . . . She had not lived for it. A housemaid does not make plans for her daughter. Her grief was mostly physical, it had been caused by that loathsome amputation: the death which tore from your breast the burden of flesh attached to it by the mouth. Her mind brushed away the memory of her child, who appeared to her as a small, shriveled corpse clinging monstrously to one of her boobs by its nails and dead mouth. Thus do I meditate during the walk in the sun to the cemetery, on the road along which a maid who is going to bury her little girl is trudging.

  Paulo had watched her calvary without turning a hair.

  It was regrettable that the little girl had died no sooner than she was born. The maid would later have taught her the art of two-part singing so as to beg in the street, just as she herself had been taught by her mother. In their little room, near a window that looked out on the yard, they would have gravely learned to sing, in strict time, the touching and bewitching songs that open hearts and purses. Art. Great art.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Standing on the balcony, with his elbow leaning on the night, Riton waited. Far off, intermittently, the cannon boomed.

  “That's the big works. Go to it. I know all about it!”

  The disorder in his intestines, the bubbles of gas he heard fizzing inside him added to his monstrousness. The awareness, in the midst of that infernal solitude, of what that solitude had made of him—a barbaric divinity of all-out war looking down at the city it condemns—filled him with an evil joy, the joy of being joyous and handsome in a desperate situation which he had evilly got himself into, out of hatred for France (which he rightly confused with Society), the day he signed up for the Militia, the day his contempt for his “brothers” impelled him to choose gestures more beautiful than anything.

  I have the soul of Riton. It is natural for the piracy, the ultra-mad banditry of Hitler's adventure, to arouse hatred in decent people but deep admiration and sympathy in me. One day, when I saw German soldiers firing at Frenchmen from behind a parapet, I was suddenly ashamed of not being with the former, shouldering my rifle, and dying at their side. I mention also that at the center of the whirlwind that precedes—and almost envelops—the moment of orgasm, a whirlwind more intoxicating at times than the orgasm itself, the loveliest, the gravest erotic image, that toward which everything tended, an image prepared by a kind of inner fête, was offered me by a German soldier in the black uniform of the tank driver. But though, in the depths of the eye of Gabès, Erik was sustained by grim music and the fragrance of dawn as he galloped on his horse of light (with an ax, swathed in crape, at the side of his saddle), the sweating executioner was naked, having arrived from Germany after crossing rivers, forests, and towns in a single day: dark, hairy, and muscular, in trim, spangled tights, the sky-blue jersey of which delicately molded the detail of the soft, heavy prick and balls. The ridges of my brow were crushed against Jean's behind, and a momentary but severe headache sharpened my vision, exacerbated it. The delights there where the iron soldier was entwining himself with the azure executioner came swarming in. My tongue burrowed more deeply
. My eyes were devoured by suns, by the steel teeth of a circular saw. My temples were throbbing. Riton was standing on the footbridge.

  Not far away, a shot rang out from the Belleville area. A voice whispered in Riton's ear:

  "Komm schlafen, Ritône.” Someone gently took hold of his right arm. He turned around in terror. The ship had gone down. Without realizing it, he had just sunk to the bottom of the sea and was already hearing the language that is spoken there. He could not break away. He was the prisoner of an emotional tangle, which is worse than a mechanism of locks or laws. In that darkness, at the end of his reverie, he thought he was hearing, close to his ear, his own voice for the first time. It was attached to no human branch and seemed to be uttering the words of a language that can be spoken only in the depths of what is a fabulous element, namely any enemy family and people. He turned his head to the right. Erik was at his left, and his arm was around the boy's shoulder.