Funeral Rites (24 page)

“I'll give you the works.”

The patriot smiled sadly. Then, his face became impassive. Unable to throw his enemies out and shut the door on them, he shut his face on them. The two militiamen felt the same shame and fury, which bound them then and there in deep friendship. Only a common hatred can give friendship such strength. The two kids escaped the patriots’ gaze. Riton raised his revolver, and the other boy, who was more nervous, shivered on his legs. Had the patriot made a move against one of the militiamen, the other, that pendant of love, would have risked his life for his friend. When the captain motioned to them, Riton pressed the muzzle of his revolver into the elder patriot's back and said, as he pushed him:

“Get going.”

Despite himself he had used the formal form of address. The two handcuffed men went down the stairs of the hotel and stepped into a car. Riton was struck by their beauty. The men in the underground had a finer bearing
than the militiamen of the same age. Certainly they were of nobler metal. Coming from me, this is no compliment. I mean by nobility a certain conventional combination of very beautiful lines, a certain physical and moral carriage. The noblest metal is that which goes through the fire most often: steel. One cannot regret that they were not on the German side, for the Germans were all the more handsome for having handsome enemies. Out of a sort of sadistic refinement I would have liked the men of the underground to fight for evil. Those whom I saw were good-looking and too brave. In their presence neither Riton nor his pal lost anything of his vicious grâce, but they thought of other militiamen who wore glasses, who were weak, round-shouldered, dirty, fat, or sickly. They felt the same sadness that I myself did at Santé Prison when I saw hoodlums who had neither good looks nor shrewdness, although I had the strength and boldness to imagine pious church clubs full of splendid fellows in which, however, the outlaw element was represented by the handsomest boys. The militiamen copied the youth of the Reich, and the patriots had the advantage of originality and its freshness. Although people feared that everything was ersatz and a mere pretense of serving a fine cause, splendid youths, drunk with freedom, lived in the woods. That amazing godsend had been the result of despair. The Resistance sprang up in the underbrush like a nervous prick in the hair around it. All of France rose up like that prick. If he were sitting in his armchair or lying on his couch, the French bourgeois would have stood up when he heard the
Marseillaise,
but Riton was standing near a window; if he were wearing a hat, he would have removed it; but he was bareheaded. To honor France, with a magnificent gesture of his right arm he removed from his nose, as one unsheathes one's
sword, his tortoise-shell glasses with thick temples, and held them at his chest until the end of the anthem, which was being played on the hills in the twilight. The
Marseillaise
was emerging from the woods:

“You won't take it with you!”

The young patriot responded thus to a kick from Riton, who was humiliated by all that glamor.

“I'll let you have it in the shins. That'll put your pal in his place!”

As the arrest had taken place in the morning, Riton's entire day was as if bruised by that shame, not that he thought about it or, above all, that he could carefully analyze the reasons why he was sad, but he felt uneasy in his mind. It was not until that evening, when he met Erik on the boulevard, that he felt a bit calmer. Although the Militia was an astounding association of hoodlums, who were almost always cowardly and indulged in looting (for their monthly pay of eight thousand francs could only be called part of the booty), it was also a police force, since it made arrests, and always in accordance with a certain social order, never freely. It could perform its police functions only with excess, with the very excesses that magnified it. Drunk with the thrill of finally being the police, it acted drunkenly. Beneath an appearance of legality and probity, it tried at first to mask its looting and murdering, but the joy of being able to steal without danger made it cynical. However, the militiamen kept their distance from the hoodlums who had remained pure and anarchic to the marrow of their bones. The entire Militia thought it was ready to betray what it served. We shall see that, to a certain degree, it was unable to.

A firing squad was appointed to execute the twenty-eight victims. Thirty-five men. I have referred to the joy that Riton felt when he learned he had been chosen. He
was in the barracks room when the sergeant informed him and the other fellows in these words:

“You'll be on the firing squad.”

Riton turned slightly pale. But he immediately sensed that all eyes were watching him. Pride lifted him up, it made him stand erect. His body vibrated at once, even the curly lock that fell over his eyes. He replied, a bit more curtly than firmly, “Okay, chief,” and stood stock-still, with a fixed stare.

“Clean your gun. The corporal'll wake you up at three
A.M.
”

This detail terrified him, but he betrayed no emotion. He repeated:

“Okay, chief.”

The sergeant went off to inform others. Riton's two bunkmates who had also been chosen went over to him. They were not pals, but at that moment a kind of complicity was born among them. The three kids displayed the same casualness of gesture, but their eyes were gleaming. One of them made the first comment:

“Three
A.M.
What a lousy break! Tomorrow's Sunday.”

Riton gave a shrug of his shoulders that meant: “Tough luck, it's fate.”

Just one fellow in the room muttered:

“What a business. . . .”

But his voice was quickly drowned out:

“So what, it's our job.”

“It's what we're here for.”

“That's what we're paid for.”

A voice said:

“That's not the point. After all, they're thugs.”

“So what? Who the hell cares!”

He dared not say “All the better,” but they were all willing to see that job as the extreme activity for which
they had come together. It was the climax of their life as militiamen, the act that wholly fulfilled them, since it made them then and there, without danger, murderers, traitors, and cops. To have killed bourgeois would doubtless have charmed them, since it meant killing in order to be a tough. They would have known the pleasure of revenge, but perhaps with a certain horror of that mass murder which was of no use to them. Yet they felt a need of help. And when they cleaned their rifles, they quickly realized that grim cruelty could do away with the slightest remorse, with the greatest shortcomings.

A thought:

“Are they going to get it in the belly or the ass?”

And the snickering that followed made cruelty dawn in the room. A fang, an eye, a snicker, and they immediately realized the advantage it meant.

Someone answered with a laugh:

“You'd rather squirt it up their ass, huh, you bastard?”

“I'm going to aim at the heart.”

“Me, between the eyes. The bullet'll bounce off the bone.”

They laughed. They were vying in ferocity, wallowing in murder, their legs, thighs, and hands were full of blood.

Looking at his shiny steel weapon, Riton declared:

“It's a fact, when it comes to being fierce we know a thing or two.”

And turning to his pals, smiling, but with solemn eyes:

“Am I right, you big bruisers?”

He was filled with intense joy at being the delegate of the willful cruelty of a whole barracks room. A young militiaman, who was on his way out with a pal, said:

“That's not revolutionary.”

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At the break of day, on Sunday, July 17, the whole prison was awakened by a salvo and seven finishing shots. Three others were heard. Dawn was being greeted. Twenty-eight youngsters collapsed in their blood at the foot of the outer wall. In the cell where he was alone, Pierrot thus received confirmation of his glory. He instinctively assumed the supplest moral attitude, which enables one to absorb hard blows.

“Don't tighten up.”

“Mustn't tighten up.”

Despite him, his mask assumed a tragic character: his eyes stared in the dawn, his mouth opened, his lips contracted around an O, but he quickly loosened his face a little by shaking his head, running his tongue over his lips, yawning, stretching.

“Got to be natural. The situation is so natural. And besides, that means they weren't meant to live after twenty. That kind of zeal requires a will whose source can be found only in love, in passion. But if I display such passion in discarding good, it's because I'm passionately attached to it. And if evil arouses such passion, it's because it itself is a good, since one can love only what is good, that is, alive.

“And, after all, that means you were meant to live only until twenty. Jean, I'm talking to you because you can understand me. We mustn't get worked up, either of us, that wouldn't get us anywhere. Let's remain calm. You've got to make the best of it. . . .”

Thinking them was not enough. These words, if they remained ideal, would have still been too noble. I had to utter them. With my elbows on the coffin and my feet and legs against the flowers, I was bent over his face. In the presence of the flowers I got a hard-on, and it made me feel ashamed, but I felt that I could oppose the stiffness of the corpse only with the stiffness of my prick. I
had a hard-on and desired nobody. I replied to myself: “It's fatigue.”

The death of Jean D. reveals to me the meaning of the great funerals that nations grant their heroes. The grief of a people that has lost the man who had captured its attention makes it indulge in the strangest fancies: flags at half-staff, speeches, radio programs, streets named after him. By that funeral Jean's family knew display, princely pomp, and the mother was ennobled by the escutcheon on which a capital D was embroidered in silver. With my eyes closed, I heard in the silence the echo—the prolongation rather—of a wail or a very faraway call, which was being uttered within me but which had the overtones of the long-drawn-out calls of farmers’ wives on the heath, calls that are heard on a late afternoon in autumn behind a thornbush, near a swamp, by the little girl who has lingered with her geese and who goes to get her afternoon snack. It was a similar cry that I heard, and in its physical unreality and human reality it seemed to me to be related to the images which escape from the pupil of the eye when one is greatly fatigued and which engender a spectacle that is truly fantastic. Jean was rotting among the roses, but he seemed to understand the situation very well. The very silence of his pale, narrow face was intelligent. He visibly knew that the cries and tears would plunge me into great tragic eddies, into workings of the mind from which I would be unable to extricate myself. I would founder. And his attitude was advising me to be careful, not to give too much credit to the drama. Fortunately, certain thoughts are not uttered aloud, and when they are not formulated in your depths by very precise words, the cruelty of those thoughts is frightful. How many deaths I have desired! I keep within me a charnel house for which poetry may be responsible. How many
devoured hearts, stabbed and slit throats, opened chests, how many lies, poisoned weapons, kisses! I am surprised by the daylight, surprised by my cruel and ridiculous game. I am told that the German officer who was in charge of the Oradour butchery had a mild, rather likeable face. He did what he could—a great deal—for poetry. He deserved well of it. My deaths rarely dare express my cruelty. I love and respect that officer. Jean was listening to me:

“. . . You're twenty, and that's not bad. You couldn't, believe me (I softened my voice even more to avoid the somewhat declamatory tone of repetition), you couldn't live past twenty. As for me, I'm going to go on. They'll arrange things for you, they'll enclose you, you'll have a nice grave. . . .”

Despite my efforts, my face remained drawn. I would have liked to smile a little, but I couldn't. None the less, that conversation in a familiar, slightly silly tone, did a great deal toward calming my suffering. If it had been caused by the disappearance of Jean's friendship, when I think I am experiencing this suffering, should the cause of my friendship, which I almost said was impaired, rather be said to have been revealed and exalted by this death? I have gradually been able to grow accustomed to the strength and comforting inner warmth of that friendship, and do I perhaps feel that pain because I no longer receive its rays? Was my extreme sensitivity able to perceive that an astral body had died? What means have I of knowing whether it was the birth into the light of my friendship for him or the death into the light of his for me? I would like to indulge in words as little as possible, but I let myself think that that friendship perhaps fed on the mad, violent, consuming love (fed friendship . . . consuming love) I felt for Jean years ago. My present feeling can be measured only by the violence of my
pain as I record my friendship (and its strength) at the very moment when the one for whom I feel it escapes (exactly the right word) me, and I truly think that in the past my love caused me the same pains when I felt that Jean was out of sight or far away because his heart was indifferent. The adventure of Jean's death became natural. The porter of the amphitheater came up to me, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “You mustn't stay, sir. You've been here a quarter of an hour. Be reasonable.”

I said all right, without looking at him. He released my shoulder and added: “It's warm. They'll take him down to the refrigerator.”

I bent over the forehead that was already beginning to turn green, I kissed it, and, still bent over it, I murmured:

“Yes, you'll be more comfortable in the refrigerator. Come now, be patient a bit longer. Good-by, my dear.”

No doubt, I said to myself, the refrigerator is a very clean, hygienic invention, and since Jean's body is now only a corpse, it's good that it'll be preserved there. However, he'll fulfill his dead man's destiny when his grave is filled. He therefore should be buried as soon as possible.