by Jean Genet
“Is this the way to the Boulevard Ménilmontant?”
She seemed not to know about my anguish, and the constipated look on my mug could not tell her the cause of it. Yet she did not seem shocked at my not addressing her more politely. As for me, I felt I was entitled to everything. People, even those who did not know me, owed me the greatest respect, for inside I was in mourning for Jean. Although I had always accepted the costume of widows in deep mourning, nevertheless its reduction to the status of a symbol, the black arm band, the strip of crape on a lapel, the black cockade on the brim of workmen's caps, had previously seemed ridiculous to me. Suddenly I understood their necessity: they advise people to approach you with consideration, to be tactful with you, for you are the repository of a divinized memory.
“. . . It's almost at the corner of the Rue de Belleville, opposite number 64, 66, or 68. I know about it from the fellow in the Party. You'll see a delicatessen.”
I did not know the flavor of human flesh, but I was sure that all sausages and meat spreads would have a corpse-like taste. I live frightfully alone and desperate, in a voracious society that protects a family of criminal sausage-makers (the father, mother, and probably three kids), mincers of corpses who feed all of France with dead young men and hide at the back of a shop on the Avenue Parmentier. I stepped onto the left-hand sidewalk, where the odd numbers are. I was at 23. It was time to cross. I turned toward the empty gutter, that river of dangerous light which separated me from Hell, and prepared to leave the shore. I was laden, encumbered with a more agonizing pain, with the fear of being alone amidst the passers-by at an invisible theater where death had kidnaped Jean, where the drama—or mystery—had been performed, and the result of which I knew only through its negation. My pain was so great that it sought escape in the form of fiery gestures: kissing a lock of hair, weeping on a breast, pressing an image, hugging a neck, tearing out grass, lying down on the spot and falling asleep in the shade, sun, or rain with my head on my bent arm. What gesture would I make? What sign would be left me? I looked over to the other side of the street. First I saw, directly opposite me, a little girl of about ten who was walking quickly and clenching a stiff bouquet of white carnations in her little hand. I stepped down from the sidewalk, and a car that was going by on the other side, a little way up the street, suddenly exposed a French sailor whom I recognized by his white collar. He bent over toward the foot of a tree where a few people were standing and looking. The sailor's odd movement, which was accompanied by the passing of the girl, made my heart pound. When I reached the middle of the gutter, I could see better: at the foot of the tree were flowers in tin cans. The sailor had straightened up and was no longer a sailor. I had to make an effort to look at the number of the house opposite: 52. I still had a hope: someone else might have been killed there, at the same time as he. I put my hands into my pockets. Let it not be thought that I can be a party to this ridiculous plebeian tribute. Though they looked fresh from a distance and formed a kind of altar, from up close almost all the flowers were seen to be wilted. I was in the heart of China, in Japan, where the dead are honored in the streets, on the roads, on the sides of volcanoes, on the shores of rivers and the sea. I saw a big damp spot and realized immediately it was the water from the flowers that was flowing. Nevertheless, I could not help thinking of all the blood Jean had lost. It was a lot of blood. Hadn't it dried since his death? An idiotic thought. Another: it was his piss. Or maybe the sailor had just relieved himself against the tree. Jean's piss! There's nothing to laugh about. Could he have died of fright? Not at all, one sometimes loses one's urine. No, it's not that. There were holes in the cans. The white shopfront . . . “Delica . . . Oh, God!”
I looked first at the sturdy sailor beaming in the middle of the spreading urine, and my eye took in the whole group: tree, flowers, and people. The sailor was a young fellow who had apparently been in the underground. His face was radiant: brown hair, though discolored by the sun, a straight nose, hard eyes. In order to put his hands into his pockets, he pushed back the flaps of a leather coat, a mackinaw, whose white furry collar—probably sheepskin—had misled me, for I had mistaken it for the light collar of a sailor. The little girl was still squatting in front of the tree, putting her white carnations into a can with a red and green label on which the word “Peas” was printed in black. I tried to recognize her face, but I had certainly never seen her before. She was alone. She was probably pretending that she was placing flowers on a grave. She had found a pretext for performing in everyone's presence the hidden rites of a nature cult and of a cult of the gods which childhood always discovers, but which it serves in secret. I was there. What gestures should I make? I would have liked to lean on the arm of the husky underground fighter. Does the tree perform marriages, or what if it records acts of adultery: its trunk is girdled with an official tricolored ribbon. The tree contains Jean's soul, which took refuge there when the shots from a machine gun riddled his elegant body. If I approach the fellow in the mackinaw, anger will make the plane tree shake its plume of leaves angrily. I dared not think of anyone other than Jean. I was in a cruel light, beneath the pitiless gaze of things. Since they know how to read every sign, every secret thought, they would condemn me if I had the slightest intention of acting. Yet I needed love. What to do? What gesture? Too much grief was pent up within me. If I opened a single thin gate, the flood would sweep into my gestures and there's no telling what would happen. Crosses of Lorraine, tricolor cockades, and a few tiny pin-and-paper flags were stuck into the tree trunk around a sheet of lined note paper pinned to the bark. And on the sheet, in an awkward hand, was written the following: “A young patriot fell here. Noble Parisians, leave a flower and observe a moment of silence.” Perhaps it wasn't he? I don't know yet. But what idiot wrote the word “young"? Young. I withdrew from the drama as far as possible. In order to weep, I had descended to the realm of the dead themselves, to their secret chambers, led by the invisible but soft hands of birds down stairways which were folded up again as I advanced. I displayed my grief in the friendly fields of death, far from men: within myself. No one was likely to catch me making ridiculous gestures; I was elsewhere. “Young” had been written in black ink, but it seemed to me that the certainty of Jean's death should not depend on a word that can be erased.
“And what if I erased it?” I realized at once that they wouldn't let me. Even the least hardhearted would prevent me from checking fate. I would be depriving them of a dead person, and above all a dead person who was dear to them by virtue of his being dead. I thought of an eraser. The one I had in my pocket was a pencil eraser. What I needed was a harder, more granular one, an ink eraser. No. People would slap me. One doesn't try to resurrect bodies with an eraser.
“He's a Boche!” they would say. “A swine! A rat! A traitor! He's the one who killed him!” The mob would lynch me. Its cries welled up within me, rose all the way from my depths to my ears, which heard them backwards. The little girl who had been squatting stood up and went off, probably to her home twenty yards away. Could I be asleep? Are Belleville and Ménilmontant places in Paris where people venerate the dead by putting flowers into rusty old tin cans and placing them at the foot of a dusty tree? Young! No doubt about it, I said to myself, it's here . . . I stopped there. The uttering of “here” and, even if only mentally, of the words meant to follow, “that he was killed,” gave to my pain a physical precision that aggravated it. The words were too cruel. Then I said to myself that the words were words and did not in any way change the facts.
I forced myself to say over and over, inwardly, with the irritating repetitiveness of a saw, He-re, He-re, He-re, He-re.* My mind was being sharpened at the spot designated by “Here.” I was no longer even witnessing a drama. No drama could have taken place in an area too narrow for any presence. “He-re, He-re, He-re, He-re. That he was killed, that he was killed, that he was killed, that heels killed, that heels killed . . .” and I mentally composed the following epitaph: “Here that heels killed.
” People were watching. They no longer saw me, they were unaware of my adventures. An unkempt working-class woman was carrying a shopping bag. With a sigh, she drew from it a very tight little bunch of those ridiculous yellow flowers that are called marigolds. I looked at her. She was somewhat plump, and bold-looking. She bent over and put the bunch of marigolds into a rusty can in which there were wilted red roses. Everyone (five other persons, including the underground fighter, who was at my left) watched her performance. She straightened up and said, as if to herself, but it was meant for all of us:
“Poor things. Mustn't ask who it's for.”
An old woman wearing a hat nodded. No one else made a gesture or uttered a word. The tree was acquiring an amazing bearing and dignity which heightened with each passing second. If that plane tree had grown on my estate or on the heights where I go to give thanks to love, I could have leaned against it, could have casually carved a heart in its bark, have wept, have sat down on the moss and fallen asleep in an air still blended with Jean's spirit, which had been reduced to powder by a burst of machine-gun fire. I turned around. In the glass of the shopfront were two round, star-shaped holes. As everything was, at the time, a painful sign to me, the glass at once became sacred, forbidden. It semed to be Jean's congealed soul, which, though pierced, retained its eternal transparency and protected the repulsive landscape of his flesh, which had been pounded, chopped, and cut up in the form of sausages and liver paté. I was about to turn around and thought the tree had perhaps lost its ridiculous adornment, the tin cans, the spreading urine, in short what one never sees at the foot of a tree and what could only be the doing of children or dreams. Everything, indeed, might have disappeared. Was it true that philosophers doubted the existence of things that were in back of them? How could one detect the secret of the disappearance of things? By turning around very fast? No. But faster? Faster than anything? I glanced behind me. I was on the watch. I turned my eyes and head, ready to. . . . No, it was pointless. Things can never be caught napping. You would have to spin about with the speed of a propeller. You would then see that things had disappeared, and you with them. I stopped playing. With a feeling of gravity, I turned around. The tree was there. A lady who was going by made the sign of the cross. That little fete, at the foot of a tree that was pissing, was in bad taste. I refused everyone the right to invent such indelicate tributes. Let them stick to the polite, customary rites. The only thing lacking in that indecent spectacle was a wooden bowl draped with a crape ribbon for collecting pennies for the widow and the kids. On a sunny day, with a delicate gesture, they could show that their hearts were in the right place, if they wanted to, though they kept their precious vases at home, and had the nerve to offer a naked hero graceless flowers in empty tins which they had stolen from garbage cans— and they hadn't even bothered to hammer down the sharp edges. While his soul was floating in the air, around the tree, Jean was heartbroken at still having that filthy wound, that damp, flowery canker whose rot stank in my nostrils. The canker was to blame for Jean's being kept on earth. He was unable to dissolve absolutely into the azure.
I looked at the fake sailor. He had put a cigarette into his mouth, no doubt mechanically, but very quickly removed it. Out of respect, I think. Thus, the patriot standing there in the August sun in a fur-lined leather coat open on a flexible waist and a broad chest pure as a banner was not, though I had hoped for a moment that he was, what death had achieved with Jean. He was not Jean transformed, disfigured, and transfigured, sloughing his hide and emerging with a new skin; for Jean, that soldier of the Year II, would not have dared make that inept gesture of respect.
I had never yet seen Jean's half brother. I was sure that it was he, as a matter of fact, whom I saw the following day at the funeral, with his mother.
He went off. For a moment I followed him with my eyes—not that I suspected what linked him to Jean—but because of his splendid bearing, which I shall speak about later. When he entered the room in which I was chatting with Erik for the first time, darkness was setting in. He said:
“Hello.”
And he sat down in a corner, near the table. He did not look at either Erik or me. The first thing he did was to take the wristwatch that was lying on the table and put it on. His face expressed nothing in particular.
I was perhaps mistaken in supposing that the two watches lying back to back on a night table betrayed a shameful intimate relationship, but I had so often dreamed fruitlessly of intimate loves that the most desirable of these loves were signified, written, by things that are inanimate when alone and they sing—and sing only of love—as soon as they encounter the beloved, the song, ornaments of secret states of adornment. Paulo took a gun from his pocket and began to take it apart. The fact that he showed so little surprise meant that his mother must have informed him of my presence. She must have seen him when he came in. Erik had stopped talking. He did not look at Paulo. The mother came in by the same door as her son. She said to me, pointing at him:
“This is Paul, Jean's brother.”
“Oh! I see.”
The boy did not deign to make a movement. He did not say a word to me or even look at me.
“Can't you say hello? It's Monsieur Genet, you know, Jean's friend.”
He did deign to stand up and come over to shake hands. I could tell he had recognized me, but he didn't smile at me.
“How goes it?”
He looked deep into my eyes. His face was grim, not because he was tired or out of indifference to my question or to me, but, I think, out of a violent will to exclude me, to drive me out. At that moment, Erik, who had left for twenty seconds, reappeared in the mirror and as he entered while Paulo was staring at me and gripping the weapon with one hand, I was seized with fear, a physical fear, as when one feels the imminence of a brawl. The grimness of that swarthy little face made me feel immediately that I was entering tragedy. Its hardness and sternness meant above all that there could be no hope and that I had to expect the worst. I hardly looked at him, yet I felt him living under very high tension, and on my account. He parted his lips but said nothing. Erik was behind him, ready, I felt, to back him up if, as once happened with a sailor, Paulo said to me, “Come outside,” and joined me with a knife in his fist for a fight that would be fatal to me, not because of the blade but because it seemed to me impossible to soften all that hardness. I would have liked the inflexible frame that made Paulo mortally seductive to bend for me. But all I could do was be conscious of his elegant severity, the result of a disheartening failure (for if I can note here this kind of short poem, the reason is that it was not granted me to live a moment of happiness, because a sailor's face in front of me went blank when I asked him for a light). Paulo went to the table and started toying with his gun again. I watched his hands: not a single superfluous gesture. Not one of them that did not do what it was meant to do. That precision created a disturbing impression of indifference to everything that was not the projected act. The machine could not make an error. I think that Paulo's meanness thus called attention to itself by a kind of inhuman severity. I turned to the mother:
“I'll be going.”
“But you'll stay and have dinner with us. You're not going off just like that.”
“I've got to go home.”
“Is it urgent?”
“Yes, I've got to go home.”
“But you'll come again. Come and see us again. Erik will be delighted to see you. All this war and killing is so unfortunate.”
The maid was in the entryway. She opened the door for me to leave and looked at me without saying anything. In order to open it, she had to lift up a worn hanging that concealed it, and her hand grazed that of Jean's mother, who drew back and said, apropos of so trivial a thing:
“Do watch what you're doing.”
She too knew that the father of Juliette's child was not Jean but a former sergeant in the regular army who was now a captain in the Militia.
The maid opened the door. She neither smiled nor sa
id good-by, and I dared not speak to her about Jean.
I left. Jean had hardly spoken to me about his brother, who had gone off to Germany, then Denmark, and then Germany again. Yet, within me, I followed Paulo's adventures very attentively, waiting, so as to record them, in order for them to take on a particular meaning that would make them interesting, that is, capable of expressing me. My despair over Jean's death is a cruel child. It's Paulo. Let the reader not be surprised if in speaking of him the poet goes so far as to say that his flesh was black, or green with the greenness of night. Paulo's presence had the color of a dangerous liquid. The muscles of his arms and legs were long and smooth. One imagined his joints to be perfectly supple. That suppleness and the length and smoothness of his muscles were the sign of his meanness. I mean by “sign” that there was a connection between his meanness and his visible features. His muscles were elegant and distinguished. So was his meanness. His head was small and was set on a massive neck. The fixity of his gaze, which was worse than that of Erik, was that of an implacable judge, of a soldier, of an officer stupid to the point of sublimity. His face never smiled. His hair was smooth, but the locks overlapped. Or to put it another way, he seemed never to comb his hair but only to slick it down with his wet hands. Of all the little guys I like to stick into my books, he's the meanest. Abandoned on my bed, naked, polished, he will be an instrument of torture, a pair of pincers, a serpentine dagger ready to function, functioning by its evil presence alone and springing up, pale and with clenched teeth, from my despair. He is my despair embodied. He made it possible for me to write this book, just as he granted me the strength to be present at all the ceremonies of memory.
