by Jean Genet
“They'll think I'm not sad,” she thought.
“They'll think I didn't love my little girl.”
“People'll think I killed her, who knows.”
The soldiers of the squad accompanying their dead comrades looked at the little woman in mourning who was standing near the hanging ropes that passed through a hole in the belfry. Finally, the eleven coffins were carried out and taken to the station so that they could rest on the other side of the Rhine. In the church, the prayers of intercession were run off rapidly. The black cassocks, which were too short and had buttons missing (buttons round as boot buttons), exposed the choirboys’ legs, which were bare and hairy in the kind of rubber boots that were often worn by men in the Resistance, and the white lace surplice detracted not a bit from their vigor. They served the priest as one serves a piece of artillery. The servant is the one who passes the ammunition. They served with the same faith, the same devotion, the same promptness: whether it was the incense, the holy water, or the responses. Then, when the ceremony in church was over, they marched out first, preceding the priest, the two undertaker's assistants, and the mourning housemaid. A sexton closed the church door behind them. And on that interminable day began the long night of the maid's journey from the church to the grave and from the grave to her room.
I would have liked to say more about the hero Jean D. in a particular tone, to give an account of him, with facts and dates. But such a procedure is quite pointless and deceptive. Song alone can give some notion of what he meant to me, but the register of poets is limited. Although the novelist can deal with any subject, can speak of any character in precise detail, and can achieve variety, the poet is subject to the demands of his heart, which attracts to him all human beings who have been marked obliquely by evil and misfortune, and the characters in my books all resemble each other. They live, with minor variations, the same moments, the same perils, and when I speak of them, my language, which is inspired by them, repeats the same poems in the same tone.
When Jean was alive he made me suffer terribly, and his death now does the same. His life was a miracle of purity which his death in combat continues to illuminate. During the funeral ceremony, the priest said a few words, including the following: “He died on the field of honor.” On any other occasion, the formula would have made me shrug and smile, but the priest made this statement about Jean. Apart from the fact that it magnified him by granting him the honors that are at men's disposal (the field of honor is a long, wide vacant lot behind the home of my foster-parents where a few heroes who have come a great distance, sometimes from Japan, go at night to die), the velvet and gold fringe, that statement, coming from a Christian, whose role is to pacify, to shed further light on the figure of Jean, made it stand out more sharply, and showed him as a hero of the just cause against evil, like the pure-hearted knight confronting the beast. That purity impresses me. I now understand the value of symbols, since I wanted to toss a flower on his grave and since the priest's statement produced a kind of physical steadying during my grief, a tension of the thighs and buttocks that enables me to say I am proud of Jean. It was to that purity, to the grandeur of that death, to my child's calm, silent courage that I wanted to dedicate the story which best expresses the secret iridescences of my heart, but the characters I find in it are what I adored in the past, what I still love, but what I want to mutilate hatefully.
Though all these spirited characters have not yet made their exit, nevertheless it is not possible for me to see them in the same lighting. Am I going to love uprightness, nobleness? The more Jean's soul inhabits me—the more Jean himself inhabits me—the fonder I shall be of cowards, traitors, and petty no-goods.
I shall speak first of his presence within me. As soon as he was covered with earth at the cemetery, when the little mound was finished and I took my first step away from the grave, I had the distinct feeling that I was detaching myself from the corpse which for four days, plus a good quarter of an hour before they locked the coffin, had taken Jean's place, from the corpse into which Jean had been transformed by the prodigy of a well-aimed bullet. Then immediately, not the memory, Jean himself took a place in what I am really obliged to call my heart. I recognize his presence by the following: I dare not do or say or think a thing that might hurt or anger him. And here is another proof of his presence within me: if anyone were to make a remark about him, a remark inoffensive in itself but vulgarly worded, for example: “He's dead, he won't-fart any more,” I would consider it an insult and more than an insult, a profanation, and I would kill the insulter who insults not only my grief but Jean himself, who can hear, for he is inside me and I hear the insult. I would kill him because Jean has only my arms—which are his—with which to defend himself. I would have put up with his being insulted when he was alive, if he couldn't hear. And if he did hear, let him defend himself! He was young and strong. But he now hears with my ears and fights with the help of my fists. I therefore cannot doubt my love when this book which I am writing while he inhabits me is the eager quest for the hoodlums he despises. But I do not feel that I am committing a sacrilege in offering him monstrous stories. My earlier books were written in prison. In order to rest, I put my arm around Jean's neck in my imagination and spoke to him quietly about the latest chapters. As for the present book, whenever I stop writing I see myself alone at the foot of his open coffin in the amphitheater and I relate my tale to him sternly. He makes no comments, but I know that his body which has been disfigured by the bullets, blood, and an over-long stay in the refrigerator hears me and, though it may not approve of me, accepts me.
It is raining this morning, and it grieves me to think that he is in damp earth. I sit down, and my movement tells me that he can no longer sit. I beg of you, God:
Palace of my memory where the sea coils
Miraculous and wingèd, herds grazing on fear
God of mingled plaster and night gospel of fingers
Frozen by gold weak buttons harmony of woodwinds
Red cap black ark and blue gaze of Spanish wells
God of heaven and bare arms product
Of fear and fire peaceful pillow
Where I dream secret object malaise swarm
Of lost fans end of time god alone
And only house shutter sweet lime-blossom
Refuge god of evening or of sorrowful woods
White tortured bones gift of a happy prince
Palace of my memory where fear coils.
The guard who watches at your door, and these spear flowers
And that sponge, O my God, I am here.
I offer you my song that is drawn by your weary eye
Like a thread wound off through the eye, and my body
All hollowed out by that light golden thread
Will be thread of your dreams, reserve of piety,
Clear recording for your summer harps.
Precious spool, O God, your machines
Have so deep a need for love. Keep nights and my sleep
So that he may sleep, hear me Lord
A tale of nailed bones, of pierced bones, from elsewhere
Paradises closed over twisted boughs,
Shepherdess without echo, moonlight stretched
On the wires of the dryer, walk, walk through
The lost churches of the marbles of the sea.
The boy I carry about inside me smiles and is sadly amused at my being concerned with things of this world.
“Why buy dozens of handkerchiefs?”
Since my life no longer has meaning, since a gesture denotes nothing, I want to stop living. Even if this decision is nullified and renewed every single moment, it prevents me from using the future. Everything must be done within the moment, since the next moment I shall be among the dead, squatting in the field of honor and talking to Jean. Every empty gesture that makes me think life will continue either betrays my wish to die or gives offense to Jean, whose death should lead to mine by means of love. That is how I lace my shoes, and the
gesture quickens him. One doesn't wear shoes among the dead. I am therefore as detached from things as the condemned men I used to see in prison.
The only image of Jean I preserve within me is the one which shows him lying in his coffin, where he was still only a man condemned to death since his body had a more terrible and frightening presence than that of a boy who stopped breathing while awaiting the verdict. Although I knew he was dead, I saw him only as a condemned man who cares a little less about things and persists in his game of sleep. He had a haughty contempt in my presence, and his true death occurred only after the ceremony in church.
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Erik, who dressed like a prince, was the executioner's lover for two years. They would meet in the killer's small apartment on the Kronprinzenufer. The windows, like those of a Venetian palace, overlooked a canal. From behind the colored panes one could feel a thick fog rise up from the river. The fog might have set the house adrift had the building not been anchored to rock by the executioner's presence. But the house was firmer than a lighthouse lashed by storms. It was inhabited by a quiet killer, a man who indulged in guilty but peaceful love affairs.
The two rooms were dark because of the leaded windows. They were simply furnished in middle-class style: oak furniture, a radio, a bed. The walls were adorned with a photograph of the executioner and one of Erik. They led a domestic existence that enabled Erik to do his job in the Hitler Youth and the other to perform his morning murders. Erik played the harmonica. He would sometimes ask for details about an execution. He would insist on being told the victim's last words, on getting an account of his cries, gestures, and grimaces. He was becoming callous. And the executioner, in emptying himself a little into the ears of a boy who loved him, was becoming gentler. He would take long naps on the cushions. He would stroke an old dog whose rheumy eyes moved him to pity, just as he was moved by children's snot, the gum of a cherry tree, the juice of poppies and lettuce, the tears of gonorrhea.
Erik had been transformed. He cropped his hair less closely. What had been too soft in his expression had hardened. His cheeks had grown hollow. He had a growth of beard which he shaved every day. Marching, exercise, and physical training had strengthened his muscles even more. But his eyes still had a bland, faraway look, and his mouth, which was sharply outlined and amazingly sinuous, was as sad as ever. His voice finally now had assurance when he spoke to the executioner. It no longer had shrill notes and the trembling that accompanied them, notes that will come back when he is a prisoner in the apartment of Jean's mother.
Yet there were times when he would have liked to be the executioner so as to be able to contemplate himself and enjoy from without the beauty he emitted: to receive it. As for me, I would have loved to perform a single one of those gestures so as to have been caught, if only fleetingly, in a moment of beauty. When a speeding train gives me a glimpse of a boy standing in a fog amidst wet leaves and dead branches, a boy whose shoulder supports the weight of a big fellow whose breath mingles with his friend's, I no doubt envy his beauty, his ragged grace, and his luck in serving a happy minute. I console myself with the thought that he can't enjoy the moment because he is unaware of its charm and is waiting to get it over with.
I said earlier that Pierrot was willful and gentle. A word about his will: as a child, he spent the summer in the country. He would often fish in a stream and bait his line with the long worms called earthworms. He would look for them in loose ground and cram them into a pocket of his kneepants. The habit of biting one's nails is often accompanied by a corollary of putting into the mouth whatever the hand happens upon. Pierrot would mechanically pick from his pocket the dried bread crumbs of his four o'clock snack and eat them. One evening, he took from his pocket something hard and dry and put it into his mouth. The warmth and moisture quickly restored the softness of the shriveled worm which had remained in the pocket where it had dried and which the darkness had prevented the boy from recognizing. He found himself caught between fainting with disgust or mastering his situation by willing it. He willed it. He made his tongue and palate knowingly and patiently suffer the hideous contact. This willfulness was his first poet's attitude, an attitude governed by pride. He was ten years old.
Other and more generally practiced concerns were going to direct Erik as he pursued his individual destiny. Although the theft of the watch had delivered that proud young brute to the executioner, pride had led him to Russia where at times he still suffered at the memory of two years of humiliation. As shame assured him that not a single bond remained between him and human beings, he was ready for anything. In short, since circumstances—then judged unfortunate—had set him on a path that leads to the renunciation of honor, he would take advantage of them to rebuild his life on the basis of that terrible failing, not so as to erect it with abjection as its foundation but rather to allow the abject to make it achieve power.
I still do not know why it is necessary for Erik to commit a murder at this point. The explanations I shall give will not seem valid at first. However, if the murder of the child is out of place, that is, not in accordance with a logical order that justifies its presence in the novel, I must state that this act of Erik's comes in here, at this particular point, because it forces itself on me. It may shed light on what happens later in the story.
If the only sin—evil according to the world—is to take life, it is not surprising that murder is the symbolic act of evil and that one instinctively recoils from it. The reader will therefore not be surprised that I wanted to be helped in my first murder. The declaration of war thrilled me. My hour had struck. I could kill a man without danger, I would know what one kills in oneself, and what remorse after killing is like. But without danger, I mean without danger of social reprobation, without incurring the prison sentence of the person who destroys life. At last I was going to strike out for my freedom.
One evening when I was strolling outside a small French village that had recently been taken, a stone grazed the bottom of my trousers. I thought it was an attack or insult. My hand flew to my revolver. I was immediately on guard, that is, I bent one knee and spun around. I was on a small dune in the deserted countryside. Sixty feet away I saw a kid of about fifteen playing with a puppy, throwing stones which the animal retrieved. One of the carelessly thrown stones had grazed me. Fear and then anger of having been afraid and reacting with fear in sight of a child's innocent eyes, and the fact of having been a Frenchman's target, plus the nervousness of all my gestures, made me grab the grip of my revolver and tear it from its holster. In any other circumstance, I would have come to my senses. I would have sheathed my weapon, but I was alone and felt I was. Immediately, on looking at the child's delicate face, which delicacy made ironic, I realized that the moment had come to know murder. The swift, shoreless rivers of green anger were flowing within me, from north to south, from one hand to the other, mingling their boiling, impetuous waves and their calm, flat ones. My gaze was fixed in a set, grim, and yet sparkling face, for rays from all the features converged around the bridge of the nose. A cry might have saved me from the mute, blurred rattle that rose up, without emerging, from my stomach to my mouth. The child bent down in the twilight to take the slobbery stone from the dog's mouth. He straightened up with a laugh. Snow fell. Before my eyes, such gentleness descended upon the woebegone landscape to soften the ridges of things, the angles of gestures, the thorny crown of the stones, a snow so light that my hand with the gun lowered a little. The joyous black puppy yelped twice as it frisked about the child. The twilight soothed bleeding Europe. The boy's lips were parted, and I parted mine in the same way, but without smiling, for I inhaled not air but more hatred. The dog was leaping about its bare-kneed master without a sound.
The green waves, which had grown calm for a moment, rolled through me faster and faster. The cataracts set electrical machines going, turbines,
something like that, dynamos which emitted a terrible current that escaped through the gauze, piercing the veil of snow, splitting the muslins that the sweetness of the child's face spread like a twilight of milk over the countryside which had been frightened by the anger of the offended soldier.
“Violence calms storms, the time has come.”
I felt my weapon in my right hand. A column of darkness or pure water, contained by the shape of our lips, circulated from my open mouth to the open mouth of the child sixty feet away and linked us down as far as our stomachs. But my periwinkle gaze was destroying the strict appearances and seeking the secret of death. My black police cap, which had been too far down over my eye, was displaced by my brusque about-face, fell on my shoulder and to the ground.
“I'm shedding my leaves” was a thought that flashed through my mind, barely grazing me. My left hand made a very subtle gesture to snatch up the fallen cap. A faint green vapor rose up over my subsided rivers. A touch of humanity brought thought back to me, slowly, though only three seconds had elapsed between the brusque about-face and the gesture of aiming. My more human glances were even graver, more bent on melting the gentleness that the boy's smile had snowed over the stunned countryside, which had fallen on its ass without daring to complain. In order to aim, I had only to shift the gun imperceptibly, to right the muzzle, whose cunning black mouth, though it had been humiliated for a moment at watching the earth laugh below, suddenly became strong in the assurance that it was expressing an eternal, obvious truth: a tiny fraction of an inch in the new aim was sufficient. Nevertheless, my hand moved slowly and solemnly as I readjusted my aim. The black-sleeved arm holding the gun strayed a huge distance away, moved the hand into the darkness, passed behind the mound over which the child towered, enveloped him several times, bent back, returned, passed behind me, and tied me to the child, who was still linked to me by the column of darkness. Then, getting still longer and suppler, the arm enclosed the countryside, seized the darkness, compressed it, fastened it in that slow but sovereign movement of encircling the moment and turned it into a repulsive block traversed by the blue ray of Erik's increasingly human gaze. The arm made a few more loops, grabbing and strangling every living thing it encountered, and brought back in front of me, waist-high—a bit higher—and slightly more to the right, the resolute revolver. The first stroke of seven rang out from the invisible belfry. Stars in the sky, maybe one or two. I felt that the gun was becoming an organ of my body, an essential organ whose black orifice, which was marked by a more gleaming little circle, was, for the time being, my own mouth, which at last was having its say. My finger on the trigger. The highest moment of freedom was attained. To fire on God, to wound him and make him a deadly enemy. I fired. I fired three shots.
