Funeral Rites

by Jean Genet

  Erik felt strong, and tender. The thought that all was lost impelled him to kindness for the first time.

  His beauty dictated his proud attitudes, and he would have died standing, offering himself, without witnesses, to the bullets—not in order to compose an image of gallantry for the final hour, but because his physical beauty, being proud, allowed him only such gestures as: raising his head or torso, crying no, tossing a grenade or a stone as a last projectile, crushing a face beneath his heel, etc., gestures which were in keeping with his gaze and also with the harmonious model of his whole body and of his features. His heroism was not a pose, nor was it assumed so that he would be worthy of his beauty—so as to heighten it, for example—for he forgot about it in action. Rather, he was heroic because that beauty (of the face and body) acted, without his realizing it, in all his acts, commanded them, filled them.

  Though he tried to take advantage of the war to break away from the executioner, in moments of sadness—that is, when he was resting in the rear lines or immobilized in snow and mud—a great need for tenderness and protection made him turn toward his friend, who would then appear to him (so far away, in the center of the capital) in the role of an imperturbable dispenser of justice whose life and function were becoming more and more of a mystery to him.

  He plundered France, shipped to Germany furniture stolen from museums, and paintings, carpets, cloth, gold. He wanted his destiny to be carried out quickly and death to take him without his regretting anything. With icy cruelty, he was pursuing his ascesis. For the same reason that made him choose his linen with great care and buy leather goods and English cloth, that is, in order to keep his feet on the ground, with desperate eagerness he sought a pretext that would justify his social life—and found it. In short, he had given himself an aim, and a most frivolous one, for he had no faith that might have enabled him to choose serious ones.

  “That's all I can do, be a pivot (which is what I am) and surround myself with the rarest ornaments in the world so that I don't covet anything. With luxury and money I'll be free.” He had to fulfill himself in the easiest way. And to see himself for only one day. To know for only one day that he was complete would be enough for him. There is a book entitled I'll Have a Fine Funeral. We are acting with a view to a fine funeral, to formal obsequies. They will be the masterpiece, in the strict sense of the word, the major work, quite rightly the crowning glory of our life. I must die in an apotheosis, and it doesn't matter whether I know glory before or after my death as long as I know that I'll have it, and I shall have it if I sign a contract with a firm of undertakers that will attend to fulfilling my destiny, to rounding it off.

  "Komm, mein Ritône.”

  Perhaps because he had to muffle his voice, he uttered the words so tenderly that Riton was flooded with disgust. He was being torn from his proud solitude. No doubt he knew he could never maintain it, but they could at least let him enjoy that beautiful moment which he thought he had artfully prepared a long time before. Let him and the moment remain alone together, in a sublimity that would end only with daylight.

  With the speed of a man falling, he again became a fleeing soldier who runs off exhausted. He said:

  “Yes yes, I'm coming.” But he did not move. An added gush of bitterness sickened him. While trying so cleverly to pride himself on having accepted, alone and light-heartedly, the fact of being abandoned by an entire people, he was secretly hoping for the faint excuse of a threat, of pressure exerted by the Germans, for one does not escape as easily as one thinks from a country that sticks to you, that clings to your hands and feet, if you pull them, in cables of molasses impossible to break. Threats and blows would have helped Riton break free. Instead of gripping him firmly, the German, his comrade-in-arms, spoke to him in the tone in which one speaks to the dying. Anyway, Riton had a right to count on the Germans’ disgust with a Frenchman who goes over to the enemy. By increasing his solitude, such disgust would have made him stronger, harder, more capable of putting up with it. Since the first day's fighting he had lost all hope of saving himself. Perhaps a few more flights over the rooftops, a few bursts of machine-gun fire, but there was little chance of getting out of it, since the sergeant and his men refused to surrender. If he himself surrendered, he would be shot. In any case, barring a miracle, he had little time left. A whole lifetime would be too long for him to take the risk of accepting it with utter contempt, but at least let them not diminish his sacrifice by offering him ridiculous tenderness.

  Riton thought of the German soldiers and his friends who had escaped by the sewers. They were leading, in another darkness, a life which was the subterranean replica of his life up in the sky. They were somewhat like our reflections at the bottom of muddy ponds when we are on the shore. “The poor guys, they must be with the rats. I ate cat and they're eating rat. If we see each other again, we'll start fighting. . . .” He felt in his flesh the presence of a cat, a cat so well assimilated that at times he was afraid it could be heard miaowing and purring. He was also afraid that it might emerge from him and go off in its new form (of cat or devil) with part of his flesh. He kept peering into the darkness with his hand on his gun, and Erik thought he was aiming at something. He himself looked around suspiciously and whispered:

  “You, want shoot?”

  He stopped talking.

  A deep modesty suddenly prevented him from wanting to know any more or say any more about himself. He saw himself in an iron darkness, in the presence of a strange, barefoot creature on the balcony, a creature with arms of flesh who was emerging from a heavy, dripping corset and was dressed in a complete weapon as if he had dwelt in the barrel of the machine gun and bullets had shot from his mouth. We know the power of the muzzle of a gun. When I heard that Jean had gone to a party despite his oath, I put my gun into my pocket and left with the kid. We went down to the Seine. It was dark. There was nobody around. We were near the parapet, under the trees. My arm was around his neck.

  “My darling.”

  My mouth was on his ear, and my tongue and lips got busy. He shuddered with pleasure. I got a hard-on. I put my right hand into my pocket and very cautiously took out my gun. My anger was softened by my excitement and loosened its hold. The air was mild. The most serene music descended from the sky to the water and from the trees to us. I whispered in Jean's ear:

  “You little bitch, you gave yourself, eh?”

  He thought I was using a lover's language, he smiled. My gun was in my hand and was being caressed by the night air. I pressed the muzzle against the kid's hip and said, in an implacable tone:

  “My finger's on the trigger. If you move, you'll drop.”

  He understood. He murmured, facing the river:

  “Jean!”

  “Don't say a word.”

  We stood there motionless. The water was flowing with such solemnity that one would have thought it had been delegated by the gods to make the slow course of the drama visible. I said:

  “Wait.”

  I withdrew the muzzle that was buried in the cloth of the jacket. At no time did I feel that I was preparing a murder. I added, softly:

  “Do as I tell you. Do it or I'll shoot. Here. Now suck.”

  I placed the muzzle of my gun on his parted lips, which he brought together.

  “I'm telling you it's loaded. Suck.”

  He opened his mouth and I inserted the tip of the weapon in it. I whispered in his ear:

  “Go on, suck it, you little bitch.”

  His pride hardened him. He was motionless, unperturbed.

  “Well?”

  I heard the click of his teeth on the steel. He was watching the Seine flow by. His whole body must have been waiting for the lightning that would kill us, the hummed love song that would distract me, the eagle that had been instructed to carry off me, the cop, the child, the dog.

  “Suck or I'll shoot.”

  I said it in such a tone that he sucked. My body was pressed against his. With my free hand I stroked his behind.
/>   “That must give you a hard-on since you like that.”

  I delicately contrived to slip my hand into his fly, which I opened. I stroked him, I kneaded him. Little by little he got excited, though not as stiff as I pride myself that I can make someone if I care to.

  “Go on, suck it till it shoots.”

  I tremble with shame at the memory of that moment, for it was I who gave in. I withdrew the muzzle of the gun from that beautifully curved mouth and moved it to Jean's ribs, at heart level. The Seine kept flowing quietly. Above us, the still foliage of the plane trees was animated by the very spirit of tragic expectation. Things around us dropped their defenses.

  “You're lucky, you bitch.”

  He turned his head slightly toward me. His eyes were shining. He was holding back his tears.

  “You can talk now. You're lucky I don't have the guts to blast your dirty bitchy little mug.”

  He looked at me for a second, then turned his eyes away.

  “Beat it!”

  He looked at me again and walked off. I went home with my weapon lowered. Early next morning he knocked at the door of my room. He took advantage of my usual morning torpor to bring about the reconciliation I longed for.

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  The winded hearse had come to a stop, for the road was going uphill through pine woods. The horse stopped to rest. The familiarity of death with nature was nobility itself. The maid, who was ready to drop, caught up with the procession, but no sooner was she under the pines and stirred by the smell of resin and life when the funereal machine got under way again. A hundred yards farther, the horse's shoes rang out on the king's highway. The procession was going through a suburb. The maid looked up. The first thing she saw was the police station, which is always at the entrance of villages. The policemen were sleeping on cots. The dark uniforms lay strewn on the worn, mud-stained bedside rugs or drooped on chairs above empty boots. The muscular bodies were naked, chastely stretched out in the summer humidity. Black flies alighted on them. The men's sleep was dreamless. Making one's rounds against petty theft in the countryside is tiring. But had one of them seen the maid go by as he stood at the window with shirt half unbuttoned and his belt loosely buckled, he would not have recognized the wiliest of hoodlums under that extravagant grief and mourning. A little farther off was the prison. In the façade, behind the outer wall, were seventeen skylights, and through the bars of one of them hung a huge and tiny hand frozen in a gesture of farewell, the unhappy hand of a condemned woman. Finally we reached the town. All the windows were decked with flags, and tricolored bunting hung in the sun. The stone balconies were decorated in Roman fashion with sheets, rugs, garlands, and ivy monograms. The whole village was at the window to see the royal procession go by. People were waving their arms, applauding, laughing, shouting for joy. The maid was so weary that she felt smaller than a stone, fit at most for blocking the wheels of the hearse. She was as weary as a soldier back from a parade, but she held herself together, supported at each step by the national anthems which were playing a victory march for her alone.

  That day will be a long one. Perhaps the sun set and rose several times, but a kind of fixity—which was chiefly in the gaze—made people, animals, plants, and objects stand out with flawless lucidity. Every object maintained within itself a motionless time from which sleep was banished. It is not by exceeding twenty-four hours that this day is lengthened: it stretches the moments, and each thing observes them with such fixed attention that one feels nothing will pass unnoticed. The trees in particular want to catch you in the act; their immobility infuriates me. The day of Jean's funeral thus acquired a living personality which seemed to me to be marked by the contents of Jean's death, or rather by the contents of Jean dead, wrapped in cloth, a precious and life-giving nucleus, a soft, compact almond around which the day wound itself, worked at its thread, spun its cocoon in which the dead boy lived; around which life and its characters—and I, exceptionally, along with them, whereas usually I am that nucleus—wound and unwound themselves spirally in all directions. From the moment I saw Jean displayed in his coffin (at four in the afternoon) until midnight of the following day, this day, which was strange on account of its position in time and frightening on account of the very presence in its heart of a corpse that in the end filled it completely since it was its essence, rendered painful and made difficult because of my friendship for Jean, and violently revealed to me by his death, could end, despite two evenings, two dead suns, two or three lunches, two or three dinners, only after I had slept. When I woke up, I felt a little less horror, but for forty hours had lived, had flowed on, within a living day whose life was emitted, like dawn around the manger, by the luminous corpse of a twenty-year-old child that had the shape and consistency of a milk-almond in its cloths and wrappings. A similar day is going to flow by. Every single object is very attentive and is making an effort to note it by noticing it. Things are on the watch. The colonel's tooth-glass makes its crystal maintain a deeper state of pensiveness. It listens. It records. The trees can toss about, shake their feathers in the wind, they can growl, fight, sing, but their agitation is deceptive: they are on the watch. One of them in particular disturbs me. As for the characters, they are poisoned. All these pages will be pallid, for moonlight flows in their veins instead of blood.

  On each side of the street stood three- and four-story middle-class sandstone houses. Faces were smiling at the doorsteps. People were throwing kisses to the Prussian tank that was covered with foliage. The top of the turret was crowned with the motionless torso of Erik. He was fascinating because of the color of his outfit, the severity of his gaze, the beauty of his face. The people were delirious. All the bands of heaven were blaring their music. Hitler appeared on the balcony of a very simple house. He looked at the maid. She was following the tank, which was accompanied by the noise of cannon and churchbells. He saluted, in his fashion, with his arm extended and hand open, but he did not smile. Erik did not see the Führer. Sharp-eyed, evil-eyed, he was driving his tank.

  “Hitler surely recognized me,” thought the maid, and her grief eased a little, for her daughter's death was serving the Führer's glory. The souls of these cherubim and the fragrance of their innocence were enough to destroy the world. The people were still cheering the tank as it went by. Hitler left the balcony, and, after dismissing the dignitaries of the Air Force and of the Army and Navy, who had accompanied him at a respectful distance, he retired to his room.

  Jewelers call a good-sized, well-cut diamond a solitaire. One speaks of its “water,” that is, its limpidness, which is also its brilliance. Hitler's solitude made him sparkle. In one of his recent speeches (I am writing this in September 1944), he cried:

  (It may be noted that his public life was no more than a raging torrent of cries. A gushing. A fountain whose limpidness is free of any thought other than the physical movement of the voice) he cried:

  “. . . I shall withdraw, if necessary, to the top of the Spitzberg!” But did I ever leave it? My castration forces me to a white, icy solitude. The bullet that tore off both my balls in 1917 subjected me to the harsh discipline of the dry masturbator, but also to the sweet pleasures of pride.

  Gérard, who was the master of my secret revels, had the right to enter immediately when I was alone. He therefore entered, pushing in front of him a pale, young French hoodlum with a cap in his hand. The boy was not particularly surprised at finding himself in the presence of the most powerful man of the age. Hitler stood up, for he knew that the politeness of kings is exquisite, and put out his hand to Paulo, whose amazement and horror began that very moment. The seated wax effigy came to life on his behalf. Despite having done so, it retained the damp lock of hair across the forehead, the two long wrinkles, the mustache, the cross-belt, all the attributes by which the most obscure of men had suddenly become the most illustrious, and the only one
Paulo had really looked at in the waxworks museum in Paris when he was sixteen. However, he had already been dragged to so many orgies, in Paris and Berlin, where he had honestly thought that all the tired queers at those parties were infantes, princes, and kings that he was not intimidated. The Führer looked at him. He had weighed the thigh muscles in the trousers with wrinkles at the knees as soon as the door opened. The sculpture of the neck and head seemed fine to him. He smiled and looked at Gérard.

  "Wunderschön,” he said. And to Paulo:

  "Wie heissen sie?"

  "Er ist Franzose” said Gérard.

  “Ah, you are French?” Hitler's smile broadened.

  “Yes, sir,” said Paulo, who was about to add . . . “and from Paname,"* but he checked himself in time. This time he had the feeling that he was at the very heart of one of the world's gravest moments. The ambassadors, the general staffs, the ministers, the whole world, who were unaware of this interview and still arranging for it, had to wait for it to come to an end. Paulo hardly breathed. The room was rather large but had commonplace printed drapes and was furnished with Tyrolese chairs. In that room was the world's pivot, the diamond axis on which, according to certain Hindu cosmographies, the world turns. The bronze doors of the moment were closed. Paulo thought very fast, and with such fright that he squeezed his cap against his chest with both hands: “Even though Hitler acts so charming, he won't be able to let me leave the palace, for there are secrets it's mortally dangerous to know.” And while all this agitation, which lasted the rest of his life, was taking shape, Paulo barely noticed that the Führer was beckoning to Gérard and saying good-by to him.