Our Lady of the Flowers

by Jean Genet

  “Like a woman in childbirth!”

  The solid citizens going by form a crowd and see nothing, know nothing. They are scarcely, imperceptibly, dislodged from their calm state of confidence by the trivial event: Divine being led away by the arm, and her sisters bewailing her.

  Having been released, the next evening she is again at her post on the boulevard. Her blue eyelid is swollen:

  “My God, Beauties, I almost passed out. The policemen held me up. They were all standing around me fanning me with their checked handkerchiefs. They were the Holy Women wiping my face. My Divine Face. ‘Snap out of it, Divine! Snap out of it,’ they shouted, ‘snap out of it, snap out of it!’ They were singing to me.

  “They took me to a dark cell. Someone (Oh! that SOMEONE who must have drawn them! I shall seek him throughout the fine print on the heavy pages of adventure novels which throng with miraculously handsome and raffish page boys. I untie and unlace the doublet and hip boots of one of them. who follows Black-Stripe John; I leave him, a cruel knife in one hand and his stiff prick clutched in the other, standing with his face to the white wall, and here he is, a young, fiercely virgin convict. He puts his cheek to the wall. With a kiss, he licks the vertical surface, and the greedy plaster sucks in his saliva. Then a shower of kisses. All his movements outline an invisible horseman who embraces him and whom the inhuman wall confines. At length, bored to tears, overtaxed with love, the page draws. . . .) had drawn, dear ladies, a whirligig of ah! yes yes, my Beauties, dream and play the Boozer so you can fly there–I refuse to tell you what–but they were winged and puffy and big, sober as cherubs, splendid cocks, made of barley sugar. Ladies, around some of them that were more upright and solid than the others, were twined clematis and convolvulus and nasturtium, and winding little pimps too. Oh! those columns! The cell was flying at top speed! It drove me simply mad, mad, mad!”

  The sweet prison cells! After the foul monstrousness of my arrest, of my various arrests, each of which is always the first, which appeared to me in all its irremediable aspects in an inner vision of blazing and fatal speed and brilliance the moment my hands were imprisoned in the steel handcuffs, gleaming as a jewel or a theorem, the prison cell, which now I love as one loves a vice, consoled me, by its being, for my own being.

  The odor of prison is an odor of urine, formaldehyde, and paint. I have recognized it in all the prisons of Europe, and I recognized that this odor would finally be the odor of my destiny. Every time I backslide, I examine the walls for the traces of my earlier captivities, that is, of my earlier despairs, regrets, and desires that some other convict has carved out for me. I explore the surface of the walls, in quest of the fraternal trace of a friend. For though I have never known what friendship could actually be, what vibrations the friendship of two men sets up in their hearts and perhaps on their skin, in prison I sometimes long for a brotherly friendship, but always with a man–of my own age–who is handsome, who would have complete confidence in me and be the accomplice of my loves, my thefts, my criminal desires, though this does not enlighten me about such friendship, about the odor, in both friends, of its secret intimacy, because for the occasion I make myself a male who knows that he really isn't one. I await the revelation on the wall of some terrible secret: especially murder, murder of men, or betrayal of friendship, or profanation of the dead, a secret of which I shall be the resplendent tomb. But all I have ever found has been an occasional phrase scratched on the plaster with a pin, formulas of love or revolt, more often of resignation: “Jojo of the Bastille loves his girl for life.” “My heart to my mother, my cock to the whores, my head to the hangman.” These rupestral inscriptions are almost always a gallant homage to womanhood, or a smattering of those bad stanzas that are known to bad boys all over France:

  When coal turns white,

  And soot's not black,

  I'll forget the prison

  That's at my back.

  And those pipes of Pan that mark the days gone by!

  And then the following surprising inscription carved in the marble under the main entrance: “Inauguration of the prison, March 17, 1900,” which makes me see a procession of official gentlemen solemnly bringing in the first prisoner to be incarcerated.

  –Divine: “My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.”

  –Divine's kindness. She had complete and invincible confidence in men with tough, regular faces, with thick hair, a lock of which falls over the forehead, and this confidence seemed to be inspired by the glamor these faces had for Divine. She had often been taken in, she whose critical spirit is so keen. She realized this suddenly, or gradually, tried to counteract this attitude, and finally intellectual scepticism, struggling with emotional consent, won out and took root in her. But in that way she is still in error, because she now takes it out on the very young men to whom she feels attracted. She receives their declarations with a smile or ironic remark that ill conceals her weakness (weakness of the faggots in the presence of the lump in Gorgui's pants), and her efforts not to yield to their carnal beauty (to make them dance to her tune), while they, on the other hand, immediately return the smile, which is now more cruel, as if, shot forth from Divine's teeth, it rebounded from theirs, which were sharper, colder, more glacial, because in her presence their teeth were more coldly beautiful.

  But, to punish herself for being mean to the mean, Divine goes back on her decisions and humiliates herself in the presence of the pimps, who fail to understand what's going on. Nevertheless, she is scrupulously kind. One day, in the police wagon, on the way back from court, for she often slipped, particularly for peddling dope, she asks an old man:

  “How many?”

  He answers:

  “They slapped me with three years. What about you?”

  She's down for only two, but answers:

  “Three years.”

  –July Fourteenth: red, white, and blue everywhere. Divine dresses up in all the other colors, out of consideration for them, because they are disdained.

  Divine and Darling. To my mind, they are the ideal pair of lovers. From my evil-smelling hole, beneath the coarse wool of the covers, with my nose in the sweat and my eyes wide open, alone with them, I see them.

  Darling is a giant whose curved feet cover half the globe as he stands with his legs apart in baggy, sky-blue silk underpants. He rams it in. So hard and calmly that anuses and vaginas slip onto his member like rings on a finger. He rams it in. So hard and calmly that his virility. observed by the heavens, has the penetrating force of the battalions of blond warriors who on June 14, 1940, buggered us soberly and seriously, though their eyes were elsewhere as they marched in the dust and sun. But they are the image of only the tensed, buttressed Darling. Their granite prevents them from being slithering pimps.

  I close my eyes. Divine: a thousand shapes, charming in their grace, emerge from my eyes, mouth, elbows, knees, from all parts of me. They say to me: “Jean, how glad I am to be living as Divine and to be living with Darling.”

  I close my eyes. Divine and Darling. To Darling, Divine is barely a pretext, an occasion. If he thought of her, he would shrug his shoulders to shake off the thought, as if the thought were a dragon's claws clinging to his back. But to Divine, Darling is everything. She takes care of his penis. She caresses it with the most profuse tenderness and calls it by the kind of pet names used by ordinary folk when they feel horny. Such expressions as Little Dicky, the Babe in the Cradle, Jesus in His Manger, the Hot Little Chap, your Baby Brother, without her formulating them, take on full meaning. Her feeling accepts them literally. Darling's penis is in itself all of Darling: the object of her pure luxury, an object of pure luxury. If Divine is willing to see in her man anything other than a hot, purplish member, it is because she can follow its stiffness, which extends to the anus, and can sense that it goes farther into his body, that it is this very body of Darling erect and terminating in a pale, tired face, a face of eyes, nose, mo
uth, flat cheeks, curly hair, beads of sweat.

  I close my eyes beneath the lice-infested blankets. Divine has opened the fly and arranged this mysterious area of her man. Has beribboned the bush and penis, stuck flowers into the buttonholes of the fly. (Darling goes out with her that way in the evening.) The result is that to Divine, Darling is only the magnificent delegation on earth, the physical expression, in short, the symbol of a being (perhaps God), of an idea that remains in heaven. They do not commune. Divine may be compared to Marie-Antoinette, who, according to my history of France, had to learn to express herself in prison. willy-nilly, in the slang current in the eighteenth century. Poor dear Queen!

  If Divine says in a shrill voice: “They dragged me into court,” the words conjure up for me an old Countess Solange, in a very ancient gown with a train of lace, whom soldiers are dragging on her knees, by her bound wrists, over the cobblestones of a law court.

  “I'm swooning with love,” she said.

  Her life stopped, but around her life continued to flow. She felt as if she were going backward in time, and wild with fright at the idea of–the rapidity of it–reaching the beginning, the Cause, she finally released a gesture that very quickly set her heart beating again.

  Once again the kindness of this giddy creature. She asks a young murder whom we shall eventually meet (Our Lady of the Flowers) a question. This casual question so wounds the murderer that Divine sees his face decomposing visibly. Then, immediately, running after the pain she has caused in order to overtake it and stop it, stumbling over the syllables, getting all tangled up in her saliva, which is like tears of emotion, she cries out:

  “No, no, it's me.”

  The friend of the family is the giddiest thing I know in the neighborhood. Mimosa II. Mimosa the Great, the One, is now being kept by an old man. She has her villa in Saint-Cloud. As she was in love with Mimosa II who was then a milkman, she left her her name. The II isn't pretty, but what can be done about it? Divine has invited her to high tea. She came to the garret at about five o'clock. They kissed each other on the cheek, being very careful to make sure their bodies did not touch. She greeted Darling with a male handshake, and there she is sitting on the couch where Divine sleeps. Darling was preparing the ladies’ tea; he had his little coquetries.

  “It's nice of you to have come, Mimo. We see you so seldom.”

  “That's the least I could do, my dear. Besides, I simply adore your little nook. It has quite a vicarage effect with the park in the distance. It must be awfully nice having the dead for neighbors!”

  Indeed, the window was very lovely.

  When the cemetery was beneath the moon, at night, from her bed, Divine would see it bright and deep in the moonlight. The light was such that one could clearly discern, beneath the grass of the graves and beneath the marble, the spectral unrest of the dead. Thus, the cemetery, through the fringed window, was like a limpid eye between two wide-open lids, or, better still, it was like a blue glass eye–those eyes of the fair-haired blind–in the hollow of a Negro's palm. It would dance, that is, the wind stirred the grass and the cypresses. It would dance, that is, it was melodic and its body moved like a jellyfish. Divine's relations with the cemetery: it had worked its way into her soul, somewhat as certain sentences work their way into a text, that is, a letter here, a letter there. The cemetery within her was present at cafés, on the boulevard, in jail, under the blankets, in the pissoirs. Or, if you prefer, the cemetery was present within her somewhat as that gentle, faithful, submissive dog was present in Darling, occasionally giving the pimp's face the sad, stupid look that dogs have.

  Mimosa is leaning out the window, the bay window of the Departed, and is looking for a grave with her finger pointing. When she has found it, she yelps:

  “Ah! you hussy, you harlot, so you finally kicked off! So now you're good and stiff beneath the icy marble. And I'm walking on your rugs, you bitch!”

  “You're wackeroo,” muttered Darling, who almost bawled her out in whore (a secret language).

  “Darling, I may be wacky with love for you, you great big terrible Darling, but Charlotte's down there in the grave! Charlotte's right down there!”

  We laughed, for we knew that Charlotte was her grandfather who was down in the cemetery, with a grant in perpetuity.

  “And how's Louise (that was Mimosa's father)? And Lucie (her mother)?” asked Divine.

  “Ah! Divine, don't talk to me about them. They're much too well. The dumb bitches'll never kick off. They're just a couple of filthy sluts.”

  Darling liked what the faggots talked about. He especially liked, provided it was done in private, the way they talked. While preparing the tea, he listened, with a gliding caravel on his lips. Darling's smile was never stagnant. It seemed forever twitching with a touch of anxiety. Today he is more anxious than usual, for tonight he is to leave Divine; in view of what is going to happen, Mimosa seems to him terrible, wolflike. Divine has no idea of what is in store. She will learn all at once of her desertion and of Mimosa's shabby behavior. For they have managed the affair without losing any time. Roger, Mimosa's man, has taken a powder.

  “My Roger's off to the wars. She's gone to play Amazon.”

  Mimosa said that one day in front of Darling, who offered, in jest, to replace Roger. Well, she accepted.

  Our domestic life and the law of our Homes do not resemble your Homes. We love each other without love. Our homes do not have the sacramental character. Fags are the great immoralists. In the twinkling of an eye, after six years of union, without considering himself attached, without thinking that he was causing pain or doing wrong, Darling decided to leave Divine. Without remorse, only a slight concern that perhaps Divine might refuse ever to see him again.

  As for Mimosa, the fact of hurting a rival is enough to make her happy about the pain she is causing.

  The two queens were chirping away. Their talk was dull compared to the play of their eyes. The eyelids did not flutter, nor did the temples crinkle. Their eyeballs flowed from right to left, left to right, rotated, and their glances were manipulated by a system of ball bearings. Let us listen now as they whisper so that Darling may draw near and, standing beside them, pachyderm that he is, make titanic efforts to understand. Mimosa whispers:

  “My dear, it's when the Cuties still have their pants on that I like them. You just look at them and they get all stiff. It drives you mad, simply mad! It starts a crease that goes on and on and on, all the way down to their feet. When you touch it, you keep following the crease, without pressing on it, right to the toes. My love, you'd think that the Beaut was going straight down. For that, I recommend sailors especially.”

  Darling was smiling faintly. He knows. The Big Beaut of a man does not excite him, but he is no longer surprised that it excites Divine and Mimosa.

  Mimosa says to Darling:

  “You're playing hostess. To get away from us.”

  He answers:

  “I'm making the tea.”

  As if realizing that his answer was too noncommittal, he added:

  “No news from Rogerboy?”

  “No,” said Mimosa, “I'm the Quite-Alone.”

  She also meant: “I'm the Quite-Persecuted.” When they had to express a feeling that risked involving an exuberance of gesture or voice, the queens contented themselves with saying: “I'm the Quite-Quite,” in a confidential tone, almost a murmur, heightened by a slight movement of their ringed hand which calms an invisible storm. Oldtimers who, in the days of the great Mimosa, had known the wild cries of freedom and the mad gestures of boldness brought on by feelings swollen with desires that contorted the mouth, made the eyes glow, and bared the teeth, wondered what mysterious mildness had now replaced the disheveled passions. Once Divine began her litany, she kept on until she was exhausted. The first time Darling heard it, he merely looked at her in bewilderment. It was in the room; he was amused; but when Divine began again in the street, he said:

  “Shut up, chick. You're not gonna make me look li
ke an ass in front of the boys.”

  His voice was so cold, so ready to give her the works. that Divine recognized her Master's Voice. She restrained herself. But you know that nothing is so dangerous as repression. One evening, at a pimp's bar on the Place Clichy (where, out of prudence, Darling usually went without her), Divine paid for the drinks and, in picking up the change, forgot to leave a tip on the counter for the waiter. When she realized it, she let out a shriek that rent the mirrors and the lights, a shriek that stripped the pimps:

  “My God, I'm the Quite-Giddy!”

  Right and left, with the merciless speed of misfortune, two slaps shut her up, shrank her like a greyhound, her head no longer even as high as the bar. Darling was in a rage. He was green beneath the neon. “Beat it,” he said. He, however, went on sipping his cognac to the last drop.

  These cries (Darling will say: “She's losing her yipes,” as if he were thinking: “You're losing money,” or, “You're putting on weight.”) were one of the idiosyncrasies of Mimosa I that Divine had appropriated. When they and a few others were together in the street or a queer café, from their conversations (from their mouths and hands) would escape ripples of flowers, in the midst of which they simply stood or sat about as casually as could be, discussing ordinary household matters.

  “I really am, sure sure sure, the Quite-Profligate.”

  “Oh, Ladies, I'm acting like such a harlot.”

  “You know (the ou was so drawn out that that was all one noticed), yoouknow, I'm the Consumed-with-Affliction.”

  “Here here, behold the Quite-Fluff-Fluff.”

  One of them, when questioned by a detective on the boulevard:

  “Who are you?”

  “I'm a Thrilling Thing.”

  Then, little by little, they understood each other by saying: ‘'I'm the Quite-Quite,” and finally: “I'm the Q'Q’.”

  It was the same for the gestures. Divine had a very great one: when she took her handkerchief from her pocket, it described an enormous arc before she put it to her lips. Anyone trying to read something into Divine's gesture would have been infallibly mistaken, for two gestures were here contained in one. There was the elaborated gesture, which was diverted from its initial goal, and the one that contained and completed it by grafting itself on just at the point where the first ceased. Thus, in taking her hand out of her pocket, Divine had meant to extend her arm and shake her unfurled lace handkerchief. To shake it for a farewell to nothing, or to let fall a powder which it did not contain, a perfume–no, it was a pretext. This tremendous gesture was needed to relate the following oppressive drama: “I am alone. Save me who can.” But Darling, though unable to destroy it completely, had reduced the gesture, which, without, however, becoming trivial, had turned into something hybrid and thereby strange. He had, in overwhelming it, made it overwhelming. Speaking of these constraints, Mimosa had said: