Our Lady of the Flowers

by Jean Genet

  When he walked by, Darling was smoking, and a slit of abandon in the woman's hardness of soul chanced just then to be open, a slit that catches the hook cast by innocent looking objects. If one of your openings happens to be loosely fastened or a flap of your softness to be floating, you're done for. Instead of holding his cigarette between the first joint of the forefinger and middle finger, Darling was pinching it with his thumb and forefinger and covering it with the other fingers, the way men and even small boys usually hold their pricks when they piss at the foot of a tree or into the night. The woman (when he spoke to Divine about her, Darling referred to her as “the floozy” and Divine called her “that woman") was unaware of the virtue of that position and, as far as certain details are concerned, of the position itself. But its spell therefore acted upon her all the more promptly. She knew, though without quite knowing why, that Darling was a hard guy, because to her a hard guy was, above all, a male with a hard-on. She became mad about him. But she came too late. Her round curves and soft femininity no longer acted upon Darling, who was now used to the hard contact of a stiff penis. At the woman's side, he remained inert. The gulf frightened him. Still, he made an effort to overcome his distaste and keep the woman attached to him in order to get money from her. He acted gallantly eager. But a day came when, unable to bear it any longer, he admitted that he loved a–earlier he might have said a boy, but now he has to say a man, for Divine is a man–a man then. The lady was outraged and uttered the word fairy. Darling slapped her and left.

  But he did not want his dessert to escape him (Divine was his steak), and he went back to wait for her one day at the Saint Lazare Station, where she got off, for she came in every day from Versailles.

  The Saint Lazare Station is the movie-stars’ station.

  Our Lady of the Flowers, still and already wearing the light, baggy, youthful, preposterously thin and, in a word, ghostlike gray-flannel suit that he was wearing the day of the crime and that he will be wearing the day of his death, came there to buy a ticket for Le Havre. Just as he got to the platform, he dropped his wallet which was stuffed with the twenty thousand franc notes. He felt it slip from his pocket and turned around just in time to see it being picked up by Darling. Calmly and fatally, Darling examined it, for though he was a genuine crook, nevertheless he did not know how to be at ease in original postures and imitated the gangsters of Chicago and Marseilles. This simple observation also enables us to indicate the importance of dreaming in the life of the hoodlum, but what I want particularly to show you by means of it is that I shall surround myself only with roughnecks of undistinguished personality, with none of the nobility that comes from heroism. My loved ones will be those whom you would call “hoodlums of the worst sort.”

  Darling counted the bills. He took ten for himself, put them into his pocket and handed the rest to Our Lady, who stood there dumbfounded. They became friends.

  I leave you free to imagine any dialogue you please. Choose whatever may charm you. Have it, if you like, that they hear the voice of the blood, or that they fall in love at first sight, or that Darling, by indisputable signs invisible to the vulgar eye, betrays the fact that he is a thief. . . . Conceive the wildest improbabilities. Have it that the depths of their being are thrilled at accosting each other in slang. Tangle them suddenly in a swift embrace or a brotherly kiss. Do whatever you like.

  Darling was happy to find the money. However, with an extreme lack of appropriateness, all he could say, without unclenching his teeth, was: “Guy's no dope.” Our Lady was boiling. But what could he do? He was too familiar with Pigalle-Blanche to know that you must not put on too bold a front with a real pimp. Darling bore, quite visibly, the external marks of the pimp. “Have to watch my step,” Our Lady felt within him. So he lost his wallet, which Darling had noticed. Here is the sequel: Darling took Our Lady of the Flowers to a tailor, a shoe shop, and a hat shop. He ordered for both of them the bagatelles that make the strong and terribly charming man: a suede belt, a felt hat, a plaid tie, etc. Then they stopped at a hotel on the Avenue de Wagram. Wagram, battle won by boxers!

  They spent their time doing nothing. As they walked up and down the Champs-Elysées, they let intimacy fuse them. They made comments about the women's legs, but, as they were not witty, their remarks had no finesse. Since their emotion was not torn by any point, they quite naturally skidded along on a stagnant ground of poetry. They were child-roughnecks to whom chance had given gold, and I enjoy giving it to them, just as I enjoy hearing an American hood–it's amazing–say the word dollar and speak English. When they were tired, they went back to the hotel and sat for a long time in the big leather chairs in the lobby. Even there, intimacy evolved its alchemy. A solemn marble stairway led to corridors covered with red carpets, upon which one moved noiselessly. During a high mass at the Madeleine, when Darling saw the priests walking on carpets, after the organ had stopped playing, he began to feel uneasy at the mystery of the deaf and the blind, the tread upon the carpets that he recognizes in the grand hotel, and as he walks slowly over the moss, he thinks, in his guttersnipe language: “Maybe there's something.” For low masses are said at the end of the halls of big hotels, where the mahogany and marble light and blow out candles. A mingled burial service and marriage takes place there in secret from one end of the year to the other. People move about like shadows. Does this mean that my ecstatic crook's soul lets slip no opportunity for falling into a trance? Oh to feel yourself flying on tiptoe while the soles of humans move flat on the ground! Even here, and at the Fresnes Prison, the long fragrant corridors that bite their tails restore to me, despite the· precise, mathematical hardness of the wall, the soul of the hotel thief I long to be.

  The stylish clients moved about the lobby in front of them. They took off their furs, gloves, and hats, drank port, and smoked Craven cigarettes and Havana cigars. A bellboy scurried about. They knew they were characters in a movie. And so, mingling their gestures in this dream, Darling and Our Lady of the Flowers quietly wove a brotherly friendship. How hard it is for me not to mate the two of them better, not to arrange it so that Darling, with a thrust of the hips–rock of unconsciousness and innocence, desperate with love–deeply sinks his smooth, heavy prick, as polished and warm as a column in the sun, into the waiting mouth of the adolescent murderer who is pulverized with gratitude.

  That too might be, but will not. Darling and Our Lady, however rigorous the destiny I plot for you, it will never cease to be–oh, in the very faintest way–tormented by what it might also have been but will not be because of me.

  One day, Our Lady, quite naturally, confessed to the murder. Darling confessed to his life with Divine. Our Lady, that he was called Our Lady of the Flowers. Both of them needed a rare flexibility to extricate themselves without damage from the snares that threatened their mutual esteem. On this occasion, Darling was all charm and delicacy.

  Our Lady of the Flowers was lying on a couch. Darling, seated at his feet, watched him confess. It was over, as far as the murder was concerned. Darling was the theater of a muted drama. Confronting each other were the fear of complicity, friendship for the child, and the taste, the desire for squealing. He still had to admit to the nickname. Finally he got to it, little by little. As the mysterious name emerged, it was so agonizing to watch the murderer's great beauty writhing, the motionless and unclean coils of the marble serpents of his drowsy face moving and stirring, that Darling realized the gravity of such a confession, felt it so deeply that he wondered whether Our Lady was going to puke pricks. He took one of the child's hands, which was hanging down, and held it between his own.

  “. . . You understand, there were guys that called me . . .”

  Darling held on to his hand. With his eyes, he was drawing the confession toward him:

  “It's coming, it's coming.”

  During the entire operation, he did not take his eyes off the eyes of his friend. From beginning to end, he smiled with a motionless smile that was fixed on his mouth, for he felt t
hat the slightest emotion on his part, the slightest sign or breath, would destroy . . . It would have broken Our Lady of the Flowers.

  When the name was in the room, it came to pass that the murderer, abashed, opened up, and there sprang forth, like a Glory, from his pitiable fragments, an altar on which there lay, in the roses, a woman of light and flesh.

  The altar undulated on a foul mud into which it sank: the murderer. Darling drew Our Lady toward him, and, the better to embrace him, struggled with him briefly. I would like to dream them both in many other positions if, when I closed my eyes, my dream still obeyed my will. But during the day it is disturbed by anxiety about my trial, and in the evening the preliminaries of sleep denude the environs of my self, destroy objects and episodes, leaving me at the edge of sleep as solitary as I was one night in the middle of a stormy and barren heath. Darling, Divine, and Our Lady flee from me at top speed, taking with them the consolation of their existence, which has its being only in me, for they are not content with fleeing; they do away with themselves, dilute themselves in the appalling insubstantiality of my dreams, or rather of my sleep, and become my sleep; they melt into the very stuff of my sleep and compose it. I call for help in silence; I make signals with the two arms of my soul, which are softer than algae, not, of course, to some friend firmly planted on the ground, but to a kind of crystallization of the tenderness whose seeming hardness makes me believe in its eternity.

  I call out: “Hold me back! Fasten me!” I break away for a frightful dream which will go through the darkness of the cells, the darkness of the spirits of the damned, of the gulfs, through the mouths of the guards, the breasts of the judges, and will end by my being swallowed very very slowly by a giant crocodile formed by the whiffs of the foul prison air.

  It is the fear of the trial.

  Weighing upon my poor shoulders are the dreadful weight of legal justice and the weight of my fate.

  How many policemen and detectives, with their teeth on edge, as is so aptly said, for days and nights, were making relentless efforts to unravel the puzzle I had set? And I thought the affair had been shelved, whereas they kept plugging away, busying themselves about me without my being aware of it, working on the Genet material, on the luminous traces of the Genet gestures, working away on me in the darkness.

  It was a good thing that I raised egoistic masturbation to the dignity of a cult! I have only to begin the gesture and a kind of unclean and supernatural transposition displaces the truth. Everything within me turns worshiper. The external vision of the props of my desire isolates me, far from the world.

  Pleasure of the solitary, gesture of solitude that makes you sufficient unto yourself, possessing intimately others who serve your pleasure without their suspecting it, a pleasure that gives to your most casual gestures, even when you are up and about, that air of supreme indifference toward everyone and also a certain awkward manner that, if you have gone to bed with a boy, makes you feel as if you have bumped your head against a granite slab.

  I've got lots of time for making my fingers fly! Ten years to go! My good, my gentle friend, my cell! My sweet retreat, mine alone, I love you so! If I had to live in all freedom in another city, I would first go to prison to acknowledge my own, those of my race, and also to find you there.

  Yesterday I was summoned by the examining magistrate. From the Santé to the Law Court, the jolting and the smell of the police van had nauseated me. I appeared before the judge as white as a sheet.

  As soon as I entered his chambers, I was struck by the gloom, despite the dusty, secret flowering of the criminal files, caused by the presence of the smashed violin that Divine also saw. And, because of that Christ, I was open to pity. Because of it and of the dream in which my victim came to forgive me. In fact, the judge smiled at me very kindly. I recognized my victim's smile in my dream and recalled, or realized again, that he himself was supposed to have been both a judge on the bench, whom I confused perhaps intentionally with the examining magistrate, and an examining magistrate. Knowing that I had been pardoned by him, feeling tranquil and sure, not with a certainty resulting from logic, but out of a desire for peace, a desire to return to the life of men (the desire that makes Darling serve the police so as to return to his place among human beings through having served order, and at the same time to depart from the human through deliberate baseness), sure that everything had been forgotten, hypnotized by the pardon, with a sense of confidence, I confessed.

  The clerk recorded the confession, which I signed.

  My lawyer was stupefied, staggered. What in the world had I done? Who tricked me? Heaven? Heaven, dwelling of God and his Court.

  I went back through the underground corridors of the Court and returned to my dark, icy little cell in the “Mouse-trap.” Ariadne in the labyrinth. The most alive of worlds, human beings with the tenderest flesh, are made of marble. I strew devastation as I pass. I wander dead-eyed through cities and petrified populations. But no way out. Impossible to retract the confession, to annul it, to unravel the thread of time that wove it, and to make it unwind and destroy itself. Flee? What an idea! The labyrinth is more tortuous than the summing-up of judges. What about the guard leading me? A guard of massive bronze to whom I am chained by the wrist. I quickly concoct a scheme of seducing him, of kneeling before him, first laying my forehead on his thigh, devoutly opening his blue pants. . . . What folly! I'm done for. Why didn't I steal a tube of strychnine from a pharmacy, as I had meant to? I could have kept it on me and concealed it while I was being searched. One day, utterly weary of the land of the Chimeras–the only one worth inhabiting, “the nothingness of human things being such that, save for the being who is by himself, nothing is beautiful, but that which is not” (Pope)1–I would, without any vain ornamentation surrounding the act, have poisoned myself. For, my good friends, I am ripe for the Send-off.

  There are times when we suddenly understand the hitherto unperceived meaning of certain expressions. We live them and mutter them. For example: “I felt the earth giving way beneath me.” This is a phrase that I have read and said a thousand times without living it. But it was enough, when I awoke, to linger over it for ten seconds as I was being visited by the memory of my arrest (the remains of last night's nightmare), for the dream element that created the expression to envelop me, or rather to give me the sensation of internal, visceral emptiness that is also caused by the precipices from which one falls at night with a feeling of certainty. I felt that way last night. No outstretched, merciful arm tries to catch me. A few rocks might perhaps offer me a stony hand, but just far enough away for me to be unable to grab it. I was falling. And in order to delay the final shock–for the feeling of falling caused me that intoxication of absolute despair, which is akin to happiness during the fall, but it was also an intoxication fearful of awakening, of the return to things that are–in order to delay the shock at the bottom of the gulf and the awakening in prison with my anguish at the thought of suicide or jail, I accumulated catastrophes, I provoked accidents along the verticality of the precipice, I summoned up frightful obstacles at the point of arrival. It was the very next day that the influence of this un-dissipated dream made me pile up details, all of them serious, in the confused hope that they were staving off the inevitable. I was slowly sinking.

  Yet, back in my 426, the sweetness of my work entrances me. The first steps I take, with my hands on my hips, which seem to be pitching, make me feel as if Darling, who is walking behind, were passing through me. And here I am again in the soothing comfort of the elegant hotel which they will have to leave, for twenty thousand francs is not eternal.

  During his stay at the hotel, Darling had not been to the garret. He had left Divine without any news. Our dearest was dying of anxiety. So, when Our Lady and he ran out of money, he thought about going back. Dressed like fake monarchs, they returned to the attic, where, with blankets stolen from cars, they arranged a bed for the murderer on the rug. He slept there, near Divine and Darling. When she saw them enter,
Divine thought she had been forgotten and replaced. Not at all. We shall see later the kind of incest that bound the two lads together.

  Divine worked for two men, one of whom was her own.

  Until then, she had loved only men who were stronger and just a little, a tiny bit older, and more muscular than herself. But then came Our Lady of the Flowers, who had the moral and physical character of a flower; she was smitten with him. Something different, a kind of feeling of power, sprang up (in the vegetal, germinative sense) in Divine. She thought she had been virilified. A wild hope made her strong and husky and vigorous. She felt muscles growing, and felt herself emerging from a rock carved by Michelangelo in the form of a slave. Without moving a muscle, though straining within herself, she struggled internally just as Laocoön seizes the monster and twists it. Then, bolder still, she wanted to box, with her arms and legs of flesh, but she very quickly got knocked about on the boulevard, for she judged and willed her movements not in accordance with their combative efficiency but rather in accordance with an esthetic that would have made of her a hoodlum of a more or less gallant stripe. Her movements, particularly a hitching of the belt and her guard position, were meant, whatever the cost, at the cost of victory itself, to make of her not the boxer Divine, but a certain admired boxer, and at times several fine boxers rolled into one. She tried for male gestures, which are rarely the gestures of males. She whistled, put her hands into her pockets, and this whole performance was carried out so unskillfully that in the course of a single evening she seemed to be four or five characters at the same time. She thereby acquired the richness of a multiple personality. She ran from boy to girl, and the transitions from one to the other–because the attitude was a new one–were made stumblingly. She would hop after the boy on one foot. She would always begin her Big Scatterbrain gestures, then, suddenly remembering that she was supposed to show she was virile so as to captivate the murderer, she would end by burlesquing them, and this double formula enveloped her in strangeness, made her a timid clown in plain dress, a sort of embittered swish. Finally, to crown her metamorphosis from female into tough male, she imagined a man-to-man friendship which would link her with one of those faultless pimps whose gestures could not be regarded as ambiguous. And to be on the safe side, she invented Marchetti. It was a simple matter to choose a physique for him, for she possessed in her secret, lonely-girl's imagination, for her nights’ pleasure, a stock of thighs, arms, torsoes, faces, hair, teeth, necks, and knees, and she knew how to assemble them so as to make of them a live man to whom she loaned a soul–which was always the same one for each of these constructions: the one she would have liked to have herself. The invented Marchetti had a few adventures with her, in secret. Then, one night, she told him that she was tired of Our Lady of the Flowers and that she was willing to let Marchetti have him. The agreement was sealed with a male handshake. The dream was as follows: Marchetti comes breezing into the place with his hands in his pockets.