Our Lady of the Flowers

by Jean Genet

  “Hello, kid,” he says to Divine.

  He sits down and they have a man-to-man talk about the grind. Our Lady arrives. Shakes hands with Marchetti. Marchetti kids him a bit about his girl's puss. As for me (Divine is talking to herself in secret), I pretend not to see them. But I'm sure that now, thanks to me, Our Lady is going to tear off a quickie with Marchetti (he has too nice a name to need a given name). I busy myself for three minutes about the room. I manage it so that my back is turned to them. I turn around. I see them billing and cooing, and Marchetti's fly is open. The love-making begins.

  Divine had not become virile; she had aged. An adolescent now excited her, and that was why she had the feeling of being old, and this certainty unfurled within her like the hangings formed by the wings of bats. That evening, undressed and alone in the garret, she saw with fresh eyes her white, hairless body, smooth and dry, and, in places, bony. She was ashamed of it and hastened to put out the lamp, for it was the ivory body of Jesus on an eighteenth-century crucifix, and relations with the divinity, even a resemblance to it, sickened her.

  But along with this desolation, a new joy was being born within her.

  The joy that precedes suicides. Divine was afraid of her daily life. Her flesh and soul were turning sour. There came for her the season of tears, as we speak of the season of rains. Once she has switched off the light and created darkness, for nothing in the world would she take a step out of bed, where she thinks she is safe, but in the same way that she thinks she is safe in her body. She feels rather protected by the fact of being in her body. Outside reigns terror. One night, however, she dared open the door of the garret and take a step out on the dark landing. The stairway was filled with the wails of sirens calling her to the bottom. They were not exactly wails or songs, nor exactly sirens either, but they were quite clearly an invitation to madness or to death by falling. Mad with fright, she went back to the garret. It was the moment before alarm clocks start ringing. If she was spared fears, during the day she knew another torture: she would blush. For the veriest trifle, she would become the Very Crimson, the Purplish One, Her Eminence. It must not be thought that she was ashamed of her profession. She had known too well and too early how to penetrate steadily to the depths of despair not to be, at her age, dead to all sense of shame. Calling herself an old whorish whore, Divine simply forestalled mockery and insults. But she blushed about little things which seemed trivial, which we think insignificant, until the moment when, observing more closely, she realized that the blush had spread just when someone was humiliating her unwittingly. A mere trifle humiliated Divine. The kind of humiliation which–she was again Culafroy–laid her lower than the ground, by the mere power of words. Words again took on for her the magic of boxes empty, when all is said and done, of everything that is not mystery. When closed words, sealed, hermetic words, open up, their meanings escape in leaps and bounds that assault and leave us panting. Brew, which is a word from sorcery, led me to the home of the old maid who grinds coffee, mixes in some chicory, and brews; through coffee grounds (this is a trick of hocus-pocus), it leads me back to sorcery. The word Mithridate: one morning Divine suddenly comes upon it again. It had once opened up and revealed to Culafroy its virtue, and the child, going back up the centuries to the fifteen hundreds, buried himself in the Rome of the Pontiffs. Let us take a look at this period in Divine's life. As aconite was the only poison he could procure, every night, in a long, stiff-pleated dressing gown, he would open the door of his room, which was on a level with the garden, would step over the railing–gesture of a lover, burglar, dancer, somnambulist, mountebank–and jump into the vegetable garden, which was bounded by a hedge of elders, mulberries, and black thorns, but where someone had laid out, between the vegetable beds, borders of reseda and marigolds. Culafroy would gather a bunch of Napel aconite leaves. He would measure them with a six-inch ruler, increase the dose each time, roll them up, and then swallow. But the poison had the double virtue of killing and raising from the dead those it killed, and presto! it would act. The Renaissance would take possession of the child through the mouth, just as the Man-God does of the little girl who, sticking out her tongue, though piously, swallows the host. The Borgias, Astrologers, Pornographers, Princes, Abbesses, and Condottieri would receive him naked on their knees, which were hard beneath the silk; he would tenderly place his cheek against an erect penis, stony beneath the silk, of stone as un-yielding as the chests of Negro jazzmen must be beneath the shiny satin of their jackets.

  It was in a green alcove, for feasts that end in death by daggers, scented gloves, a treacherous wafer. Beneath the moon, Culafroy became this world of poisoners, pederasts, thieves, sorcerers, warriors, and courtesans, and the surrounding nature, the vegetable garden, remaining what they were, left him all alone, possessing and possessed by an epoch, in his barefoot walk, beneath the moon, about the cabbage and lettuce beds where lay an abandoned rake and spade, left him free to lift and draw trains of brocade with lofty gestures. No episode from history or a novel organized the dream mass; only the murmur of a few magic words thickened the darkness, from which there loomed a page or horseman, a handsome cocksman, disheveled by a broadcloth night. . . . “Datura fastuosa, Datura stramonium, Belladona. . . .”

  As the coolness of the night that fell upon his white robe would make him feel chilly, he would walk to the wide-open window, slip under the railing, close the window, and lie down in a huge bed. When day came, he was again the shy, pale schoolboy stooping with the weight of his books. But one does not have enchanted nights without the days retaining some telltale signs, which are to the soul what circles are to the eyes. Ernestine used to dress him in very short blue serge pants, over which he wore a black schoolboy's smock that buttoned down the back with white glazed buttons; she also made him wear black wooden sabots and black cotton stockings that concealed his rather thin calves. He was not in mourning for anyone, and it was touching to see him all in black. He belonged to the race of harried children, early wrinkled, volcanic. Emotions ravage faces, root out peace, swell the lips, crease the brow, and make the eyebrows quiver with shudders and subtle convulsions. His schoolmates called him “Coolie,” which name, uttered during their games, was a slap in the face. But children of this kind, like vagabonds, have in their bags charming or terrible tricks by means of which they open out warm and downy havens where they drink red wine that makes them drunk and where they are loved in secret. Culafroy would escape through the ceiling of the village school, like a hunted thief, and among the unsuspecting schoolboys, during the clandestine recreations (the child is the re-creator of heaven and earth), he would meet Jean the Black Terror. When school was over, he returned to the house nearest the school and thus avoided having to take part in the voodoo mysteries of the schoolboys who were freed at four o'clock from parents and teachers. His room was a little nook with mahogany furniture and was decorated with colored prints of autumn landscapes, which he did not look at because the only faces he could find there were those of three green nymphs. Childhood wearies of the conventional myths foisted upon a conventional childhood; it doesn't care a rap about picture-book fairies and decorative monsters, and my personal fairies were the slender butcher with the pointed mustache, the consumptive schoolmistress, the pharmacist; everyone was a fairy, that is, was isolated by the halo of an unapproachable, inviolable existence, through which all I could see was gestures whose continuity–hence whose logic and element of reassurance–escaped me, and every fragment of which raised a new question for me, word by word, and disturbed me.

  Culafroy would enter his room. Immediately he is in his vatican, a sovereign pontiff. He lays his bag, which is crammed with books and pads, on a straw chair; from under the bed he pulls out a case. Old playthings pile up, torn and dog-eared picture albums, a shaggy teddybear, and from that bed of darkness, from the tomb of still fragrant and radiant glories, he pulls out a grayish violin which he himself has made. His hesitant gesture makes him blush. He feels the humiliation, stron
ger than the green shame of someone's spitting on your back, that he had felt while putting it together–though not while conceiving it–just about a week before, with the cardboard binding of the picture album, the piece of broom handle and four white threads, the strings. It was a flat gray violin, a two-dimensional violin, with only the soundboard and the neck, and four white strings, geometric and rigorous, spanning the extravagance, a phantom violin. The bow was a walnut twig, from which he had peeled the bark. The first time Culafroy had asked his mother to buy him a violin, she had winced. She had been salting the soup. None of the following images had appeared before her eyes with any precision: a river, flames, escutcheoned oriflammes, a Louis XV heel, a page in blue tights, the page's craft and slyness, but the disturbance that each of them created within her, a plunge into an ink-black lake, held her for a moment between life and death, and when, two or three seconds later, she came to herself, a nervous shudder ran through her which made the hand salting the soup tremble. Culafroy did not know that a violin, because of its tortured lines, could upset his sensitive mother, and that violins moved about in her dreams in the company of lithe cats, at corners of walls, under balconies where thieves divide the night's loot, where other toughs slouch around a lamppost, on stairways that squeak like violins being skinned alive. Ernestine wept with rage at being unable to kill her son, for Culafroy was not what one could kill, or rather we can see that what one killed in him made possible another birth: rods, straps, spankings, and slaps lose their power, or rather change their virtues. The word violin was never uttered again. In order to study music, that is, to make the same gestures as some pretty youngster in a magazine, Culafroy made the instrument, but in front of Ernestine never again would he utter the word that begins with the same syllable as violate. The making took place in the greatest secrecy, at night. During the day, he buried it away at the bottom of the case of old toys. Every evening, he took it out. With humiliation, he learned by himself how to place his left fingers on the white threads, according to the instructions in an old manual that he found in the attic. Each silent session exhausted him. The disappointing squeak that the bow tore from the strings gave his soul gooseflesh. His heart was drawn out fine and unraveled into strained silences–ghosts of sounds. His frustration haunted him throughout the lesson, and he studied in a state of constant shame. He felt shifty and humiliated, as we do on New Year's Day. Our good wishes are furtive and whispered, as, among others, those of proud servants and lepers must be. Since these are gestures reserved for the masters, we often feel as if we were using their wardrobes to receive each other. They embarrass us, as the unlined dress-jacket must embarrass the apprentice butler who wears it. One evening, Culafroy made a broad, extravagant, tragedian's gesture. A gesture that went beyond the room, entered into the night, where it continued on to the stars, among the Bears, and even farther; then, like the snake that bites its tail, it returned to the shadow of the room, and into the child who drowned in it. He drew the bow from the point to the base, slowly, magnificently; this final laceration sawed his soul apart; the silence, the shadow, and the hope of separating these diverse elements, which fell away severally, thus dashed to the ground an attempt at construction. He let his arms drop, and the violin and the bow; he wept like a child. The tears ran down his flat little face. Once again he realized it was all hopeless. The magic net through which he had tried to gnaw tightened about him, isolating him. With a feeling of utter emptiness, he went to the little mirror of the dresser and looked at his face, for which he felt the tenderness one feels for a homely little dog when that dog is one's own. The shadow, which had somehow slipped into the room, installed itself. Culafroy let it be. All that interested him was the face in the mirror and its changes, the globes of the luminous eyes, the halo of shadow, the black spot of the mouth, the illuminated forefinger that supported his bent head. His head was bent so that he could see himself in the mirror, but he had to raise his eyes, and this made him observe himself in the sly way that actors do in films: “I might be a great artist.” He did not formulate this idea clearly; nevertheless, the splendor involved in it made him lower his head a little more. “The weight of destiny,” he thought. In the gleaming rosewood of the dresser, he saw a fleeting scene, similar in essence to many others that often visited him: a small boy was crouching beneath a barred window, in a dark room, where he himself was walking about with his hands in his pockets.

  Capitals rose up from his sandy childhood. Capitals like cactuses beneath the sky. Cactuses like green suns, radiating pointed rays and steeped in poison. His childhood, like a sahara, quite tiny or immense–we don't know–a childhood sheltered by tile light, the scent, and the flow of personal charm of a huge flowering magnolia that rose into a sky deep as a grotto above the invisible though present sun. This childhood was withering on its broiling sand, with–in moments swift as pencil strokes and as thin, thin as the paradise one sees between the eyelids of a Mongol–a glimpse of the invisible and present magnolia. These moments were at all points like those of which the poet speaks:

  I saw in the desert

  Your open sky . . .

  Ernestine and her son lived in the only house in the village, except for the church, that had a slate roof. It was a large, rectangular freestone building, divided into two sections by a corridor that opened up like a heroic breach between the rocks. Ernestine had a rather large income that had been left her by her husband when he committed suicide by leaping into the green moat of the local castle. She could have lived in luxury, could have been waited on by several servants and have moved about amidst huge mirrors that rose from the carpets to the gilded ceiling. She denied herself the luxury and beauty that kill reverie. Love too. Once upon a time love had placed her on earth and kept her there with the grip of a wrestler who is used to pinning huskies to the mat. At the age of twenty, she had given birth to a legend. When the peasants speak of her later, they will be unable to refrain from evoking the creature whose face was all swathed–like the face of a wounded aviator, the very face of Weidmann, except for the mouth and eyes–in strips of gauze, so as to shield the thick coatings of a special beauty cream that protected her skin from sunburn and hay when she came in summertime to do the haying at her father's place. But bitterness had passed over her face like an acid, eating away the sweetness. She now feared whatever could not be spoken of in a simple and familiar way, with a smile. This fear alone proved the danger of a relapse into the power of the Greedy One (Beauty). Though the fastenings that bound and delivered her over to powers whose contact or merely whose approach upset her, were loose, nevertheless they were solid. They were art, religion, love, which are enveloped in the sacred (for at the sacred, which is called, alas, the spiritual,1 one neither laughs nor smiles; it is sad. If it is that which touches upon God, is God therefore sad? Is God therefore a painful idea? Is God therefore evil?) and which are always approached with a courtesy that guards them. Among the appurtenances of the village were an old feudal castle surrounded by moats that rumbled with frogs, a cemetery, the house of the unwed mother and the unwed mother herself, a bridge with three stone arches above three arches of clear water, over which hung, every morning, a thick mist that finally lifted from the landscape. The sun would slash it to tatters. which would then go and. very briefly, dress up the scrawny black trees as gypsy children.

  The sharp blue slates, the granite stones of the house, and the high window panes isolated Culafroy from the world. The games of the boys who lived beyond the river were unknown games, complicated by mathematics and geometry. They were played along the hedges, with the rams and colts of the fields as attentive spectators. The players themselves, actor-children away from school, away from the town, slipped back into their rustic personalities, again became cowherds, bird nesters, climbers, mowers of rye, and stealers of plums. If they were for Culafroy–without being able quite to fathom his feeling, though they suspected it, a race of fascinating demons–Culafroy, on the other hand, unwittingly had for them a certa
in glamor that he possessed by virtue of his isolation, of the refinement and legend of Ernestine, and of the slate roof of his house. Though they hated him, there was hardly a small boy who did not dream about him, envying the cut of his hair, the elegance of his leather schoolbag. The slate house was supposed to contain fabulous riches in the midst of which Culafroy had the glamor of walking about slowly and the privilege of venturing familiar gestures, such as drumming on some article of furniture or sliding on the parquet, in a setting that they judged to be regal, smiling like a crown prince, perhaps playing cards there. Culafroy seemed to secrete a royal mystery. King's sons are too common among children for the village schoolboys to be able to take this one seriously. But they regarded it as a crime on his part to divulge so clearly an origin that every one of them kept well hidden within himself, and that offended their Majesty. For the royal idea is of this world; if man does not hold it by virtue of carnal transmissions, he should acquire it and adorn himself with it in secret so as not to be degraded in his own eyes. Since the dreams and reveries of children interlace in the night, each possessed the other unknowingly, in a rapacious (they were really rapes) and almost total way. The village, which they recreated for their own use, and where, as we have said, the children were sovereign, was entangled in practices that were without strangeness to those who lived in a village of strange nights, where stillborn children were buried toward evening, carried to the cemetery by their sisters in pine boxes as narrow and varnished as violin cases; where other children ran about in the glades and pressed their naked bellies, though sheltered from the moon, against the trunks of beeches and oaks that were as sturdy as adult mountaineers whose short thighs bulged beneath their buckskin breeches, at a spot stripped of its bark, in such a way as to receive on the tender skin of their little white bellies the discharge of sap in the spring; where the Italian woman walked by, spying on the old, sick, and paralytic, whose souls she culled from their eyes, listening to them die (the old die the way children are born), having them at her mercy, and her mercy was not her grace; a village whose days were no less strange than its nights, where, on Corpus Christi or Rogation Day, corteges went through the blazing noonday countryside in processions composed of little girls with porcelain heads wearing white dresses and crowned with cloth flowers, of choir boys swinging in the wind censers covered with verdigris, of women stiff in their green or black moire, of men gloved in black, holding up a canopy of oriental cast that was plumed with ostrich feathers, under which walked the priest carrying a monstrance. Beneath the sun, amidst the rye, pines, and clover, and inverted in the ponds, with their feet to the sky.