Our Lady of the Flowers

by Jean Genet

  “The chick works hard. Now she's gulping down paper.”

  Perhaps this indifference was due to the fact that Our Lady felt nothing the way Mimosa did and did not imagine that anyone could feel a thrill by literally incorporating into himself the picture of a desired human being, by drinking him down, and he would have been incapable of recognizing in this an act of homage to his virility or beauty. Let us conclude from this that he had no desire of this kind. Yet, as we shall see, he was veneration itself. As for Divine, remember that she once answered. Mimosa: “Our Lady will never be too proud. I want to make of him a statue of pride,” thinking: “I want him to be molded of pride,” and further: “molded in pride.” Our Lady's tender youth (for he had his moments of tenderness) did not satisfy Divine's need to be subjected to brutal domination. The ideas of pride and statue very rightly go hand in hand, and with them the idea of massive stiffness. But we can see that Our Lady's pride was only a pretext.

  As I have said, Darling Daintyfoot no longer came to the garret, and had even stopped meeting Our Lady in the grove of the Tuileries. He did not suspect that Our Lady knew all about his cowardly doings. In her garret, Divine lived only on tea and grief. She ate her grief and drank it; this sour food had dried her body and corroded her mind. Nothing–neither her own personal care nor the beauty parlors–kept her from being thin and having the skin of a corpse. She wore a wig, which she set most artfully, but the net of the underside showed at the temples. Powder and cream did not quite conceal the juncture with the skin of the forehead. One might have thought that her head was artificial. In the days when he was still in the garret, Darling might have laughed at all these embellishments had he been an ordinary pimp, but he was a pimp who heard voices. He neither laughed nor smiled. He was handsome and prized his good looks, realizing that if he lost them he would lose everything. Though the difficult charms employed in making beauty hold fast did not excite him, they left him cold and drew no cruel smile. It was quite natural. So many former girl friends had made themselves up in his presence that he knew that the damages to beauty are repaired without mystery. In shady hotels, he had witnessed clever restorations, had watched women as they hesitated with a lipstick in mid-air. Many a time he had helped Divine fasten her wig on. His movements had been skillful and, if I may say so, natural. He had learned to love that kind of Divine. He had steeped himself in all the monstrosities of which she was composed. He had passed them in review: her very white dry skin, her thinness, the hollows of her eyes, her powdered wrinkles, her slicked down hair, her gold teeth. He noted every detail. He said to himself that that's how it was; continued to screw it. He knew ecstasy and was caught good and proper. Darling the sturdy, all and always hot muscle and bush, was smitten with an artificial queen. Divine's wiles had nothing to do with it. Darling plunged headlong into this sort of debauch. Then, little by little, he had grown weary. He neglected Divine and left her. In the garret, she then had terrible fits of despair. Her advancing age was moving her into a coffin. It got to the point where she no longer dared a gesture or manner; people who came to know her during this period said that she seemed retiring. She still clung to the pleasures of bed and hallway; she cruised the tearooms, but now it was she who did the paying. When making love, she would experience the wildest terror, fearing, for example, lest an excited youngster rumple her hair while she was on her knees, or press his head against her too roughly and push off her wig. Her pleasure was encumbered with a host of petty worries. She would stay in the garret in order to jerk off. For days and nights on end she would remain lying in bed, with the curtains drawn over the window of the dead, the Bay Window of the Departed. She would drink tea and eat fruitcake. With her head beneath the sheets, she would devise complicated debauches, involving two, three, or four persons, in which all the partners would arrange to discharge in her, on her, and for her at the same time. She would recall the narrow but vigorous loins, the loins of steel that had perforated her. Without regard for their tastes, she would couple them. She was willing to be the single goal of all these lusts, and her mind strained in an effort to be conscious of them simultaneously as they drifted about in a voluptuousness poured in from all sides. Her body would tremble from head, to foot. She felt personalities that were strange to her passing through her. Her body would cry out: “The god, behold the god!” She would sink back, all exhausted. The pleasure soon lost its edge. Divine then donned the body of a male. Suddenly strong and muscular, she saw herself hard as nails, with her hands in her pockets, whistling. She saw herself doing the act on herself. She felt her muscles growing, as when she had tried to play virile, and she felt herself getting hard around the thighs, shoulderblades, and arms, and it hurt her. This game, too, petered out. She was drying up. There were no longer even any circles under her eyes.

  It was then she sought out the memory of Alberto and satisfied herself with him. He was a good-for-nothing. The whole village mistrusted him. He was thievish, brutal, and coarse. Girls frowned when his name was mentioned in their presence, but their nights and sudden escapes during the dreary hours of work were taken up with his vigorous thighs, with his heavy hands that were forever swelling his pockets and stroking his flanks, or that remained there motionless, or moved gently, stealthily, as they lifted the taut or distended cloth of his trousers. His hands were broad and thick, with short fingers, a splendid thumb, an imposing, massive mound of Venus, hands that hung from his arms like sods. It was on a summer evening that the children, who are the usual bearers of staggering news, informed the village that Alberto was fishing for snakes. “Snake fisher, that's just what he's fit for,” thought the old women. This was one more reason for wishing him to the devil. Some scientists were offering an attractive premium for every reptile captured alive. While playing, Alberto caught one unintentionally, delivered it alive, and received the promised premium. Thus was born his new profession, which he liked, and which made him furious with himself. He was neither a superman nor an immoral faun. He was just a boy with simple thoughts, though embellished by voluptuousness. He seemed to be in a state of perpetual delight or perpetual intoxication. It was inevitable that Culafroy should meet him. It was the summer he spent wandering along the roads. As soon as he saw Alberto's figure in the distance, he realized that there was the purpose and goal of his walk. Alberto was standing motionless at the edge of the road, almost in the rye, as if waiting for someone, his two shapely legs spread in the stance of the Colossus of Rhodes, or the one shown us by the German sentries, so proud and solid beneath their helmets. Culafroy loved him. As he passed by, brave and indifferent, the lad blushed and lowered his head, while Alberto, with a smile on his lips, watched him walk. Let us say that he was eighteen years old, and yet Divine remembers him as a man.

  He returned the following day. Alberto was standing there, a sentinel or statue, at the side of the road. “Hello!” he said, with a smile that twisted his mouth. (This smile was Alberto's particularity, was himself. Anyone could have had, or could have acquired, the same stiff hair, the color of his skin, his walk, but not his smile. Now when Divine seeks out the lost Alberto, she tries to portray him on herself and invents his smile with her own mouth. She puckers her muscles in what she thinks is the right way, the way–so she thinks when she feels her mouth twisting–that makes her resemble Alberto, until the day it occurs to her to do it in front of a mirror, and she realizes that her grimaces in no way resemble the smile we have already called starlike.) “Hello!” muttered Culafroy. That was all they said to each other, but from that day on Ernestine was to get used to seeing him desert the slate house. One day, Alberto asked:

  “Want to see my pouch?”

  He showed him a closely woven wicker basket buckled by a strap. The only thing in it that day was one elegant and angry snake.

  “Shall I open it?”

  “Oh! no, no, don't open it!” he said, for he has always felt that uncontrollable repulsion for reptiles.

  Alberto did not lift the lid, but he put his har
d, gentle, briar-scratched hand on the back of Culafroy's neck, just as the child was about to drop to his knees. Another day, three snakes were writhing about each other. Their heads were hooded in little hard leather cowls that were tightened about their necks by nooses.

  “You can touch them. They won't hurt you.”

  Culafroy didn't move. Rooted with horror, he could no more have run away than at the apparition of a ghost or an angel from heaven. He was unable to turn his head. The snakes fascinated him; yet he felt that he was about to vomit.

  “You scared? Come on, admit it. I used to be scared too.”

  That wasn't true; but he wanted to reassure the child. With sovereign superiority, Alberto calmly and deliberately put his hand into the tangle of reptiles and took one out, a long, thin one whose tail flattened like a whipcord, but without a sound, about his bare arm. “Touch it!” he said, and as he spoke, he took the child's hand and placed it on the cold, scaly body, but Culafroy tightened his fist and only the joints of his fingers came into contact with the snake. That wasn't touching. The coldness surprised him. It entered his vein, and the initiation proceeded. Veils were falling from large and solemn tableaux that Culafroy's eyes could not make out. Alberto took another snake and placed it on Culafroy's bare arm, about which it coiled just as the first had done.

  “You see, she's harmless.” (Alberto always referred to snakes in the feminine.)

  Just as he felt his penis swelling between his fingers, so the sensitive Alberto felt in the child the mounting emotion that stiffened him and made him shudder. And the insidious friendship for snakes was born. And yet he had not yet touched any, that is, had not even grazed them with the organ of touch, the finger tips, the spot where the fingers are swollen with a tiny sensitive bump, by means of which the blind read. Alberto had to open the boy's hand and slip the icy, lugubrious body into it. That was the revelation. At that very moment, it seemed to him that a host of snakes might have invaded him, climbed over him, and wound themselves into him without his feeling anything but a friendly joy, a kind of tenderness, and meanwhile Alberto's sovereign hand had not left his, nor had one of his thighs left the child's, so that he was no longer quite himself. Culafroy and Divine, with their delicate tastes, will always be forced to love what they loathe, and this constitutes something of their saintliness, for that is renunciation.

  Alberto taught him culling. You must wait until noon, when the snakes are asleep on the rocks, in the sun. You sneak up on them and then, crooking the index and middle finger, you grab them by the neck, close to the head, so that they can't slip away or bite; then, while the snake is hissing with despair, you quickly slip the hood over its head, tighten the noose, and put it into the box. Alberto wore a pair of corduroy trousers, leggings, and a gray shirt, the sleeves of which were rolled up to the elbows. He was good-looking–as are all the males in this book, powerful and lithe, and unaware of their grace. His hard, stubborn hair, which fell down over his eyes to his mouth, would have been enough to endow him with the glamor of a crown in the eyes of the frail, curly-haired child.

  They generally met in the morning, around ten o'clock, near a granite cross. They would chat for a while about girls and then leave. The harvesting had not yet been done. As the metallic rye and wheat were inviolable by all others, they found sure shelter there. They entered obliquely, crept along and suddenly found themselves in the middle of the field. They stretched out on the ground and waited for noon. At first, Culafroy played with Alberto's arms, the next day with his legs, the day after with the rest of him, and this memory thrilled Divine, who could see herself hollowing her cheeks the way a boy does when he whistles. Alberto violated the child everywhere until he himself collapsed with weariness.

  One day Culafroy said:

  “I'm going home, Berto.”

  “Going home? Well, see you this evening, Lou.”

  Why “See you this evening?” The phrase came out of Alberto's mouth so spontaneously that Culafroy took it for granted and replied:

  “See you this evening, Berto.”

  Yet the day was over, they would not see each other until the following day, and Alberto knew it. He smiled foolishly at the thought that he had let slip a phrase that he had not meant. As for Culafroy, the meaning of this farewell remained hazy. The phrase had thrilled him, as do certain artless poems, the logic and grammar of which become apparent only after we have enjoyed their charm. Culafroy was thoroughly bewitched. It was washday at the slate house. On the drier in the garden, the hanging sheets formed a labyrinth where specters hovered. That would be the natural place for Alberto to wait. But at what time? He had mentioned no specific time. The wind shook the white sheets as the arm of an actress shakes a backdrop of painted canvas. Night thickened with its usual quietness and constructed a rigid architecture of broad planes, packed with shadows. Culafroy's stroll began just as the spherical, steaming moon rose in the sky. This was to be the scene of the drama. Would Alberto come to rob? He needed money, he said, “for his chick.” He had a chick; hence he was a true cock. As for stealing, it was possible. He had once inquired about the furnishings in the slate house. Culafroy liked the idea. He hoped that Alberto would come for that too. The moon was rising into the sky with a solemnity calculated to impress sleepless humans. A thousand sounds that make up the silence of night pressed in about the child, like a tragic chorus, with the intensity of the music of brasses and the strangeness of houses of crime, and of prisons, too, where–oh, the horror of it–one never hears the rattle of a bunch of keys. Culafroy walked about barefoot, among the sheets. He was experiencing minutes as light as minuets, minutes composed of anxiety and tenderness. He even ventured a toe dance, but the sheets, which formed hanging partitions and corridors, the sheets, quiet and crafty as corpses, might have drawn together and imprisoned and smothered him, as the branches of certain trees in hot countries sometimes smother careless savages who lie down to rest in their shade. If he ceased to touch the ground, save by an illogical movement of his taut in-step, this movement might have made him take off, leave the earth, might have launched him into worlds from which he would never return, for in space nothing could stop him. He placed the soles of his feet squarely on the ground so that they would hold him there more firmly. For he knew how to dance. He had plucked the following theme from a copy of Screen Weekly: "A little ballerina photographed in her ballet skirt, her arms curved gracefully above her head, her toe rooted to the floor, like a spearhead.” And below the picture, the following caption: “Graceful Kitty Ruphlay, twelve years old.” With an amazing sense of divination, this child, who had never seen a dancer, who had never seen a stage or any actor, understood the page-long article dealing with such matters as figures, entrechats. jetés-battus, tutus, toe-shoes, drops, footlights, and ballet. From the aspect of the word Nijinsky (the rise of the N, the drop of the loop of the j, the leap of the hook on the k and the fall of the y, graphic form of a name that seems to be drawing the artist's élan, with its bounds and rebounds on the boards, of the jumper who doesn't know which leg to come down on). he sensed the dancer's lightness, just as he will one day realize that Verlaine can only be the name of a poet-musician. He learned to dance by himself, just as he had learned to play the violin by himself. So he danced as he played. His every act was served by gestures necessitated not by the act itself, but by a choreography that transformed his life into a perpetual ballet. He quickly succeeded in dancing on his toes, and he did it everywhere: in the shed while gathering sticks of wood, in the little barn, under the cherry tree. . . . He would put aside his sabots and dance on the grass in black wool slippers, with his hands clinging to the low branches. He filled the countryside with a host of figurines who thought they were dancers in white tulle tutus, but who nonetheless remained a pale schoolboy in a black smock looking for mushrooms or dandelions. He was very much afraid of being discovered, especially by Alberto. “What would I say to him?” He thought of the form of suicide that might save him, and he decided upon hanging.
Let us go back to that night. He was surprised and startled by the slightest movement of the branches, the slightest breath that was a bit dry. The moon struck ten. Then came aching anxiety. In his heart and throat the child discovered jealousy. He was now sure that Alberto would not come, that he would go and get drunk; and the idea of Alberto's betrayal was so acute that It established itself despotically in Culafroy's mind, to such a degree that he declared: “My despair is immense.” Generally, when he was alone, he felt no need to utter his thoughts aloud, but today an inner sense of the tragic bade him observe an extraordinary protocol, and so he declared: “My despair is immense.” He sniffled, but he did not cry. About him, the setting had ceased to appear marvelously unreal. Everything was exactly as it had been before: there were still the same white sheets hanging on wire lines which sagged beneath the weight, the same star-spangled sky, but their meaning had changed. The drama that was being enacted there had reached its phase of high pathos, the dénouement: all that remained for the actor was to die. When I write that the meaning of the setting was no longer the same, I do not mean that for Culafroy–and later for Divine–the setting was ever any different from what it would have been for anyone else, namely, wash drying on wire lines. He was well aware that he was a prisoner of sheets, but I beg of you to see the marvelous in this: a prisoner of familiar, though stiff sheets in. the moonlight–unlike Ernestine, whom they would have reminded of brocade hangings or the halls of a marble palace, she who could not mount one step of a stairway without thinking of the word tier, and in the same circumstances, she would not have failed to feel profound despair and make the setting change attribution, to transform it into a white marble tomb, to magnify it, as it were, with her own sorrow, which was as lovely as a tomb, whereas for Culafroy nothing had moved, and this indifference of the setting better signified its hostility. Each thing, each object, was the result of a miracle, the accomplishing of which filled him with wonder. Likewise each gesture. He did not understand his room, nor the garden, nor the village. He understood nothing, not even that a stone was a stone, and this amazement in the face of what is–a setting which, by dint of being, ends by no longer being–left him the writhing prey of primitive, simple emotions: grief, joy, pride, shame. . . .