by Jean Genet
DIVINARIANA (continued)
Despite the abjection in which you may hold her, Divine still reigns on the boulevard. To a newcomer (perhaps fifteen years old) in shabby linen, who winks mockingly, a pimp says, shoving her aside:
“Her, she's Divine. You, you're a slob.”
Divine has been seen at the market at about eight in the morning. Shopping bag in hand, she was discussing the price of vegetables, violets, eggs.
The afternoon of the same day, five friends at tea: “Behold, my darlings, behold Divine wedded to God. She rises at cock's crow to go to communion, the Quite-Repentant.”
The chorus of friends:
“Pitah, pitah, for Divine!”
The following day:
“My dear, they made Divine strip at the police station. She was all bruised. She'd been biffed. Her Darling's been beating her.”
The chorus of friends:
“Woo, woo, woo, Divine's getting licked!”
Now, the fact is that Divine wore next to her skin a clinging hair shirt, unsuspected by Darling and the clients.
Someone is talking to Divine (it's a soldier who wants to re-enlist):
“What can I do to get along? I have no money.”
Divine:
“Work.”
“You can't find work right away.”
He tries to tempt Divine and persists:
“So?”
He hopes she will answer, or think: “Steal.” But Divine dared not reply, because, musing on what she would have done. in such a case, she saw herself holding out to the birds her crumbs of hunger, and she thought: “Beg.”
Divine:
“We have seen cyclists, wrapped in the garlands of the song they whistled, going dizzily down the celestial slope of the hills. We awaited them in the valley, where they arrived in the form of little pats of mud.”
Divine's cyclists awake in me an ancient terror.
It is absolutely essential that I come back to myself, that I confide in a more direct way. I wanted to make this book out of the transposed, sublimated elements of my life as a convict. I am afraid that it says nothing about the things that haunt me. Although I am striving for a lean style, one that shows the bone, I should like to address to you from my prison a book laden with flowers, with snow-white petticoats and blue ribbons. There is no better pastime.
The world of the living is never too remote from me. I remove it as far as I can with all the means at my disposal. The world withdraws until it is only a golden point in so somber a sky that the abyss between our world and the other is such that the only real thing that remains is our grave. So I am beginning here a really dead man's existence. More and more I prune that existence, I trim it of all facts, especially the more petty ones, those which might readily remind me that the real world is spread out twenty yards away, right at the foot of the walls. Among my concerns, I rule out those most apt to remind me that they were necessitated by an established social practice: for example, tying my shoelaces with a double bow would remind me too sharply that, in the world, I used to do that to keep them from coming undone during the miles of walking I did. I don't button my fly. To do so would oblige me to check on myself again in the mirror or when I leave the can. I sing what I would never have sung out there, for example, that frightful: “We're the ones who are mopey and lousy and tough . . . ,” which, ever since I sang it at La Roquette when I was fifteen, comes to mind every time I go back to prison. I read things I would never read elsewhere (and I believe in them): the novels of Paul Féval. I believe in the world of prisons, in its reprehended practices. I accept living there as I would accept, were I dead, living in a cemetery, provided that I lived there as if I were really dead. But the diversion must be based not on the difference between the occupations, but on their essence. I must do nothing clean or hygienic: cleanliness and hygiene are of the earthly world. I must feed on the gossip of the law courts. Must feed on dreams. Must not be dandyish and bedeck myself with new adornments, other than a tie and gloves, but must give up being smart and trim. Must not want to be good-looking: must, want something else. Must use another kind of speech. And must think that I've been imprisoned once and for all, and for eternity. That's what is meant by “building a life”: giving up Sundays, holidays, concern about the weather. I was not surprised when I discovered the practices of prisoners, the practices that make of them men on the margin of the living: cutting up matches lengthwise, making cigarette lighters, smoking ten to a butt, walking round and round the cell, and so on. I think that hitherto I bore that life within me secretly and that all I needed was to be put into contact with it for it to be revealed to me, from without, in its reality.
But now I am afraid. The signs pursue me and I pursue them patiently. They are bent on destroying me. Didn't I see, on my way to court, seven sailors on the terrace of a café, questioning the stars through seven mugs of light beer as they sat around a table that perhaps turned; then, a messenger boy on a bicycle who was carrying a message from god to god, holding between his teeth, by the metal handle, a round, lighted lantern, the flame of which, as it reddened his face, also heated it? So pure a marvel that he was unaware of being a marvel. Circles and globes haunt me: oranges, Japanese billiard balls, Venetian lanterns, jugglers’ hoops, the round ball of the goalkeeper who wears a jersey. I shall have to establish, to regulate, a whole internal astronomy.
Fear? And what worse can happen to me than what will happen? Apart from physical suffering, I fear nothing. Morality clings to me only by a thread. Yet, I am afraid. Did I not suddenly realize, on the eve of the trial, that I had been awaiting that moment for eight months, during which time I never gave it a thought? Few are the moments when I escape from horror, few the moments when I do not have a vision, or some horrifying perception of human beings and events. Even, and especially, of those commonly judged to be the most beautiful. Yesterday, in one of those narrow cells in the “Mousetrap” where you wait until it's time to go up to the chambers of the examining magistrate, there were twelve of us, standing, crowded together. I was at the back, by the latrines, near a young Italian who was laughing and relating some trivial experiences. But owing to his voice and his accent and his French, these adventures vibrated with pathos. I took him for an animal that had been metamorphosed into a man. I felt that, in the presence of this privilege which I thought he possessed, he could, at any given moment, turn me, by his simple wish, even unexpressed, into a jackal, a fox, a guinea hen. Perhaps I was hypnotizing myself in the presence of this privilege which I thought he possessed. At one point, he exchanged a few naïve and mortal remarks with a child-pimp. He said, among other things: “I skinned the gal,” and in the narrow cell he was suddenly so close to me that I thought he wanted to love me, and so fierce that I thought he meant: “I skinned the woman” in the sense that one says of a rabbit: “I skinned it,” that is, carved it up. He also said: “The warden says to me straight off: “You're a funny egg,’ and I answer back: ‘Let me tell you, eggs like me are worth just as much as eggs like you.’ “ I think of the word “egg” in the mouths of babies. It's horrible. The marvelous horror was such that when I remember those moments (it had to do with crap games), it seems to me that the two kids were suspended in air, without support, their feet off the floor, and that they were shooting remarks at each other in silence. I am so certain of remembering that they were in the air that in spite of myself my intelligence tries to figure out whether they didn't have some gadget that enabled them to lift themselves up, a hidden mechanism, an invisible spring, under the floor, some kind of plausible device. But as nothing of the sort was possible, my memory strays into the sacred horror of the dream. Frightful moments–which I seek out–when you cannot contemplate either your body or heart without disgust. I encounter everywhere a trivial incident, seemingly innocuous, which plunges me into the foulest horror: as if I were a corpse being pursued by the corpse that I am. It's the odor of the latrines. It's the hand of the man condemned to death, the hand with its wedd
ing ring, which I see when he puts it outside the grating of his cell to take the soup tin from the assistant: since he himself remains invisible to me, the hand is like the hand of the god of a trick temple, and that cell, in which the light is kept on day and night, is the Space-Time amalgam of the anteroom of death–a vigil of arms which will last for forty-five times twenty-four hours. It's Darling with his trousers down, sitting on the white enamel toilet seat. His face is contracted. When the hot lumps, suspended for a moment, drop from him, a whiff apprises me that this blond hero was stuffed with shit. And the dream swallows me with one gulp. It's the fleas biting me, and I know they're malicious and that they're biting me with an intelligence that at first is human, and then more than human.
Do you know some poison-poem that would burst my cell into a spray of forget-me-nots? A weapon that would kill the perfect young man who inhabits me and makes me give asylum to a whole agglomeration of animals?
Swallows nest beneath his arms. They have masoned a nest there of dry earth. Snuff-colored velvet caterpillars mingle with the curls of his hair. Beneath his feet, a hive of bees, and broods of asps behind his eyes. Nothing moves him. Nothing disturbs him, save little girls taking first communion who stick out their tongues at the priest as they clasp their hands and lower their eyes. He is cold as snow. I know he's sly. Gold makes him smile faintly, but if he does smile, he has the grace of angels. What gypsy would be quick enough to rid me of him with an inevitable dagger? It takes promptness, a good eye, and a fine indifference. And . . . the murderer would take his place. He got back this morning from a round of the dives. He saw sailors and whores, and one of the girls has left the trace of a bloody hand on his cheek. He may go far away, but he is as faithful as a pigeon. The other night, an old actress left her camellia in his button hole.
I wanted to crumple it; the petals fell on the rug (but what rug? my cell is paved with flat stones) in big, warm, transparent drops of water. I hardly dare look at him now, for my eyes go through his crystal flesh, and all those hard angles make so many rainbows there that that is why I cry. The end.
It may not seem like much to you, yet this poem has relieved me. I have shat it out.
Divine:
“By dint of saying that I'm not alive, I accept the fact that people stop thinking about me.”
Though Darling's personal relations had dwindled as a result of his betrayals, Divine's had increased. In her date book, famous for its oddness, where every other page was strewn with a jumble of penciled spirals, which intrigued Darling until Divine once confessed that these were the pages of cocaine days, where she noted her accounts, fees, and appointments, we already read the names of the three Mimosas (a Mimosa dynasty had been reigning over Montmartre since the triumphs of Mimosa the Great, the fluffy-wuffy of high thievery), of Queen Oriane, First Communion, Duckbill, Sonia, Clairette, Fatty, the Baroness, Queen of Rumania (why was she called Queen of Rumania? We were once told that she had loved a king, that she was secretly in love with the King of Rumania, because his mustache and black hair gave him a gypsy look. That in being sodomized by one male who represented ten million, she felt the spunk of ten million men flowing into her, while one tool lifted her like a mast to the midst of the suns), of Sulphurous, Monique, Sweet Leo. At night they haunted narrow bars which had not the fresh gaiety and candor of even the shadiest dancehalls. They loved each other there, but in fear, in the kind of horror we experience in the most charming dream. There is a sad gaiety in our love, and though we have more wit than Sunday lovers by the water's edge, our wit attracts misfortune. Here laughter springs only from trouble. It is a cry of pain. At one of these bars: as she does every evening, Divine has placed on her head a little coronet of false pearls. She resembles the crowned eagle of the heraldists, with the sinews of her neck visible beneath the feathers of her boa. Darling is facing her. Sitting about at other tables are the Mimosas, Antinea, First Communion. They are talking about dear absent friends. Judith enters and, in front of Divine, bows to the ground:
“Good evening, Madame!”
“What an ass!” exclaims Divine.
“Die Puppe hat gesprochen,” says a young German.
Divine bursts out laughing. The crown of pearls falls to the floor and breaks. Condolences, to which malicious joy gives rich tonalities: “The Divine is uncrowned! . . . She's the great Fallen One! . . . The poor Exile!” The little pearls roll about the sawdust-covered floor, and they are like the glass pearls that peddlers sell to children for a penny or two, and these are like the glass pearls that we thread every day on miles of brass wire, with which, in other cells, they weave funeral wreaths like those that bestrewed the cemetery of my childhood, rusted, broken, weathered by wind and rain, with just a tiny little pink blue-winged porcelain angel, attached to a thin blackened wire. In the cabaret, all the faggots are suddenly on their knees. Only the men stand upright. Then, Divine lets out a burst of strident laughter. Everyone pricks up his ears: it's her signal. She tears her bridge out of her open mouth, puts it on her skull and, with her heart in her throat, but victorious, she cries out in a changed voice, with her lips drawn back into her mouth:
“Dammit all, Ladies, I'll be queen anyhow!”
When I said that Divine was composed of a pure water, I ought to have made clear that she was hewn of tears. But making her gesture was a slight thing compared to the grandeur of soul required for the other: taking the bridge from her head, putting it back into her mouth, and fastening it on.
And it was no slight matter for her to parody a royal coronation. When she was living with Ernestine in the slate house:
Nobility is glamorous. The most equalitarian of men, though he may not care to admit it, experiences this glamor and submits to it. There are two possible attitudes toward it: humility or arrogance, both of which are explicit recognition of its power. Titles are sacred. The sacred surrounds and enslaves us. It is the submission of flesh to flesh. The Church is sacred. Its slow rites, weighed down with gold like Spanish galleons, ancient in meaning, remote from spirituality, give it an empire as earthly as that of beauty and that of nobility. Culafroy of the light body, unable to escape this potency, abandoned himself to it voluptuously, as he would have done to Art had he known it. The nobility has names as heavy and strange as the names of snakes (already as difficult as the names of old, lost divinities), strange as signs and escutcheons or venerated animals, totems of old families, war cries, titles, furs, enamels–escutcheons that closed the family with a secret, as a signet seals a parchment, an epitaph, a tomb. It charmed the child. Its procession in time, indistinct and yet certain, and present, a procession of rough warriors, of whom he was, so he thought, the final issue, therefore they themselves–a procession whose sole reason for being had been to arrive at the following result: a pale child, prisoner of a village of thatched cottages–moved him more than an actual and visible procession of weather-beaten soldiers, of whom he might have been chief. But he was not noble. Nobody in the village was noble, at any rate nobody bore the traces of nobility. But one day, among the rubbish in the attic, he found an old history book by Capefigue. In it were recorded a thousand names of barons and knights-at-arms, but he saw only one: Picquigny. Ernestine's maiden name was Picquigny. No doubt about it, she was noble. We quote the passage from Monsieur Capefigue's Constitutional and Administrative History of France (page 447):
“. . . a preliminary and secret meeting of the Estates, which was organized by Marcel and the municipal magistrates of Paris. It was carried out as follows. Jean de Picquigny and several other men-at-arms went to the castle where the King of Navarre was held captive. Jean de Picquigny was governor of Artois. The men-at-arms, who were burghers of Amiens, set up ladders under the walls and took the guards by surprise, but they did not harm them . . .”