Our Lady of the Flowers

by Jean Genet

  “He's going away,” she said to herself.

  The priest–the same one we saw officiating so oddly–brought the Holy Sacrament. A candle was burning on the little tea table, near a black crucifix and a bowl of holy water in which a dry, dusty little branch of box holly was soaking.

  Usually, Ernestine accepted in religion only what was most purely marvelous in it (not the mystery that is added to the mystery and conceals it); the marvelous that she found in it was as sound as sterling. Judge from the following: knowing that lightning has a fancy for entering by the chimney and leaving by the window, she, from her armchair, would watch herself go through the windowpanes, retaining–including her bust, neck, legs, and skirts–the stiffness, the coagulation of a starched cloth, and falling on the lawn or rising to the sky, with her heels together, as if she were a statue. Thus. she would fall downward or upward, the way we see saints and angels flying in old paintings, the way Jesus goes straight to heaven, without being carried by clouds.

  That was her religion. As at other times, the days of big flush and gush, days of mystic debauch, she would say to herself: “Suppose I played at believing in God?” She would do it until she trembled.

  At the hour of Divine's death, she played so well at believing in God that she couldn't help having a bit of a transport.

  She saw God gulping down an egg. “To see” is here a casual way of speaking. Regarding revelation, there is not much I can say, for all I know of it is what was granted me to know, thanks to God, in a Yugoslav prison. I had been taken from town to town, depending on where the police van stopped. I would stay a day or two, sometimes longer, in each of the town prisons. Finally I arrived and was locked up in a rather large room with about twenty other prisoners. Three gypsies had organized a school for pickpockets there. It worked as follows: while one of the prisoners lay sleeping on his bunk, each of us, in turn, had to remove from his pockets–and put back without waking him–the objects that were already there. It was delicate work, for we often had to tickle the sleeper in a certain way so that he would turn in his sleep and free the pocket on which he was lying with the full weight of his thighs.

  When it was my turn to operate, the head gypsy called me and ordered me to go to work. Beneath the cloth of the jacket, I felt my heart beating, and I fainted. I was carried to my bunk and was left there until I came to. I still have a very exact memory of the arrangement of the theater. The cell was a kind of passageway that left just enough room for the sloping wooden bunks that lined the walls. At one of the ends, opposite the door, was a slightly arched skylight which was fortified with bars. The yellow light that filtered in from a sky invisible to us was falling obliquely, exactly the way it is shown in prints and novels.

  When I regained consciousness, I was in the corner near the window. I squatted, the way Berbers and little children do, with my feet wrapped in a blanket. In the other corner, standing in a bunch, were the other men.

  They looked at me and burst out laughing. As I did not know their language, one of them pointed at me and made the following gesture: he scratched his hair and, as if he had pulled out a louse, made a show of eating it, with the mimetic gestures characteristic of monkeys.

  I do not remember whether I had lice. In any case, I have never devoured any. My head was covered with dandruff that formed a crust which I would scrape off with my nail and then knock from my nail with my teeth, and which I sometimes swallowed.

  It was at that moment that I understood the room. I realized–for a fraction of a second–its essence. It remained a room, though a prison of the world. I was, through my monstrous horror, exiled to the confines of the obscene (which is the off-scene of the world), facing the graceful pupils of the school of light-fingered theft. I saw clearly ("see,” as in the case of Ernestine) what that room and those men were, what role they were playing: it was a major role in the march of the world. This role was the origin of the world and at the origin of the world. It seemed to me suddenly, thanks to a kind of extraordinary lucidity, that I understood the system. The world dwindled, and its mystery too, as soon as I was cut off from it. It was a truly supernatural moment, similar, in respect to this detachment from the human, to the one I experienced when Chief Warrant Officer Cesari, at the Cherche-Midi Prison, had to write a report on my sexual practices. He said to me, “That word” (he didn't dare utter the word “homosexual"), “is it written as two words?” And he pointed to it on the sheet with his forefinger extended . . . but not touching the word.

  I was ravished.

  Like me, Ernestine was ravished by God's Angels, who are details, meetings, coincidences of the following order: the toe step or perhaps the meeting place of the thighs of the ballerina which the smile of a beloved soldier makes blossom in the hollow of my chest. She held the world between her fingers for a moment and looked at it with the severity of a schoolmistress.

  During the preparation for the last sacrament. Divine emerged from her coma. On seeing the taper, beacon of her own end, she quailed. She realized that death had always been present in life, though its symbolic face had been hidden by a kind of mustache which adjusted its ghastly reality to current taste–that Frankish mustache which, once soldierly, now falling from the scissors, made it look as sheepish as a castrato, for its face at once grew gentle and delicate, pale, with a tiny chin and rounded forehead, like the face of a female saint on Romanesque stained glass or a Byzantine empress, a face we are accustomed to seeing capped with a veiled hennin. Death was so close that it could touch Divine, could tap at her with its lean forefinger, as at a door. She clenched her rigid fingers, tugged at the sheets, which also stiffened, froze.

  “But,” she said to the priest, ‘'I'm not dead yet. I've heard the angels farting on the ceiling.”

  “. . . dead yet,” she repeated to herself, and in voluptuously swinging, nauseating and, in effect, paradisial clouds, Divine again sees the dead woman–and the death of the dead woman–old Adeline of the village, who used to tell him–and Solange–stories about Negroes.

  When the old woman (his cousin) died, he was unable to weep, and in order, nevertheless, to make people think that he was deeply grieved, it occurred to him to moisten his dry eyes with saliva. A ball of smoke is rolling in the heart of Divine's belly. Then she feels herself being invaded, as if by seasickness, by the soul of old Adeline, whose high-heeled button shoes Ernestine made her wear to school after the old lady's death.

  On the night of the wake, moved by curiosity, Culafroy got up. As he started to tiptoe out of his room, there surged forth from every corner a throng of souls which formed a barrier that he had to cross. He entered into their midst, strong in his hieratic delegation, frightened, thrilled, more dead than alive. The souls, the shades, formed an immense, a numerous cortege, rose up from the beginnings of the world; generations of shades trailed behind him to the deathbed. It was fear. He was walking barefoot, as unsolemnly as possible.

  He was advancing as a thief in the night is supposed to advance, perhaps as many a night he had stolen to the closet to steal sugared almonds, almonds that had been given to Ernestine at some baptism or wedding and which he munched with respect, not as a trivial tidbit, but as a sacred food, a symbol of purity, regarding them in the same way he did white wax orange blossoms that lay under a glass globe: a musty smell of incense, a vision of white veils. And that air: the veni Creator.

  “What if the woman keeping vigil is at her post? What will she say?” But she was in the kitchen, drinking coffee.

  The room was empty. Emptied. Death creates a vacuum otherwise and better than does an air pump. The bed sheets outlined the face in relief, like clay that has barely been touched by the sculptor.

  With outstretched hand and rigid arm, Culafroy lifts the sheets. The corpse was still there. He drew near so as to be less frightened. He dared touch the face and even kiss the eyelids. which were as round and icy as agate marbles. The body seemed fecundated by reality. It was uttering the truth.

  At that momen
t, the child was invaded, as it were, by a disorderly troop of memories of readings and stories he had heard: for example, that the room of Bernadette Soubiroux, at the hour of her death, was full of the scent of invisible violets. He therefore instinctively sniffed, but did not recognize the odor that is said to be the odor of sanctity. God was forgetting His servant. And a good thing too. In the first place, you shouldn't waste the scent of flowers on the bed of a dead old maid; and furthermore, you should fear to sow panic in the souls of children.

  But that moment seems to have been the starting point of the thread that was to lead Culafroy-Divine, in accordance with a superlatively devised fatality, to death. The tentative groping had begun long before. The preliminary investigation, which had been carried on at first in the wonderment arising at the first replies, dated from remote, misty, opaque ages, when he belonged to the people of the gods, exactly like the primitives, who have not yet been unswaddled of their urine-scented wrappings and who possess the dignity–which they share with children and certain animals–the gravity, and the nobility that are rightly called ancient. Now–and increasingly so, until the attainment of the exactly poetic vision of the world–knowledge having been acquired, the swaddling clothes were thrust aside. As each questioning, each sounding, rendered a more and more hollow sound, it indicated death, which is the only reality that satisfies us wholly.

  Gone was the joyous rebound upon contact with objects. At each touch, his blindly scrutinizing little finger plunged into emptiness. Doors turned by themselves and revealed nothing. He kissed the old lady on the eyes, and the snakelike iciness froze him. He was about to reel, perhaps fall, when the Memory came to his rescue: the memory of Alberto's corduroy pants. As a man who, through some unexpected privilege, has caught a glimpse of the very heart of the mysteries, quickly looks away so as to regain his footing on earth, so the terror-stricken Culafroy flung himself, burying his head, into the warm, enveloping memory of Alberto's trousers, where he thought to find, to his relief, comforting broods of titmice.

  Then, borne by Alberto, who had come down from heaven, he went back to his room and to bed, where he wept. But–and don't let this surprise you–he wept at being unable to weep.

  Here is how our Great Divine died.

  Having looked for her little gold watch, she found it between her thighs and, with her fist closed over it, handed it to Ernestine, who was sitting at her bedside. Their two hands met in the form of a shell with the watch in the middle. A vast physical peace relaxed Divine. Filth, an almost liquid shit, spread out beneath her like a warm little lake, into which she gently, very gently –as the vessel of a hopeless emperor sinks, still warm, into the waters of Lake Nemi–was engulfed, and with this relief she heaved another sigh, which rose to her mouth with blood, then another sigh, the last.

  Thus did she pass away, one might also say drowned.

  Ernestine was waiting. Suddenly, by some miracle, she realized that the throbbing of their joined hands was the ticking of the watch.

  Because she lived among omens and signs, she was not superstitious. She therefore laid out the corpse all by herself and dressed Divine in a very modest blue cheviot suit of English cut.

  So here she is dead. The Quite-Dead. Her body is caught in the sheets. It is, from head to foot, forever a ship in the breaking-up of ice-floes, motionless and rigid, drifting toward infinity: you, Jean, dear heart, motionless and rigid, as I have already said, drifting on my bed to a happy Eternity.

  And with Divine dead, what is left for me to do? To say?

  This evening, the poplars, of which I see only the tops, are being cruelly dashed together by an angry wind. My cell, lulled by that kindly death, is so sweet today!

  What if I were free tomorrow?

  (Tomorrow is the day of the hearing.)

  Free, in other words, exiled among the living. I have made myself a soul to fit my dwelling. My cell is so sweet. Free: to drink wine, to smoke, to see ordinary people. And tomorrow, what will the jury be like? I have anticipated the stiffest possible sentence it can inflict. I have prepared myself for it with great care, for I have chosen my horoscope (according to what I can read of it from past events) as a figure of fatality. Now that I can obey it, my grief is less great. It is annihilated in the face of the irremediable. It is my hopelessness, and what will be, will be. I have given up my desires. I too am “already far beyond that” (Weidmann). Let me therefore live between these walls for a man's lifetime. Who will be judged tomorrow? Some stranger bearing a name that was once my name. I can continue to die, until my death, amidst all these widowers. Lamp, washbasin, regulations, broom. And the straw mattress, my spouse.

  I do not feel like going to sleep. Tomorrow's hearing is a solemnity that requires a vigil. It is this evening that I should like to weep–as one who stays behind–for my farewells. But my lucidity is like a nakedness. The wind outside is getting wilder and wilder and is being joined by the rain. The elements are thus a prelude to tomorrow's ceremonies. Today is the 12th, isn't it? What shall I decide? Warnings are said to come from God. They don't interest me. I already feel that I no longer belong to the prison. Broken is the exhausting fraternity that bound me to the men of the tomb. Perhaps I shall live. . . .

  At times I am shaken with a burst of brutal and unaccountable laughter. It resounds within me like a joyous cry in the fog, which it seems to be trying to dissipate, but it leaves no trace other than a wistful longing for sun and gaiety.

  What if I am condemned? I shall don homespun again, and this rust-colored garment will immediately entail the monastic gesture: hiding my hands in my sleeves; and the equivalent attitude of mind will follow: I shall feel myself becoming humble and glorious; then, snug under my blankets–it is in Don Juan that the characters come back to life on the stage and kiss each other–I shall, for the enchantment of my cell, refashion lovely new lives for Darling, Divine, Our Lady and Gabriel.

  I have read moving letters, full of wonderful touches, of despair, of hopes, of songs; and others more severe. I am choosing from among them one which will be the letter Darling wrote to Divine from prison:

  “Dearest,

  I'm writing a few lines to give you the news, which isn't good. I've been arrested for stealing. So try to get a lawyer to handle my case. Arrange to pay him. And also arrange to send me a money order, because you know how lousy things are here. Also try to get permission to come and see me and bring me some linens. Put in the blue and white silk pajamas. And some undershirts. Dearest, I'm awfully sorry about what's happened to me. Let's face it, I'm plain unlucky. So I'm counting on you to help me out. I only wish I could have you in my arms so I could hold you and squeeze you tight. Remember the things we used to do together. Try to recognize the dotted lines. And kiss it. A thousand big kisses, sweetheart, from

  Your Darling.”

  The dotted line that Darling refers to is the outline of his prick. I once saw a pimp who had a hard-on while writing to his girl place his heavy cock on the paper and trace its contours. I would like that line to portray Darling.

  Fresnes Prison, 1942

  1 These are not Pope's exact words, but a translation of the author's misquotation, from memory, of a French version. (Translator's note.)

  1 The sense of this passage turns on the word spirituel, which has the double meaning of spiritual and witty. (Translator's note.)