Funeral Rites by Jean Genet Read Free Book Online Page A

emerging with a new skin; for Jean, that soldier of the Year II, would not have dared make that inept gesture of respect.
    I had never yet seen Jean's half brother. I was sure that it was he, as a matter of fact, whom I saw the following day at the funeral, with his mother.
    He went off. For a moment I followed him with my eyes—not that I suspected what linked him to Jean—but because of his splendid bearing, which I shall speak about later. When he entered the room in which I was chatting with Erik for the first time, darkness was setting in. He said:
    “Hello.”
    And he sat down in a corner, near the table. He did not look at either Erik or me. The first thing he did was to take the wristwatch that was lying on the table and put it on. His face expressed nothing in particular.
    I was perhaps mistaken in supposing that the twowatches lying back to back on a night table betrayed a shameful intimate relationship, but I had so often dreamed fruitlessly of intimate loves that the most desirable of these loves were signified, written, by things that are inanimate when alone and they sing—and sing only of love—as soon as they encounter the beloved, the song, ornaments of secret states of adornment. Paulo took a gun from his pocket and began to take it apart. The fact that he showed so little surprise meant that his mother must have informed him of my presence. She must have seen him when he came in. Erik had stopped talking. He did not look at Paulo. The mother came in by the same door as her son. She said to me, pointing at him:
    “This is Paul, Jean's brother.”
    “Oh! I see.”
    The boy did not deign to make a movement. He did not say a word to me or even look at me.
    “Can't you say hello? It's Monsieur Genet, you know, Jean's friend.”
    He did deign to stand up and come over to shake hands. I could tell he had recognized me, but he didn't smile at me.
    “How goes it?”
    He looked deep into my eyes. His face was grim, not because he was tired or out of indifference to my question or to me, but, I think, out of a violent will to exclude me, to drive me out. At that moment, Erik, who had left for twenty seconds, reappeared in the mirror and as he entered while Paulo was staring at me and gripping the weapon with one hand, I was seized with fear, a physical fear, as when one feels the imminence of a brawl. The grimness of that swarthy little face made me feel immediately that I was entering tragedy. Its hardness and sternness meant above all that there could be no hopeand that I had to expect the worst. I hardly looked at him, yet I felt him living under very high tension, and on my account. He parted his lips but said nothing. Erik was behind him, ready, I felt, to back him up if, as once happened with a sailor, Paulo said to me, “Come outside,” and joined me with a knife in his fist for a fight that would be fatal to me, not because of the blade but because it seemed to me impossible to soften all that hardness. I would have liked the inflexible frame that made Paulo mortally seductive to bend for me. But all I could do was be conscious of his elegant severity, the result of a disheartening failure (for if I can note here this kind of short poem, the reason is that it was not granted me to live a moment of happiness, because a sailor's face in front of me went blank when I asked him for a light). Paulo went to the table and started toying with his gun again. I watched his hands: not a single superfluous gesture. Not one of them that did not do what it was meant to do. That precision created a disturbing impression of indifference to everything that was not the projected act. The machine could not make an error. I think that Paulo's meanness thus called attention to itself by a kind of inhuman severity. I turned to the mother:
    “I'll be going.”
    “But you'll stay and have dinner with us. You're not going off just like that.”
    “I've got to go home.”
    “Is it urgent?”
    “Yes, I've got to go