Funeral Rites by Jean Genet Read Free Book Online Page B

home.”
    “But you'll come again. Come and see us again. Erik will be delighted to see you. All this war and killing is so unfortunate.”
    The maid was in the entryway. She opened the door for me to leave and looked at me without saying anything. Inorder to open it, she had to lift up a worn hanging that concealed it, and her hand grazed that of Jean's mother, who drew back and said, apropos of so trivial a thing:
    “Do watch what you're doing.”
    She too knew that the father of Juliette's child was not Jean but a former sergeant in the regular army who was now a captain in the Militia.
    The maid opened the door. She neither smiled nor said good-by, and I dared not speak to her about Jean.
    I left. Jean had hardly spoken to me about his brother, who had gone off to Germany, then Denmark, and then Germany again. Yet, within me, I followed Paulo's adventures very attentively, waiting, so as to record them, in order for them to take on a particular meaning that would make them interesting, that is, capable of expressing me. My despair over Jean's death is a cruel child. It's Paulo. Let the reader not be surprised if in speaking of him the poet goes so far as to say that his flesh was black, or green with the greenness of night. Paulo's presence had the color of a dangerous liquid. The muscles of his arms and legs were long and smooth. One imagined his joints to be perfectly supple. That suppleness and the length and smoothness of his muscles were the sign of his meanness. I mean by “sign” that there was a connection between his meanness and his visible features. His muscles were elegant and distinguished. So was his meanness. His head was small and was set on a massive neck. The fixity of his gaze, which was worse than that of Erik, was that of an implacable judge, of a soldier, of an officer stupid to the point of sublimity. His face never smiled. His hair was smooth, but the locks overlapped. Or to put it another way, he seemed never to comb his hair but only to slick it down with his wet hands. Of all the little guys I like to stick into my books, he's the meanest. Abandonedon my bed, naked, polished, he will be an instrument of torture, a pair of pincers, a serpentine dagger ready to function, functioning by its evil presence alone and springing up, pale and with clenched teeth, from my despair. He is my despair embodied. He made it possible for me to write this book, just as he granted me the strength to be present at all the ceremonies of memory.
    That visit to the home of Jean's mother left me in a state of exhaustion. To restore my peace of mind I had to organize and carry on the lives which I had fractured for a moment and integrate them into mine, but I was too weary to do it then. I had dinner in a restaurant, then went to a movie.
    Suddenly the audience burst out laughing when the narrator said: “No, indeed, fighting on the rooftops doesn't fill a man's belly,” for a militiaman had just appeared on the screen, a kid of sixteen or seventeen, frailer than Paulo. I said to myself: “He's frailer than Paulo,” and this reflection proves that the adventure had got off on the right track. The kid was skinny but good-looking. His face had suffered. It was sad. It was trembling. One would have thought it expressionless. His shirt was open at the neck. There were cartridge loops on his belt. He was walking in socks too big for him. His head was down. I felt he was ashamed of his black eye. In order to look more natural, to deceive the paving stones in the street, he ran his tongue over his lips and made a brief gesture with his hand which was so closely related to that of his mouth that it traced his whole body, puckered it with very subtle waves, and immediately made me think the following:
    “The gardener is the loveliest rose in his garden.”
    The screen was then filled by a single arm, which was fitted with a broad, heavy, very beautiful hand, then bya young French soldier who was shouldering the little