“It is.” And Erik smiled. He spoke perfect French, with a somewhat heavy accent. Walking at Riton's side, he readjusted his short black jacket, his belt, and his revolver. He passed a candy-vending machine and saw his black sleeve in the narrow mirror: to the already sublime fact of being a tank driver in the German army was added the brilliance of his name. Deep inside the dark block of his funereally garbed body he guarded that name: Erik Seiler, followed by a magical expression, and around them, though less precise, for it was only the pretext for the scintillating of the name, a whole amazing adventure that was set in Berlin. The expression: the executioner's lover. Erik had no vanity. His reputation for scandalous love affairs had satisfied him in the past, but this was because they prevented his diverging from his singular destiny.
“I alone am Erik Seiler.” This certainty exalted him. He was sure that no one recognized him in the street, but he knew that the crowd knew of the existence of Erik Seiler, whom he alone could be. Renown suffices, even if it be of an ignominious kind and thus the opposite of glory, if fama is glory. To have been the executioner's lover sufficed for his glory. He was famous, young, handsome, rich, intelligent, loving, and loved. In short, he had everything that is implied, everything that is specified, when people say: “He had everything to make him happy.” The unhappiness or sufferings of that exceptional being could therefore have had only a noble source. His; sufferings were of metaphysical origin. As others are isolated by an infirmity, so he was isolated by that bouquet of multiple gifts. From his solitude sprang his qualms about the problem of evil, and he had opted for evil out of despair. His having seen himself—though just a glimpse—in the mirror of the candy-vending machine fortified him against his image of himself. He was under the protection of the headsman of Germany, of the executioner with the ax, and when he emerged from the subway into the darkness of the street, he stroked the militiaman's delicate neck, and the boy nimbly turned halfway around and placed one of his legs between Erik's.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Pierrot was not the administrator of justice but a merchant. He was afraid of what Paulo would think if he heard about the adventure. And he would hear about it. Little by little he lost altitude. He was being abandoned by his sublime rectitude. Death was withdrawing. He was walking on earth. At the same time, his mind got busy, and his intelligence told him that it was impossible for anyone to check upon his choice. He pointed to faces that he hated then and there, and, as he himself was a minor, in the minor section he pointed out only the younger ones. The contempt of all the men—and chiefly that of the adults who saw squealing pass by in the garb of youth and beauty—was more and more evident. In order to appear casual, indifferent to his role and to the contempt he aroused when he went to point out the victim, he forced his way through the herd of brutes with his hands in his pockets. To escape their gaze, that is, in order that his own not be caught in that of someone sterner, tougher than he, he drew his hands together in his pockets till they almost met over his belly, so that the cloth of his trousers tightened around his behind and made him pivot on one heel with so nimble a movement that his locks got mussed and the flap of his muffler slapped an old man in the face. As he progressively lost his haughty rigor, the captain's blind confidence in him declined. A bit of hesitation, a more bullying manner, gestures that were more insolent because of the contempt that had to be pushed aside, were perhaps signs warning the officer that the kid was lying. For a moment he thought of checking, but his laziness, first of all, and his indifference to the lives of others made him more or less drop the idea.
“What a little bitch the kid is!” he thought to himself. And he could not refrain from loving him, from secretly forming an alliance with him. He was even grateful to the boy for reminding him that the Militia played the same role in the life of France that the kid was playing in the present life of the prison. He more than anyone else knew that the Militia existed in order to betray. It bore a burden of shame. Every militiaman had to have the guts to despise courage, honor, and justice. It's hard at times, but laziness helps us just as it does the saints. The kid is worthy of a militiaman. While he was pursuing these thoughts, with one hand immobilized in his pocket on his keyring and the other resting on his yellow leather holster, a kind of grin twisted his mouth, but actually the laugh continued inside the closed mouth with a slight ironic sound in mockery of that thought, and his eyes suddenly grew fixed so that his mind could see it more clearly in a crueler light.
“And what the hell does it matter if we do shoot innocent ones?” He had this thought the moment preceding the choice of the twenty-eighth victim, whom the kid had just designated by standing in front of him and repeating for the twenty-seventh time the following words: “He's one too.” The kid was leaving the cell. The turnkey was about to lock the door, but the captain turned to Pierrot and asked, “Did you look carefully? Are you sure he's the only one in that bunch?”
An unexpected gentleness in the captain's voice disturbed the kid, who thought it had been feigned. He had spoken in a theatrical tone in which the kid thought he detected a fierce irony. He was seized with fear lest his imposture be discovered. He turned pale. If after such a betrayal the power that had demanded it on pain of death turned against him or even abandoned him to the hatred of the prisoners, he would have to swallow his tears and, bent endlessly over the rag with which one washes the steps of a staircase, endure eternal humiliation. And it was a poor, humble little housemaid, subjected to all kinds of whims, who, trembling like a dog, answered:
“No, sir, no. . . .” His voice remained suspended, not daring to say “He's the only one,” for that sentence contained the statement “He's one,” which he had not the courage to proclaim, for fear of suddenly hearing a frightful burst of laughter in the sky, that is, in all things, in doors and walls, in eyes, in voices, when they heard so monstrous a statement. And he quickly calmed down, for he told himself that such monstrousness had been possible because fate had made an error and had used him to commit that error. “And if heaven recognizes the error,” he thought to himself, “there will be such joy in our Father's dwelling that my reconciliation with the order of the world will take place by itself.” In short, that's how I express what he felt.
Then he came down to earth. He was afraid and did not want to find a single condemned face in any of the four remaining cells. He went up to a kid of about sixteen whose jacket, which was simply thrown over his shoulders, fell to the floor. Pierrot picked it up very politely and helped him slip it on. Souls have been saved for less than that. For a caterpillar that has fallen from a tree and that is put back on a leaf, for a little blue flower that the foot refuses to crush, for a kindly thought about a toad, nature sings a hymn of joy, all the censers swing in your honor. A child was sure that no harm would befall him because one afternoon, in the empty church where he was about to break open the poor box, he was so kind as to close the open door of a stall, thereby re-establishing the destroyed order, repairing an error, perhaps a tiny one, but there is nothing to which one does not cling, and Pierrot knew that he would be forgiven everything for that one charitable gesture. It is not surprising that he has such difficulty in climbing the rungs of evil and that he seeks help. He did not cheat. When the Yogi makes his way to knowledge, he is always accompanied by a master who guides and helps him. It is right for the murderer to help himself along however he can.
Pierrot, the captain, the warden, the chief guard, and three other guards (for one of the three turnkeys led each chosen victim to a cell elsewhere) formed a group which at that moment was at the end of the fifth section. With his soul utterly distraught, Pierrot stood stock-still and awaited the announcement of a frightful judgment. The captain went up to him and put out his hand, which the kid shook. He said: “My boy, you've done your duty. You've just performed an act of courage, and I congratulate you.”
; Then, addressing the warden, he demanded that the guards treat the squealer decently. And then he asked what would be done to protect him from the prisoners’ revenge and persecution. It was quickly arranged that he would be a librarian until he was freed by an early pardon. A guard escorted him to the library. Two hours later, another guard, whose voice he could feel was charged with hatred and disgust, informed him that an emergency court composed of the warden, the captain, and an official delegated by the secretary to keep order had just issued a blanket verdict sentencing the twenty-eight child victims, minors all, to death by a firing squad.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The prison chaplain suffered from aerophagia, and, in order to release his gases in silence, he would squeeze his buttocks together with one hand. The farts, instead of exploding, would fizz without making a loud noise. Being close to fifty, he was almost bald and his pudgy face was grayish, not because of the color of the skin but because it was completely expressionless. On the morning of the execution, as soon as he got up, he ran to the crapper at the far end of the garden without buttoning his cassock. All went well, and when he wanted to wipe his ass, he reached out mechanically for the tissue paper. But his housekeeper had once again hung the pages of The Religious Weekly on the nail. Usually he didn't give much of a damn. That morning he dared not drag the name of Jesus or Mary through the shit. He ran his forefinger over the shitty hole and tried to wipe it, as he often did, on the door (the swimmer does it on the rocks, as the athlete on the boards of fences). Whereupon he noticed that the comma which his finger had just shaped there formed, at the top of the heart bored in the door, a bouquet of flames that made a Sacred Heart of Jesus out of the empty heart through which could be seen in the dawn a priest's garden and, to be more exact, a clump of white phlox. The heart, suddenly consummated by the sublime distinction of its flame, burst into a blaze, and the abbé thus received the baptism of fire. He did not reflect upon what he should do in the presence of that simple prodigy. He did better than think, he acted. Frightened by the sight of God—and not because God manifested himself in the crapper by transfiguring an image of emptiness and shit—but because of the suddenness of the grace that had been granted and because his soul was not, he thought, quite ready to receive God, on account of a terrible sin—whereas that sin alone had put him in a state of grace—the priest tried to kneel, but his knees banged against the door, which opened and presented in the trivial daybreak the shit-adorned heart that had gleamed in the darkness of the outhouse but that was dismally dirty in the morning light. Confronted with this new miracle—the disappearance of the first—his agitation increased. He rushed out and did violence to his feelings in order not to slam the holy door. He ran through the garden, which had been dampened by the night mist. He stepped over a lane of strawberry plants and entered the presbytery, which was on the street. Three minutes later he was at the Militia barracks. In a few amazingly supple strides he dashed upstairs to the captain's office and opened the door without knocking. Then he stopped, out of breath. “God,” he said to himself, “is first making me perform a little act that has a social meaning.”
If I am relating the inner adventures of a Catholic priest, do not think that I am satisfied with probing the secrets of the mechanism of religious inspiration. My goal is God. I am aiming at Him, and since He hides Himself in the jumble of the various faiths more than elsewhere, it seems clever of me to pretend that I am trying to track Him down there. Priests think that they are with God. Let us assume that they are with Him, and let us see ourselves in them. Despite his devoutness, the captain was infuriated at the interruption. Nevertheless, he stood up. The priest made a gesture of peace with his right hand. He said:
“Remain seated, captain.”
His breathlessness made him actually say “main seated.”
The captain was standing behind his desk, at the right of the glass cabinet containing the French flag, the silk cloth of which was double, heavy, and motionless.
“In case of trouble,” he thought, “I'll wrap myself in its folds.”
His pale clenched hands were pressing against the black wooden desk over which his body was bent. A sunbeam, coming from the window like grace from heaven, separated him from the priest, whose face was enough for him to understand the significance of the priest's behavior, thus justifying his casualness. He said:
“Monsieur l'abbé. . . .”
The abbé had already taken a paper from his cuff, but he did not use it. “Is the captain baptized?” he wondered. “Where are the baptismal certificates?” He saw the roster on the wall. . . . “Join up. . . .”
“Captain, what I have to do would be painful if it were not ordered by God. . . .” He stopped, embarrassed by the beginning of the sentence. The solemnity of the order and the majesty of Him who had given it were too great for him, were not in keeping with the place, with the posters, the pencils, the ordnance survey maps. He looked at the officer.
“It was in the crapper, in the form of shit. . . .”
The captain's cold eyes stared at the bridge of the abbé's nose. Beneath that gaze, which was visibly ready for anything, even for the most dangerous weapon, irony, the priest had a burst of courage and wild hope. Still winded by his tirade, he cried out with a sputter, in a high-pitched voice:
“. . . God. . . .”
Uttered in such a tone, that burning and desperate name, which was now outside of him, could have been a threat, an appeal, an invocation. It emerged from the priest's mouth amidst a spray of spit that crossed the field of blond light from the panes and became the golden rays of an extremely delicate sun in which the name appeared suddenly glorious, alone, and so intimately mingled with those tenuous rays that it scattered itself in droplets which sprinkled the captain's clothes with an invisible and perhaps dangerous constellation. The captain did not move under the onslaught. Thanks to the fixity of his eyes, he was master of the situation. There was a moment of silence. It was a July morning. Each guarded within himself a treasure that was his strength and behind which he took shelter. The priest had God since he spat Him out piecemeal as a tubercular spits out his lungs. France and, better than France, a tricolored banner of thick silk embroidered and fringed with gold were a magnificent cope for the captain.
“Tell me about it,” said the captain, who immediately thought to himself with gravity, “You could have wiped your ass.”
“It's . . . very grave. . . . It's. . . . I know . . . today, this very morning. . . .”
The captain had regained his self-possession. Fully absorbed in higher contemplation of the disaster, he was master of the moment. He pulled himself together, and this betrayed him, for he replied haughtily and arrogantly:
“What do you mean?”
The admission was in the tone.
“Captain, what I know . . . if. . . .”
“If what? . . . If what?”
“Save those children. I have. . . .”
“What? . . .”
“Proof.”
“You have proof? What proof?”
“I'll strike. I'm a priest and God is my strength. . . .”
All the same, the captain began to be afraid, but it was a fear of the moment and not of social and official consequences. Anything was possible with a man dressed as a woman, in a black robe beneath which were no doubt hidden at night, clinging to the hairs on the balls, to the balls themselves as to the rocks of the Sierra, armies of policemen with muscular thighs who might at any moment open the cassock and handcuff him and extradite him from public barracks. He overcame this idiotic fear and said:
“That paper of yours. . . .”
The priest, who had just held the paper out, tossed it on the desk, and the captain saw a cartoon of a soldier teasing a servant girl.
“Revelation. . . . Revelation. . . . Revelation. . . .”
Once the word appeared, it prolifera
ted in the ecclesiastic's head with an abundance that left no room for any idea. Threatened by a military man who seemed very self-possessed, the priest had no time to think, but he was suddenly struck, with lightning speed, by the following: “God reveals himself to me who reveals the sin of others." The word revelation meant both glory and its exact opposite. God was backing away from France but was thereby triumphing over it.
“My son. . . .”
The abbé put out his hands, and his arms, which for a few seconds were parallel, motionless, and stiff as marionettes, then crossed on his chest. The captain walked around his desk and kneeled before the priest, who blessed him and left the room, murmuring:
“Compose yourself. God needed that admirable sin.”
A Militia company had put down the prison rebellion. Riton was not a member of it. He was among those who were chosen—or picked at random—to execute the twenty-eight victims. When he learned that hoodlums were to be shot, nothing within him rebelled. On the contrary, he was filled with a kind of gladness. His eyes gleamed. We can be sure that none of the following ideas occurred to him, but I am trying to explain why he was joyful. Fed by the gutter, the entire soul of the gutter would be in him until he died. He liked hoodlums and respected the strong and despised the weak. It was hunger that had made him a militiaman, but hunger would not have been enough. He had learned from pals of his who had joined up earlier that the Militia recruited from among riffraff. They were birds of a feather that would never include squares who wore glasses, noncoms of the destroyed army, hollow-chested bureaucrats, but only former thugs from Marseilles and Lyons. The Militia was hated by the bourgeois before it was formed. Its purpose was to spread fear, to spread disorder. It seemed the materialization of what every thief desires: that organization, that free, powerful society, which was ideal only in prison, in which each thief—and even each murderer—would be openly appreciated for no reason other than his worth as a thief or murderer. The police make associations of felons impossible, and the great gangs that are not fantasies of journalists and policemen are quickly broken up. The thief and the murderer know camaraderie only in jail, where their worth is finally recognized, accepted, rewarded, and honored. The “underworld” no longer exists, except that of pimps, who are stool pigeons. The burglar and the killer are alone, but they sometimes have friends. Though pals may hang out together, you must always be on guard, must always give vague answers: “Oh, I manage,” must never give any publicity to jobs, which are veritable jewels, except when you're nabbed. But the great happiness of knowing your name is under a photo, of thinking that the pals are jealous of that glory, is paid for with freedom and often with life, with the result that every job, every burglary or murder, will be a wonder of art, for from the last one of all will come your death and your glory. The felon is a Chinese, a Burmese, who prepares his funeral all his life. He works on the coffin, splendid lacquers, skillful paintings, gold and blood-red lanterns, cymbals. He invents processions of Laotian priests wrapped in their white linen bands. He pays embalmers. He organizes his glory. Each act is a phrase of our overlong funeral. Though the police serve order and the Militia disorder, they cannot be compared socially. The fact remains that the latter also did the work of the former. It was at the ideal point where the thief and the policeman meet and merge. They achieve the following exploit: fighting the cop and the thief. In like manner, the Gestapo. On June 23, Riton and one of his cronies were summoned to the captain's office. The chief was sitting on the edge of his typist's table and smoking a cigarette. When the two lads entered, he turned his chest a little. The new leather of a complicated outfit (belts, holsters, cross-belts, etc.) creaked.