“Don't.”
Riton pulled away impatiently and his nervous finger let loose a second burst.
“Don't,” Erik repeated hoarsely in a scolding but low tone.
He was again traversed by rivers of green anger. They were sailing at night, beneath a sky streaked with heat lightning, down a river full of alligators. On the shore where ferns grew, the savage moon-worshipers were dancing around a fire in the forest. The tribe that had been invited to the feast was reveling in the dance and in anticipation of the young body that was cooking in a caldron. It is nice and comforting to me, among the men of a black, disrupted continent whose tribes eat their dead kings, to find myself again with the natives of that country of Erik's so that I can eat the flesh of the tenderest body without danger of remorse, so that I can assimilate it to mine, can take the best morsels from the fat with my fingers, keep them in my mouth, on my tongue, without disgust, feel them in my stomach, and know that their vitals will become the best of myself. The boredom of the preparations was spared me, although the dancing helped the cooking, the digestion, and the efficacity of the virtues of the boiling child. I was dancing, blacker than the blacks, to the sound of the tom-tom, I was making my body supple, I was preparing it to receive the totemic food. I was sure that I was the god. I was God. Sitting alone at the wooden table, I waited for Jean, who was dead and naked, to bring me, on his outstretched arms, his own corpse. I was presiding, with a knife and fork in my hands, over a singular feast at which I was going to consume the privileged flesh. There were no doubt a halo around my head and a nimbus around my whole body: I felt I was shining. The blacks were still playing the bamboo flute and the tom-tom. Finally, Jean appeared from somewhere or other, dead and naked. Walking on his heels, he brought me his corpse, which was cooked to a turn. He laid it out on the table and disappeared. Alone at the table, a divinity whom the negroes dared not gaze at, I sat and ate. I belonged to the tribe. And not in a superficial way by virtue merely of my being born into it, but by the grace of an adoption in which it was granted me to take part in the religious feast. Jean D.’s death thus gave me roots. I finally belong to the France that I cursed and so intensely desired. The beauty of sacrifice for the homeland moves me. Before my eyes smart and my tears flow, it's by my beard that I become aware of the first manifestation of my emotion: a kind of gooseflesh that is made more sensitive by the presence in the epidermis of the rough hairs of my beard, which suddenly gives me the sensation of being a field of reaped rye—of stubble-over which two bare little feet are running. Perhaps my chin trembled like those of sorrowful children. I have my dead who died for her, and the abandoned child is now entitled to the freedom of the city. The lovely moon was motionless in the clear sky.
“Don't.”
Erik uttered the word more calmly, more gently, he seemed to be roaring from a deeper, more mysterious part of the forest. His hand remained, preventing Riton from continuing to shoot.
“Not . . . (Erik hesitated, trying to find the word) not . . . now.”
Riton's hand lost its will power and Erik's became more friendly. Gently, with the other hand, the German took the machine gun and put it down at his side. He had not let go of Riton, in fact he made his hug more affectionate. He drew the kid's head to him. He kissed him.
“Up. . . .”
This single word had the curtness of an order, but Riton was already used to Erik's ways. He stood up. Leaning back against the brick monument, facing a Paris that was watching and waiting, Erik buggered Riton. Their trousers were lowered over their heels where the belt buckles clinked at each movement. The group was strengthened by leaning against the wall, by being backed up, protected by it. If the two standing males had looked at each other, the quality of the pleasure would not have been the same. Mouth to mouth, chest to chest, with their knees tangled, they would have been entwined in a rapture that would have confined them in a kind of oval that excluded all light, but the bodies in the figurehead which they formed looked into the darkness, as one looks into the future, the weak sheltered by the stronger, the four eyes staring in front of them. They were projecting the frightful ray of their love to infinity. That sharp relief of darkness against the brick surface was the griffin of a coat of arms, the sacred image on a shield behind which two other German soldiers were on the lookout. Erik and Riton were not loving one in the other, they were escaping from themselves over the world, in full view of the world, in a gesture of victory. It was thus that, from his room in Berlin or Berchtesgaden, Hitler, taking a firm stand, with his stomach striking their backs and his knees in the hollows of theirs, emitted his transfigured adolescents over the humiliated world. But Erik's fatigue was already, and more obstinately, drawing him back. He was re-entering himself, was recapturing his youth, his first marriage with the executioner in the shrubbery when each of his hands, which were equally skillful in wielding the ax, unbuttoned a fly, pushed aside a shirt, took out a prick, and Erik raised his frightened eyes to those of the brute and said to him sweetly:
“Don't be angry with me if I don't do it well, but it's the first time.”
Standing against a tree, the executioner made Erik face him, and he put his member between the kid's thighs. Riton's arms grabbed Erik's disheveled head and pressed the strong, famous neck, which bent forward, Erik's head finally touched the pale face, which was an utter appeal, a dying concert. Riton's arms quivered around the captured neck and enclosed it in a basket of tenderness and roses, of children's frills, of lace, and the kid's voice murmured against the ear of the half-naked warrior:
“All right now. Come in, it's time.”
In passing through all his flesh, the memory of the executioner obliged Erik to greater humility toward the child. All his excitement receded. The executioner's hideous but hard face and sovereign build and stature, which he could see in his mind's eye, must be feeling freer, either the thought of them gave him greater pride in buggering Riton and caused him to beat and torture him so as to be surer of his freedom and his own strength and then take revenge for having been weak, or else he had remained humiliated by past shame and finished his job with gentler movements and reached the goal in a state of brotherly anguish. Riton, surprised at the respite of love, wanted to murmur a few very mild words of reproach, but the vigor of the movements gave him the full awareness that great voluptuaries always retain in love. He said, almost sobbingly:
“You won't have me! No, you won't have me!” and at the same time impaled himself with a leap.
"Einmal. . . ."
With my head bent back, I observed the solitude of the chimney, alone against the starry sky, like a cape outlined in the sea. They—the chimney and the cape—seemed to me to be conscious of their beauty and driven to despair by that consciousness. The whole member entered in, and Riton's behind touched Erik's warm belly. The joy of both of them was great, as was their confusion, since that joy had been attained. In the kind of swing which is in the form of a closed cage, the kind you see at country fairs, two kids pool their efforts. The cage goes up. Each oscillation acquires greater amplitude, and when the cage reaches the zenith after describing a semicircle, it hesitates before falling in order to complete its perfect curve. For two seconds it is motionless. During that moment the kids are upside down. It is then that their faces come together and their mouths kiss and their knees get entangled. Beneath them, the crowd, whose heads are inverted, looks on. Riton became even more tender. He murmured as one prays:
“Say, listen, see if you can't get it all in!”
For Erik this sentence was only a graceful song. He answered with an equally lovely sentence and in an equally hoarse tongue. And Riton:
“You're right, try.”
Then suddenly Erik's body arches a little.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
When the grave of the housemaid's child was filled, the hearse left the cemetery. The choirboys ran off a
mong the graves. They laughingly scaled the wrought-iron railings and made a few rips in the lace of their surplices. Suddenly stopping face to face, they looked each other in the eye. For a moment they did not move, and suddenly they burst out laughing and, with their cheeks flushed, fell on each other in the grass, under the cypresses, where the roses known as “chiffon roses” twined. The younger escaped from the other's embrace with his hair mussed, and dashed to the cemetery wall and climbed over it. In the distance, the empty hearse was on its way back to the garage. The kid turned around and shaded his eyes with his hand, and what he saw hurled him down from the wall. His friend was naked in the black cassock, which was open on a muscular body. He got a hard-on. I approached and lay down near Erik. A tornado of petals came down on our heads from the roses twined about the cypresses. Only two sturdy arms struggling in the position that sailors call “an iron arm” survived that avalanche. He made Erik stay there without moving so as to be completely aware of being possessed in the silence of immobility. Only white roses could emerge from Erik's member to enter the bronze eye. They flowed out slowly with each quick but regular pulsation of the prick, as round and heavy as cigar smoke rings from pursed lips. Riton felt them rising within him by a path swifter than that of the intestines all the way up to his chest, where their fragrance spread in layers, though surprisingly it did not perfume his mouth. Now that Riton is dead, killed by a Frenchman, if one perhaps opened his chest would one find, caught in the trellis of the thorax, a few of those slightly dried roses?
Erik covered the sweating face with kisses. The perforating tool so hurt the child that he longed for an increase of pain so to be lost in it.
"Ich. . . ."
Erik's mouth was speaking, breathing on the kid's shoulder. And his back kept thrusting. His eyes, which he had kept closed, opened on those of Riton. It's banal to say: “Those eyes have beheld death.” Yet such eyes do exist, and after the ghastly encounter, the gaze of the men who possess them retains an unwonted hardness and brilliance. Without wanting to speak too long in this tone about the eye of Gabès and create a confusion close to punning, I wish to say that Jean's eye became funereal to me. When I stretched out on his back, when I went farther down, I sharpened my tongue to a very fine point so as to burrow neatly into that crack which was as narrow as the eye of a needle. I felt myself being (I've got him by the ass!) . . . I felt myself being there. Then I tried hard to do as good a job as a drill. As the workman in the quarry leans on his machine that jolts him amidst splinters of mica and sparks from his drill, a merciless sun beats down on the back of his neck, and a sudden dizziness blurs everything and sets out the usual palm trees and springs of a mirage, in like manner a dizziness shook my prick harder, my tongue grew soft, forgetting to dig harder, my head sank deeper into the damp hairs, and I saw the eye of Gabès become adorned with flowers, with foliage, become a cool bower which I crawled to and entered with my entire body, to sleep on the moss there, in the shade, to die there.
In my memory, that purest of eyes was decked out with jewels, with diamonds and pearls arranged in the form of a crown. It was limpid. Erik's eyes: Erik had known the snows of Russia, the cruelty of hand-to-hand fighting, the bewilderment of being the only survivor of a company; death was familiar to his eyes. When he opened them, Riton saw their brilliance despite the darkness. Remembering all of Erik's campaigns, he also thought very quickly: “He's been face to face with death.” Erik had stopped work. His eyes kept staring; his mouth was still pressed against Riton's. “I now have the impression I love you more than before.” This phrase was offered to me three months ago by Jean, and I put it in the mouth of a militiaman whom a German soldier has just buggered. Riton murmured:
“I now have the impression that I love you more than before.” Erik did not understand.
No tenderness could have been expressed, for as their-love was not recognized by the world, they could not feel its natural effects. Only language could have informed them that they actually loved each other. We know how they spoke to each other at the beginning. Seeing that neither understood the other and that all their phrases were useless, they finally contented themselves with grunts. This evening, for the first time in ten days, they are going to speak and to envelop their language in the most shameless passion. A happiness that was too intense made the soldier groan. With both hands clinging, one to the ear, the other to the hair, he wrenched the kid's head from the steel axis that was getting even harder.
“Stop.”
Then he drew to him the mouth that pressed eagerly to his in the darkness. Riton's lips were still parted, retaining the shape and caliber of Erik's prick. The mouths crushed against each other, linked as by a hyphen, by the rod of emptiness, a rootless member that lived alone and went from one palate to the other. The evening was marvelous. The stars were calm. One imagined that the trees were alive, that France was awakening, and more intensely in the distance, above, that the Reich was watching. Riton woke up. Erik was sad. He was already thinking of faraway Germany, of the fact that his life was in danger, of how to save his skin. Riton buttoned his fly in a corner, then quietly picked up the machine gun. He fired a shot. Erik collapsed, rolled down the slope of the roof, and fell flat. The soldiers in the hideout neither heard the fall nor noticed the oddness of the shot. For ten seconds, a joyous madness was mistress of Riton. For ten seconds, he stamped on his friend's corpse. Motionless, with his back against the chimney and his eyes staring, he saw himself dancing, screaming, jumping about the body and on it and crushing it beneath his hobnailed heels. Then he quietly came to his senses and slowly made his way to other rooftops. All night long, all the morning of August 20, abandoned by his friends, by his parents, by his love, by France, by Germany, by the whole world, he fired away until he fell exhausted, not because of his wounds but with fatigue, as sweat glued desperate locks of hair to his temples. For a moment, he was so afraid of being killed that he thought of suicide. The Japanese, according to the papers, advised their-soldiers to fight on even after death so that their souls could sustain and direct the living. . . . The beauty of that objurgation (which shows me a heaven bursting with a potential activity and full of dead men eager to shoot) impels me to make Riton utter the following words:
“Help me die.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The little maid returned to her room. It was nighttime. She did not let anyone know.
She sat down on her cot, still wearing her wreath at a rakish angle. Sleep crept up on her as she sat there holding her faded daisy and rocking her leg. When she woke up, late in the night, a moonbeam was shining through the window and brightening a patch of the threadbare rug. She stood up and quietly, piously, laid the daisy on that grave. Then she undressed and slept until morning.
* * *
* “Staves and orchards” renders an untranslatable play on words: les verges et les vergers. Verge is the zoological word for penis.
—Translator's note.
* A few French terms have been retained in this and the following paragraphs. L'oeil de Gabès ("the eye of Gabès") was African Batallion slang for the anus. A member of the Batallion, which was referred to familiarly as the Bat-d'Af (Bataillon d'Afrique) was a bataillonnaire or, familiarly, a Joyeux (a Merry Boy).
—Translator's note.
* Gabès is in southern Tunisia.
—Translator's note.
* The French word ânte means both “soul” and “bore” of a gun.
—Translator's note..
* There is a play here on the words scie (saw) and ici (here).
—Translator's note.
* A play on the words corbillard (hearse) and corbeille (basket).
—Translator's note.
* French slang for Paris.
— Translator's note.
Jean Genet, Funeral Rites
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