I shall speak again about Divine. but Divine in her garret, between Our Lady, the marble-hearted. and Gorgui. If Divine were a woman, she would not be jealous. She would be perfectly willing to go out alone in the evening to pick up customers between the trees on the boulevard. What would it matter to her that her two males spent their evenings together? On the contrary, a family atmosphere, the light of a lamp shade, would utterly delight her; but Divine is also a man. She is, to begin with, jealous of Our Lady, who is young and handsome and without guile. He is in danger of obeying the sympathies of his name. Our Lady, without guile and wily as an Englishwoman. He may arouse Gorgui. It would be easy. Let us imagine them at the movies one afternoon, side by side in the artificial darkness.
“Got your snotrag, Seck?”
No sooner said than done, his hand is on the Negro's pocket. Oh! fatal movement. Divine is jealous of Gorgui. The Negro is her man, and that little tramp of an Our Lady is young and pretty. Beneath the trees of the boulevard, Divine is looking for old geezers, and she is being torn apart by the anguish of a double jealousy. Then, as Divine is a man, she thinks: “I have to feed them both together. I'm the slave.” She is becoming bitter. At the movies, well-behaved as schoolboys (but, as around schoolboys, who–and that's enough–lower their heads together behind the desk, there prowls, ready to leap, a mad little act), Our Lady and Gorgui smoke and see only the film. In a little while they will go for a glass of beer, unsuspecting, and they will return to the garret, but not without Our Lady's having strewn on the sidewalk little pistol caps with which Gorgui amuses himself by exploding them beneath his steel-tipped shoes; thus, like the whistle blasts between those of pimps, sparks blazed forth between his calves.
The three of them are about to leave the garret. They're ready. Gorgui is holding the key. Each has a cigarette in his mouth. Divine strikes a kitchen match (she sets fire to her own stake each time), lights her cigarette, then Our Lady's, and holds out the flame to Gorgui.
“No,” he says, “not three on a match. That's bad luck.”
Divine:
“Don't play around with that, you never know what it can lead to.”
She seems weary and drops the match, now all black and skinny as a grasshopper. She adds:
“One starts with a little superstition and then falls into the arms of God.”
Our Lady thinks:
“That's right, into the priest's bed.”
At the top of the Rue Lepic is the little cabaret of which I have already spoken, The Tabernacle, where the habitués practice sorcery, concoct mixtures, consult the cards, question the bottoms of teacups, decipher the lines of the left hand (when questioned, fate tends to answer the truth, Divine used to say), where good looking butcherboys are sometimes metamorphosed into princesses in flowing gowns. The cabaret is small and low-ceilinged. Milord the Prince governs. Assembled there are: All of them, but especially First Communion, Banjo, the Queen of Rumania, Ginette, Sonia, Persifanny, Clorinda, the Abbess, Agnes, Mimosa, Divine. And their Gentlemen. Every Thursday the little latch door is closed to the curious and excited bourgeois visitors. The cabaret is given over to the “pure few.” Milord the Prince (she who said, “I make one cry every night,” speaking of the safes he cracked which the jimmy made creak) sent out the invitations. We were at home. A phonograph. Three waiters were on duty, their eyes full of mischief, lewd with a joyous lewdness. Our men are at the bar playing poker dice for drinks. And we are dancing. It is customary to come in drag, dressed as ourselves. Nothing but costumed queens rubbing shoulders with child-pimps. In short, not a single adult. The make-up and the lights distort sufficiently, but often we wear black masks or carry fans for the pleasure of guessing who's who from the carriage of a leg, from the expression, the voice, the pleasure of fooling each other, of making identities overlap. It would be an ideal spot for committing a murder, which would remain so secret that the fluttering queens, in a state of panic (though quickly one of them, startled into maternal severity, would be able to transform herself into a rapid and precise detective), and the little pimps, their faces tense with terror, their bellies drawn in, huddling against the ladies, would try in vain to know who was the victim and who the murderer. A crime at a masked ball.
Divine has dug out for this evening her two 1890 silk dresses, which she keeps, souvenirs of former carnivals. One of them is black, embroidered with jet; she puts it on and offers the other to Our Lady.
“You're nuts. What'll the guys say?”
But Gorgui insists, and Our Lady knows that all his pals will have a laugh, that not a single one will snicker; they esteem him. The dress drapes Our Lady's body, which is naked under the silk. He rather likes the way he looks. His legs, with their downy, even slightly hairy skin, brush against each other. He bends down, turns around, looks at himself in the mirror. The dress, which has a bustle, makes his rump stick out, suggesting a pair of cellos. Let us put a velvet flower into his tousled hair. He is wearing Divine's tan shoes, the ones with ankle straps and high heels, but they are completely concealed by the flounces of the skirt. They dressed very quickly that evening because they were going out for real fun. Divine puts on her black silk dress and over it a pink jacket, and takes a spangled tulle fan. Gorgui is wearing tails and a white tie. Occurred the scene of the match being blown out. They went down the stairs. Taxi. The Tabernacle. The doorman, quite young and ever so good looking, leers three times. Our Lady dazzles him. They enter the brilliant fireworks of silk and muslin flounces which cannot fight clear of the smoke. They dance the smoke. They smoke the music. They drink from mouth to mouth. Our Lady is acclaimed by his pals. He had not realized that his firm buttocks would draw the cloth so tight. He doesn't give a damn that they see he has a hard-on, but not to such a point, in front of the fellows. He would like to hide. He turns to Gorgui and, slightly pink, shows him his bulging dress, muttering:
“Say, Seck, let me ditch that.”
He barely snickers. His eyes seem moist, and Gorgui does not know whether he is kidding or annoyed; then, the Negro takes the murderer by the shoulders, hugs him, clasps him, locks between his mighty thighs the jutting horn that is raising the silk, and carries him on his heart in waltzes and tangoes which will last till dawn. Divine would like to weep with rage, to tear cambric handkerchiefs with her nails and teeth. Then, a former state resembling the present one suddenly recalled the following: “She was in Spain, I believe. Kids were chasing her and screaming ‘Maricona’ and throwing stones at her. She ran to a sidetrack and climbed into an empty train. The kids continued from below to insult her and pepper the doors of the train with stones. Divine crouched under a seat, cursing the horde of children with all her might, hating them until she rattled with hatred. Her chest swelled out; she longed for a sigh so as not to choke with hatred. Then she realized it was impossible to devour the kids, to rip them to pieces with her teeth and nails, as she would have liked, so she loved them. The pardon gushed forth from her excess of rage, of hatred, and she was thereby appeased.” She consents, out of love, to the Negro's and Our Lady's loving each other. Around her is the room of Milord the Prince. She is sitting in a chair; on a carpet, masks are strewn about. They are all dancing downstairs. Divine has just slit everyone's throat, and in the mirror of the wardrobe she sees her fingers contracting into criminal hooks, like those of the Düsseldorf vampire on the covers of novels. But the waltzes ended. Our Lady, Seck, and Divine were among the last to leave the ball. It was Divine who opened the door, and quite naturally Our Lady took Gorgui's arm. The union, destroyed for a moment in the leave-taking, had been so abruptly reconstructed, unknotting the tricks of hesitation, that Divine felt a bite in her side, the bite of contempt with which someone dispatches us. She was a good loser; so she remained behind pretending to fasten a garter. At five A.M. the Rue Lepic went straight down to the sea, that is, to the promenade of the Boulevard de Clichy. The dawn was tight, a little tight, not very sure of itself, on the point of falling and vomiting. The dawn was nauseous w
hen the trio was still at the top of the street. They went down. Gorgui had placed his top hat very properly on his kinky head, at a slight angle. His white shirt-front was still rigid. A big chrysanthemum was drooping in his buttonhole. His face was laughing. Our Lady was holding him by the arm. They descended between two rows of garbage cans full of ashes and comb-scrapings–those garbage cans which every morning receive the first shifty glances of the merrymakers, those garbage cans which zigzag down the street.
If I were to put on a play in which women had roles, I would insist that these roles be performed by adolescent boys, and I would so inform the audience by means of a placard which would remain nailed to the right or left of the sets throughout the performance. Our Lady. in his pale-blue faille dress, edged with white Valenciennes lace, was more than himself. He was himself and his complement. I'm mad about fancy dress. The imaginary lovers of my prison nights are sometimes a prince–but I make him wear a tramp's castoffs–and sometimes a hoodlum to whom I lend royal robes. I shall perhaps experience my greatest delight when I play at imagining myself the heir of an old Italian family, but the impostor-heir, for my real ancestor would be a handsome vagabond, walking barefoot under the starry sky, who, by his audacity, would have taken the place of this Prince Aldini. I love imposture. So, Our Lady walked down the street as only the great, the very great ladies of the court knew how to walk, that is, without too much stiffness and without too much swaying, without kicking aside his train, which casually swept the gray cobblestones, dragged along straw and bits of wood, a broken comb, and a leaf of yellowed arum. The dawn was purging itself. Divine followed from some distance. She was furious. The costumed Negro and murderer staggered a bit and leaned against each other. Our Lady was singing:
Taraboom ti-ay!
Taraboom ti-ay! Taraboom ti-ay!
He laughed as he sang. His smooth bright face, the lines and masses of which had been knocked awry by a night of dancing and laughter, of tumult and wine and love (the silk of the dress was spotted), offered itself to the dawning day as to the icy kiss of a corpse. Though the roses in his hair were only of cloth, they had wilted on the brass, but they still held up, a flower basket in which the water had not been changed. The cloth roses were quite dead. To freshen them up a bit, Our Lady raised his bare arm, and the murderer made almost the very gesture, though perhaps a trifle more rough, that Emilienne d’ Alençon would certainly have made in rumpling her chignon. In fact, he resembled Emilienne d’ Alençon. The big proud Negro was so moved by the bustle of Our Lady's blue dress (what was called a false bottom) that he drooled slightly. Divine watched them tripping down to the beach. Our Lady was singing among the garbage cans. Imagine a blond Eugénie Buffet, in a silk dress, singing in courtyards one early morning, clinging to the arm of a Negro in evening dress. We're surprised that none of the windows on the street opened on the sleepy face of a dairywoman or her mate. Such people never know what goes on beneath their windows, and that's as it should be. They would die of grief if they knew. Our Lady's white hand (his nails were in mourning) was lying flat on Seck Gorgui's forearm. The two arms grazed each other so delicately (they had probably seen this kind of thing in the movies) that had you watched them you would certainly have been reminded of the madonnas of Raphael, who perhaps is so chaste only because of the purity that his name implies, for he lit up the gaze of little Tobias. The Rue Lepic descended perpendicularly. The Negro in full dress was smiling as champagne can make one smile, with that festive, that is vacant air. Our Lady was singing:
Taraboom ti-ay!
Taraboom ti-ay!
The air was cool. The coldness of the Paris morning froze his shoulders and fluttered his dress from top to bottom.
“You're cold,” said Gorgui looking at him.
“And how!”
Without anyone's taking notice, Seck's arm went around Our Lady's shoulders. Behind them, Divine arranged her face and gestures so that, upon turning around, they both thought her preoccupied with a very practical inventory. But neither of the two seemed to care whether Divine was absent or present. They heard the morning angelus, the rattle of a milk can. Three workmen went by on bicycles along the boulevard, their lamps lit, though it was day. A policeman on his way home, where perhaps he would find an empty bed (Divine hoped so, for he was young), passed without looking at them. The garbage cans smelled of sink and cleaning women. Their odor clung to the white Valenciennes lace of Our Lady's dress and to the festoons on the flounces of Divine's pink. jacket. Our Lady continued to sing and the Negro to smile. Suddenly they were at the brink of despair, all three of them. The marvelous road was traveled. Now it was the flat and banal asphalt boulevard, the boulevard of everybody, so different from the secret path they had just cleared in the drunken dawn of a day, with their perfumes, silks, laughter, songs, across houses whose guts were hanging out, houses cleft down the front, where, continuing their naps, suspended in sleep, were old people, children, pimps–pimple-dimple-girly-flowers–barmen, so different, I repeat, from that out-of-the-way path that the three children approached a taxi in order to escape the vexation of a commonplace return. The taxi anticipated them. The driver opened the door and Our Lady stepped in first. Gorgui, because of his position in the group, ought to have got in first, but he moved aside, leaving the opening free for Our Lady. Bear in mind that a pimp never effaces himself before a woman, still less before a faggot (which, however, with respect to him, Our Lady had that night become); Gorgui must have placed him quite high. Divine blushed when he said:
“Get in, Danie.”
Then, instanly, in order to think more nimbly, Divine again became the Divine she had left behind while going down the Rue Lepic. For, though she felt as a “woman,” she thought as a “man.” One might think that, in thus reverting spontaneously to her true nature, Divine was a male wearing make-up, disheveled with make-believe gestures; but this is not a case of the phenomenon of recourse to the mother tongue in times of stress. In order to think with precision, Divine must never formulate her thoughts aloud, for herself. Doubtless there had been times when she had said to herself aloud: “I'm just a foolish girl,” but having felt this, she felt it no longer, and, in saying it, she no longer thought it. In Mimosa's presence, for example, she managed to think “woman” with regard to serious but never essential things. Her femininity was not only a masquerade. But as for thinking “woman” completely, her organs hindered her. To think is to perform an act. In order to act, you have to discard frivolity and set your idea on a solid base. So she was aided by the idea of solidity, which she associated with the idea of virility, and it was in grammar that she found it near at hand. For if, to define a state of mind that she felt, Divine dared use the feminine, she was unable to do so in defining an action which she performed. And all the “woman” judgments she made were, in reality, poetic conclusions. Hence, only then was Divine true. It would be curious to know what women corresponded to in Divine's mind, and particularly in her life. No doubt, she herself was not a woman (that is, a female in a skirt); she was womanly only through her submission to the imperious male; nor, for her, was Ernestine, who was her mother, a woman. But all of woman was in a little girl whom Culafroy had known when he was a kid, in the village. Her name was Solange. On broiling days they would sit curled up on a white stone bench, in a delicate little patch of shade, narrow as a hem, with their feet tucked under their smocks so as not to wet them with sun; they felt and thought in common in the shelter of the snowball tree. Culafroy was in love, since, when Solange was sent to a convent, he made pilgrimages. He visited the Grotto Rock. Mothers used that granite rock as a bogy, peopling its cavities, to terrify us, with evil creatures, sandmen, and vendors of shoelaces, pins, and charms. Most of the children paid no heed to the stories dictated by the mothers’ prudence. Only Solange and Culafroy, when they made their way there–as often as possible–had the sacred terror in their souls. One summer evening, which was heavy with gathering storm, they approached it. The rock advanced like a prow
through a sea of golden crops with glints of blue. The sky descended upon earth like a blue powder in a glass of water. The sky was visiting the earth. A mysterious and mystic air (imitated from temples) which only a landscape set off from the village could preserve in all seasons: a pond inhabited by salamanders and framed by little groves of firs which were idealized in the green water. Firs are amazing trees which I have often seen in Italian paintings. They are meant for Christmas mangers and are thus involved in the charm of winter nights, of the magi, of gypsy musicians and vendors of postcards, of hymns and kisses given and received at night, barefooted on the rug. Culafroy always expected to find in their branches a miraculous virgin, who, so that the miracle might be total, would be made of colored plaster. He had to have this hope in order to tolerate nature. Hateful nature, anti-poetic, ogress swallowing up all spirituality. As ogrish as beauty is greedy. Poetry is a vision of the world obtained by an effort, sometimes exhausting, of the taut, buttressed will. Poetry is willful It is not an abandonment, a free and gratuitous entry by the senses; it is not to be confused with sensuality, but rather, opposing it, was born, for example, on Saturdays, when, to clean the rooms, housewives put the red velvet chairs, gilded mirrors, and mahogany tables outside, in the nearby meadow.