Funeral Rites by Jean Genet Page A

standing on a roof in that gleaming array that the Boches had tied around him. He took his machine gun and sat for a few seconds without moving. A shot rang out, perhaps from a roof, perhaps from below.
    “What if it was someone alone? It would be pretty lousy. Poor guy.”
    He thought fleetingly of the militiaman alone on a roof, but alone with his weapon. Alone, one is only one's self. With a weapon, solitude is shared. One is one's self and one's duty. Self and . . . another character who is invisible but present and who changes name depending on the case. Self and . . . triumph or death. Alone, one manages. Either one surrenders or one gets away without being bothered since one is unarmed. The enemy pursues not so much the warrior as what makes the warrior: his weapon. It's not true that one can easily throw away one's rifle, machine gun, or knife and slip off. If the exchange of charms between the weapon and the warrior has taken place in accordance with the rites, if it was consecrated by combat and the prestige of a chief, bonds are formed between the weapon and the warrior, bonds that it is harder for a man to cut if he is valorous himself, and his valor—I'm so glad—leads him to his death.
    “Who can it be? Maybe it's a guy I know. No way of telling. The hell with it. He's doing what I'm doing, he's in the shit and doing what he can.”
    Riton was going from one painful idea to another idea, like a monk who, at night, near a torrent that runs alongthe stations of the cross, rushes from station to station and kneels before the rocks that shimmer in the faint light of a lantern. The landscapes in which Riton and the monk are moving are identical: stones through which the barrel of a rifle may be peering, black thorns gleaming with black eyeballs, the devastating roar of a torrent.
    In order to be sure of himself and the better to shake off his flabby thoughts, he put a fist on his hip and tried to arch his calf, but he was standing on bare heels. However, his fist struck his carapace and that was enough to make him more keenly aware of the value of the moment. He felt that beneath the armor he had a heart of bronze, and he wanted to die, for bronze is immortal. This time he was handsomer than the fellow in the underground whom he and his captain had arrested. In the darkness, looking out on the city that was palpitating with such a beautiful day but was still uncertain of the consequences of the victory, he had an extraordinary consciousness of his transformation into one of those terrifying, sharp-eyed characters whose gestures have long been prepared for combat and whose knees and elbows bristle with blades. A dragon. A chimera. His hair was poisonous. His stomach surged with repressed farts which he dared not unleash, for he heard the soldiers who were nearby in the darkness organizing for the night. He smiled over Paris as he thought that he would have driven mothers mad with terror by stroking a child's cheek.
    “I'd like to be the one who makes mothers cry!”
    That remark had once been made to him by the former bataillonnaire, Paulo's friend, who had brought it back from Africa. He was alone on that sixth-floor balcony despite the presence of the German soldiers. He felt a slight itching between his legs and was obliged to scratch. As his exceptional situation distorted the slightest circumstance,his member and its surrounding bush suddenly seemed to him to be a kind of stone at the bottom of the sea, encrusted, among the algae, with tiny shellfish that made it even harder, and his mind went back to the sight of Erik making the same gesture, then to Erik's tool in the black breeches which he assumed was another mossy megalithic monument studded with gray, hard-shelled parasites.
    “When the shootin’ starts, there'll be hell to pay,” he thought, in a slightly somnolent state that unsteadied him. He woke up in surprise. He got his bearings in the twinkling of an eye.
    “Sure thing, I'm in a hole,” he