Funeral Rites Read Online Free Page A

again. Paulo's body hesitated. He was his brother's chief mourner, as a king is a king's, and led the cortège like a caparisoned horse charged with a nobility of fire, silver, and velvet. His pace was slow and heavy. He was a lady of Versailles, dignified and unfeeling.
    When Jean had diarrhea, he said to me, “I've got the trots.” Why did that word have to come back to me just as I was watching Paulo's solemn and almost motionless backside, why did I have to call that barely indicated dance the trots?
    Roses have the irritability, curtness, and magnetic edginess of certain mediums. It was they who were performing the actual service.
    The coffin was slid onto the catafalque through an opening at one end. This sudden theatrical stunt, the conjuring away of the coffin, greatly amused me. Acts without overtones, without extension, empty acts, were reflecting the same desolation as the death being reflected on the black-draped chairs, on the little trick of a catafalque, on the Dies Irae. Jean's death was duplicating itself in another death, was making itself visible, was projecting itself upontrappings as dark and ugly as the details with which interments are surrounded. It seemed to me an inane, doubly useless act, like the condemnation of an innocent man. I deeply regretted that processions of handsome boys, naked or in underpants, sober or laughing—for it was important that his death be an occasion for play and laughter—had not accompanied Jean from a bed of state to his grave. I would have loved to gaze at their thighs and arms and the backs of their necks, to have imagined their woolly sex under their blue woolen underpants.
    I had sat down. I saw people kneeling. Out of respect for Jean, I suppose, and in order not to attract attention, I wanted to kneel too. I mechanically put my hand into my jacket pocket and encountered my little matchbox. It was empty. Instead of throwing it away, I had inadvertently put it back into my pocket.
    “There's a little matchbox in my pocket.”
    It was quite natural for me to recall at that moment the comparison a fellow prisoner once made while telling me about the packages which the inmates were allowed to receive:
    “You're allowed one package a week. Whether it's a coffin or a box of matches, it's the same thing, it's a package.”
    No doubt. A matchbox or a coffin, it's the same thing, I said to myself. I have a little coffin in my pocket.
    As I stood up in order to kneel, a cloud must have passed in front of the sun, and the church was darkened by it. Was the priest censing the catafalque? The harmonium played more softly, or so it seemed, as soon as I was on my knees, with my head between my hands. This posture immediately brought me into contact with God.
    “Dear God, dear God, dear God, I melt beneath your gaze. I'm a poor child. Protect me from the devil andGod. Let me sleep in the shade of your trees, your monasteries, your gardens, behind your walls. Dear God, I have my grief, I'm praying badly, but you know that the position is painful, the straw has left its mark on my knees. . . .”
    The priest opened the tabernacle. All the heralds in blazoned velvet jerkins, the standard-bearers and pike-men, the horsemen, the knights, the S.S., the Hitler Youth in short pants paraded through the Fuhrer's bedroom and on into his quarters. Standing near his bed, with his face and body in the shadow and his pale hand leaning on the flounced pillow, he watched them from the depths of his solitude. His castration had cut him off from human beings. His joys are not ours. Out of respect, the parade performed in the deep silence reserved for the sick. Even the footsteps of the stone heroes and the rumbling of the cannons and tanks were deadened by the woolen rugs. At times, a slight rustling of cloth could still be heard, the same sound that is made in the darkness by the stiff, dry cloth of the uniform of American soldiers when they move fast on their rubber soles.
    “. . . Dear God,