Le condamné à mort

“I dedicated this poem to the memory of my friend Maurice Pilorge, whose body and radiant face haunt my sleepless nights.” (Jean Genet, Le Condamné à mort, Gallimard)

Discogs

Sound recording of Jean Genet’s poem Le condamné à mort (1952)

THE MAN SENTENCED TO DEATH

In memory of Maurice Pilorge, a twenty-year-old murderer

The wind that rolls a heart across the prison yard,
An angel sobbing, caught within a tree,
The azure column twisted round by marble,
Open emergency doors into my night.

A poor bird falling and the taste of ash,
The memory of an eye asleep upon the wall,
And this aching fist that threatens heaven
Bring your face down into the hollow of my hand.

That face, harder and lighter than a mask,
Yet heavier in my hand than in the receiver’s fingers
The jewel he covets; it is drowned in tears.
It is dark and fierce, a green bouquet its helmet.

Your face is stern: the face of a Greek shepherd.
It still trembles inside my closed hands.
Your mouth belongs to a dead woman, your eyes are roses,
And your archangel’s nose may be a beak.

The glittering frost of your malicious modesty,
Powdering your hair with bright steel stars,
Crowning your brow with the rosebush’s thorns—
What falling sickness melted it, if now your face can sing?

Tell me what mad sorrow makes your eye burst
With such lofty despair that savage grief,
Distraught and in person, adorns your rounded mouth
Despite your frozen tears, with a mourning smile?

Do not sing “The Strongmen of the Moon” tonight!
Golden boy, be instead a princess in a tower,
Melancholy, dreaming of our poor love;
Or be the blond cabin boy keeping watch aloft.

Come down towards evening to sing upon the deck
Among the sailors kneeling, bareheaded,
The Ave maris stella. Every sailor holds ready
His cock, springing in his scoundrel’s hand.

And it is to mount you, beautiful wandering cabin boy,
That the muscled sailors harden beneath their trousers.
My Love, my Love, will you steal the keys
That open for me the heaven where the rigging trembles,

From which, royal, you scatter white enchantments
Snowing onto my page, into my silent prison:
Terror, the dead among violet flowers…
Death with its cocks; its ghosts of lovers…

A prowling guard passes on velvet feet.
Rest the memory of you within my hollow eyes.
Perhaps one may escape by crossing the roof.
They say French Guiana is a warm land.

O sweetness of the impossible and distant penal colony!
O sky of the Beautiful One, O sea and palms,
Transparent mornings, wild evenings, quiet nights,
O shaven heads and Satin-Skins!

Let us dream together, Love, of some hard lover,
Large as the Universe, his body stained with shadows,
Who will lock us naked in those dark inns,
Between his golden thighs, upon his steaming belly,

A dazzling pimp cut from an archangel,
Hard above bouquets of carnations and jasmine
That your luminous hands will carry trembling
Along his august flank, disturbed by your kiss.

Sorrow in my mouth! Bitterness swelling,
Swelling my poor heart! My perfumed loves
Farewell, they are leaving! Farewell beloved balls!
O farewell, insolent cock, upon my severed voice!

Boy, do not sing; put down your Apache manner!
Be the young girl with the pure radiant neck,
Or, if you are unafraid, the mysterious child
Who died in me long before the axe cuts me.

So beautiful a page of honour, crowned with lilac!
Lean over my bed; let my rising cock
Strike your golden cheek. Listen: it tells you
Your lover the murderer’s tale in a thousand shards.

It sings that he possessed your body and your face,
Your heart that will never open to the spurs
Of a massive horseman. To have your round knees!
Your fresh neck, your soft hand—O kid, to have your age!

To steal, steal your sky splashed with blood
And make a single masterpiece from the dead gathered
Here and there in meadows and hedges, dead dazzled
To prepare their death, their adolescent heaven…

Solemn mornings, rum, the cigarette…
The shadows of tobacco, the penal colony and sailors
Visit my cell, where the spectre of a killer
With a heavy fly rolls me over and clasps me.

The song crossing a world of darkness
Is the cry of a hoodlum carried by music.
It is the song of a hanged man stiff as a cudgel.
It is the enchanted call of a thief in love.

A sixteen-year-old sleeper calls for buoys
That no sailor throws to the frantic sleeper.
One child stands upright, pressed against the wall.
Another sleeps curled within his knotted legs.

*

I killed for the blue eyes of a handsome indifferent boy
Who never understood my restrained love,
While in her black gondola an unknown lover,
Beautiful as a ship, died adoring me.

When you are ready, armed for crime,
Masked by cruelty, helmeted in blond hair,
To the mad and fleeting rhythm of violins,
Cut the throat of a wealthy woman in love with your swagger.

An iron knight will appear upon the earth,
Impassive and cruel, visible despite the hour
In the uncertain gesture of an old woman weeping.
Above all, do not tremble before his clear gaze.

This apparition comes from the dreadful heaven
Of love’s crimes. Child of the depths,
From his body astonishing splendours will be born,
From the perfumed semen of his adorable cock.

Black granite rock upon the woollen carpet,
One hand upon his hip, listen to him walk.
Walk towards the sun of his sinless body
And lie down calmly at the edge of his fountain.

Each festival of blood sends a beautiful boy
To support the child through his first ordeal.
Calm your fear and your new anguish;
Suck his hard member as one sucks an icicle.

Nibble tenderly the prick that strikes your cheek,
Kiss its swollen head, push into your throat
The bundle of my cock, swallowed in one gulp.
Choke yourself with love, spit it out, and pull your face!

On both knees adore, like a sacred post,
My tattooed chest; adore until tears
My sex that splits you, strikes you better than a weapon;
Adore my staff that is about to enter you.

It leaps upon your eyes; it threads through your soul.
Lower your head a little and watch it rise.
Seeing it so noble and so worthy of kissing,
You bow very low and call it: “Madam!”

Madam, listen to me! Madam, people die here!
The manor is haunted! The prison flies and trembles!
Help us, we are moving! Carry us away together
To your room in Heaven, Lady of Mercy!

Call the sun; let it come and console me.
Strangle all those cocks! Put the executioner to sleep!
The day smiles maliciously behind my window.
Prison is a dreary school in which to die.

*

Upon my neck, unarmoured and without hatred, my neck
That my hand, lighter and graver than a widow,
Brushes beneath my collar without moving your heart,
Let your teeth lay down their wolf’s smile.

O come, my beautiful sun, O come, my Spanish night,
Enter my eyes, which will be dead tomorrow.
Come, open my door, bring me your hand,
Lead me far from here to fight our campaign.

The sky may awaken, the stars flower,
The flowers sigh, and the black meadow grass
Welcome the dew from which morning will drink,
The bell tower may ring: I alone am going to die.

O come, my rose-coloured sky, O my blond basket!
Visit your condemned man in his night.
Tear away your flesh, kill, climb, bite,
But come! Place your cheek against my round head.

We had not finished speaking of love.
We had not finished smoking our Gitanes.
One may wonder why the Courts condemn
A murderer so beautiful that he makes daylight pale.

Love, come upon my mouth! Love, open the doors!
Cross the corridors, descend, tread lightly,
Fly down the stairs, more supple than a shepherd,
More upheld by air than a flight of dead leaves.

O cross the walls; if necessary, walk along
The edges of roofs and oceans; cover yourself in light,
Use threats, use prayer,
But come, O my frigate, one hour before my death.

*

The murderers on the wall wrap themselves in dawn
Inside my cell, opened to the song of tall fir trees,
Which rocks it, suspended from fine ropes
Knotted by sailors gilded by the clear morning.

Who carved a compass rose into the plaster?
Who thinks of my home from the depths of Hungary?
What child rolled upon my rotten straw
At the moment of waking and remembering friends?

Ramble, my Madness; for my joy give birth
To a consoling hell populated by beautiful soldiers,
Naked to the waist, drawing from mignonette trousers
Strange flowers whose scent strikes me down.

Tear from no one knows where the wildest gestures.
Steal children, invent tortures,
Mutilate beauty, work upon faces,
And give Guiana to the boys as a meeting place.

O my old Maroni, O gentle Cayenne!
I see fifteen or twenty convicts’ bodies leaning
Around the blond kid smoking the cigarette ends
Spat by guards among the flowers and moss.

One damp butt is enough to sadden us all.
Standing alone above the rigid ferns,
The youngest rests upon his slight hips,
Motionless, waiting to be consecrated as bridegroom.

And the old murderers, gathering for the rite,
Crouched in the evening, draw from a dry stick
A little fire, swiftly stolen by the young boy,
More moving and pure than a moving cock.

The hardest bandit, within his polished muscles,
Bows respectfully before this frail boy.
The moon rises in the sky. A quarrel subsides.
The mysterious folds of the black flag move.

They wrap you so finely, your gestures of lace!
One shoulder resting against the reddening palm,
You smoke. The smoke descends into your throat
While the convicts, in solemn dance,

Grave, silent, one by one, child,
Come to take from your mouth an embalmed drop,
One drop, not two, of the rounded smoke
Your tongue lets flow to them. O triumphant brother,

Terrible divinity, invisible and cruel,
You remain impassive, sharp, of bright metal,
Attentive only to yourself, fatal distributor
Lifted upon the thread of your singing hammock.

Your delicate soul is beyond the mountains,
Still accompanying the enchanted flight
Of an escaped convict in the depths of a valley,
Dead, without thinking of you, from a bullet in the lungs.

Rise into the moonlit air, O my girl.
Come pour into my mouth some of the heavy semen
Rolling from your throat towards your teeth, my Love,
So that at last our adorable wedding may be fruitful.

Press your ravished body against mine, which dies
From fucking the most tender and gentle of rogues.
As I weigh your round blond balls with delight,
My black marble prick threads you through to the heart.

O look at it, erect in its blazing sunset,
About to consume me! I have little time left.
If you dare, come, leave your ponds,
Your marshes, your mud where you make bubbles,

Souls of those I killed! Kill me! Burn me!
Exhausted Michelangelo, I carved into life,
But Beauty, Lord, I always served it,
With my belly, my knees, my hands rosy with emotion.

The cocks in the henhouse, the Gallic lark,
The milkman’s cans, a bell in the air,
A footstep on gravel, my white and shining window:
The joyful gleam upon the prison’s slate roof.

Gentlemen, I am not afraid! If my head rolled
Into the basket’s sound beside your white head,
Mine happily upon your slender hip,
Or, more beautifully, upon your neck, my chick…

Attention! Tragic king with half-open mouth,
I enter your desolate gardens of sand,
Where you stand hard, frozen, alone, two fingers raised,
Your head covered by a veil of blue linen.

Through my idiotic delirium I see your pure double!
Love! Song! My queen! Is this your male spectre,
Glimpsed during the games within your pale pupil,
Examining me now upon the plaster wall?

Do not be severe; let matins sing
Within your Bohemian heart; grant me a single kiss…
My God, I am going to croak without ever having held you,
Once in my life, against my heart and my cock!

*

Forgive me, my God, because I have sinned!
The tears in my voice, my fever, my suffering,
The pain of flying away from the beautiful land of France—
Is that not enough, my lord, to let me lie down,
Stumbling with hope,

Within your embalmed arms, within your castles of snow?
Lord of dark places, I still know how to pray.
It was I, my father, who once cried out:
Glory in the highest heaven to the god who protects me,
Hermes of the tender foot!

I ask death for peace, for long sleeps,
The songs of Seraphim, their perfumes, their garlands,
Woollen cherubs in warm greatcoats,
And I hope for nights without moons or suns
Upon motionless moors.

It is not this morning that they will guillotine me.
I can sleep peacefully. On the floor above,
My lazy darling, my pearl, my Jesus,
Awakens. He will strike his hard boot
Against my shaven skull.

*

It seems an epileptic lives next door.
The prison sleeps upright in the darkness of a song for the dead.
If sailors upon the water see the harbours drawing near,
My sleepers will flee towards another America.

***

I dedicated this poem to the memory of my friend Maurice Pilorge, whose body and radiant face haunt my sleepless nights. In spirit I relive with him the final forty days he spent, chains around his ankles and sometimes his wrists, in the condemned cell of Saint-Brieuc prison. Newspapers have no sense of proportion. They published foolish articles to illustrate his death, which coincided with the executioner Desfourneaux taking up his post. Commenting on Maurice’s attitude before Death, the newspaper L’Œuvre said that “this child deserved another destiny.” In short, they diminished him. For me, who knew and loved him, I want to affirm here, as gently and tenderly as possible, that through the double and singular splendour of his soul and body he was worthy of receiving such a death. Every morning, through the complicity of a guard bewitched by his beauty, youth and Apollonian agony, I left my cell to bring him a few cigarettes. He rose early, humming, and greeted me with a smile: “Morning, Jeannot!” Originally from Puy-de-Dôme, he had a slight Auvergne accent. The jurors, offended by so much grace—stupid yet nevertheless majestic in their role as the Fates—sentenced him to twenty years of hard labour for burgling villas along the coast. The following day, because he had killed his lover Escudero to steal less than one thousand francs, the same court sentenced my friend Maurice Pilorge to have his head cut off. He was executed on 17 March 1939 in Saint-Brieuc.

Gatopardo

This LP is one of them, a setting of Jean Genet’s Le Condamné à Mort (or The Man Sentenced to Death), recorded in 1952 and released on LP in 1968. The poem, first published in 1945, is a paean to prison inmates’ homoeroticism, with explicitly gay language and provocations typical from Genet.

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