A fine rain is blowing across the sand of the street. 'That man doesn't want papers, he wants a fistful of banknotes, doesn't he?'
I don't answer. We walk for half an hour on the boulevard. Then Genet buys a few newspapers and some magazines, and goes back to the hotel.
Today we got the passport. We found a friend who knew a government official and we paid. Genet's giving a small party in his hotel room. I'm standing opposite Genet.
'Why're you taking her with you?' pointing to me a famous older male friend of Genet's asks him.
'Oh, she works for me. She's a gardener.'
I want to laugh in the guy's face because Genet doesn't have a house or a garden.
'She's your servant.'
Genet thinks about this. 'I didn't mean to mislead you,' he says. 'I don't consider anyone a servant.'
The strange man smiles. I'm accepted in this world. I shake hands with Genet.
Later on the same man asks Genet where we're planning to travel.
'I don't know, I know I can't go to the United States, their government won't let me in again, and I can't go to the Soviet Union for the same reason.
In
Journal du Voleur
Genet wrote:
Movies and novels have made Tangier into a scary place, a dive where gamblers haggle over the secret plans of all the armies in the world. From the American coast, Tangier seemed to me a fabulous city. It was the very symbol of treason. Here all the big men I've known, all the men who've hurt me because they had no feelings or who've offered me affection and then stamped on me the minute I reached for it, who've swung their monstrous cocks in front of my face and then laughed when I begged to touch, TRAITORS FASCISTS WHO NEED TO CONNIVE all of you live in this fabulous city. I worship you. I can't fuck anyone else. It's not your cocks, but it's your dishonesty your need to manoeuvre
and lie the way most people walk down a street that form those entanglements I call ADVENTURE. Everything else is dead. When I'm with one of you I'm alive and otherwise I don't give a shit.
I don't call having some young boy between my sheets SEX. I rarely let myself go for young or nice boys because I know I'll get bored. I want the textures of your lives, the complexities set up by betrayals and danger - I like men who hurt me because I don't always see myself, I have my egotism cut up. I love this: I love to be beaten up and hurt and taken on a joy ride. This SEX - what I call SEX - guides my life. I know this Sex of traitors, deviants, scum, and schizophrenics exists. They're the ones I want.
In Egypt, the end
Genet takes Janey with him and they travel through North Africa, through Rabat across the inland through Fés to Oujda, through Tiemsen the city of oases, straight north to Oran, and then, just as summer hits, along the Algerian sea border through Algiers and Bougie down to the mysterious city of Constantine.
In Constantine Genet makes Janey put on the double black dress of an Arabian woman. A dress about twelve feet in length thrown over the head, belted around the waist, then pulled upward at the belt, so three skirts fall from the belt to the ground. Two eyeholes permit the woman to see.
From here Genet and Janey travel along dust-filled roads, through small villages almost nameless, to Tripoli, and along the seacoast through Agheila, through Derna, through Tobruk, as fast as they can, until they reach Alexandria.
Scene 1
Inside an Alexandrian brothel. All the women's houses in the Arab section are brothels, so to speak, but this is
especially
a brothel because its women cater to foreigners. In Alexandria women are low and these are the lowest there are. For them there is no class struggle, no movements of the left, and no right-wing terror because all the men are fascists. All the men own all the money. A man is a walking mass of gold.
The rooms are done in gold. Extremely thick tapestries cover the floor. A large silver cask, lying on a small wood table, decorated on its outside by leaves and branches contains layers of incense and honey. The scene is two whores talking professionally. It is clear that the whores regard what most people regard as (them)selves as images. Sex, that unblocked meeting of selves, is the most fake thing there is.
At the end of this scene a crippled drunken lobotomy case walks into the brothel. He controls the whores because he is a man.
Janey to herself: Genet doesn't know how to be a woman. He thinks all he has to do to be a woman is slobber. He has to do more. He has to get down on his knees and crawl mentally every minute of the day. If he wants a lover, if he doesn't want to be alone every single goddamn minute of the day and horny so bad he feels the tip of his clit stuck in a porcupine's quill, he has to perfectly read his lover's mind, silently, unobtrusively, like a corpse, and figure out at every changing second what his lover wants. He can't be a slave. Women aren't just slaves. They are whatever their men want them to be. They are made, created by men. They are nothing without men.
I have to decide what the world is from my own loneliness.
Scene 2
Janey's lying in the dirt outside Genet's ritzy hotel and dreaming of fucking rock-n-roll stars. First she and James Frogface, whom she met while she was living on the streets of New York City, are standing, holding hands, in a large room. Or they're in a black rock-n-roll club (CBGB's). They walk down the block together, two blocks, to his place. She's surprised she's going home with James because she hadn't thought she was hot for him and also thought he was too young for her taste. Surprisingly now she's kissing James her hands are running up and down his back she's turned on hot shivery steaming WOW! Her legs spread open as she sinks on to the bed woom her arms close around those thin shoulders. It feels wonderful. Not weird or sort-of-good or not-really-all-there. Just straight wonderful. He fucks hard. He likes to fuck. No need thought fucks everything up. Good. Good. When she meets him at CBGB's at night, her hand strokes his thigh through his thin black sharkskin pants, she realizes she knew it was OK to touch him.
She dreams she's fucking someone more famous than Frogface. More shivers run through her nerves: loss of thought, trust. Trust is loss of thought. Janey and the blond rock-n-roller are madly in love. When she wakes she can't remember who he was and what the sex was like. She doesn't know what to do with herself.
Genet enters and tells Janey she's totally ugly. Because she's so loud no one wants to talk to her. She's the worst kind of Jewish mama pig. She's vulgar and unrestrained and that is what Europeans especially Frenchmen hate most about Americans. The hierarchy is (Genet has to explain the nature of the social world to her because she's American):
Rich men
Poor men
Mothers
Beautiful women
Whores
Poor female and neo-female slut-scum
Janey. Then he kicks Janey around and tells her to be worse than she is, to get down, there, down in the shit, to learn. Go to the extreme. To make the decision. Janey girl still has pretensions. She has to be drained of everything. She has to be disembowelled.
At this moment Genet's secretary runs over to him and helps him off with his coat.
'Thank you, M'Namah,' Genet says politely. 'Reporters have been running after me all day. I shook hands with all of them and smiled a lot. I'm very tired.'
Little by little Janey begins to understand how beautiful Genet is. She's so enamoured with him she's creating him. Truth and falsehood, memory, perception, and fantasy: all are toys in this swirling that is him-her. She's predicting her future.
Her future: Genet spits on her and kicks her. The more she tries to be whatever he wants, the more he despises her. Finally she decides her black wool hood and dress aren't enough. If Genet thinks she's shit, she should be invisible. When she follows him around, she hides in the walls like a shadow. She secretly washes his dirty underpants. She takes on his moodiness and his hating.
'We have to keep you a great writer,' M'Namah says to Genet inside the hotel room.
'Yes. The most important thing is that I be the best possible writer. Writing is the great thing, the great teacher.'
'Don't worry about anything else. I and the crab girl who crawls in those dirty . . .'
'Janey
'. . . will take care of everything else.' M'Namah laughs and laughs.
Scene 3
The country south of Alexandria is open, dry, and endless. Camel dung and pebbles caught in the sands. Janey is working in a rich man's fields which border on this sand vastness.
Boss
{the boss is a big man who has gorgeous shoulders, big feet, and talks like a sweet American missionary):
Where's a washcloth?
{The Egyptian [slave] workers look dumb.)
Goddamn country. Filthy. Filthy. You don't even have a washcloth. You never take baths, do you?
Janey:
With whom, sir?
Boss
{to Sahih, an Egyptian worker. Sahih is tall, thin, and looks like a voodoo man):
Can't you shut them up?
{Sahih is his top slave worker.)
Sahih:
I'm very sorry, Mr Knockwurst. You mustn't be angry with us. We're just like children.
Boss:
You've had plenty of time to grow up by now. You people are where you are because you take things too easy. You don't work hard enough.
Janey
(with pride):
I'm going to work harder. I'm going to work so hard I'm going to get out of here.
Boss:
Why do you people want to get out of here? Can you think? Can you feel? Tell me, what is life? You eat and you sleep.
Sahih:
I'll tell you why she acts the way she does.
(He pulls a cigarette out of his pants.)
Will you allow me to smoke? It's only when the boss is around, I smoke a cigarette. Otherwise I work all the time. Even though I'm an animal. I'm one of the best workers you have.
Janey
(resolutely):
I hate . . .
Sahih
(breaking in):
I didn't tell you you could open your mouth.
Janey:
You did. All of you did. You said I'm nothing and . . .
Sahih:
All she does is weep, Mr Knockwurst. You should get rid of her. We might be animals, but at least we know to keep our feelings locked in us. Women are worse than animals, Mr Knockwurst. They don't understand what's happening as we do.
Janey:
For 2,000 years you've had the nerve to tell women who we are. We use your words; we eat your food. Every way we get money has to be a crime. We are plagiarists, liars, and criminals.
Sahih: I
know what's discontenting her, Mr Knockwurst. It's always the same thing with women. She's living with that rebellious homosexual and she's horny.
Janey:
My face makes him sick.
Sahih:
Even though I'm a real man, I know how he feels.
Janey: I
don't have anywhere to sleep. I have to work as hard as possible so I can get enough fame then money to get away from here so I can become alive.
Boss:
Tell them to shut up. Women are not allowed to talk.
Sahih
(to Janey):
You have to understand that you're stupid. And you'll never be able to make enough money to get away by working.
Boss:
Unless she spreads her legs.
Sahih:
Even then she'll have to do specialties.
Boss:
So she's horny? She wants a lover? She likes our baskets?
(Laughing.)
She's a woman. She doesn't know what it is to be a human.
(He walks up to Janey and seizes her thighs. Rips them apart.)
Like that. That's what a human is.
(He's in a bad mood. To Sahih):
Get back to work.
Sahih:
Are you leaving us, Mr Knockwurst?
The thunder is beginning everywhere. Chaos and horribleness is beginning.
Sahih
(to Janey): How are you going to get the money to get out of here?
Janey:
Any way I
can.
Sahih:
Things are happening. There's no reasons or meanings. Things are one way or the other. Which way are you going to choose? There's no way the poor can get money. (
Pause.)
What are you going to choose?
Janey:
Everything's going so fast!
Scene 4
Janey's in gaol in Alexandria for stealing two copies of
Funeral Rites
and hash from Genet. She's alone in a cell surrounded by bars like a caged animal. Every hour an Egyptian judge who's dressed like an overdressed English barrister walks by and tells her who she is.
Judge 1:
You're a woman.
Judge 2:
You whine and snivel. You don't stand up for yourself. You
act like you do totally to please other people. You're a piece of shit.
You're not real.
Judge 3:
You're a whore a thief a liar a smelly fish a money dribbler an
egotistic snob.
Judge 4:
You have every vice in the world.
etc.
Janey
(to
these gaolers):
I hate you.
President Carter:
So what?
Janey: I
have a right to be happy.
President Carter:
You have no rights. The universe is evil. Why do
you think anything? You women are always complaining. Why aren't
you like us fascist men: why don't you learn to shut up, stow away
your grievances, learn the small details and particulars of evil?
(Pause.)