He left, suggesting we meet up that evening with Cousteau, near Pigalle. As I headed out, I went over to greet Brasillach, who was sitting with a woman I didn’t know; he acted as if he hadn’t recognized me and welcomed me with a smile, but did not introduce me to his companion. I asked him for news of his sister and his brother-in-law; he politely enquired about the conditions of life in Germany; we vaguely agreed to see each other again, without fixing a date. I went back to my hotel room, changed into my uniform, wrote a note to Knochen, and left to drop it off at Avenue Foch. Then I returned to put my civilian clothes back on and went out walking until the time we’d agreed on. I found Rebatet and Cousteau at the Liberty, a drag bar at the Place Blanche. Cousteau, not that he was into that sort of thing, knew the owner, Tonton, and obviously at least half the queens, whom he called by their first names; several of them, proud and absurd with their wigs, makeup, and glass jewelry, exchanged taunts with him and Rebatet while we drank martinis. “That one, you see,” Cousteau pointed, “I nicknamed her ‘Pompe-Funèbre.’ Because she sucks you to death.”—“You stole that from Maxime Du Camp, you creep,” Rebatet retorted with a face, before diving into his vast literary knowledge to try to surpass him. “And you, darling, what do you do?” one of the queens asked me, pointing an impressively long cigarette holder at me. “He’s with the Gestapo,” Cousteau said ironically. The fairy placed her lace-gloved fingers on her lips and let out a long “Ooooh.” But Cousteau had already launched into a long anecdote about Doriot’s boys giving blow jobs to German soldiers in the Palais Royal urinals; the Parisian cops who regularly raided them or those toward the bottom of the Champs-Élysées sometimes ran into bad surprises; but while the Préfecture bitched, the Majestic seemed not to care. These ambiguous stories put me ill at ease: What were they playing at, these two? Other comrades, I knew, showed off less and practiced more. But neither of them had the slightest scruple about publishing anonymous denunciations in the columns of
Je Suis Partout; and if someone didn’t have the misfortune of being a Jew, he could just as easily be made into a homosexual; more than one career, or even life, had been ruined that way. Cousteau and Rebatet, I thought, were trying to show that their revolutionary radicalism surmounted all prejudices (except those that were scientific and racialist, as French thinking had to be); basically, they too were just trying to shock the bourgeois, like the surrealists and André Gide, whom they so execrated. “Did you know, Max,” Rebatet asked me, “that the sacred phallus the Romans paraded during the Liberalia, in the spring and at harvest time, was called a fascinus? Mussolini may have remembered that.” I shrugged my shoulders: all this seemed false to me, bad theater, a stage production, while everywhere people were dying for real. I, for one, really did want a boy—not just for show, but for the warmth of his skin, the sharpness of his sweat, the sweetness of his sex nestled between his legs like a little animal. As for Rebatet, he was afraid of his shadow, of men and of women, of the presence of his own flesh, of everything except abstract ideas that could offer him no resistance. More than ever I wanted to be left alone, but it seemed this was impossible: I was scraping my skin on the world as on broken glass; I kept deliberately swallowing fishhooks, then being surprised when I tore my guts out of my mouth.