Page 10 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
order to go up to the rooms. Salvador wiped his face with his sleeve and went in. I hesitated. Then I followed. I was twenty years old. If the drop that hesitates at the edge of a nostril has the limpidity of a tear, why should I not drink it with the same eagerness? I was already sufficiently involved in the rehabilitation of the ignoble. Were it not for fear of revolting Salvador, I would have done it in the cafe. He, however, sniffled, and I gathered that he was going to swallow his snot. Basket in arm, passing the beggars and the guttersnipes, he moved toward the kitchen. He preceded me.
“What's the matter with you?” I said.
“You're attracting attention.”
“What's wrong?”
“People don't kiss that way on the sidewalk. Tonight, if you like... “
He said it all with a charmless pout and the same disdain. I had simply wanted to show my gratitude, to warm him with my poor tenderness.
“But what were you thinking?”
Someone bumped into him without apologizing, separating him from me. I did not follow him to the kitchen. I approached a bench where there was a vacant seat near the stove. Though I adored vigorous beauty, I didn't bother my head much about how I would bring myself to love this homely, squalid beggar, bullied by the less bold, how I would come to care for his angular buttocks... and what if, unfortunately, he were to have a magnificent sex?
The Barrio Chino was, at the time, a kind of haunt thronged less with Spaniards than with foreigners, all of them down−and−out bums. We were sometimes dressed in almond−green or jonquil−yellow silk shirts and worn−out rope−soled sandals, and our hair was so plastered down that it looked as if it would crack. We did not have leaders but rather directors. I am unable to explain how they became what they were. Probably it was as a result of profitable operations in the sale of our meagre booty. They attended to our affairs and let us know about jobs, for which they took a reasonable commission. We did not form loosely organized bands, but amidst that vast, filthy disorder, in a neighborhood stinking of oil, piss and shit, a few waifs and strays relied on others more clever than themselves. The squalor sparkled with the youth of many of our number and with the more mysterious brilliance of a few who really scintillated, youngsters whose bodies, gazes arid gestures were charged with a magnetism which made of us their object. That is how I was blasted by one of them. In order to do justice to the one−armed Stilitano I shall wait a few pages. Let it be known from the start that he was devoid of any Christian virtue. All his brilliance, all his power, had their source between his legs. His tool, and that which completes it, the whole apparatus, was so beautiful that the only thing I can call it is a generative organ. He was dead, you thought, for he rarely, and slowly, got excited: he watched. He generated in the darkness of a well−buttoned fly, though buttoned by only one hand, the luminosity with which its bearer will be aglow.
Our love lasted six months. It was not the most intoxicating but rather the most fecund of loves. I had managed to love the sickly body, the grey face, the sparse and ridiculous beard. Salvador took care of me, but at night, by candlelight, I hunted for lice, our pets, in the seams of his pants. The lice inhabited us. They imparted to our clothes an animation, a presence, which, when they had gone, left our garments lifeless. We liked to know — and feel — that the translucent bugs were swarming; though not tamed, they were so much a part of us that a third person's louse disgusted us. We chased them away but with the hope that during the day the nits would have hatched. We crushed them with our nails, without disgust and without hatred. We did not throw their corpses — or remains — into the garbage; we let them fall, bleeding with our blood, into our
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