Page 101 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
When I turned my head, my eye was dazzled by the grey triangle formed by the two legs of the murderer, one of whose feet was propped up on the low edge of the wall while the other stood motionless in the dust of the yard. The two legs were clothed in rough, stiff, dreary homespun. I was dazzled a second time for, having taken from between my teeth the white rose whose stem I had been chewing, I had carelessly tossed it away (in the face, perhaps, of a hoodlum), and it had caught, with sly cunning, in the fly forming the stern angle of grey cloth. This simple gesture escaped the guard. It even escaped the other prisoners and the murderer, who felt only a very slight shock. When he looked at his pants, he blushed with shame. Did he think it was a gob of spit or the sign of a pleasure granted him by the mere fact of being for a moment beneath the brightest sky in France? In short, his face turned crimson and, with a casual gesture, trying to conceal the fact, he pulled out the absurd rose, which had slyly caught on by the tip of a thorn, and stuffed it into his pocket.
I call saintliness not a state, but the moral procedure leading to it. It is the ideal point of a morality which I can not talk about since I do not see it. It withdraws when I approach it. I desire it and fear it. This procedure may appear foolish. Yet, though painful, it is joyful. It's a gay girl. It stupidly assumes the figure of a Carolina carried off in her skirts and screaming with happiness.
I make of solitude, rather than of sacrifice, the highest virtue. It is the creative virtue par excellence. There must be damnation in it. Will anyone be surprised when I claim that crime can help me ensure my moral vigor?
When might I finally leap into the heart of the image, be myself the light which carries it to your eyes? When might I be in the heart of poetry?
I run the risk of going astray by confounding saintliness with solitude. But am I not, by this phrase, running the risk of restoring to saintliness the Christian meaning which I want to remove from it?
This quest for transparency may be vain. If attained, it would be repose. Ceasing to be “I", ceasing to be “you", the subsisting smile is a uniform smile cast upon all things.
The very day of my arrival at the Sante Prison—for one of my many stays there—I was brought up before the warden: I had babbled at the reception desk about a friend I had recognized going by. I was given two weeks of solitary confinement and was taken away at once. Three days later an assistant slipped me some butts. They had been sent to me by the prisoners in the cell to which I had been assigned, though I hadn't yet set foot in it. When I got out of the hole, I thanked them. Guy said to me, “We saw there was someone new. It was written on the door. Genet. We didn't know who Genet was. We didn't see you come. We realized you were in solitary, so we slipped you the butts.”
Because my name was down in the register for that cell, its occupants already knew that they were involved in an unknown penalty incurred for an offence in which they had no part. Guy was the soul of the cell. This curly and fair−skinned, buttery adolescent was its inflexible conscience, its rigor. Every time he addressed me I felt the meaning of that strange expression: “Ready to fire a load from his loins.”
He was arrested by the police. The following dialogue took place in my presence:
“You're the one who did the job on the Rue de Flandre.”
“No, it wasn't me.”
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