Page 106 - The Thief's Journal

“Everyone's broke.”
The Thief's Journal
It was not a burial for a dead man that Guy was demanding. He wanted the pomp of the world to be accorded his hoodlum friend who had been shot down by the bullets of a cop. He wished to weave for the humblest the handsomest of floral mantles. To honor the friend, but above all to glorify the most wretched with the means employed by those who regard them as such and are even responsible for their being so.
“Doesn't it make you sore to know that cops who get killed get first−class funerals?” “Does that bother you?”
“Doesn't it you? And when they bury judges, the whole court walks behind.”
Guy was excited. He was lit up with indignation. He was generous and without restraint. “Nobody's got any dough.”
“Got to find some.”
“Go swipe some flowers with his pals.” “You're crazy!”
He spoke in a hollow voice, shamefully, perhaps regretfully. A madman can pay homage to his dead with remarkable funerals. He can and must invent rites. Guy already had the pathetic attitude of a dog shitting. It squeezes, its gaze is fixed, its four paws are close together beneath its arched body; and it trembles, from head to reeking turd. I remember my shame, in addition to my astonishment, in the presence of so needless a gesture, when one Sunday, at the cemetery, my foster mother, after looking about her, tore a clump of marigolds from an unknown and quite fresh grave and replanted them on the grave of her daughter. Stealing flowers anywhere to cover the coffin of a loved one is a gesture—Guy was aware of this—which does not gratify the thief. No humor is tolerated in such a situation.
“Well, what are you going to do?”
“I'm going to rob, but fast. A stick−up.” “Have anything in mind?”
“No.”
“Well?”
At night, with two friends, he pilfered some flowers from the Montparnasse Cemetery. They went over the wall on the Rue Froidevaux, near the urinal. It was, so Guy told me later, a lark. Perhaps, as always when he committed a burglary, he took a crap. At night, if it's dark, he lets down his pants, usually behind the main entrance, or at the bottom of the stairway, in the yard. This familiar gesture restores his assurance. He knows that in French slang a turd is known as a “watchman”.
“I'm going to post a watchman,” he says. We then go up more calmly. The place is less strange to us.
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