Page 11 - The Thief's Journal

her dwelling where her daughter was confined.
The Thief's Journal
untidy underclothes. The lice were the only sign of our prosperity, of the very underside of our prosperity, but it was logical that by making our state perform an operation which justified it, we were, by the same token, justifying the sign of this situation. Having become as useful for the knowledge of our decline as jewels for the knowledge of what is called triumph, the lice were precious. They were both our shame and our glory. I lived for a long time in a room without windows, except a transom on the corridor, where, in the evening, five little faces, cruel and tender, smiling or screwed up with the cramp of a difficult position, dripping with sweat, would hunt for those insects of whose virtue we partook. It was good that, in the depths of such wretchedness, I was the lover of the poorest and homeliest. I thereby had a rare privilege. I had difficulty, but every victory achieved — my filthy hands, proudly exposed, helped me proudly expose my beard and my long hair — gave me strength — or weakness, and here it amounts to the same thing — for the following victory, which in your language would naturally be called a fall from grace. Yet, light and brilliance being necessary to our lives, a sunbeam did cross the pane and its filth and penetrate the dimness; we had the hoar−frost, the silver thaw, for these elements, though they may spell calamity, evoke joys whose sign, detached in our room, was adequate for us: all we knew of Christmas and New Year's festivities was what always accompanies them and what makes them dearer to merrymakers: frost.
The cultivation of sores by beggars is also their means of getting a little money — on which to live — but though they may be led to this out of a certain inertia in their state of poverty, the pride required for holding one's head up above contempt is a manly virtue. Like a rock in a river, pride breaks through and divides contempt, bursts it. Entering further into abjection, pride will be stronger (if the beggar is myself) if have the knowledge — strength or weakness — to take advantage of such a fate. It is essential, as this leprosy gains on me, that I gain on it and that, in the end, I win out. Shall I therefore become viler and viler, more and more an object of disgust, up to that final point which is something still unknown but which should be governed by an aesthetic as well as moral inquiry? It is said that leprosy, to which I compare our state, causes an irritation of the tissues; the sick person scratches himself; he gets an erection. Masturbation becomes frequent. In his solitary eroticism the leper consoles himself and hymns his disease. Poverty made us erect. All across Spain we carried a secret, veiled magnificence unmixed with arrogance. Our gestures grew humbler and humbler, fainter and fainter, as the embers of humility which kept us alive glowed more intensely. Thus developed my talent for giving a sublime meaning to so shabby an appearance. (I am not yet speaking of literary talent). It proved to have been a very useful discipline for me and still enables me to smile tenderly at the humblest among the debris, whether human or material, including vomit, including the saliva I let drool on my mother's face, including your excrement. I shall preserve within me the idea of myself as beggar.
I wanted to be like that woman who, at home, hidden away from people, sheltered her daughter, a kind of hideous, misshapen monster, stupid and white, who grunted and walked on all fours. When the mother gave birth, her despair was probably such that it became the very essence of her life. She decided to love this monster, to erect it devotedly. Within herself she ordained an altar where she preserved the idea of Monster. With devoted care, with hands gentle despite the callouses of her daily toil, with the willful zeal of the hopeless, she set herself up against the world, and against the world she set up the monster, which took on the proportions of the world and its power. It was on the basis of the monster that new principles were ordained, constantly attacked by the forces of the world which came charging into her but which stopped at the walls of
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I. I learned from the newspapers that, after forty years of devotion, this mother sprayed her sleeping daughter, and then the house, with gasolene — or petroleum — and set fire to the house. The monster (the daughter) died. The old woman (age 75) was rescued from the flames and was saved, that is, she was brought to trial.
But, for it was sometimes necessary to steal, we also knew the clear and earthly beauties of boldness. Before we went to sleep, the chief, the liege lord, would advise us. For example, we would go with fake papers to the various consulates in order to be repatriated. The consul, moved or annoyed by our woes and wretchedness, and our filth, would give us a railroad ticket to a border post. Our chief would resell it at the Barcelona station.
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