Page 111 - The Thief's Journal

Suddenly he looked at me and smiled.
The Thief's Journal
“The gentleman receives me downstairs. Can't we go to your room? Is your kid there?”
“Yes.”
“Is he nice? Who is he?”
When he had left us, I asked Lucien what he thought of Guy. Secretly I would have been happy had they loved each other.
“He's a queer−looking bird, with his hat. Gets himself up like a scarecrow.”
And he immediately spoke of something else. Neither Guy's tattoos, nor his adventures, nor his boldness would have interested Lucien. All he saw was how ridiculously he was dressed. The elegance of hoodlums may be challenged by a man of taste. But they deck themselves out during the day, and especially at night, with as much care as a tart, and there is something touching about their seriousness. They want to shine. Egoism reduces their personalities to their bodies alone (the poverty of the home of a pimp who is better dressed than a prince). But what did this quest for elegance, almost always achieved, reveal about Guy? What does it mean when the details are that ridiculous little hat, that tight jacket, the pocket−handkerchief? Nevertheless, though he lacked Lucien's childlike grace and discreet manner, his passionate temperament, warmer heart and more ardent and burning life still made him dear to me. He was capable, as he said, of committing murder, of ruining himself in an evening for a friend or for himself alone. He had guts. And perhaps all of Lucien's qualities do not have, in my eyes, the value of a single virtue of this ridiculous hoodlum.
My love for Lucien and my happiness in this love are beginning to invite me to recognize a morality more in conformity with your world. Not that I am more generous (I have always been that), but the rigid goal toward which I am moving, fierce as the iron shaft at the top of a glacier, so desirable, so dear to my pride and my despair, seems to me too great a threat to my love. Lucien is not aware that I am headed for infernal regions. I still like to go where he takes me How much more intoxicating, to the point of dizziness, falling and vomiting, would be the love I bear him, if Lucien were a thief and a traitor. But would he love me then? Do I not owe his tenderness and his delicate merging within me to his submission to the moral order? Yet I would like to bind myself to some iron monster, smiling though icy, who kills, steals, and delivers father and mother to the judges. I also desire this so as to be myself the monstrous exception, which a monster, delegate of God, allows himself to be, and which satisfies my pride as well as my taste for moral solitude. Lucien's love fills me with joy, but if I go through Montmartre, where I lived for a long time, what I see there, and the squalor I sense, make my heart beat and strain my body and soul. I know, better than anyone else, that there is nothing in disreputable neighborhoods; they are without mystery; yet they remain mysterious to me. To live again in such places so as to be in harmony with the underworld would require an impossible return to the past, for the pale−faced corner−hoodlums have pale souls, and the most dreadful pimps are distressingly stupid. But at night, when Lucien has gone back to his room, I curl up fearfully under the sheets and want to feel against me the body of a thief, tougher, more dangerous and more tender. I am planning for the near future a perilous outlaw's life in the most dissolute quarters of the most dissolute of ports. I shall abandon Lucien. Let him become whatever he can. I shall go away. I shall go to Barcelona, to Rio or elsewhere, but first to prison. I shall find Sek Gorgui there. The big negro will stretch out gently on my back. Gently, but with sure precision, his penis will enter me. It will not tremble. It will not jerk hastily like mine. This presence within me will so fill me that I shall forget to come. The negro, vaster than night, will cover me over. All his muscles will be conscious, however, of being the tributaries of a virility converging at this hard and violently charged point, his whole body quivering with goodness and self−interest, which exist only for my happiness. We shall be motionless. He will drive deeper. A kind of sleep will lay the negro out on my shoulders; I shall be crushed by
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