Page 121 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
prison. Where are the others? If they are wandering about, by what chance shall I meet them, and what will each of us be? However, even were the antithesis of vile and noble to remain, I would be able to discern among them moments of pride and rigor, and to recognize them as the scattered elements of a severity which I wish to assemble within me so as to make of them a deliberate masterpiece.
Armand's physical appearance—seaman's build, bulky and weary, dull eyes, hair cropped short, nose broken not by a man's fist but by having smashed against the glass walls which cut us off from your world—evokes for me now, though it might not have done so in the past, the prison of which he seems to me the most significant, the most illustrious representative. I was summoned to him, hastened toward him, and it is now, in my desperation, that I dare be engulfed within him. The maternal element I perceived in him was not feminine. Men sometimes hail each other as follows:
“Well, Old Gal?” “Hi, you Hen!”
“Is that you, Wench?”
This usage belongs to the world of poverty and crime. Of punished crime which bears upon itself —or within itself—the mark of a faded brand. (I speak of it as of a flower, preferably as of a lily, when the brand was the fleur de lis.) These salutations indicate the downfall of men who once were strong. Having been wounded, they can now bear the equivocal. They even desire it. The tenderness that makes them unbend is not femininity but the discovery of ambiguity. I think they are prepared to impregnate themselves, to lay and hatch their eggs without blunting the cruel goad of males.
1
The humblest beggars say among themselves, “How's la Grinche going?” or “How's la Chine?”.
(Guiana) is a feminine noun. It contains all those males who are called tough. In addition, it is a tropical country, at the world's waist−band, the most feverish of all—with gold fever—where fierce tribes are still hidden in the swamps of the jungle. Thither I go—for though it has disappeared, “it is now the ideal region of misfortune and penitence towards which proceeds not my physical person but the person that watches over it—with mingled fear and sweet exhilaration. Each of the toughs who haunt it has remained virile—like those of la Chine and la Grinche—but his downfall teaches him the useless−ness of proving that he has. Armand was a man, wearily so. He slept on his muscles, like heroes on their laurels. He rested in his strength, and on it. If, with his fist placed on the delicate nape of a boy's neck, he brutally rammed the head down on his prick, he did it with indifference, or as a result of not having forgotten the methods and unconcerned ways of a world where he must have lived a long time, from which I thought he had returned. If he was kind, as I have said earlier, it was that he might offer me a hospitality which was to fulfill utterly my most secret desires—those which I discover with the greatest pain —but which are the only ones that can make of me the finest of characters, that is, the one most identical with myself. I aspire to Guiana. No longer to that geographical place now depopulated and emasculated, but to the proximity, the promiscuity, not in space but in consciousness, of the sublime models, of the great archetypes of misfortune. It is kindly. The respiratory movement which makes it rise and fall in a slow, though heavy and regular rhythm, is−governed by an atmosphere of kindness. The place seems to be most cruelly dry and arid, and yet here am I expressing it by a theme of kindness: it suggests and imposes the image of a maternal breast, charged, in like manner, with a reassuring power, from which rises a slightly nauseating odor, offering me a shameful peace. I call the Virgin Mother and Guiana the Comforters of the Afflicted.
1. La Grinche (panhandling) and la Chine (ragpicking) are beggars' slang.—The significance of the feminine gender of these nouns is developed in the course of the paragraph. (Translator's note.)
The Thief's Journal 119
La Guyane