Page 122 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
Armand seemed to have the same evil characteristics. If I recall him, no cruel images rise up, but rather very tender ones, precisely such as would express my love not for him but for you. When, as I have already mentioned, I left Belgium, hounded by a kind of remorse or shame, I kept thinking of him in the train, and, having no hope of ever seeing him again, I went in strange pursuit of his ghost: as the train increased the distance between us, I had to force myself to reduce the space and time separating us, to rush backwards in thought more and more swiftly, while the idea of his kindness—the only thing able to console me for his loss—forced itself upon me, grew more precise, to such a point that when the train (it first went through a forest of firs, and perhaps the sudden discovery of a clear landscape, as a result of its brutal break with the kindly shade, prepared the idea of catastrophe), near Maubeuge, roared over a bridge, I felt that, were the bridge to give way and the train to be cut in two, just about to drop into the sudden precipice, this kindness alone, which already filled me to the point of governing my acts, would have been enough to join the broken sections, restore the bridge and save the train from catastrophe. When we had crossed the viaduct, I even wondered whether everything I have just mentioned had not actually occurred. The tram continued along the tracks. The landscape of France put Belgium behind me.
Armand's kindness did not consist in doing good: the idea of Armand, as it sped away from its bony and muscular pretext, became a kind of vaporous element in which I took refuge, and so sweet was this refuge that from his bosom I addressed to the world messages of gratitude. I would have found within him the justification of my love for Lucien, which he would have approved. Unlike Stilitano, he would have contained me with my charge of love and of everything which is to come of it. Armand absorbed me. His kindness, thus, was not one of the qualities recognized by ordinary morality, but rather something which, as I think about it, still stirs within me emotions from which issue images of peace. It is by means of language that I experience it.
Even when they are easy and relaxed, Stilitano, Pilorge, Michaelis and all the pimps and hoodlums I have ever met stand erect, not severely but calmly, without any tenderness; even in voluptuousness, or when dancing, they remain alone, reflected within themselves, delicately mirrored in their virility and strength, which polish and limit them as meticulously as an oil−bath, while facing them, unperturbed by their ardent presence, their buxom girl−friends are likewise reflected within themselves, and remain themselves, isolated by their beauty alone. I would like to make a bouquet of these handsome boys, to enclose them in a sealed glass vase. Perhaps an irritation would then melt the invisible matter which isolates them; in the shadow of Armand, who contains them all, they might flower, bloom and offer me the revels which are the pride of my ideal Guiana.
Amazed that all, save one, of the Church sacraments (the very word is sumptuous) suggest solemnity, I shall give the sacrament of penitence its rightful place in the liturgical ceremonial. In my childhood, it was reduced to a shame−faced and shifty mumbling, carried on with a shadow behind the shutter of the confessional, to a few prayers quickly recited as I knelt on a chair; but today it unfolds in full earthly pomp: when it is not the brief walk to the scaffold, it is the elaboration of that expedition which takes to the sea and continues throughout life in a fabulous region. I do hot dwell on Guiana's special characteristics which make it appear, at the end, sombre and splendid; its nights, palms, suns and gold are to be found in abundance on altars. If I had to live—perhaps I shall, though the idea is untenable—in your world, which, nevertheless, does welcome me, it would be the death of me. At the present time, when, having won by sheer force, I have signed an apparent truce with you, I find myself in exile. I do not care to know whether I desire prison so as to expiate a crime of which I am unaware. My nostalgia is so great that I shall have to be taken to it. I feel sure that only in prison shall I be able to continue a life which was cut off when I entered it. Rid of preoccupations with glory and wealth, I shall achieve with slow, scrupulous patience the painful gestures of the punished. Every day I shall do a job governed by a rule which has no other authority than that of emanating from an order which presents the penitentiary and creates it. I shall wear myself out. The men I find there will help me. I shall become as polished as they, as pumiced.
The Thief's Journal 120