Page 126 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
impossible. The only way I could prove my independence was by acting on the emotional level. The idea of betraying Armand set me aglow. I feared and loved him too much not to want to deceive and betray and rob him. I sensed the anxious pleasure that goes with sacrilege. If he were God (he had known pity), and had he been well pleased with me, it were sweet to deny him. And better still, that Stilitano, who did not love me and whom I would never have betrayed, should be helping me. His sharp personality aptly suggested the image of a dagger piercing the heart. The strength of the devil and his power over us lie in his irony. His seductiveness may be only his detachment. The force with which Armand denied the rules proved his own power—and the power of the rules over him. Stilitano smiled at them. His smile dissolved me. It was bold enough to express itself on a face of great beauty.
We entered a bar, and Stilitano explained what I would have to do. “Did you tell Robert about it?”
“You're crazy. It's just between us.”
“And you think there'll be a lot of dough in it?”
“I'll say! He's a miser. He made a terrific pile in France.”
Stilitano seemed to have been thinking the matter over for a long time. I could see him rising up from a nocturnal life that had been lived before my eyes but had remained secret. Behind his smile he watched and spied. As we left the bar, a beggar came up to us; he asked for a hand−out. Stilitano looked at him rather contemptuously.
“Do what we do, pal. If you want dough, take it.”
“Tell me where to find it.”
“There's some in my pocket, and if you want it, go look for it.” “That's what you say, but if you were...”
Stilitano refused to enter into a conversation which might have gone on and in which he himself might have weakened. He very cleverly knew how to cut it short so as to sharpen his rigor, to give the appearance of being divided in clear−cut sections.
“When we want it, we take it where it is,” he said to me. “We're not getting into trouble for bums.”
Was he aware that it was the right moment to give me a lesson in severity, or did he himself feel a need to take deeper root in selfishness? Stilitano said this in such a way—with a knowing casualness—that the advice took on, in the night and fog, the proportions of a slightly arrogant philosophical truth agreeable to my natural bent, which was inclined toward pity. I could recognize in this unnatural truth the value of an attitude capable of protecting me from myself.
“You're right,” I said. “If we get nabbed, he won't be the one who goes to jail. Let him shift for himself, if he's got the guts to.”
By this remark I was not only wounding the most precious—though concealed—period of my life; I was establishing myself in my diamond−like wealth, in the city of diamond−cutters, and in that night of self−centered solitude whose facets sparkled. We approached the place where Sylvia worked, but it was late;
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