Page 128 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
in himself and his accessories. The tender and hazy were banished. Yet I had seen him, not long before, in humiliating attitudes. The fairground attraction known as the Palace of Mirrors is a labyrinth partitioned with plates of glass, some silvered and some transparent. You pay and enter; the problem is to get out. You go about desperately bumping into your own image or into a visitor cut off from you by a glass. The onlookers witness from the street the quest for the invisible path. (The scene I am about to describe gave me the idea for a ballet called 'Adame Miroir.) As I approached the booth, the only one on the fairground, there was such a big crowd watching it that I knew something unusual was going on. The people were laughing. I recognized Roger in the crowd. He was staring at the involved mirror−system; his face was tragically tense. Before seeing him I knew that Stilitano, and he alone, was trapped, visibly distraught in glass corridors. No one could hear him, but by his gestures and his mouth one could tell he was yelling with anger. He was looking at the crowd in a rage, and they were looking at him and laughing. The manager of the booth was indifferent. Situations of that kind were quite common. Stilitano was alone. Everyone had found the way out, except him. The universe became strangely overcast. The shadow which suddenly covered things and people was the shadow of my solitude in the face of this despair, for Stilitano, exhausted with yelling and bumping into the glasses, had resigned himself to being the laughingstock of the onlookers and simply squatted on the floor, indicating thereby that he refused to go on. I hesitated, not knowing whether to leave or to fight for him and demolish his crystal prison. I looked at Roger, without his seeing me. He was still staring at Stilitano. I approached him. His straight but soft hair, parted in the middle, fell down to the side of his cheeks and met at his mouth. His head resembled certain palm−trees. His eyes were wet with ears.
If I am accused of using such theatrical props as funfares, prisons, flowers, sacrilegious pickings, stations, frontiers, opium, sailors, harbors, urinals, funerals, cheap hotel rooms, of creating mediocre melodramas and confusing poetry with cheap local color, what can I answer? I have said that I love outlaws who have no other beauty than that of their bodies. The props are steeped in the violence of men, in their brutality. Women are not involved in them. They are animated by male gestures. The traveling fairs in the North are dedicated to big blond fellows. They alone haunt them. Their girls cling with difficulty to their arms. It was the girls who were laughing at Stilitano's mishap.
Roger made up his mind and went in. We thought he'd get lost in the mirrors. We saw his abrupt and slow twists and turns, his sure−footedness. He lowered his eyes in order to get his bearings by the floor, which was less hypocritical than the glasses. Guided by his certainty, he reached Stilitano. We saw his lips muttering. Stilitano stood up and, gradually regaining his poise, emerged with Roger in a kind of apotheosis. They had not seen me. Laughing and free, they continued around the fair−ground. As for me, I went home, alone. Was it the image of the wounded Stilitano that was troubling me so? I knew he could hold in the smoke of an entire cigarette, the consuming of which was manifested only by the glowing embers. At each inhalation, his face would light up. I felt his penis beneath my lightly groping fingers.
“You like it?”
I didn't answer. What was the use? He knew that my swagger had just gone dead. He took his left hand from his pocket and, putting his arm around my shoulders, squeezed me against him while the cigarette guarded his mouth, protecting it from a kiss. Someone was coming along. I muttered very quickly, “I love you.”
We pulled apart. When I left him at the door of his hotel, he was sure I would give him full information about Armand.
I returned to my room and went to bed. Even when my lovers deceived or hated me, I was never able to hate them. Separated by a thin wall from Armand, who was jazzing Robert, I suffered at not being in the place of either one of them or at not being with them or at not being one of them. I envied them, but I felt no hatred. I went up the wooden staircase very carefully, for it was squeaky and rickety and almost all the partitions were wooden. I imagine that when Armand took off his belt that evening, he did not crack it like a whip. He must
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