Page 13 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
him hunched over, squatting on a bench, his shoulders huddled up in the green and yellow cotton blanket with which he would go our begging on cold wintry days. He would also be wearing an old, black woolen shawl which I refused to wear. Indeed, though my mind endured, even desired, humility, my violent young body refused it. Salvador would speak in a sad and reticent voice:
“Would you like us to go back to France? We'll work in the country. “
I said no. He did not understand my loathing — no, my hatred — of France, nor that my adventure, if it stopped in Barcelona, was bound to continue deeply, more and more deeply, in the remotest regions of myself.
“But I'll did all the work. You'll take it easy.” “No.”
I would leave him on his bench to his cheerless poverty. I would go over to the stove or the bar and smoke the butts I had gleaned during the day, with a scornful young Andalusian whose dirty white woolen sweater exaggerated his torso and muscles. After rubbing his hands together, the way old men do, Salvador would leave his bench and go to the community kitchen to prepare a soup and put a fish on the grill. Once he suggested that we go down to Huelva for the orange picking. It was an evening when he had received so many humiliations, so many rebuffs while begging for me that he dared reproach me for my poor success at the Criolla.
“Really, when you pick up a client, it's you who ought to pay him.”
We quarreled in front of the hotel−keeper, who wanted to put us out. Salvador and I therefore decided to steal two blankets the following day and hide in a south−bound freight train. But I was so clever that that very evening I brought back the cape of a customs officer. As I passed the docks where they mount guard, one of them called me. I did what he required, in the sentry−box. After coming (perhaps, without daring to tell me so, he wanted to wash at a little fountain), he left me alone for a moment and I ran off with his big black woolen cape. I wrapped myself up in it in order to return to the hotel, and I knew the happiness of the equivocal, not yet the joy of betrayal, though the confusion which would make me deny fundamental oppositions was already forming. As I opened the door of the cafe, I saw Salvador. He was the saddest of beggars. His face had the quality, and almost the texture, of the sawdust that covered the floor of the cafe. Immediately I recognized Stilitano standing in the midst of the ronda players. Our eyes met. His gaze lingered on me, who blushed. I took off the black cape, and at once they started haggling over it. Without yet taking part, Stilitano watched the wretched bargaining.
“Make it snappy, if you want it,” I said. “Make up your minds. The customs man is sure to come looking for me.”
The players got a little more active. They were used to such reasons. When the general shuffle brought me to his side, Stilitano said to me in French:
“You come from Paris?” “Yes. Why?”
“Just so.”
The Thief's Journal 11