Page 23 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
1. This face also merges with that of Rasseneur, a rowdy with whom I worked around 1936. I have just read in the weekly “Detective Story Magazine” that he has been given a life sentence, whereas that very same week a petition of writers asked, for the very same punishment, that the President of the Republic pardon me. The photo of Rasseneur in court was on the second page. The journalist stated ironically that he seemed quite pleased about being shipped off. That doesn't surprise me. At the Sante Prison he was a little king. He'll be a big shot at Riom or Clairvaux. Rasseneur is, I believe, from Nantes. He also robbed homosexuals. I learned from a friend that an auto, driven by one of his victims, looked all over Paris for him for a long time in order to run him over “accidentally”. There is a terrible fairy vengeance.
Though the blue woolen cape stolen from the customs officer had already afforded me a presentiment, as it were, of a conclusion wherein law and outlaw merge, one lurking beneath the other but feeling with a slight nostalgia the virtue of its opposite, to Stilitano it would offer an adventure Mess spiritual or subtle but more deeply involved in daily life, better utilized. It will not be another question of treason. Stilitano was a power. His egoism sharply marked out his natural frontiers. (Stilitano was a power to me).
When he entered late at night, he told me that everything was arranged. He had met the customs officer. “He won't bother you. It's all over. You can go out just as you used to.”
“But what about the cape?”
“I'm keeping it.”
Feeling that a strange merging of baseness and seduction from which I was naturally excluded had just taken place that night, I dared not ask for more details.
“Get started!”
With a gesture of his vivid hand, he motioned to me that he wanted to undress. As on other evenings, I got down on my knees to unhook the bunch of grapes. Inside his pants was pinned one of those imitation bunches of thin cellulose grapes stuffed with cotton−wool. (They are as big as greengage plums, and the elegant women of that time and in that country wore them on their loose−brimmed, straw sun−bonnets.) Whenever some queer at the Criolla, excited by the swelling, put his hand on Stilitano's basket, his horrified fingers would encounter this object, which he feared might be actual balls.
The Criolla was not only a fairy joint. Some boys in dresses danced there, but women did too. Whores brought their pimps and their clients. Stilitano would have made a lot of money were it not that he spat on queers. He had contempt for them. He was amused at their annoyance about his grapes. The game lasted a few days. So I unhooked the bunch, which was fastened to his blue pants by a safety−pin, but, instead of putting it on the mantle−piece as usual and laughing (for we would burst out laughing and joke during the operation), I could not restrain myself from keeping it in my cupped hands and laying my cheek against it. Stilitano's face above me turned hideous.
“Drop it, you bitch!”
In order to open the fly, I had squatted on my haunches, but Stilitano's rage, had my usual zeal not been enough, made me fall to my knees. That was the position that, in spite of myself, mentally, I used to take. I stopped moving. Stilitano struck me with his two feet and his one fist. I could have got away. I stayed there.
“The key's in the door,” I thought. Through the fork of the feet that were kicking me furiously I saw it sticking out of the key−hole, and I would have liked to turn it with a double turn so as to be locked in alone with my
The Thief's Journal 21