Page 24 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
executioner. I made no attempt to explain to myself the reason for his anger, which was so disproportionate to its cause, for my mind was hardly concerned with psychological motives. As for Stilitano, from that day on he stopped wearing the bunch of grapes. Toward morning, having entered the room before him, I waited for him. In the silence, I heard the mysterious rustling of the sheet of yellow newspaper which replaced the missing window−pane. “That's subtle,” I said to myself. I was discovering a lot of new words. In the silence of the room and of my heart, in the expectation of Stilitano, this slight noise disturbed me, for before I came to understand its meaning there elapsed a brief period of anxiety. Who — or what — is calling such fleeting attention to itself in a poor man's room?
“It's a newspaper printed in Spanish,” I said to myself again. “It's natural that I don't understand the sound it's making.”
Then I really felt I was in exile, and my nervousness was going to make me permeable to what—for want of other words—I shall call poetry.
The bunch of grapes on the mantle−piece nauseated me. One night Stilitano got up to throw it into the toilet. During the time he had worn it, it had not harmed his beauty. On the contrary, in the evening, slightly encumbering his legs, it had given them a slight bend and his step a slightly rounded and sweet constraint, and when he walked near me, in front or behind, I felt a delicious agitation because my hands had prepared it. It was, I still think, through the insidious power of this bunch that I grew attached to Stilitano. I did not detach myself until the day when, in a dance−hall, while dancing with a sailor, I happened to slip my hand under his collar. This seemingly most innocent of gestures was to reveal a fatal virtue. My hand, lying flat on the young man's back, knew that it was gently and piously hidden by the sign, upon them, of the candor of sailors. It felt as if something were flapping against it, and my hand could not keep from thinking that Java was flapping his wing. It is still too soon to talk about him.
I shall prudently refrain from comment upon this mysterious wearing of the bunch of grapes; yet it pleases me to see in Stilitano a queer who hates himself.
“He wants to baffle and hurt, to disgust the very people who desire him,” I say to myself when I think of him. As I ponder it more carefully, I am more disturbed by the idea—and I can make the most of it—that Stilitano had bought a fake wound for that most noble spot (I know that he was magnificently hung) in order to save his lopped−off hand from scorn. Thus, by means of a very crude subterfuge here I am talking again about beggars and their sorrows. Behind a real or sham physical ailment which draws attention to itself and is thereby forgotten is hidden a more secret malady of the soul. I shall list the secret wounds:
decayed teeth, foul breath,
a hand cut off, smelly feet,
a gouged eye, a peg−leg, etc.
We are fallen during the time that we bear the marks of the fall, and to watch within us the knowledge of the imposture is of little avail. Using only the pride imposed by our poverty, we aroused pity by cultivating the most repulsive wounds. We became a reproach to your happiness.
The Thief's Journal 22