Page 25 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
I aggravated this foul adventure by an attitude that became an actual disposition. One day, just for the run of it, Stilitano said to me, “I'm going to have to stick my prick up your ass.”
“It would hurt,” I said with a laugh. “Not a bit. I'll put trees in it.”
“Trees” are put into shoes. I made believe to myself that he would put “trees” into his cock so that it would get even bigger, until it became a monstrous, unnameable organ, cultivated specially for my loathing, and not for my pleasure. I accepted this make−believe explanation without disgust.
Meanwhile, Stilitano and I were having a hard time. When, thanks to a few queers, I brought in a little money, he showed such pride that I have sometimes wondered whether he is not great, in my memory, because of the bragging of which I was the pretext and chief confidant. The quality of my love required that he prove his virility. If he was the splendid beast gleaming in the darkness of his ferocity, let him devote himself to sport worthy of it. I incited him to theft.
We decided to rob a store together. In order to cut the telephone wire, which, most imprudently, was near the door, a pair of pliers was needed. We entered one of the numerous Barcelona bazaars where there were hardware departments.
“Manage not to move if you see me swiping something.” “What'll I do?”
“Nothing. Just look.”
Stilitano was wearing white sneakers. He was dressed in his blue pants and a khaki shirt. At first I noticed nothing, but when we left, I was amazed to see at the flap of his shirt−pocket, a kind of small lizard, both restless and still, hanging by the teeth. It was the steel pliers that we needed and that Stilitano had just stolen.
“That he charms monkeys, men and women,” I said to myself, “is comprehensible, but what can be the nature of the magnetism, born of his glib muscles and his curls, of that blond amber, that can enthrall objects?”
However, there was no doubt about the fact that objects were obedient to him. Which amounts to saying that he understood them. So well did he know the nature of steel, and the nature of this particular fragment of polished steel that is called pliers, that it remained, to the point of fatigue, docile, loving, clinging to his shirt to which he had known, with precision, how to hook it, biting desperately, so as not to fall, into the cloth with its thin jaws. At times, however, these objects, which are irritated by a clumsy movement, would hurt him. Stilitano used to cut himself, his fingertips were finely gashed, his nail was black and crushed, but this merely heightened his beauty. (The purple of sunsets, according to physicists, is the result of an increased thickness of air which is crossed only by short waves. At mid−day, when nothing is happening in the sky, an apparition of this kind would trouble us less; the wonder is that it occurs in the evening, when the sun sets, when it disappears to pursue a mysterious destiny, when perhaps it dies. The physical phenomenon that fills the sky with such pomp is possible only at the moment that most exalts the imagination: at the setting of the most brilliant of tile heavenly bodies.) Ordinary objects, those used every day, will adorn Stilitano. His very acts of cowardice melt my rigor. I liked his taste for laziness. He was leaky, as one says of a vessel. When we had the pliers, he made as if to leave.
“There may be a dog around.”
The Thief's Journal 23