Page 26 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
We thought of putting it out of the way with a piece of poisoned meat. “Rich people's dogs don't eat just any old thing.”
Suddenly Stilitano thought of the legendary trick of the gipsies: the thief was said to wear a pair of pants smeared with lion's fat. Stilitano knew that this was unobtainable, but the idea excited him. He stopped speaking. He was probably imagining himself in a thicket, at night, stalking his prey, wearing a pair of pants stiff with fat. He was strong with the lion's strength, savage as a consequence of being thus prepared for war, the stake, the spit and the grave. In his armor of grease and imagination he was resplendent. I do not know whether he was aware of the beauty of adorning himself with the strength and boldness of a gipsy, nor whether he was thrilled at the idea of thus penetrating the secrets of the tribe.
“Would you like being a gipsy?” I once asked him.
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“I wouldn't mind. Only I wouldn't want to stay in a caravan.”
Thus, he did dream sometimes. I thought I had discovered the flaw in his petrified shell through which a bit of my tenderness might slip in. Stilitano was too little excited by nocturnal adventures for me to feel any real exhilaration in his company when we slunk along walls, lanes and gardens, when we scaled fences when we robbed. I have no concrete memory of any such excitement. It was with Guy, in France, that I was to have the profound revelation of what burglary was.
(When we were locked in the little lumber−room, waiting for night and the moment to enter the empty offices of the Municipal Pawn−shop in B., Guy suddenly seemed to me inscrutable, secret. He was no longer the ordinary chap whom you happen upon somewhere or other; he was a kind of destroying angel. He tried to smile. He even broke out into a silent laugh, but his eyebrows were knitted together. From within this little fairy where a hoodlum was confined there sprang forth a determined and terrifying fellow, ready for anything—and primarily for murder—if anyone made so bold as to hinder his action. He was laughing, and I thought I could read in his eyes a will to murder which might be practised on me. The longer he stared at me, the more I had the feeling that he read in me the same determined will to be used against him. What if someone had entered at such a moment, uncertain as we were of one another (so it seemed to me), each half−dead with fear that one of us might resist the other's terrible decision?)
I continued doing other jobs with Stilitano. We knew a night−watchman who tipped us off. Thanks to him, we lived off our burglaries for a long time. The boldness of a thief's life—and its light—would have meant nothing if Stilitano at my side had not been proof of it. My life became magnificent by men's standards since I had a friend whose beauty derived from the idea of luxury. I was the valet whose job was to look after, to dust, polish and wax, an object of great value which, however, through the miracle of friendship, belonged to me.
“When I walk along the street,” I wondered, “am I being envied by the loveliest and wealthiest of senoritas? What mischievous prince, what ragged infanta, can walk about and have so fair a lover?”
I speak of this period with emotion, and I magnify it, but if glamorous words, I mean words charged in my mind with more glamor than meaning, occur to me, they do so perhaps because the wretchedness they express, which was mine too, is also a source of wonder. I want to rehabilitate this period by writing of it with the names of things most noble. My victory is verbal and I owe it to the richness of the terms, but may the
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