Page 27 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
wretchedness that counsels such choices be blessed. In Stilitano's company, during the period when I had to experience moral abjection, I stopped desiring it, and I hated that which must be its sign: my lice, rags and filth. Perhaps his power alone was enough for Stilitano 'to inspire respect without having to perform a bold deed; nevertheless, I would have liked our life together to be more brilliant, though it was sweet for me to encounter in his shadow (his shadow, dark as a negro's must be, was my seraglio) the looks of admiration of the whores and their men when I knew that we were both poor thieves. I kept inciting him to ever more perilous adventures.
“We need a revolver,” I said to him.
“Would you know what to do with it?”
“With you around, I wouldn't he scared to bump a guy off.”
Since I was his right arm, I would have been the one to execute. But the more I obeyed serious orders, the greater was my intimacy with him who issued them. He, however, smiled. In a gang (an association of evil−doers) the young boys and inverts are the ones who show boldness. They are the instigators of dangerous jobs. They play the role of the fecundating sting. The potency of the males, the age, authority and presence of the elders, fortify and reassure them. The males are dependent only upon themselves. They are their own heaven, and, knowing their weakness, they hesitate. Applied to my particular case, it seemed to me that the men, the tough guys, were made of a kind of feminine fog in which I would still like to lose myself so that I might feel more intensely that I was a solid block.
A certain distinction of manners, a more assured step, proved to me my success, my ascension into the secular domain. In Stilitano's presence, I walked in the wake of a duke. I was his faithful but jealous dog. My bearing was proud. Along the Ramblas, toward evening, we passed a woman and her son. The boy was good−looking. He was about fifteen. My eyes lingered on his blond hair. We walked by them and I turned around. It was at that moment, when both Stilitano's eyes and mine were staring after her son, that the mother drew him to her, or drew herself to him, as if to protect him from the danger of our two gazes, of which, however, she was unaware. I was jealous of Stilitano whose mere movement of the head had, so it seemed to me, just been sensed as a danger by the mother's back.
One day, while I was waiting in a bar on the Parallelo (the bar was, at the time, the meeting−place of all the hardened French criminals: pimps, crooks, racketeers, escaped convicts. Argot, sung with somewhat of a Marseilles accent, and a few years behind Montmartre argot, was its official tongue. Twenty−one and poker were played there rather than ronda), Stilitano blew He was welcomed by the Parisian pimps with their customary, slightly ceremonious politeness. Severely, but with smiling eyes, he solemnly placed his solemn behind on the straw−bottomed chair whose wood groaned with the shamelessness of a beast of burden. This wailing of the seat expressed perfectly my respect for the sober posterior of Stilitano whose charm was neither all nor always contained there, but which would assemble in that spot—or rather on it—and would there accumulate and delegate its most caressing waves—and masses of lead!—to give the rump a reverberating undulation and weight. I refuse to be prisoner of a verbal automatism, but here again I must have recourse to a religious image: this posterior was a Station. Stilitano sat down. Still with his elegant lassitude—“I palmed them,” he would say on all and every occasion—he dealt the cards for the poker game, from which I was excluded. None of these gentlemen would have required me to leave the game, but of my own accord, out of courtesy, I went to sit down behind Stilitano. As I was about to take my seat, I saw a louse on the collar of Stilitano's jacket. Stilitano was handsome and strong, and welcome at a gathering of similar males whose authority likewise lay in their muscles and their awareness of their revolvers. The louse on Stilitano's collar, still invisible to the other men, was not a small stray spot; it was moving; it shifted about with disturbing velocity, as if crossing and measuring its domain— its space rather. But it was not only at home; on Stilitano's collar it was the sign that he belonged to an unmistakably verminous world, despite his eau de Cologne and
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