Page 28 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
silk shirt. I examined him with closer attention: his hair near the neck was too long, dirty, and irregularly cut.
“If the louse continues, it's going to fall on his sleeve or into his glass. The pimps'll see it...”
As if out of tenderness, I leaned on Stilitano's shoulder and gradually worked my hand up to his collar, but I was unable to complete my movement. With a shrug, Stilitano disengaged himself, and the insect continued its meanderings. It was a Pigalle pimp, tied up, so they said, with an international band of white−slavers, who made the following remark:
“There's a nice one climbing on you.”
All eyes turned—without, however, losing sight of the game—to the collar of Stilitano, who, twisting his neck, managed to see the insect.
“You're the one who's been picking them up,” he said to me as he crushed it.
“Why me?”
“I'm telling you it's you.”
The tone of his voice was unanswerably arrogant, but his eyes were smiling. The men continued their card game.
It was the same day that Stilitano informed me that Pepe had just been arrested. He was in the Montjuich jail. “Who told you?”
“I read it in the paper.”
“How long can they give him?”
“Life.”
We made no other comment.
This journal is not a mere literary diversion. The further I progress, reducing to order what my past life suggests, and the more I persist in the rigor of composition—of the chapters, of the sentences, of the book itself—the more do I feel myself hardening in my will to utilize, for virtuous ends, my former hardships. I feel their power.
In the urinals, which Stilitano never entered, the behavior of the faggots would make matters clear: they would perform their dance, the remarkable movement of a snake standing on its tail and undulating, swaying from side to side, tilted slightly backward, so as to cast a furtive glance at my prick which was out of my fly. I would go off with the most prosperous−looking one.
The Ramblas were frequented, in my time, by two young mariconas who carried a tame little monkey on their shoulders. It was an easy excuse for approaching clients: the monkey would jump up on the man they pointed out to it. One of the mariconas was called Pedro. He was pale and thin. His waist was very supple, his step quick. His eyes in particular were splendid, his lashes immense.
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