Page 30 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
“After all, fellows, you're not going to fight with a cripple.”
He held out his stump. But he did it with such simplicity, such sobriety, that this vile hamming, instead of disgusting me with him, ennobled him. He withdrew, not to the sound of jeers, but to a murmur expressing the discomfort of decent men discovering the misery about them. Stilitano went off slowly, protected by his outstretched stump, which was placed simply in front of him. The absence of the hand was as real and effective as a royal attribute, as the hand of justice.
Those whom one of their number called the Carolinas paraded to the site of a demolished street urinal. During the 1933 riots, the insurgents tore out one of the dirtiest, but most beloved pissoirs. It was near the harbor and the barracks, and its sheet−iron had been corroded by the hot urine of thousands of soldiers. When its ultimate death was certified, the Carolinas—not all, but a solemnly chosen delegation—in shawls, mantillas, silk dresses and fitted jackets, went to the site to place a bunch of red roses tied together with a crape veil. The procession started from the Parallelo, crossed the Calle Sao Paolo and went down the Ramblas de Las Flores until it reached the statue of Columbus. The faggots were perhaps thirty in number, at eight o'clock, sunrise. I saw them going by. I accompanied them from a distance. I knew that my place was in their midst, not because I was one of them, but because their shrill voices, their cries, their extravagant gestures had, it seemed to me, no other aim but to try to pierce the shell of the world's contempt. The Carolinas were great. They were the Daughters of Shame.
When they reached the harbor, they turned right, toward the barracks, and upon the rusty and stinking sheet−iron of the can that lay battered on the heap of dead scrap−iron they placed the flowers.
I was not in. the procession. I belonged to the ironic and indulgent crowd that was entertained by it. Pedro airily admitted to his false lashes, the Carolinas to their wild larks.
However, Stilitano, by denying himself to my pleasure, became the symbol of chastity, of frigidity itself. If he did screw the whores often, I was unaware of it. When he lay down to sleep in our bed, he had the modesty to arrange his shirt−tail so artfully that I saw nothing of his sex. The purity of his features corrected even the eroticism of his walk. He became representative of a glacier. I would have liked to offer myself to the most bestial of negroes, to the most flat−nosed and most powerful face, so that within me, having no room for anything but sexuality, my love for Stilitano might be further stylized. I was therefore able to venture in his presence the most absurd and humiliating postures.
We often went to the Criolla together. Hitherto, it had never occurred to him to exploit me. When I brought back to him the pesetas I had earned in the pissotieres, Stilitano decided that I would work in the Criolla.
“Would you like me to dress up as a women?” I murmured.
Would I have dared, supported by his powerful shoulder, to walk the streets in a spangled skirt between the Calle Carmen and the Calle Mediodia? Except for foreign sailors, no one would have been surprised, but neither Stilitano nor I would have known how to choose the dress or the hair−do, for taste is required. Probably that was what held us back. I still remembered the sighs of Pedro, with whom I had once teamed up, when he went to get dressed.
“When I see those old rags hanging there, I get the blues! I feel as if I were going into a vestry and getting ready to conduct a funeral. They've got a priestish smell. Like incense. Like urine. Look at them hanging! I wonder how I manage to get into those damn sausage−skins.”
“Will I have to have things like that? Maybe I'll even have to sew and cut with my man's help. And wear a bow, or maybe several, in my hair.”
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