Page 33 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
that it rose, that it continued its curve and completed it. If I saw it in the sky of the astronomers, it was because it was the bold projection there of the one I preserved within myself. Perhaps I even confused it in some obscure way with the vanished Stilitano.
I am indicating to you, in this way, the form that my sensibility took. Nature made me uneasy. My love for Stilitano, the roar with which he burst upon my wretchedness, and any number of other things, delivered me to the elements. But they are malicious. In order to tame them I wanted to contain them. I refused to deny them cruelty; quite the contrary, I congratulated them for having as much as they had; I flattered them.
As an operation of this kind can not succeed by means of dialectics, I had recourse to magic, that is, to a kind of deliberate predisposition, an intuitive complicity with nature. Language would have been of no help to me. It was then that things and circumstances became maternal to me, though alert within them, like the sting of a bee, was the point of my pride. (Maternal: that is, whose essential element is femininity. In writing this I do not want to make any Mazdaean allusion: I merely point out that my sensibility required that it be surrounded by a feminine order. It could do so inasmuch as it could avail itself of masculine qualities: hardness, cruelty, indifference.)
If I attempt to recompose with words what my attitude was at the time, the reader will be no more taken in than I. We know that our language is incapable of recalling even the pale reflection of those strange and perished states. The same would be true of this entire journal if it had to be the notation of what I was. I shall therefore make it clear that it is meant to indicate what I am today, as I write it. It is not a quest of time gone by, but a work of art whose pretext−subject is my former life. It will be a present fixed with the help of the past, and not vice versa. Let it be therefore understood that the facts were what I say they were, but the interpretation that I give them is what I am—now.
At night I would stroll about the city. I would sleep against a wall, sheltered from the wind. I thought about Tangiers, whose nearness fascinated me, as did the glamor of the city, that haunt, rather, of traitors. To escape my poverty, I invented the boldest acts of treason, which I would have performed with all calmness. Today I know that only my love of the French language attaches me to France, but then!
This taste for treason will have to be better formulated when I am questioned at the time of Stilitano's arrest.
“Should I squeal on Stilitano for money and under the threat of blows?” I asked myself. “I still love him, and I answer no. But should I squeal on Pepe who murdered the ronda player on the Parallelo?”
I might have accepted, though with great shame, the knowledge that the interior of my soul was rotten since it emitted the odor that makes people hold their noses. Now the reader may remember that my periods of begging and prostitution were to me a discipline which taught me to utilize ignoble elements, to apply them to my own ends, indeed, to take pleasure in my choosing for them. I would have done the same (strong in my skill in turning my shame to account) with my soul that had been decomposed by treason. Fortune granted that the question be put to me at the time when a young ship's ensign was condemned to death by the maritime court of Toulon. He had handed over to the enemy the plans of a weapon or of a port or a boat. I am not talking of an act of treason causing the loss of a naval battle, which is slight, unreal, hanging from the wings of a schooner's sails, but of the loss of a combat of steel monsters where dwelt the pride of a people no longer childlike, but severe, helped and supported by the learned mathematics of technicians. In short, it was an act of treason in modern times. The newspaper reporting these facts (I saw it in Cadiz) said, stupidly no doubt, for what could they know about it: “...out of a taste for treason.” Accompanying the text was the photograph of a young and very handsome officer. I was taken with his picture, which I still carry with me. As love is exalted in perilous situations, secretly within me I offered to share the exile's Siberia. The maritime court, by arousing my hostility, further facilitated my climb toward him whom I approached with heavy yet winged foot. His name was Marc Aubert. I shall go to Tangiers, I said to myself, and perhaps I may be summoned among the
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