Page 35 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
Along the shores of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean I went through fishing−ports where the elegant poverty of the fishermen wounded my own. Without their seeing me, I would brush against men and women standing in a patch of shadow, against boys playing on a square. The love that human beings seem to feel for one another tortured me at the time. If two chaps exchanged a greeting or a smile in passing, I would retreat to the farthest edges of the world. The glances exchanged by the two friends—and sometimes their words—were the subtlest emanation of a ray of love coming from the heart of each. A ray of very soft light, delicately coiled: a spun ray of love. I was amazed that such delicacy, so fine a thread and of so precious, and so chaste, a substance as love should be fashioned in so dark a smithy as the muscular bodies of these males, though they themselves always emitted this gentle ray in which there sometimes sparkled the droplets of a mysterious dew. I would fancy hearing the elder say to the other, who was no longer I, speaking of that part of the body that he must have loved dearly:
“I'm going to dent your halo for you again tonight!”
I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me. (Maurice G. and Robert B. met at the Belle−Isle Reformatory. They were seventeen years old. I had known them in Paris. I had made love to each of them several times, though neither knew about the other. They saw each other one day at Belle−Isle when they were tending cows or sheep. I don't know how it happened, but in talking about Paris, the first person whose name came up was myself. They were amused and amazed to learn that the other had also been my lover. It was Maurice who told me about it.
“We became real good pals by thinking about you. I used to feel down in the dumps at night...” “Why?”
“I used to hear him groaning behind the partition that separates the men. He was better looking than me and all the yeggs were ramming it into him. There was nothing I could do.”
I am always moved whenever I learn that the miraculous unhappiness of my childhood at the Mettray Reformatory is forever perpetuated.)
Inland, I went through landscapes of sharp rocks that gnawed the sky and ripped the azure. This rigid, dry, malicious indigence flouted my own and my human tenderness. Yet it incited me to hardness. I was less alone upon discovering in nature one of my essential qualities: pride. I wanted to be a rock among rocks. I was happy to be one, and proud. Thus did I hold to the soil. I had my companions. I knew what the mineral kingdom was.
“We shall stand up to wind, rain and blows.”
My adventure with Stilitano retreated in my mind. He himself dwindled. All that remained of him was a gleaming point, of marvelous purity.
“He was a man,” I said to myself.
Had he not confessed to me to having killed a man in the Foreign Legion? And did he not justify himself as follows:
“He threatened to bump me off. I killed him. He had a higher calibre gun than mine. I'm not guilty.”
The only thing about him which retained any meaning for me was the manly qualities and gestures that I knew were his. Frozen, fixed forever in the past, they composed a solid object, indestructible since it had been
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