Page 36 - The Thief's Journal

achieved by those few unforgettable details.
The Thief's Journal
At times, in the interior of this negative life, I would allow myself to perform an act, occasional thefts to the detriment of poor wretches, the gravity of which gave me a certain awareness.
The palms! They were gilded by a morning sun. The light quivered, not the palms. I came upon the first of them. They lined the Mediterranean. Frost on window−panes in winter had more variety, but the palms swept me in like manner—better perhaps —into a Christmas scene born paradoxically of the verse about the holy day preceding the death of God, about the entrance into Jerusalem, about the palms strewn beneath the feet of Jesus. My childhood had dreamt of palm trees. Here I was beside them. I had been told that snow does not fall in Bethlehem. The name Alicante gave me a glimpse of the Orient. I was in the heart of my childhood, at its most preciously preserved moment. At a turn in the road I was about to discover beneath three palm trees the Christmas manger where, as a child, I used to be present at my nativity between the ox and the ass. I was the humblest of the world's poor. Wretchedly I walked in the dust and fatigue, at last deserving the palm, ripe for the penal colony, for the straw hats and the palm trees.
In the hands of a poor man, coins are no longer the sign of wealth but of its opposite. No doubt I robbed some rich hidalgo in passing—rarely, for they are well able to protect themselves—but such thefts were without action upon my soul. I shall speak of those I committed against other beggars. The Alicante crime will clarify matters. It will be recalled that, in Barcelona, Pepe, as he fled, had time to hand me the money he had picked up in the dust. Out of heroic loyalty to a hero, out of fear, too, lest Pepe” or one of his cronies find me, I had buried the money at the foot of a catalpa in a little square near Montjuich. I had the strength of character never to mention it to Stilitano, but when we decided to go south together, I dug up the money (two or three hundred pesetas) and sent it addressed to my name, care of general delivery, in Alicante. Much has been said of the effect of landscapes upon the feelings, but not, it seems to me, of the way it acts upon moral attitudes. Before entering Murcia I crossed the palm grove of Elche, and I was already so spontaneously excited by nature that my relations with men were beginning to be those that usually exist between men and things. I reached Alicante at night. I had to sleep in a work−yard. Toward morning there was revealed to me the mystery of the city and its name: on the shores of a quiet sea and plunging into it; white mountains, a few palms, a few houses, the port and, in the sunrise, a cool and luminous air. (I was to experience a similar moment in Venice.) The connection among all things was lightness. In order to be worthy of entering such a system, it seemed to me necessary to break gently with men, to purify myself. As the bond linking me to them was a sentimental one, I had to detach myself from them without fanfare. All along the road I had promised myself the bitter joy of withdrawing the money from the post−office and sending it to Pepe in the Montjuich jail. I drank a cup of warm milk at a stand that was just opening and went to the general−delivery window in the post office. No difficulties were made about giving me the full envelope. The money was there, intact. I left and tore up the bills in order to throw them into a sewer, but, the better to provoke the break, I pasted them together on a bench and then treated myself to a sumptuous lunch. Pepe must have been dying of hunger in jail, but I thought that by means of this crime I had freed myself of moral preoccupations.
However, I did not wander along the roads at random. My path was that of all beggars and, like them, I was to know Gibraltar. At night, the erotic mass of the rock, filled, thronged, with soldiers and sleeping cannons, drove me wild. I lived in the village of Linea, which is simply one big brothel, and there I began the period of tin cans. All the beggars in the world—I've seen them the same in Central Europe and in France—have one or several white tin cans (which contain peas or cassoulet) to which they add a wire handle. They go along the roads and railroad tracks with these cans hanging from the shoulder. I got my first one in Linea. It was new. I had picked it out of a garbage can where someone had thrown it the night before. Its metal was gleaming. I pressed down the sheared edges with a stone so that they wouldn't cut, and I went to the barbed wire of Gibraltar to pick up the leftovers of the English soldiers. In this way I abased myself further. I no longer begged for money but for scraps of food. To which was added the shame of begging them from soldiers. I would feel ashamed if some soldier's good looks or the potency of his uniform excited me. At night, I tried to
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