Page 38 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
thought to myself, once and for all—the dear bonds of brotherhood.
“After that, after this crime, what kind of moral perfection can I hope for?”
As this theft was indestructible, I decided to make it the origin of a state of moral perfection.
“It's cowardly, weak, dirty, low... (I shall define it only with words expressing shame). None of the elements composing it leaves me a chance to magnify it. Yet I do not deny this most monstrous of my sons. I want to fill the world with its loathsome progeny.”
But I can not go into great detail about this period of my life. My memory would like to forget it. It seems that it would like to dim its contours, powder it with talcum, offer it a formula comparable to the milk bath which the elegants of the sixteenth century called a bath of modesty.
I got my mess−tin filled with left−over stew and went off to eat in a corner. I preserved within me the memory of a sublime and debased Stilitano, with his head under his wing. I was proud of his strength and was strong in his complicity with the police. All day long I was sad, though sober. A kind of dissatisfaction inflated each of my acts, including the most simple. I would have liked a visible, dazzling glory to be manifest at my fingertips, would have liked my potency to lift me from the earth, to explode within me and dissolve me, to shower me to the four winds. I would have rained over the world. My powder, my pollen, would have touched the stars. I loved Stilitano. But loving him in the rocky dryness of this land, under an irrevocable sun, exhausted me, rimmed my eyelids with fire. Weeping a little would have deflated me. Or talking a lot, at great length, brilliantly, before an attentive and respectful audience.
I stayed in Gibraltar a few days, but chiefly in Linea. At meal−time, in front of the English barbed−wire, Salvador and I would meet with indifference. More than once I saw him some distance away pointing me out with his finger or chin to another bum. He was intrigued by the period in my life when I had stayed with Stilitano. He sought to interpret its mystery. Since this life had taken place in the company of a “man", had been mingled with his, its history, which, as a result of being related by a witness, was a veritable martyrdom, adorned me in the eyes of the other beggars with a curious glamor. By precise—though subtle—indications, I was aware of it, and I bore its weight, while within me I pursued what I thought Stilitano had indicated to me.
I would have liked to embark for Tangiers. Movies and novels have made of this city a fearful place, a kind of dive where gamblers haggle over the secret plans of all the armies in the world. From the Spanish coast, Tangiers seemed to me a fabulous city. It was the very symbol of treason.
At times I would go to Algeciras. I would wander along the port and gaze off into the distance where the notorious city could sometimes be seen.
“What orgy of treason, of haggling, could one indulge in there?” I wondered.
Reason, to be sure, prevented me from believing that anyone would have used me for purposes of spying, but so great was my desire that I thought myself illuminated by it, “singled out. Inscribed on my brow, visible to all, was the word traitor. I therefore saved a little money and paid for a trip in a fishing boat, but rough weather forced us to return to Algeciras. Another time, with the collusion of a sailor, I managed to get on board a steamer. My ragged clothing, filthy face and long, dirty hair frightened the customs−officer who would not let me disembark. Back in Spain, I decided to go through Ceuta; when I got there, I was put into jail for four days and had to go back to where I had come from.
Probably no more at Tangiers than elsewhere would I have been able to carry through an adventure regulated by an organization having its headquarters in offices, an adventure governed by the rules of a strategy of
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