Page 39 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
international politics, but to me this city so well, so magnificently represented Treason that it was only there, so it seemed to me, that I could land.
“Nevertheless, I'd find such fine examples there!”
I would find Marc Aubert, Stilitano and others whose indifference to the rules of loyalty and rectitude I had suspected, without quite daring to believe it. Saying of them “They're false” softened my heart. Still softens me at times. They are the only ones I believe capable of all kinds of boldness. Their sinuousness and the multiplicity of their moral lines form an interlacing which I call adventure. They depart from your rules. They are not faithful. Above all, they have a blemish, a wound, comparable to the bunch of grapes in Stilitano's pants. In short, the greater my guilt in your eyes, the more whole, the more totally assumed, the greater will be my freedom. The more perfect my solitude and singleness. By my guilt I further gained the right to intelligence. Too many people think, I said to myself, who have not the right to. They have not paid for it by the kind of undertaking which makes thinking indispensable to your salvation.
This pursuit of traitors and treason was only one of the forms of eroticism. It is rare—it is almost unknown —for a boy to offer me the heady joy that can only be offered me by the interlacings of a life in which I might be involved with him. A body stretched out between my sheets, fondled in a street or at night in the woods, or on a beach, affords me half a pleasure: I dare not see myself loving it, for I have known too many situations in which my person, whose importance lay in its grace, was the factor of charm of the moment. I shall never find them again. Thus do I realize that I have sought only situations charged with erotic intentions. That was what, among other things, guided my life. I am aware that there exist adventures whose heroes and details are erotic. Those are the ones I have wanted to live.
A few days later I learned that Pepe had been sent to jail. I sent all the money I had to the imprisoned Stilitano.
Two Criminal Records photographs have turned up. In one of them I am sixteen or seventeen years old. I am wearing, under a jacket of the Assistance Publique, a torn sweater. My face is an oval, very pure; my nose is smashed, flattened by a punch in some forgotten fight. The look on my face is blase, sad and warm, very serious. My hair was thick and unruly. Seeing myself at that age, I expressed my feelings almost aloud:
“Poor little fellow, you've suffered.”
I was speaking kindly of another Jean who was not myself. I suffered at the time from an ugliness I no longer find on my childhood face. Nevertheless, crass insolence—I was brazen—launched me forth into life with ease. If I was anxious, it was not apparent at first. But at twilight, when I was weary, my head would sink, and I would feel my gaze lingering on the world and merging with it or else turning inward and disappearing; I think it knew my utter solitude. When I was a farm−hand, when I was a soldier, when I was at the orphanage, despite the friendship and, occasionally, the affection of my masters, I was alone, rigorously so. Prison offered me the first consolation, the first peace, the first friendly confusion: I experienced them in the realm of foulness. Much solitude had forced me to become my own companion. Envisaging the external world, its indefiniteness, its confusion, which is even more perfect at night, I set it up as a divinity of which I was not only the cherished pretext, an object of great care and caution, chosen and led in masterly fashion, though through painful and exhausting ordeals, to the verge of despair, but also the sole object of all this labor. And little by little, through a kind of operation which I can not quite describe, without modifying the dimensions of my body, and perhaps because it was easier to contain so precious a reason for such glory, it was within me that I established this divinity—origin and disposition of myself. I swallowed it. I dedicated to it songs of my own invention. At night I would whistle. The melody was a religious one. It was slow. Its rhythm was
The Thief's Journal 37