Page 40 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
somewhat heavy. I thought that I was thereby entering into communication with God: which is what happened, God being only the hope and fervor contained in my song. Along the streets, with my hands in my pockets, my head drooping or held high, looking at houses or trees, I would whistle my clumsy hymns, not joyous, but not sad either: sober. I discovered that hope is merely the expression one gives to it. Likewise, protection. Never would I have whistled to a light rhythm. I recognized the religious themes: they create Venus, Mercury, or the Virgin.
In the second photo I am thirty years old. My face has hardened. The jaws are accentuated. The mouth is bitter and mean. I look like a hoodlum in spite of my eyes, which have remained gentle. Their gentleness is almost indiscernible because of the fixity of gaze imposed upon me by the official photographer. By means of these two pictures I can see the violence with which I was filled at the time: from the age of sixteen to thirty. In children's hells, in prisons, in bars, it was not heroic adventure that I sought; I pursued my identification with the handsomest and most unfortunate criminals. I wanted to be the young prostitute who accompanies her lover to Siberia or the one who survives him, not in order to avenge him, but to mourn him and magnify his memory.
Without thinking myself magnificently born, the uncertainty of my origin allowed me to interpret it. I added to it the peculiarity of my misfortunes. Abandoned by my family, I felt it was natural to aggravate this condition by a preference for boys, and this preference by theft, and theft by crime or a complacent attitude in regard to crime. Hence, I resolutely rejected a world which had rejected me. This almost gleeful rushing into the most humiliating situations is perhaps still motivated by my childhood imagination which invented for me (so that I might there squire about the slight and haughty person of an abandoned little boy) castles, parks peopled with guards rather than with statues, wedding gowns, bereavements and nuptials, and later on (though just a trifle later, when these reveries were thwarted to the extreme, to the point of exhaustion in a life of wretchedness, by penitentiaries and prisons and thefts), insults, prostitution, quite naturally the adornments (and the rare diction pertaining to them) which graced my mental habits and the objects of my desire. I used them to adorn my real situation as an adult, but first as a child whom knowledge of prisons was to gratify to the full. Prison offers the same feeling of security to the convict as does a royal palace to a king's guest. They are the two buildings constructed with the most faith, those which give the greatest certainty of being what they are— which are what they meant to be, and which they remain. The masonry, the materials, the proportions and the architecture are in harmony with a social whole which makes these dwellings indestructible so long as the social form of which they are the symbol endures. The prison surrounds me with a perfect guarantee. I am sure that it was constructed for me—along with the Law Court, its annex, its monumental vestibule. Everything therein was designed for me, in keeping with the utmost seriousness. The rigor of the rules, their strictness, their precision, are in essence the same as the etiquette of a royal court, as the exquisite and tyrannical politeness of which a guest at that court is the object. The foundations of the palace, like those of the prison, inhere in the fine quality of the stone, in marble stairways, in real gold, in carvings, the rarest in the realm, in the absolute power of their hosts; but they are also similar in that these two structures are one the root and the other the crest of a living system circulating between these two poles which contain it, hold it in check and which are sheer force. What security in the carpets, in the mirrors, in the very intimacy of the palace latrines! Nowhere else does the act of shitting in the early morning assume the solemn importance which can result only from its being performed in a closet through whose frosted windows can be discerned the sculptured facade, the guards, the statues and the court of honor; in a little privy where the tissue paper is of the usual kind but where some uncombed, unpowdered, powdery maid of honor in a satin dressing−gown and pink slippers will shortly come to leave a heavy load; in a little privy from which the husky guards do not brutally expel me, for shitting there becomes an important act which has its place in a life to which a king has invited me. Prison offers me the same security. Nothing will demolish it, not blasts of wind, nor storms, nor bankruptcies. The prison remains sure of itself, and you in the midst of it sure of yourself. And yet it is this spirit of seriousness in which they were erected which is the source of their self−esteem, of their mutual reserve and understanding; it is of this spirit of worldliness that they will perish. Were they established on the ground and in the world with more negligence, they might perhaps hold put for a
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