Page 41 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
long time, but their gravity makes me consider them without pity. I recognize that they have their foundations within myself; they are the signs of the most violent of my extreme tendencies, and my corrosive spirit is already working at their destruction. I pitched myself headlong into a miserable life which was the real appearance of destroyed palaces, of pillaged gardens, of dead splendors. It was their ruins, but, the more mutilated the ruins, the remoter seemed that of which they must have been the visible sign, more deeply buried in a sacred past, so that I no longer know whether I dwelt in sumptuous destitution or whether my abjection was magnificent. Finally, little by little, this idea of humiliation detached itself from what conditioned it; the cables connecting it with these ideal gildings were broken—justifying it in the eyes of the world, in my eyes of flesh—almost excusing it, and it remained alone, by itself alone a reason for being, itself its only necessity and itself its only end. But it is the abandoned urchin's amorous imagining of royal deeds that enables me to gild my shame, to carve it, to work over it like a goldsmith, in the usual sense of the term, until, through usage perhaps and the wearing away of the words veiling it, humility might emerge from it. My love of Stilitano made me aware of so exceptional a disposition. Though I had known through him a certain nobility, now I was discovering the real direction of my life—as one says the direction through the woods —and that my life should manifest itself outside your world. I knew at din time a hardness and lucidity which explain my attitude toward the poor: so great was my destitution that it seemed to me I was composed of a dough that had been kneaded of it. It was my very essence, traversing and feeding my body as well as my soul. I am writing this book in an elegant hotel in one of the most luxurious cities in the world, where I am rich, though I can not pity the poor: I am the poor. Though it may be a pleasure for me to strut before them, I most definitely deplore being unable to do so with more ostentation and insolence.
“I'd have a black, noiseless, shiny car. From inside, I would look out at poverty unconcernedly. Behind me would trail processions of myself in lavish finery so that poverty might watch me going by, so that the poor whom I shall not have ceased to be may see me slowing up nobly amidst the silence of a de luxe motor and in all the earthly and emblematic glory, if I wish, of the other.”
With Stilitano I was hopeless poverty, experiencing in the most fleshless country in Europe the dryest poetic formula, which was sometimes softened at night by my anxious trembling in the face of nature. A few pages above I wrote: “a countryside at twilight.” I did not imagine at the time that it contained grave dangers, that it concealed warriors who were going to kill or torture me; on the contrary, it became so sweet, so maternal and kind, that I was afraid to remain myself so that I might the better melt into that kindness. I would often get off a freight train and wander into the night, to whose slow working I would listen; I would squat on the grass, or else I would not dare to and would remain standing motionless in the middle of a field. At times, I would pretend that the countryside was the scene of a news item where I would place those heroes who will most effectively symbolize, as long as I live, my real drama: between two lonely willows a young murderer who, with one hand in his pocket, levels a revolver and fires into a farmer's back. Did imaginary participation in a human adventure impart such receptive sweetness to the vegetables? I understood them. I stopped shaving the down that Salvador found disagreeable and began to look more and more like a mossy stalk.
Salvador did not say another word to me about Stilitano. He was getting even homelier, but nevertheless gave pleasure to other tramps in some random alley or on some ragged litter.
“You've got to be pretty depraved to do it with that guy,” Stilitano once said to me about Salvador.
Splendid depravity, sweet and kindly, which enables one to love those who are ugly, dirty and disfigured!
“You always find guys?”
“I get along,” he answered showing his few black teeth. “Some of them give you what's left in their knapsacks or their mess−kits.”
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