Page 45 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
followed by a kind of unhealthy, impure hatred because it still contained a few shreds of tenderness. But I know that had I been alone I would have adored the policemen. No sooner was I locked up in my cell than I dreamed of their potency, of their friendship, of a possible complicity between them and me, in which, by a mutual exchange of virtues, they revealed themselves, they as hoodlums and I as a traitor.
“It's too late,” I continued. “It was when I was well dressed, when I had a watch and shiny shoes that I could have been their equal. Now it's too late, I'm a bum.”
It seemed to me to be definitely settled that I was to dwell in shame, though a happy effort for several months would have put me back into the world. I made up my mind to live with my head bowed and to pursue my destiny toward night, in an opposite direction to yours, and to exploit the inner side of your beauty.
The minds of many writers have been concerned with the idea of bands. The country was said to have been infested with them. You then imagine rough bandits united by a will to plunder, by cruelty and hatred. Was it possible? It seems hardly probable that such men could organize themselves. I am afraid that the binding element of these bands was greed, but a greed camouflaged by anger, by the demand for justice. By giving oneself this kind of pretext, of justification, one quickly reaches the point of elaborating a rough−and−ready morality on the basis of these pretexts. Except among children, it is never Evil, a zeal going counter to your morality, that unites outlaws and forms bands. In prison, every criminal may dream of a well−knit organization, closed but strong, which would be a refuge against the world and its morality: this is only a reverie. Prison is this fortress, the ideal cave, the bandit's retreat against which the forces of the world beat in vain. No sooner is he in contact with them than the criminal obeys the banal laws. If the current press speaks of bands formed by American deserters and French hoodlums, it is not a matter of organization, but of accidental and brief collaboration among three or four men at most.
When Michaelis came out of jail in Katowice, I ran into him again. I had been free for a month. I lived on petty pilferings in the neighboring villages and slept in a public park just outside the town. It was summer. Other tramps came there to sleep on the lawns in the shelter of the shadow and the low branches of the cedars. At dawn, a thief would rise up from a clump of flowers, a young beggar would yawn in the first rays of the sun, others would be delousing themselves on the steps of a pseudo−Greek temple. I spoke to no one. I would go alone to a church a few miles away and by means of a stick with gum on it would steal the money from the collection−box. In the evening, I would return to the park, always on foot. This Court of Miracles was bright. All its guests were young. Although in Spain they would get together and pool their information about the places where the pickings were good, here each beggar, each thief, ignored the others. He seemed to enter the park by a secret door. He would glide silently along the clumps and groves. Only the light of a cigarette or a furtive footfall signaled his presence. In the morning, all trace of him was effaced. All this extravagance quickened my wings. Squatting in my patch of shade, I was astounded to find myself under the same starry sky that Alexander and Caesar had seen, since I was a mere beggar and a lazy thief. I had gone across Europe by my own means, which are the opposite of glorious means. Yet I was writing for myself a secret history, in details as precious as the history of the great conquerors. It was therefore necessary that these details make me out to be the rarest and most singular of characters. Following my line, I continued to experience the most dismal misfortunes. Perhaps I missed my shameless faggotty drag which I deeply regret not having taken along with me in my valises or under my secular garments. Yet it was this torn and spangled tulle that I secretly donned at night as soon as I had crossed the park railing.
Beneath a muslin scarf I sense the translucent pallor of a naked shoulder: it is the purity of the morning when
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the Carolinas of Barcelona went in procession to lay flowers on the pissoir.
Laborers were going off to work. In front of every door, buckets full of water were being emptied on the sidewalk. Covered with ridicule, the Carolinas were sheltered. No laughter could hurt them; the squalor of their rags testified to their deprivation. The sun
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The city was awakening.