Page 46 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
1. The reader is informed that this report on my inner life or what it suggests will be merely a song of love. To be exact, my life was the preparation for erotic adventures (not play) whose I meaning I now wish to discover. Alas, heroism is what seems to me most charged with amorous properties, and since there is no hero except in our minds, heroes will therefore have to be created. So I have recourse to words. Those which I use, even if I attempt an explanation by means of them, will sing. Was what I wrote true? False? Only this book of love will be real. What of the facts which served as its pretext? I must be their repository. It is not they which I am restoring.
spared the garland which was emitting its own luminosity. They were all dead. What we saw walking in the street were Shades cut off from the world. Fairies are a pale and motley race that flowers in the minds of decent people. Never will they be entitled to broad daylight, to real sun. But, remote in their limbos, they cause curious disasters which are harbingers of new beauties. One of them, Theresa the Great, used to wait for clients in the pissoirs. At twilight, she would bring a camp−chair to one of the circular urinals near the harbor and would sit down inside and do her knitting or crocheting. She would stop to eat a sandwich. She was at home.
Senorita Dora was another. Dora would exclaim in a shrill voice, “What bitches they are, those hairy−chested she−men!”
From the memory of this cry is born a brief but profound meditation on their despair, which was mine. Having escaped—for how long!—from abjection, I want to return to it. May my interlude in your world at least enable me to write a book for the Carolinas.
I was chaste. My dresses protected me, and I waited for sleep in an artistic pose. I detached myself from the ground even more. I flew over it. I was sure of being able to cross it with the same ease, and my thefts in the church made me lighter still. The return of Michaelis made me slightly heavier, for though he helped me steal, he was almost always smiling, with a familiar smile.
I marveled at these nocturnal mysteries, and that even in daytime the earth is in darkness. Knowing almost all there was to know about poverty and how purulent it is, here I saw it silhouetted beneath the moon, projected like a shadow−play in the shadow of the leaves. It no longer had depth; it was merely a silhouette which I had the dangerous privilege of crossing with my thickness of suffering and blood. I learned that even flowers are black at night, when I wanted to gather some to carry to the altars whose collection−boxes I broke into every morning. I was not trying to use these bouquet to propitiate a saint or the Holy Virgin. Rather, I wanted to give my body and arms an opportunity to assume conventionally beautiful poses which might integrate me into your world.
The reader may be surprised that I describe so few picturesque characters. My gaze is filled with love and does not perceive, nor did it perceive then, the striking features which cause individuals to be considered as objets. From the very beginning, I was aware, without thinking, that all behavior, however strange it may seem, has its justification. The most unaccountable gesture or attitude seemed to me to correspond to an inner necessity. I was unable, I am still unable, to make fun of people. Every remark I hear, even the most absurd, seems to me to come just at the right moment. I have thus gone through penitentiaries and prisons, known low dives, bars and highways without being astonished. If I think back, I find in my memory none of those characters which a different, a more amused eye than mine, would have mounted on a pin. This book will perhaps be disappointing. In order to break its monotony I would like to try to tell a few anecdotes and report a few witty remarks.
In court. The judge: “Why did you steal the copper?”
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