Page 54 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
a whore. When I got to the prison in Susak (Italian border)—after having been in ten others where I spent only a few nights—I was locked in a cell where there were about twenty of us. I immediately saw Rade Peritch. He was a Croat who had a two−year conviction for theft. In order to take advantage of my overcoat, he made me lie down next to him on the cot. He was dark and well built. He was wearing a pair of somewhat faded blue denim mechanic's overalls with a big wide pocket in the middle into which he stuck his hands. I spent only two nights in the Susak jail, but that was time enough for me to get a terrific crush on Rade.
The prison was separated from the highway not by a wall but by a ditch beneath our cell window. When the police and then the customs officers made me cross the Italian border, by the mountain route and on a freezing night, I headed for Trieste. In the lobby of the French consulate I stole an overcoat which I immediately resold. With the money, I bought ten yards of rope and a saw and returned to Yugoslavia by way of
Piedicolle. An automobile took me to Susak where I arrived at night. I whistled from the road. Rade came to the window, and I very easily got the equipment to him. The following night I returned, but he refused to attempt an escape which would, however, have been easy. I waited until dawn, hoping to persuade him. Finally, shivering with cold, I took the mountain path again, sad that this brawny fellow preferred the certainty of prison to adventuring with me. I managed to cross the Italian border and get to Trieste, then to Venice and finally to Palermo where I was put into jail. An amusing detail recurs to my memory. When I entered the cell in the Palermo jail, the prisoners asked me, “Come va, la principessa?”
“No lo so,” I replied.
During the morning walk in the yard, I was asked the same question, but I knew nothing about the health of the Princess of Piedmont, the king's daughter−in−law (the question concerned her). I realized later that she was pregnant and that the amnesty that is always granted upon the birth of a royal child depended upon the child's sex. The guests of the Italian jails had the same preoccupations as the courtiers at the Quirinal.
When I was let out, I was taken to the Austrian border, which I crossed near Villach.
Rade did the right thing in refusing to leave. During my trip through Central Europe I was accompanied by his ideal presence. Not only did he walk and sleep at my side, but in making decisions I wanted to be worthy of the bold image of him that I had created. Once again a man with a handsome face and beautiful body gave me the opportunity to prove my courage.
Neither by the recital nor the interlacing or overlapping of the facts—and I don't know what they are, which limits them in time and space—nor by their interpretation, which, without destroying them, creates new ones, can I discover the key, nor, by means of them, my own key. I undertook, by a baroque design, to cite a few, pretending to omit those—the first which make up the apparent texture of my life—which are the knots of the glistening threads. If France is an emotion communicated from artist to artist—a relay of neurons, so to speak—then to the very end I am only a string of tinglings, the first of which are beyond my range. The prongs of a boat−hook dug into a drowned man to pull him out of a stream made me suffer in my child's body. Was it indeed possible that people searched for corpses with harpoons? I roamed about the countryside, delighted to discover in the wheat or beneath the firs the bodies of drowned men to whom I accorded the most incredible obsequies. Can I say that it was the past—or that it was the future? Everything is already caught in an ice−floe of being: my trembling when a piece of rough trade asks me to brown him (I discover that his desire is his trembling) during a Carnival night; at twilight, the view from a sand dune of Arab warriors surrendering to French generals; the back of my hand placed on a soldier's basket, but especially the sly way in which the soldier looked at it; suddenly I see the ocean between two houses in Biarritz; I am escaping from prison, taking tiny steps, frightened not at the idea of being caught but of being the prey of freedom; straddling the enormous prick of a blond legionnaire, I am carried twenty yards along the remparts; not the handsome football player, nor his foot, nor his shoe, but the ball, then ceasing to be the ball and becoming the “kick−off", and I cease being that to become the idea that goes from the foot to the ball; in a cell, unknown
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