Page 55 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
thieves call me Jean; when at night I walk barefoot in my sandals across fields of snow at the Austrian border, I shall not flinch, but then, I say to myself, this painful moment must concur with the beauty of my life, I refuse to let this moment and all the others be waste matter; using their suffering, I project myself to the mind's heaven. Some negroes are feeding me on the Bordeaux docks; a distinguished poet raises my hands to his forehead; a German soldier is killed in the Russian snows and his brother writes to me; a boy from Toulouse helps me ransack the rooms of the commissioned and non−commissioned officers of my regiment in Brest: he dies in prison; I am talking of someone—and while doing so, the time to smell roses, to hear one evening in prison the gang bound for the penal colony singing, to fall in love with a white−gloved acrobat—dead since the beginning of time, that is, fixed, for I refuse to live for any other than the very one which I found to contain the first misfortune: that my life must be a legend, in other words, legible, and the reading of it must give birth to a certain new emotion which I call poetry. I am no longer anything, only a pretext.
By moving slowly, Stilitano exposed himself to love as one exposes oneself to the sun. Offering to the rays all his facets. When I met him in Antwerp, he had put on weight. Not that he was fat, but his angles were rounded with a bit more thickness. In his gait I found the same savage suppleness, more powerful, less rapid and more muscular, but just as nervous.' In the dirtiest street in Antwerp, near the Scheldt, beneath a gray sky, Stilitano's back seemed to me streaked by the alternate light and shade of a Spanish shutter. The woman in a black satin sheath walking with him was really his female. He was surprised to see me and, it seemed to me, glad.
“Jeannot! You in Antwerp?”
“How're things going?”
I shook hands with him. He introduced me to Sylvia. I barely recognized him in the exclamation, but hardly had he opened his mouth for a more softly uttered phrase when there again, veiling it, was the white blob of spit, and through the strange mucosity which formed it, though remaining intact, I recognized, between his teeth, the Stilitano of old. Without naming anything, I said, “You've kept it.”
“You noticed?”
“Of course. You're too proud of it.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Sylvia. “We're talking, baby. Mind your business.”
This innocent complicity at once set up a relationship between us. All his former charms bore down on me: the power of his shoulders, the mobility of his buttocks, the hand that had perhaps been torn off in the jungle by another savage beast, and finally his sex, so long denied, buried in a dangerous night which was shielded from mortal odors. I was at his mercy. Without knowing anything about his activities, I was sure that he ruled over the people of the dives, docks and bars, hence over the entire city. To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance. Stilitano had unfalteringly known how to choose a pair of green and yellow crocodile shoes, a white silk shirt, a multicolored scarf and a green hat. It was all held in place by pins, links and gold chains, and Stilitano was elegant. Standing before him, I became the same unhappy creature as in the past, and this did not seem to trouble him. “I've been here three days,” I said. “Are you getting along?”
“The way I used to.” He smiled. “Do you remember?”
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