Page 58 - The Thief's Journal

and the settling of the payment were a masterpiece of finesse after the act of force.
The Thief's Journal
“I just stole it from a cop,” he said with a smile and without even deigning to get off the machine. Yet he was aware that the gesture of bestriding it would be to me a maddening spectacle; he got off the seat, pretended to examine the motor and was off again with me behind.
“We'll get rid of it right away,” he said. “You're crazy. We can do things...”
Exhilarated by the wind and the ride, I thought I was being carried off on a dangerous chase. An hour later, the motorcycle was sold to a Greek seaman who immediately put it on board. But I had been granted the sight of Stilitano at the center of a genuine, accomplished feat, for the sale of the machine, the debating of the price
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Stilitano was no more a mature man than I was. Although he really was a gangster, he played at being one that is, he invented gangster attitudes. I know no hoodlums who are not children. What “serious” mind going by a jewelry shop or a bank would seriously work out, in minute detail, an assault or a burglary? Where else would you find the idea of a guild rooted— not in the interest of the members—in a pact of complicity bordering on friendship, for mutual aid, where else than in a kind of reverie, of gratuitous game, like something out of a story−book? Stilitano was playful. He liked knowing that he was outside the law; he liked feeling that he was in danger. An aesthetic need placed him there. He was attempting to copy an ideal hero, the Stilitano whose image was already inscribed in a heaven of glory. In this way he obeyed the laws that govern gangsters, and give them form. Without them he would have been nothing. Blinded at first by his august solitude, by his calmness and serenity, I believed him to be anarchically self−creating, guided by the sheer impudence, the nerviness of his gestures. The fact is, he was seeking a type. Could it have been the one represented by the conquering hero of the comic books? At any rate, Stilitano's mild reverie was in perfect harmony with his muscles and his taste for action. Probably the hero of the pictures had finally come to be engraved in Stilitano's heart. I still respect him, for though he observed the externals of a protocol leading to it, yet within himself, and without any witness, he submitted to the constraints of his body or heart; he was never tender with his girl. Without quite becoming bosom friends, we got into the habit of seeing each other every day. I had lunch in his room, and in the evening, when Sylvia worked, we went out to dinner together. We would then make the round of the bars in order to get drunk. He also danced, almost all night long, with very pretty girls. Hardly would he arrive than the atmosphere changed, first at his table and then gradually at the others. It became both heavy and frenzied. He got into a fight almost every night; he was savage and splendid, his one hand swiftly armed with a knife which he flipped open in his pocket. The stevedores, merchant−seamen and pimps would circle round us or join forces with us. This kind of life exhausted me, for I would have liked to prowl around the docks in the fog or rain. My memory of these nights is shot through with sparks. A journalist, discussing a film, writes: “Love blossoms amidst brawls.” This absurd phrase reminds me, better than would a fine speech, of the flowers known as “snapdragons” which blossom among dry thistles, and thereby of my velvety tenderness which Stilitano wounded.
1. When, a few days ago, Pierre Fievre, the son of a state trooper and himself a probationary policeman (he's twenty−one years old), told me that he wanted to be a cop so as to have a motorcycle, I got an erection. I again saw Stilitano's buttocks flattened against the leather seat of the stolen machine.
Though he did not assign me any work, I sometimes stole bicycles which I resold in Maestricht, in Holland. When Stilitano learned that I knew how to get across the border, he accompanied me one day and we went as far as Amsterdam. The city didn't interest him. He ordered me to wait for him in a cafe for a few hours and then disappeared. I had learned that there was no use questioning him. My work concerned him, his didn't concern me. We returned in the evening, but at the station he handed me a little package, tied and sealed,
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