Page 6 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
smiling, there escaped from them through the eyes, the nostrils, the mouth, the palm of the hand, the bulging basket, through that brutal hillock of the calf under the wool or denim, a radiant and sombre anger, visible as a haze.
But, almost always, there is nothing to indicate it save the absence of the usual signs. Rene's face is charming at first. The downward curve of his nose gives him a roguish look, though the somewhat livid paleness of his anxious face makes you uneasy. His eyes are hard, his movements calm and sure. In the cans he calmly beats up the queers; he frisks them, robs them, sometimes, as a finishing touch, he kicks them in the mug with his heel. I don't like him, but his calmness masters me. He operates, in the dark of night, around the urinals, the lawns, the shrubbery, under the trees on the Champs−Elysees, near the stations, at the Porte Maillot, in the Bois de Boulogne (always at night) with a seriousness from which all romanticism is excluded. When he comes in, at two or three in the morning, I feel him stocked with adventures. Every part of his body has been involved: his hands, his arms, his legs, the back of his neck. But he, unaware of these marvels, tells me about them in forthright language. He takes from his pockets rings, wedding bands, watches, the evening's loot. He puts them in a big glass which will soon be full. He is not surprised by queers or their ways. They merely facilitate his jobs. When he sits on my bed, my ear snatches at scraps of adventure: An officer in underwear
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whose wallet he steals and who, pointing with his forefinger, orders: “Get out!” René−the−wise−guy's
answer: “You think you're in the army?” Too hard a punch on an old man's skull. The one who fainted when Rene", who was all excited, opened a drawer in which there was a supply of phials of morphine. The queer who was broke and whom he made get down on his knees before him. I am attentive to these accounts. My Antwerp life grows stronger, carrying on in a firmer body, in accordance with manly methods. I encourage Rene, I give him advice, he listens to me. I tell him never to talk first. “Let the guy come up to you, keep him dangling. Act a little surprised when he suggests that you do it. Figure out who to act dumb with.”
1. He says: “I did his wallet”.
Every night I get a few scraps of information. My imagination does not get lost in them. My confusion seems to be due to my assuming within me the role of both victim and criminal. Indeed, as a matter of fact, I emit, I project at night the victim and criminal born of me; I bring them together somewhere, and toward morning I am thrilled—to learn that the victim came very close to getting the death penalty and the criminal the colony or the guillotine. Thus, my confusion extends as far as that region of myself, which is Guiana.
Without their wishing it, the gestures and destinies of these men are stormy. Their soul endures a violence which it had not desired. It has domesticated it. Those whose customary climate is violence are simple in relation to themselves. Each of the movements which make up this swift and devastating life is simple and straight, as plain as the stroke of a great draughtsman — but when these strokes are encountered in movement, then the storm breaks, the lightning that kills them or me. Yet, what is their violence compared to mine, which was to accept theirs, to make it mine, to wish it for myself, to intercept it, to utilize it, to force it upon myself, to know it, to premeditate it, to discern and assume its perils? But what was mine, willed and essential for my defense, my toughness, my rigor, compared to the violence they underwent like a malediction, risen from an inner fire simultaneously with an outer light which sets fire to them and illuminates us? We know that their adventures are childish. They themselves are fools. They are ready to kill or be killed over a card−game in which an opponent — or they themselves — was cheating. Yet, thanks to such fellows, tragedies are possible. This kind of definition — by so many opposing examples — of violence shows you that I shall not make use of words the better to depict an event or its hero, but so that they may tell you something about myself. In order to understand me, a complicity of the reader will be necessary. Nevertheless, I shall warn him whenever my lyricism makes me lose my footing.
Stilitano was big and strong. He walked with a step both supple and heavy, brisk and slow, sinuous; he was nimble. A large part of his power over me — and over the whores of the Barrio Chino — lay in the spittle he passed from one cheek to the other and which he would sometimes draw out in front of his mouth like a veil.
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