Page 63 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
dockers and seamen, who respected him. Like all the local pimps and hoodlums of the time, he wore rope−soled canvas shoes. Being silent, his footstep was heavier and more elastic. Often he wore a pair of blue sailor pants, the flap of which was never completely buttoned, so that a triangle would hang down in front of him, or sometimes it was a slightly rolled pocket that he wore on his belly. No one had such a sinuous walk as he. I think that he slid along that way in order to recapture the memory of the body he had had as a twenty−year old hoodlum, pimp and sailor. He was faithful to it, as one is to the fashions of one's youth. But, himself a figure of the most provocative eroticism, he wished also to express it by language and gesture. Accustomed to Stilitano's modesty and to the crudeness of the dockers in their bars, I was the witness of, often the pretext for, detailed proceedings which were the height of audacity. In front of anybody Armand would grow lyrical over his member. No one interrupted him. Unless some tough, annoyed by his tone and remarks, retorted.
“My cock,” he once said, “is worth its weight in gold.” “It's not heavy,” said a seaman.
“Heavier than that beer−mug you've got in your hand!” “I doubt it.”
“You want to weigh them?” “O.K.”.
Bets were quickly laid, and Armand, who was already unbuttoned and had a stiff hard−on, put his prick on the seaman's flat palm.
“The beer−mug,” he said.
Other times, with his hand in his pocket he would stroke himself as he stood drinking at the bar. He would boast at other times that he could lift a heavy man on the end of his cock. Not knowing what this obsession with his member and strength corresponded to I admired him. In the street, if he drew me to him with his arm as if to embrace me, a brutal push of the same arm would shove me aside. Since I knew nothing about his life, except that he had traveled around the world and that he was Flemish, I tried to distinguish the signs of the penal colony from which he must have escaped, bringing back with him that cropped skull, those heavy muscles, his hypocrisy, his violence, his fierceness.
Meeting Armand was such a cataclysm that though I continued to see Stilitano often, he seemed to move off from me in time and space. It was long ago and far away that I had wedded this youngster whose toughness, with its veil of irony, had suddenly been transformed to a delicious gentleness. Never, during all the time I lived with Armand, did Stilitano joke about us. His discretion became delicately painful to me. He soon came to represent Bygone Days.
Unlike Stilitano, Armand was not a coward. Not only did he not refuse single combat, but he accepted dangerous jobs involving force. He even dared conceive them and work out the details. A week after our meeting, he told me that he would be gone for a while and that I was to wait for him to return. He asked me to take care of his belongings, a suitcase containing some linen, and he left. For a few days I felt lighter, I no longer carried the weight of fear. Stilitano and I went out together several times.
Had he not spat into his hands to turn a crank, I would not have noticed a boy of my own age. This typical workman's gesture made me so dizzy that I thought I was falling straight down to a period—or region of
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