Page 67 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
wore them, smiling and unembarrassed. All I had was a pair of pants, a jacket and some torn shirts. I concocted commonplace schemes of revenge on Stilitano. Compared to Armand, he became flatter and flatter, lacking in thickness. His good looks seemed insipid his speech dreary. I hoped for new revelations from Armand.
As for Armand's immodest attitudes, I cannot quite say that they were the cause of my decision to write pornographic books, but I certainly was flabbergasted by the insolence of the answer he gave Stilitano who had asked him very calmly, though with a kind of casual indifference, the reason why he got so passionately lyrical.
“It's my balls,” he said, “my balls! Women walk with their tits bulging out, don't they? They parade them, don't they? Well I've got the right to let my balls stick out so people can see them, and even to offer them on a platter. I've got a beautiful pair of balls and I've even got the right to send them as a present to Pola Negri or the Prince of Wales.”
Stilitano was capable of cynicism, not of song. Long buried—where, in accumulating, they thickened my rancor—his cowardice, flabbiness and laziness rose up to poison my breath. That which had once embellished him—as an ulcer sculpts and paints meat — now became reason for contempt. The two of them seemed unaware that I was jealous and furious and that this was damaging our relationship. One day when I was alone with her, Sylvia took my arm in the street. She pressed herself against me. Two men whom I loved were, by their mutual and unambiguous friendship, cutting themselves off from me, refusing me access to free—and joyous—−cordiality, but the woman of one of them, by her kindred desire to comfort the poor, degraded me even further. Her hip and breast against my body almost made me vomit. She dared say in the presence of Stilitano, no doubt to hurt him, that she rather liked me. Robert and he burst out laughing.
“The two of you can go gallivanting. We're going out together.”
Driven away by their smiles, I saw myself tumbling down the steeps of light where Stilitano was lord. I was back in Spain, with my rags, my nights among the poor, enriched by some happy memories, but hopeless: there I was, sure that all I would ever do was bite the dust and lick boots—my own, dusty with weary tramping. The idea of lice was already breeding its insects on me. It was almost time to hatch them and I had stopped cutting my hair. I resolved to kill Stilitano and Robert. Failing to be a hero in glory, I wanted to be one in affliction. I chose the penal colony or death by banishment. To bear me up I had, nevertheless, the memory of Armand and the hope of his returning, but he did not appear.
We were in Belgium. Only the French police have a fabulous glamor for me. Likewise the whole penitentiary apparatus. What I committed outside of France was not a sin but an error. What would I find in the Belgian hulks and prisons? Only the boredom, probably, of being deprived of freedom. I suggested to Stilitano and Robert that we take a trip to Maubeuge.
“If I kill them in the Ardennes, I'll be arrested by the French police and I'll be condemned to Devil's Island.”
Neither of them was willing to follow me. One day, when I was alone in his room, I stole Stilitano's revolver from the pocket of a jacket that was hanging in a closet.
The life I have been telling about was lived between 1932 and 1940. Here are the loves with which I have been preoccupied while writing about it. Having noted them, I now make use of them. May they serve the purposes of this book.
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