Page 68 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
I bit Lucien until blood flowed. I was hoping to make him scream; his insensitivity conquered me. But I know that I would go so far as to rip my friend's flesh and lose myself in an irreparable carnage wherein I would preserve my reason and know the exaltation of the fall.
“May the signs of it grow on me,” I said to myself, “long nails and hair, sharp teeth, drool; and despite my bites may Lucien preserve his indifferent face, for the signs of extremely great pain would immediately make me loosen my jaws and beg his pardon.” When my teeth bit into his flesh, my jaws clenched until they trembled and made my whole body shudder. I'm in a fury, and yet how tenderly I love my littler fisherman from Le Suquet. If he lies pressed against me, he gently twines his legs about mine and our legs are merged by the very soft cloth of our pajamas; he then takes great pains to find the right spot to cuddle his cheek. So long as he is not sleeping, I feel the quivering of his eyelids and upturned lashes against the very sensitive skin of my neck. If he feels a tickling in his nostrils, his laziness and drowsiness keep him from lifting his hand, so that in order to scratch himself he rubs his nose against my beard, thus giving me delicate little taps with his head, like a young calf sucking its mother. He is then utterly vulnerable. A cross look or harsh word from me would wound him or, without leaving a trace, would cut through a substance that has become very tender, almost soft, elastic. It sometimes happens that a wave of tenderness, rising up from my heart without my even anticipating it, passes into my arms which hug him tighter, and he, without moving his head, presses his lips against the part of my face or body with which they are in contact. It is the automatic response to the sudden pressure of my arm. The wave of tenderness is always met by this simple peck, in which I feel, skimming the surface of my skin, the sweetness of a simple and candid boy. By this sign I recognize his docility to the injunctions of the heart, the submission of his body to my mind. I whispered, my voice choked by the weight of his head, “When you're like that, crushed against me, I feel as if I were protecting you.”
“Me too,” he said. And quickly he gave me one of his pock−answers. “What do you mean 'me too'?”
“I feel that I'm protecting you too.”
“You do? Why? Do I seem weak to you?”
Gently he sighed to me, “Yes... I'm protecting you.”
After kissing my closed eyes, he leaves my bed. I hear him closing the door. Images take shape beneath my eyelids: in the clear water I see a world, agile grey insects moving about on the slimy bottom of certain fountains. They scurry about in the shade and clear water of my eyes, whose bottom is covered with slime.
It amazes me that so muscular a body dissolves so readily beneath my heat. In the street he rolls his shoulders as he walks: his hardness has melted. That which was sharp edges and splinters has grown smooth — except the eye, which gleams in the crumbling snow. That punching, butting, kicking machine lies down, stretches out, uncoils, proves to my astonishment that it was merely a contracted, taut gentleness, coiled about several times, knotted and swollen, and I learn how that gentleness, that supple docility in responding to my tenderness, will be transformed to violence, to meanness, if gentleness no longer had the opportunity to be itself, if my tenderness ceased, for example if I abandoned the child, if I deprived weakness of the possibility of its occupying this splendid body. I see what would govern the sudden starts. What rage at being so awakened. His gentleness would become knotted, would contract, would coil about itself several times so as to form a powerful spring.
“If you left me, I'd go crazy,” he said. “I'd become the worst kind of tramp.”
The Thief's Journal 66