Page 70 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
Once again I was the center of an intoxicating whirlwind. The French Gestapo contained the following two fascinating elements: treason and theft. With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassailable! It would possess the three virtues which I set up as theological, capable of composing so hard a body as Lucien's. What could be said against it? It was outside the world. It betrayed (to betray: signifying the breaking of the laws of love). It indulged in pillage. And lastly, it excluded itself from the world by pederasty. It therefore established itself in an unpuncturable solitude. I was to learn more about this from Java and shall discuss it later on.
“Are you sure of what you're saying?”
Bob looked at me. With a toss of his head, he threw back his dark curls. He walked at my side, in the shadow. “Of course I'm sure.”
I remained silent. I was observing myself intently. Within me were unfurling the waves formed by the word Gestapo. Lucien was walking on them. They bore up his graceful feet, his muscular body, his lithe−ness his neck, his head crowned with gleaming hair. I marveled that in this palace of flesh was the seat of perfect evil, which composed that perfect balance of limbs and torso, of light and shade. The palace slowly sank into the waves; it swam to the middle of the sea which beats against the coast where we walked, and, gradually becoming liquid, it turned into sea. How filled I was with peace and tenderness in the presence of so precious a solitude in so rich a case! I would have liked to fall asleep without sleeping, to close my arms over the waves. The shade of the world, of the sky, of the road and trees, entered through my eyes and settled within me.
“What about you? Didn't you ever think of joining up so that you could get your hands on things?” Bob turned his head slightly toward me. His face, alternately luminous and dark, remained impassive. “You're crazy. Where would I be now? In the jug like the rest of them.”
In the jug or dead, like the chiefs of the organization: Laffon, Bony, Clavie, Pagnon, Labussiere. The reason I tore out and saved the scrap of newspaper with their photographs was the desire to draw from it food for argument in favor of treason, which I have always endowed with a radiant visage. Maurice Pilorge, he of the fair morning face, was as tricky as they come. He used to lie. He lied to me and smilingly betrayed all his friends. I loved him. When I learned that he had murdered Escudero, I was momentarily stunned because once again. drama came so close as to touch me; it entered my life, exalted me, gave me a new importance (the guttersnipes say: “He don't feel himself shitting no more!”). And− I worshipped him as I still do eight years or so after his beheading. During the time from murder to death, Pilorge became greater than I. Thinking also of his severed life, of his rotting body, it was when I could say “Poor kid” that I loved him. I then accepted his being, for me, not an example, but a help in making my way to a heaven where I hope to join him (I do not write rejoin him). I had beneath my eyes faces (except Labussiere's) that were bored and baggy with fear and cowardice. Against them they had the bad quality of the paper and printing and their having been snapped at a trying moment. They had the look of people caught in a trap, but one which they had set for themselves, an inner trap. In the very beautiful photo which shows him bandaged, wounded by the cop who arrested him, Weidmann is also an animal caught in a trap, but a man's trap. His own truth does not turn against him to disfigure him. What I saw and what I sometimes see when I look at it, in the portrait of Laffon and his friends, is the way they themselves turn against themselves.
“A genuine traitor, a traitor for the love of it,” I say to myself, “does not have a false look on his face.”
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