Page 75 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
farther back. He held out his arms and appealed plaintively, almost like a baby, “Jean, please, let me.” “You're hurting me.”
“Only a tiny little bit, my nice little Jean. Your little eyebrow, a tiny little bit.”
I understand what binds the sculptor to his clay, the painter to his colors, each workman to the matter he handles, and the docility and acquiescence of the matter to the movements of the one who animates it; I know the love that passes from the fingers into the folds, the holes, the swellings.
Shall I abandon him? Lucien would prevent me from living. Unless his quiet tenderness, his blushing modesty, became beneath my sun of love a tiger or a lion. If he loves me, will he follow me?
“What will become of him without me?”
Being proud, he will refuse to return to his family. In my company he will acquire habits of laziness and luxury. Will he hang around bars? He will become mean and cruel out of revenge, out of defiance, out of hatred for all men. One misfortune in the world, among so many others, is a matter of indifference to me, but I suffer at the idea of this child's taking the path of shame. My love is exalted at the edge of his abyss. At the finishing−point, every evening he lights up the apotheosis of the setting sun.
“What will become of him?”
Grief unfurls over me, covers me over. I see Lucien: his numb, purple, sluggish, sensitive fingers, frozen to the bone, painfully open to enter the stiff and filthy pockets of his pants; I see him standing and tapping his toes on the sidewalk, in the dry cold, in front of cafes he dares not enter; perhaps a new dance may be born from his aching feet, a parody. He turns up the collar of his jacket. Despite the wind that chaps his lips, he will smile at the old queens. Grief unfurls over me, but happiness in my body and heart spreads its fragrance when, by the same thought which makes me abandon him, I save him from all the evil to which I doom him. He will not hate me. Nauseating whiffs of my Spain rise to my nostrils.
Can I do better than place him for a few pages in one of the most humiliating positions which I myself had been in? An awkward, childish and perhaps proud feeling of redemption makes me believe that underwent all those humiliations so that he might be spared them. But in order that the experiment be more effective I shall make Lucien live for a moment in my wretched skin. In a book entitled Miracle of the Rose I take upon myself the ignominy of the situation of a young convict whose cheeks and eyes are spat on by the other prisoners, and speaking of him I say, “I...”
Here it's the reverse. It was raining. Lucien and some other ignominious bums were sitting against a block of stone in a lot near the harbor where beggars were tolerated. Each one was tending a little brushwood fire on which he heated the rice and beans that had been handed out at the barracks and brought back in a tin can. Coming from the splendid soldiers, amongst whom he would have been the handsomest, this food, this unnameable stew, which had been left by them, which had been stirred by their pity and disdain that had now become part of it, turned to stone as it went down his throat. His heart was contracted. The tears he held back hardened his eyelids. The rain had put out all the fires, though they were still smoking. The beggars protected their stew as best they could, covering the can either with the flaps of their jackets or with a sack thrown over their shoulders. As the lot was situated at the lower level of a wall supporting a boulevard that joins the Ramblas, the strollers leaning on the parapet looked down on a genuine Court of Miracles where, at all times, one witnessed paltry disputes, paltry fights, wretched transactions. Every act was a parody. The poor are
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