Page 79 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
have put up little sheds overlooking the sea. One night someone entered the shed where I had lain down to sleep. When I walked miserably along in the rain and wind, the tiniest crag, the meagrest shelter became habitable. I would sometimes adorn it with an artful comfort drawn from what was peculiar to it: a box in the theatre, the chapel of a cemetery, a cave, an abandoned quarry, a freight−car and so on. Obsessed by the idea of a home, I would embellish, in thought, and in keeping with its own architecture, the one I had just chosen. While everything was being denied me, I would wish I were made for the fluting of the fake columns that ornament facades, for the caryatids, the balconies, the stone, for the heavy bourgeois assurance which these things express.
“I shall have to love and cherish them,” I would tell myself. “I shall have to belong to them so that they may belong to me and that the order which they support may be mine.”
Alas, I was not yet meant for them. Everything set me apart from them and prevented this love. I lacked a taste for earthly happiness. Now, when I am rich but weary, I beg Lucien to take my place.
All doubled up, wrapped in my coat so as to keep out the ocean dampness, I forgot my body and its fatigue by imagining details which would make the cane and reed hut a perfect dwelling, built expressly for the man I became in a few seconds, so that my soul might be in perfect harmony with the site—sea, sky, rocks and heaths—and the fragility of the structure. A man stumbled against me. He swore. I was no longer afraid at night. Quite the contrary. It was a coast−guard of about thirty. Armed with his rifle, he was on the lookout for the fishermen and sailors who engaged in smuggling between Morocco and Spain. He wanted to put me out; then, turning his flashlight on my face and seeing that I was young, he told me to stay. I shared his supper (bread, olives and a few herrings) and I drank some wine. We talked for a while and then he began to caress me. He told me that he was Andalusian. I don't remember whether he was good−looking. The water could be seen through the opening. We heard oars striking the water and voices speaking, but were unable to see any boat. He knew he ought to leave, but my caresses grew more artful. He couldn't tear himself away; the smugglers must have landed peacefully.
In submitting to the whims of the coast−guard I was obeying a dominating order which it was impossible not to serve, namely, the Police. For a moment I was no longer a hungry, ragged vagabond whom dogs and children chased away; nor was I the bold thief flouting the cops, but rather the favorite mistress who, beneath a starry sky, soothes the conqueror. When I realized that it was up to me whether or not the smugglers landed safely, I felt responsible not only for them but for all outlaws. I was being watched elsewhere and I could not back out. Pride bore me up. After all, since I held back the guard by feigning love, I shall hold him back more surely, I said to myself, if my love is more potent, and, unable to do better, I loved him with all my might. I granted him the loveliest of my nights. Not so that he might be happy but that I might take upon myself—and deliver him from—his own ignominy.
Treachery, theft and homosexuality are the basic subjects of this book. There is a relationship among them which, though not always apparent, at least, so it seems to me, recognizes a kind of vascular exchange between my taste for betrayal and theft and my loves.
When I had sated him with pleasure, the coastguard asked me whether I had heard anything. The mystery of the night, of the sea where invisible thieves were prowling, made me uneasy.
The very particular emotion which, quite at random, I have called poetic, left behind in my soul a kind of wake of anxiety which petered out. In my peculiar situation, the murmur of a voice at night and the sound of invisible oars on the sea had excited me. I remained on the alert to seize these vagrant moments which seemed to me in quest, as a lost soul is in quest of a body, of a consciousness to register and feel them. Having found it, they cease: the poet drains the world dry. But if he offers up another, it can be only his own reflection. When, in the Sante Prison, I began to write, it was never because I wanted to relive my emotions or to
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