Page 80 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
communicate them, but rather because I hoped, by expressing them in a form that they themselves imposed, to construct an order (a moral order) that was unknown (above all to me too).
“Yes,” I said.
He asked me where I thought they had landed. His gaze seemed to be trying to peer through the darkness. He was holding his gun in his hand, ready to fire. New, I am so concerned about exactitude that I almost indicated the right direction: it was as a result of reflection that I owed my fidelity to the smugglers. Together, as if I were his dog, we walked a few steps among the rocks and returned to the hut to go on with our love−making.
I continued traveling along the shore route. Sometimes by night, sometimes by day. I registered stupefying visions. Fatigue, shame and poverty forced me to have recourse only to a world where every incident had a meaning which I can not define but which is not the one it suggests to you. In the evening I would hear singing: peasants were gathering oranges. I would enter churches during the day in order to rest. As the origin of the moral order is in Christian precepts, I wished to familiarize myself with the idea of God: in a state of mortal sin, I would take communion at morning mass. The priest (a Spanish cure!) would take a host from the ciborium.
“What sauce do they steep in?” I wondered. The sauce was the unction of the priest's pale fingers. In order to separate them and take only one, he manipulated them with an unctuous gesture, as if he were stirring a thick liquid in a golden vase. Now, as I knew that the host was a sheet of dry white dough, I was astonished. Refusing to admit a God of light in accordance with the explanations of the theologians, I felt God—or, rather than Him, a sickening impression of mystery—by means of a few evil and sordid details (arising from a childish imagination) of the Roman liturgy.
“From this nausea,” I said to myself, “has arisen the splendid structure of the laws in which I am caught.”
In the shadow of the church, facing the priest in his chasuble, I was frightened. But as the kneeling hidalgos beside me did not shrink from my rags, as they received the same host on the tips of their tongues, knowing full well that its power manifests itself within our souls and not elsewhere, in order to catch its imposture in flagrante delicto and make it my accomplice, I mentally cursed it as I chewed it. At other times I recommended myself not to God but to the nausea induced in me by the religious services, by the shadow of the chapels where Virgins and tapers dressed for a ball keep vigil, by the hymn for the dead or the simple candle−snuffer. I note this curious impression for it was not without analogy to the one I was to know throughout my life in circumstances far different from those I am describing. The army, police stations and their guests, prisons, a looted apartment, the soul of the forest, the soul of a river (the threat— reproach or complicity of their presence at night) and, increasingly, every event I have witnessed, create in me the same sensation of disgust and fear which lead me to believe that the idea of God is something I harbor in my bowels.
Still afoot, leaving the south, I headed for France. All I knew of Seville, Triana, Alicante, Murcia and Cordova was the flop−house and the bowl of rice that was served there. Nevertheless, under all the tinsel and idiotic gilding, I could see the angular and muscular force which, suddenly taut and erect, was to bring the whole thing down a few years later. Deep within my wretchedness I was not unaware of the presence of sensuality, of a touch of fury.
(I have clipped a−poem from a Communist periodical. It was written with the purpose of flaying the warriors of the Blue Legion, the fascists, the Hitlerites. Though written against them, it actually hymns them. I quote:
Romance of the Blue Legion
The Thief's Journal 78