Page 81 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
We're all Good Catholics,
We're all good killers too,
To hell with the republic,
Let's hear of some good floggings, Let's talk of castor−oil.
It's snowing in Castile
To the whistling of the winds,
We'll all have iron crosses
We'll all be dressed in green
We'll all have iron crosses
And the lips of all the girls.
It's snowing in Castile.
Written by a Spaniard, a mediocre rhymester, this poem epitomizes Spain. The Blue Legion was a team of killers sent to Russia to help Hitler. The color of the sky helping the devil!)
Neither the state guards nor the municipal police stopped me. What they saw going by was no longer a man but the curious product of misfortune, something to which laws could not be applied. I had exceeded the bounds of indecency. I might, for example, without anyone's being surprised, have welcomed a prince of the blood, a Spanish grandee, might have called him my cousin and addressed him in elegant terms. It would have created no surprise.
“Welcomed a Spanish grandee. But in what palace?”
If I use this rhetorical device in order to give you a clearer notion of the degree to which I had achieved a solitude that conferred sovereignty upon me, I do so because it is forced upon me by a situation, by a success which is expressed in words intended to express the triumph of the century. A verbal kinship manifests the kinship of my glory with nobiliary glory. I was a kinsman of princes and kings, through a kind of secret connection, unknown to the world, the kind which permits a shepherdess to chat familiarly with a king of France. The palace of which I speak (for it has no other name) is the architectural ensemble of the increasingly tenuous delicacies which the labor of pride won from my solitude. Jupiter carries off Ganymede and kisses him: I might have allowed myself every debauch. I had a simple elegance, the easy bearing of the hopeless. My courage consisted in destroying all the usual reasons for living and in discovering others. The discovery was made slowly.
It was later on that I discovered the virtues of the discipline—not the internal regulation—observed at the Mettray Reformatory. In order to become a colonist, as the children were called, I had to force myself, Like most of the little hoodlums, I might spontaneously, without giving thought to them, have performed the many actions which realize the colonist. I would have known naive joys and sorrows; life would have offered me only trivial thoughts, those which anyone might utter. Mettray, which gratified my amorous tastes to the full,
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