Page 85 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
I grew restless again. I was dominated by the world of males. When they were merged in shadow, each group of lads offered me a puzzle, the solution of which could not be given me in a straightforward way. The still and silent males had the violence of electronic corpuscles gravitating about a sun of energy: love. Suppose, I asked myself, suppose I managed to bombard one of them? What disintegration would result, what sudden annihilation? They must, I added, know this in some obscure way and that's why they stay so fast in place.
Exhausted by the effort which had just enabled me to affront men, I was delivered over to the powers of darkness. I became lucid. A retrospective fear was invading me. I decided to give up such dangerous work. In the evening, hardly would some man turn about as I passed, than Stilitano would subtly insinuate himself into me; he would fill out my muscles, loosen my gait, thicken my gestures, almost color me. He was in action. I felt, in my footsteps on the sidewalk, his crocodile leather shoes creaking with the weight of the ponderous body of that monarch of the slums. Thus possessed, I knew I was capable of every kind of cruelty. My eye was clearer. Instead of causing fright, my transformation adorned me with manly graces. I felt myself becoming lively, impetuous. One evening, in anger, confronted with a snooty queen, my fist made the gesture of beating an invisible drum.
“You dirty louse,” I muttered between my teeth, while within me my conscience grieved at having wounded and insulted those who were the wretched expression of my dearest treasure: homosexuality.
Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. I wondered at its perfect coherence, which denied me. I was astounded by so rigorous an edifice whose details were united against me. Nothing in the world was odd: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock−market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower−beds... Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all interrelated, had a meaning: my exile. Hitherto I had acted against it slyly, in the shadow. Now I dared touch it, dared show I was touching it, by insulting those who composed it. Whereupon, recognizing my right to do so, I recognized my place in it. It seemed to me natural that waiters in cafes should call me “Monsieur”.
I might, with a bit of patience and luck, have widened the breach. However, I was held back by my ingrained habit of living with my head bowed and in accordance with an ethic contrary to the one which governs the world. In short, I was afraid of losing the benefit of my laborious and painful effort in the direction opposite to yours.
Stilitano behaved toward his woman in the same brutal way, which I envied, though he tolerated Robert's gentle mockery. He would then smile delightfully, revealing his white teeth. If he smiled at me, the smile was the same, but, perhaps because I did not take it by surprise, I was unable to read in it the same freshness, the same complicity. At Stilitano's feet all was as the bounding of fauns. Robert twined his garlands about him. The cripple was the column, the other the wistaria. I was disturbed by the fact that, though they loved each other so, they never made love. Stilitano seemed to me more and more inaccessible. I discovered, I have forgotten how, that he had not stolen the black motor−cycle from the policeman. He had not even stolen it at all. They had come to an agreement beforehand: it had been abandoned for a few seconds, and Stilitano had merely to mount it and sell it. They divided the money. A discovery of this kind ought to have estranged me from him; it made him dearer to me. I was in love with a fake hoodlum who was in cahoots with a cop. As a team, they were a traitor and an impostor. Made of mud and mist, Stilitano was a divinity to whom I could still sacrifice myself. In both senses of the word, I was possessed.
I was familiar with Stilitano's past in the Foreign Legion, which I knew about from trivial details which he mentioned from time to time, and I also knew how his time had been spent between our separation and our meeting. In the intervening four or five years he had wandered around France selling cheap lace at a very high price. He smiled as he told me the following story. A friend had concocted for him an agent's card authorizing him—and him only—to sell lace made by the young consumptives of the Cambo sanatorium.
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