Page 88 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
me bound me to the utmost severity. Though I was aware of the faking in my crimes and the fear in my boldness, I forced myself to be the man Armand saw in me. I told myself that the gestures which conventionally deny heroic acts should not correspond to them. The simple Armand would not have allowed me to serve his pleasure. Respect alone kept him from using my body, as he had done earlier, whereas such use would have swelled me with force and courage.
Stilitano and Robert lived on Sylvia's earnings. Robert, having really forgotten about our tricky dealing's with the queers, pretended to be contemptuous of my work.
“You call that work?” he said. “Fine work. You attack old men who couldn't stand up straight if it weren't for their stiff collars and their canes.”
“He's doing the right thing in picking his victims.”
I did not realize that Armand's reply would immediately bring about one of the boldest revolutions in ethics. Before Robert had even a chance to answer, he continued in a more subdued voice, “And what about me? What do you think, eh?” And turning to Stilitano: “When it's necessary, it's not old men I attack. It's old women. You get me? It's not men, it's women. And I pick the weakest. What I need is dough. A job is good when you pull it off. When you get it into your head that chivalry's not our line, you'll have learned a lot. Him (Armand, who never called me by my name or its diminutive, pointed at me), he's way ahead of you and he's right.”
His voice was not trembling, but my emotion was so great that in the midst of it all I was afraid that Armand might let fall disastrous confidences. The solid matter of the last word assured me. He stopped talking. Within me I felt a host of thoughts welling up (opening out into a sea of regrets), all reproaching me with having yielded to the appearances of honor. Armand never took the matter up again (Stilitano and Robert would not have dared argue it), but it left its germ in my mind. The code of honor peculiar to hoodlums seemed to me laughable. Armand gradually became the Almighty in the realm of ethics. No longer seeing him as a block, I could feel that he was a sum of painful experiences. However, his body remained just as bulky, and I loved him for protecting me. Finding such authority in a man devoid of fear —so I wish to believe—I began to feel myself thinking, with a new and strange lightness. No doubt it was much later that I decided to develop and exploit the many feelings of ambiguity wherein, with mingled shame and delight, I discovered that I was an abode and jumble of contradictions, but I already sensed that it is for us to declare what will serve us as principles. Later, as a result of reflection and of Armand's attitude, my will was disengaged from the mists of ethics and I was able to apply it in my way of considering the police.
It was in Marseilles that I met Bernardini. When I came to know him better, I called him Bernard. Only the French police, in my eyes, has the monstrous potency of a mythology. When I was twenty−two years old, Bernard was thirty. I wish I could describe him exactly, but my memory retains only the impression of physical and moral force which he made upon me at the time. We were in a bar on the Rue Thubaneau. A young Arab pointed him out to me.
“He's a first−class pimp,” he said. “He always has good−looking girls.”
The girl who was with him seemed to me very pretty. I might not have noticed him had I not been told he was a cop. The police of the various European countries inspired me with fear, just as they do any other thief. The French police moved me more through a kind of terror, the origin of which was in my feeling of native and irrevocable guilt, than by the danger in which I was placed by my casual delinquencies. The world of the police, like the underworld, was a world to which I would never commit myself. My lucidity (my awareness) kept me from drifting into that formless, moving, hazy universe, constantly self−creating, elementary and fabulous, of which the motorcycle police, with its attributes of force, is the delegation in our midst. That was
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