Page 9 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
table, it was a banner telling the invisible legions of my triumph over the police. I was in a cell. I knew that all night long my tube of vaseline would be exposed to the scorn — the contrary of a Perpetual Adoration — of a group of strong, handsome, husky policemen. So strong that if the weakest of them barely squeezed two fingers together, there would shoot forth, first with a slight fart, brief and dirty, a ribbon of gum which would continue to emerge in a ridiculous silence. Nevertheless, I was sure that this puny and most humble object would hold its own against them; by its mere presence it would be able to exasperate all the police in the world; it would draw upon itself contempt, hatred, white and dumb rages. It would be slightly bantering — like a tragic hero amused at stirring up the wrath of the gods — indestructible, like him, faithful to my happiness, and proud. I would like to hymn it with the latest words in the French language. But I would have also liked to fight for it, to organize massacres in its honor and bedeck a countryside at twilight with red
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bunting.
The beauty of a moral act depends upon the beauty of its expression. To say that it is beautiful is to decide that it will be so. It remains to be proven so. This is the task of images, that is, of the correspondences with the splendors of the physical world. The act is beautiful if it provokes, and in our throat reveals, song. Sometimes the consciousness with which we have pondered a reputedly vile act, the power of expression which must signify it, impel us to song. This means that it is beautiful if treachery makes us sing. To betray thieves would be not only to find myself again in the moral world, I thought, but also to find myself once more in homosexuality. As I grow strong, I am my own god. I dictate. Applied to men, the word beauty indicates to me the harmonious quality of a face and body to which I sometimes add manly grace. Beauty is then accompanied by magnificent, masterly, sovereign gestures. We imagine that they are determined by very special moral attitudes, and by the cultivation of such virtues within ourselves we hope to endow our poor faces and sick bodies with the vigor that our lovers possess naturally. Alas, these virtues, which they themselves never possess, are our weakness.
1. I would indeed rather have shed blood than deny that silly object.
Now as I write, I muse on my lovers. I would like them to be smeared with my vaseline, with that gentle, slightly mentholated substance; I would like their muscles to bathe in that delicate transparence without which the tool of the handsomest is less lovely.
When a limb has been removed, the remaining one is said to grow stronger. I had hoped that the vigor of the arm which Stilitano had lost might be concentrated in his sex. For a long time I imagined a solid member, like a blackjack, capable of the most outrageous impudence, though what first intrigued me was what Stilitano allowed me to know of it: the mere crease, though curiously precise in the left leg, of his blue denim pants. This detail might have haunted my dreams less had Stilitano not, at odd moments, put his left hand on it, and had he not, like ladies making a curtsey, indicating the crease, delicately pinched the cloth with his nails. I do not think that he ever lost his self−possession, but with me he was particularly calm. With a slightly impertinent smile, though quite nonchalantly, he would watch me adore him. I know that he will love me.
Before Salvador, basket in hand, crossed the threshold of our hotel, I was so excited that I kissed him in the street, but he pushed me aside:
“You're crazy. People'll take us for mariconas!” He spoke French rather well, having learned it in the region around Perpignan where he used to go for the grape−harvesting. Deeply wounded, I turned away. His face was purple. His complexion was that of winter cabbage. Salvador did not smile. He was shocked. “That's what I get,” he must have thought, “for getting up so early to go begging in the snow. He doesn't know how to behave.” His hair was wet and shaggy. Behind the window, faces were staring at us, for the lower part of the hotel was occupied by the main room of a cafe that faced the street and through which you had to pass in
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