Page 93 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
school for pickpockets. As a result of frequenting the quarters of the vice squad and highway police, I am
them
familiar with the stupidity of inspectors: it doesn't bother me. Nor does the mean ugliness of most of
They aren't detectives, not yet, but rather the clumsy attempt toward the perfect insect. These ridiculous and puny existences are perhaps the many stages leading to a more finished form which is attained by only a few rare specimens. However, it was not in their heroic function that I cherished detectives: the dangerous pursuit of criminals, the self−sacrifice a certain attitude which makes them popular, but rather in their offices, consulting papers and files. The search bulletins posted on the walls, the photos and descriptions of wanted criminals, the contents of the registers, the objects under seal, create an atmosphere of sullen rancor, of foul infamy, and it gives me pleasure to know that these big strapping fellows are breathing it in and that it is corrupting them and evilly corroding their minds. It was this police—note that I still require handsome representatives—to which I was devoted. Their broad, thick hands, extensions of their strong and lithe bodies which were used to physical struggle, could upset—with a brutal and touching awkwardness—files which were charged with subtle questions. It is not the more dazzling crimes they contain that I would like to know about, but rather the more “dismal, those which are called sordid and whose heroes are gloomy. As a result of the emotional shufflings they cause, crimes bring about enchanting situations: those twins, one of whom was a murderer, the other dying when his brother was beheaded; the young babies choked by hot bread; a wonderful trick in a macabre setting to delay the discovery of a murder; the stupor of the criminal who gets lost, turns about and is caught in the neighborhood of the crime; the clemency of a snowfall which protects a thief's flight; the wind which throws the hounds off the track; the grandiose chance discoveries which culminate in the beheading of a man; the zeal of objects against you; your ingenuity in conquering them; secrets which prisons contain, though here they were torn from the bosom slowly exhaled, shred by shred, by means of threat and fear.
I envied Inspector Bernardini. He could take a murder or rape from the records, swell up with it, feast on it and return home. I do not mean that he was able to amuse himself with it as with a detective story. Not amuse himself; quite the contrary. To draw to himself the most unexpected, the most unhappy situations, to take upon himself the most humiliating confessions, which are the richest. Never to smile over them: it is these that are most able to elicit the marvels of pride. The vastest intelligence could be attributed to the lucid and sympathetic witness of so many wretched confessions. Perhaps the quest of this intelligence also led me to those incredible adventures of the heart. What did the police of Marseilles not contain? Yet never did I dare ask Bernard to take me back there with him, or to let me read his reports.
I knew that he associated with some gangsters in the neighborhood of the Opera, those who hung around the bars on the Rue Saint−Saens. As he was not too sure about me, he did not introduce me to any of them. If he granted me the favor of sucking his prick occasionally, I felt deeply grateful to him for allowing me to be his slave, but I never worried about whether it was wrong to love a cop.
In a friend's room, looking at his bed and all the bourgeois furnishings:
“I could never make love here.” That kind of place freezes me. To have chosen it I would have had to make use of qualities and have preoccupations so remote from love that my life would have grown disenchanted with it. To love a man is not only to let myself be disturbed by some of the details which I call nocturnal because they create within me a darkness wherein I tremble (the hair, the eyes, a smile, the thumb, the thigh, the bush, etc.), but also to make these details render as shadow everything possible, to develop the shadow of the shadow, hence to thicken it, to multiply its realm and throng it with darkness. It is not only the body with its adornments that agitates me, nor the play of love alone, but also the prolongation of each of its erotic qualities. But these qualities can only be what they have been made to be by the actual experience of the one who bears their sign, whose bearing involves certain details wherein I think I find the germ of such experiences. Thus, from every area of shadow, on every boy, I drew the most disturbing image so that my anxiety might grow, and from all the areas of shadow I drew a nocturnal universe into which my lover plunged. It is obvious that one who has a great many details attracts me more than others. And as I draw from
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