Page 95 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
One evening Armand was waiting for me, leaning against the door−frame, in the posture of a janissary guarding a park. I was an hour late and was sure that he would bawl me out, perhaps even strike me; I was afraid. From the last or next−to−last step of the stairway I saw him stripped to the waist; his wide, blue linen trousers falling over his feet served as a base not for Armand's bust but for his crossed arms. Perhaps his head dominated them; I don't know; only his arms existed, solid and muscular, forming a heavy coil of dark flesh, one of them adorned with a delicate tattoo representing a mosque with minaret and dome and a palm−tree bent by a sand−storm. A long beige muslin scarf, the kind that legionnaires wrap about their heads for protection against the sand, hung from his neck and fell in a heap on his arms, the muscles of which bulged as they squeezed against his chest. These arms existed by themselves, that is, they were there, placed before him, his escutcheon and, in relief, his weapons.
No meditation, whether effulgent or casual, on the planetary systems, the nebulae and the galaxies will ever enable me to contain, will ever console me for not containing, the world: in the face of the universe I am lost, but the simple attribute of a potent virility reassures me. Disturbing thoughts and anxiety cease. My tenderness—nor is the finest gold or marble figure comparable to a model in the flesh—arrays this power with bracelets of wild−oats. The fear—because of my lateness—which made me almost shudder probably facilitated my emotion and revealed its meaning to me. The strange coronet of those knotted arms was the sufficient weapon of a naked warrior, though they also bore the memory of the African campaigns. The tattoo—minaret and dome—troubled me, reminding me of Stilitano's desertion when the vision of Cadiz in the sea lay beneath my eyes. I walked past him. Armand did not move.
“I'm late.”
I dared not look at his arms. They were so strong that I feared I had hitherto been mistaken in concerning myself with his eyes and mouth. The latter, or what they expressed, had no other reality than that which had suddenly just been created by the interlacing of those arms on a wrestler's torso. Were they to unwind, his most acute and exact reality would dissolve.
I realize now that I blushed when I stared at this knot of muscles because they revealed Armand to me. If the king's banner, borne by a galloping horseman appears alone, we may be moved, may bare our heads' if the king were to carry it himself, we would be crushed! The foreshortening preferred by the symbol when borne by that which it signifies gives and destroys the signification and the thing signified. (And everything was aggravated by the way his braided arms seemed to bind his torso!)
“I did the best I could to get here on time, but I'm late. It's not my fault.”
Armand made no reply. Still leaning, he pivoted on his axis as a single block. Like the gates of a temple.
(The aim of this account is to embellish my earlier adventures, in other words, to extract beauty from them, to find in them the element which today will elicit song, the only proof of this beauty.)
His arms remained twisted. Armand stood there, the statue of Indifference.
His arms were also signs of a masterly penis which did not deign to grow erect beneath the blue cloth of the trousers. They suggested night—their amber color, their fur, their erotic mass (one evening, as he lay in bed, I ran my prick—without his getting angry— along his crossed arms, the way a blind man recognizes a face with his finger), and particularly the blue tattoo which made the first star appear in the sky. At the foot of the walls of the mosque, a legionnaire, leaning against the bent palm−tree, had often waited for me at twilight in that same indifferent and lordly posture. He seemed to be guarding an invisible treasure, and now it occurs to me that, despite our love, he was protecting his intact virginity. He was older than I. He was always first at our appointments in the parks of Meknes. With a vague look in his eyes—or was he turned inward on some clear
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