Page 96 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
vision?—he would be smoking a cigarette. Without his moving an inch (he would just about mumble hello; he never offered to shake hands), I would give him the pleasure he desired and then adjust his clothes and leave him. I would have loved him to squeeze me in his arms. He was good−looking, and though I have forgotten his name, I remember that he claimed to be the son of La Goulue.
The contemplation of Armand's arms that evening was I think, the one answer to all metaphysical anxieties. Behind them Armand disappeared, destroyed, yet more present and effective than his person could be for he was the animator of the blazon.
As for what actually happened, I don't quite remember, except that he gave me two or three slaps, which it would be impolite not to mention to you. He would not tolerate my making him wait a second. Perhaps he feared that I might completely disappear. For a few days I pretended to look indulgently upon his quarrels with Robert, but I suffered, out of love, resentment and rage. At present, I would, perhaps, have resolved such anguish by an effort to couple the two men I loved, one for his strength, the other for his grace. A possible charity, now familiar to my heart, might have made me try to achieve the happiness not of two men, but of those more perfect qualities which they betoken: strength and beauty. If they cannot both be united within me, may my kindness, by means of them, achieve, outside me, a knot of perfection—of love. I had some savings. Without letting anyone know, neither Stilitano, Armand, Sylvia nor Robert, I took the train and went back to France.
In the Maubeuge forests, I realized that the country which was so hard for me to leave, the enveloping region for which I felt a sudden nostalgia as I crossed the last frontier, was Armand's radiant kindness, and that it was made up of all the elements, seen inside out, which composed his cruelty.
Unless there should occur an event of such gravity that my literary art, in the face of it, would be imbecilic and I should need a new language to master this new misery, this is my last book. I am waiting for heaven to fall across the corner of my face. Saintliness means turning pain to good account. It means forcing the devil to be God. It means obtaining the recognition of evil. For five years I have been writing books: I can say that I have done so with pleasure, but I have finished. Through writing I have attained what I was seeking. What will guide me, as something learned, is not what I have lived, but the tone in which I tell of it. Not the anecdotes, but the work of art. Not my life, but the interpretation of it. It is what language offers me to evoke it, to talk about it, render it. To achieve my legend. I know what I want. I know where I'm going. As for the chapters which follow (I have already said that a great number of them have been lost), I am delivering them in bulk.
(By legend I do not mean the more or less decorative notion which the public that knows my name will have of me, but rather the identity of my future life with the most audacious notion which I and others, after this account, may form of it. It remains to specify whether the fulfillment of my legend consists of the boldest possible existence of the criminal order.)
In the street—I am so afraid of being recognized by a policeman—I know how to withdraw into myself. Since my quintessence has taken refuge in the deepest and most secret retreat (a place in the depths of my body where I stay awake, or keep watch in the form of a tiny flame), I no longer fear anything, I am rash enough to think that my body is free of all distinguishing signs, that it looks empty, impossible to identify, since everything about me has quite abandoned my image, my gaze, my fingers, whose nervous tics vanish like vapor, and that the inspectors also see that what is walking beside them on the sidewalk is a mere shell, emptied of its man. But if I walk along a quiet street, the flame grows, spreads to my limbs, rises to my image
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