1.
In a cell, unknown thieves call me Jean.
They were gilded by a morning sun;
palms lined the Mediterranean.
Pilorge and Angel
flower within me.
I want to feel their bodies against me yet
but tougher, more dangerous, more tender.
Each of these passions led me out of here and far, far away.
Stillitano had unfalteringly chosen
a pair of green and tan crocodile shoes,
a brown suit, a white silk shirt, a pink tie,
a multicoloured scarf and a green hat.
Maurice G. and Robert B. were seventeen years old.
I had known them in Paris,
in the penal colony,
and had made love to each of them.
Lucien is modest,
a stolen rose, so desirable,
so dear to my pride and despair.
It is the handsomest criminals whom my tenderness adorns.
I went through a landscape of sharp rocks.
A German soldier is killed in the Russian snows,
the mythical regions of our living minds.
2.
My life must be a legend.
The slow and solemn agony of the penal colony,
the handsomeness of their faces,
the strength and elegance of their bodies,
the smell of roses.
I shall go to Barcelona, to Rio.
I shall find Sek Gorgui there.
The big Negro will stretch out gently on my back.
Can I say that it was the past
or that it was the future?
Stillitano, when we decided to go south together
was dressed better than a prince, better than a pimp.
Suddenly he looked at me and smiled,
“I have discovered the treasure.”
He was dwindling.
All that remained of him was a gleaming point
of marvellous purity.
I imagine Guiana, the Negro,
vaster than night.
All his muscles will cover me.
3.
I was in the heart, the Orient, of my childhood,
amongst the palms strewn beneath the feet of Jesus.
It’s as if I were being carried away.
I barely recognised him-
his passionate temperament.
I killed him.
He had a higher calibre gun than mine.
In the dirtiest street in Antwerp,
Stillitano’s back seemed to me
a fluid element.
Not only my heart, but my whole body is beating.
My body is afraid.
I am escaping toward my desire.
4.
The reader will recall that, in Barcelona,
Stillitano exposed himself to love as one exposes oneself to the sun:
the same savage suppleness,
unaware of the murderer’s rich muscularity,
the violence.
Straddling the enormous prick of the blond legionnaire
who steals and kills,
his adventures, his tattoos merge within me
to the point of dizziness and vomiting.
Frozen. Fixed forever in the past,
his love fills me with a joy
which goes from the back of my head down to my heels;
a long shudder,
a kind of threat.
It is born of fear.
I know that I am being followed.
I shall retrace my steps
as if trying to cover up my tracks.
As I rewrote the lost fragment of this journal
my hand was torn off in the jungle by a savage beast.