Read an Excerpt
1932. Spain at the time was covered with vermin, its beggars. They went from village to village, to Andalusia because it is warm, to Catalonia because it is rich, but the whole country was profitable to us. I was thus a louse, and conscious of being one. In Barcelona we hung around the Calle Mediodia and the Calle Carmen. We sometimes slept six in a bed without sheets, and at dawn we would go begging in the markets. We would leave the Barrio Chino in a-group and scatter over the Parallelo, carrying shopping baskets, for the housewives would give us a leek or turnip rather than a coin. At noon we would return, and with the gleanings we would make our soup. It is the life of vermin that I am going to describe. In Barcelona I saw male couples in which the more loving of the two would say to the other:
"I'll take the basket this morning."
He would take it and leave. One day Salvador gently pulled the basket from my hands and said, "I'm going to beg for you."
It was snowing. He went out into the freezing street, wearing a torn and tattered jacket--the pockets were ripped and hung down--and a shirt stiff with dirt. His face was poor and unhappy, shifty, pale, and filthy, for we dared not wash since it was so cold. Around noon, he returned with the vegetables and a bit of fat. Here I draw attention to one of those lacerations--horrible, for I shall provoke them despite the danger--by which beauty was revealed to me. An immense--and brotherly--love filled out my body and bore me towards Salvador. Leaving the hotel shortly after him, I would see him a way off beseeching the women. I knew the formula, as I had already begged for others and myself: it mixes Christian religionwith charity; it merges the poor person with God; it is so humble an emanation from the heart that I believe it scents with violet the straight and light breath of the beggar who utters it. All over Spain at the time they were saying: "For Dios".
Without hearing him, I would imagine Salvador murmuring it at all the stalls, to all the housewives. I would watch him as the pimp watches his whore, but with such tenderness in my heart! Thus, Spain and my life as a beggar familiarized me with the stateliness of abjection, for it took a great deal of pride (that is, of love) to embellish those filthy and despised creatures. It took a great deal of talent. It came to me little by little. Though it may be impossible for me to describe its mechanism to you, at least I can say that I slowly forced myself to consider that wretched life as a deliberate necessity. Never did I seek to make of it something other than what it was, I did not try to adorn it, to mask it, but, on the contrary, I wanted to affirm it in its exact sordidness, and the most sordid signs became for me signs of grandeur.
I was dismayed when, one evening, while searching me after a raid--I am speaking of a scene which preceded the one with which this book begins--the astonished detective took from my pocket, among other things, a tube of vaseline. We dared joke about it since it contained mentholated vaseline. The whole record-office, and I too at times, though painfully, writhed and laughed at the following:
"You take it in the nose?"
"Watch out you don't catch cold. You wouldn't want to give your guy whooping-cough."
I translate but lamely, in the language of a Paris hustler, the malicious irony of the vivid and venomous Spanish phrases. It concerns a tube of vaseline, one of whose ends was partially rolled up. Which amounts to saying that it had been put to use. Amidst the elegant objects taken from the pockets of the men who had been picked up in the raid, it was the very sign of abjection, of that which is concealed with the greatest of care, but yet the sign of a secret grace which was soon to save me from contempt. When I was locked up in a cell, and as soon as I had sufficiently regained my spirits to rise above the misfortune of my arrest, the image of the tube of vaseline never left me. The policemen had shown it to me victoriously, since they could thereby flourish their revenge, their hatred, their contempt. But lo and behold! this dirty, wretched object whose purpose seemed to the world--to that concentrated delegation of the world which is the police and, above all, that particular gathering of Spanish police, smelling of garlic, sweat and oil, but prosperous-looking, stout of muscle and strong in their moral assurance--utterly vile, became extremely precious to me. Unlike many objects to which my tenderness gives distinction, this one was not at all haloed; it lay on the table, a little grey leaden tube of vaseline, broken and livid, whose astonishing discreetness, and its essential correspondence with all the commonplace things in the record-office of a prison (the bench, the inkwell, the regulations, the scales, the odor), would, through the general indifference, have distressed me, had not the very content of the tube, perhaps because of its unctuous character, by bringing to mind an oil lamp, made me think of a night-light beside a coffin.
In describing it, I recreate the little object, but the following image cuts in: beneath a lamp-post, in a street of the city where I am writing, the pallid face of a little old woman, a round, flat little face, like the moon, very pale; I can not tell whether it was sad or hypocritical. She approached me, told me she was very poor and asked for a little money. The gentleness of this moon-fish face revealed to me at once: that the old woman had just come out of prison.
"She's a thief," I said to myself. As I walked away from her, a kind of intense reverie, living deep within me and not at the edge of my mind, led me to think that it was perhaps my mother whom I had just met. I know nothing of her who abandoned me in the cradle, but I hoped that it was that old thief who begged at night.
"What if it were she?" I thought as I walked away from the old woman. Ah! if it were, I would cover her with flowers, with gladiolus and roses, and with kisses! I would weep with tenderness over those moon-fish eyes, over that round and foolish face!" And why," I went on, "why weep over it?" It did not take my mind long to replace these customary marks of tenderness by some other gesture, even the vilest and most contemptible, which I empowered to mean as much as the kisses, or the tears, or the flowers.
