Birth of Our Power by Victor Serge Richard Greeman

and Mitchell felt hats, black or gray according to the season. The air of a well-established businessman, a frequenter of fine restaurants. Thickset in the face, through the shoulders and waist; graying at the temples and in his thick mustache; his eyes a colorless gray as if fatigued, yet alert, never lax. Discreetly, their attentive gaze, without flame or color, scanned every face in a group, every shape around him in a crowd. Lejeune usually sat in cafés in such a way as to take advantage of all the mirrors’ treacherous possibilities while presenting to others only the view of his well-shaved neck. He preferred establishments that had a back exit, and there, certain corners where you could almost disappear from sight, back well into a wall, behind an open newspaper. His insignificant name was known only to a few of us; his past to no one. Certain comrades remembered having called him “Levieux” fifteen years earlier in Paris and London. Then he disappeared. Had he been mixed up with the legendary Jacob of Amiens? 3 Had he been a counterfeiter? A convict who had “done” eight years? That’s what people said: he said nothing himself. Insurance broker (doubtless a “front”), owner of a traveling circus, wholesaler of “Parisian goods,” he lived extremelywell. The rare guests to his bachelor apartment used to wonder at a testimonial signed by the queen, for philanthropic services to the Red Cross. (“That’s a prize! It really impresses my respectable visitors. It cost me three hundred pesetas; and I came out five hundred ahead of the game by setting up a lottery. And if the wounded in Morocco are being robbed, it’s those señoras who are to blamer) We ran into him once in the cafés accompanied by an incredible little Andalusian, ageless, olive-skinned, skeletal, dressed like a footman in distress. “My secretary,” said Lejeune. (A pause.) “He can neither read nor write, but he’s marvelous at looking after horses.” Jovial, without being vulgar, he enjoyed reading good books.
    We left the Liceo together: the enchantment of the Russian ballets was totally in keeping with the magic of the nights in this city. In a blue
paseo
(boulevard) overlooking the glowing hearth of the city and the deep blue of the harbor—somewhere, suspended between sea and sky, the narrow linear beacon of a lighthouse scanning the horizon at regular intervals—we took leave of two charming, perfumed young ladies who know nothing of our real identities and would not have understood our language. Bourgeois china dolls—Mercédès the blonde, Concepción the brunette—with tiny graceful hands designed for the piano, tiny souls suited for prattle, tiny bodies (in time lascivious) made for the leisure of villas. These graceful creatures of another human species, strangely confined, imprisoned by money as are so many of our people by poverty, amuse us like figures in a ballet; we can anticipate their gestures, their speech, even their inner moods, like the movements of a dance … They let us hold their hands, and sometimes their waists; they possess, these delicious mannequins, the suppleness of the human animal in its first bloom of youth, and firm breasts sheathed in white silk. When we were alone we returned to our real faces; our real thoughts returned to us.
    Lejeune came to a halt on a street corner. Shiny automobiles slid along the asphalt, leaving a phosphorescent trail behind them—in our eyes.
    â€œI’ll hit the banks,” he said. “There are bound to be a few days of disorder, you see. So, I’ll hit the banks.
My
revolution will be over quickly. I don’t believe in
theirs.
Monarchies, republics, unions—I don’t give a damn; you understand? Get myself killed for a bunch of sanctimonious, honest, syphilitic
homo sapiens?
I’m not so dumb. You only live once. If you shoot the Jesuits and the generals, I