Street of Thieves (24 page)

Tangier was far away.

Meryem was far away, Bassam was far away; Jean-François Bourrelier's soldiers were far away; Casanova was far away; I had found
a new prison for myself, Carrer Robadors, where I could hide; you never leave prison.

Life was far away.

The first days were hard—I stayed in a hotel for students, totally unthinking: I had to leave my passport at the desk, the cops could have easily found me and collected me first thing in the morning. But nothing ever happens the way it does in books. Whatever the case, well hidden in the Raval, in the lower depths, between the whores and the thieves, I felt as if I had nothing to fear.

The Tariq ibn Ziyad Mosque was in the hands of the Pakis; I also ran into a few Arabs there, but few in comparison. The Imam was from the Punjab. I spent some time there, in the beginning, in order to meet people, to rest in prayer and reading. When you have no home and know no one, you have to start somewhere: bars or mosques—and I chose well: it was thanks to the mosque that I found my room in the dilapidated but livable apartment, in the heart of the Raval fortress: thirty square meters all lengthwise, with a little balcony. I shared the apartment with a Tunisian named Mounir. I paid three hundred euros per month, everything included—in fact we didn't know who was in charge of electricity, if there was an electric bill; as to water, it came from large reservoirs on the roof, and there were no meters. I never managed to find out who the owner was—we settled the rent in cash in a bar on Sant Ramon Street, and that was it. When Mounir couldn't pay, at the end of April, two guys gave him a good thrashing; that encouraged him to find dough quickly, he got by, took some risks to steal four nice bicycles which he sold off cheaply, nothing else.

My relationship with Judit was strange. We saw each other almost every day. She helped me with everything; she even went so far as to open an account in a savings bank in her name so I could deposit my money—she gave me the debit card and the PIN, it was all cash of course, given where I lived. It was she herself who made the
deposit for me, she didn't ask me where the cash came from and I didn't tell her.

Judit seemed to me the most beautiful and noblest of women, even if, for a reason that was entirely obscure, she no longer wanted me. She immediately arranged to find me work—teacher of Arabic. Twice a week, I gave a special class to Judit, Elena, and Francesc, one of their schoolmates, for ten euros an hour. I was very proud. I explained the subtleties of grammar to them; I commented on classical verses with them. Often, I learned that same morning from a book what I explained in the afternoon; all of a sudden I was reading a lot in Arabic to prepare for the classes, it was enjoyable. We learned by heart some poems by Abu Nuwas, in my opinion the greatest, most subversive, and funniest of the Arab poets; I explained to them, almost line by line, the great novels of Naguib Mahfouz or Tayeb Salih which I had never read, but which were on their class list.

Judit lived with her parents, at the top of the city, in Gràcia; it was a mostly middle-class, well-kept neighborhood, an old village attached to Barcelona in the nineteenth century, with narrow streets and pleasant squares; local tradition had it that the children of these bourgeois people were mostly rebellious and alternative: there were a lot of activist organizations, there was even a squat, right in the middle of the neighborhood—youth will have its fling. Up there, the Arabs too were more fashionable, more bourgeois; the restaurants mostly Syrian, Lebanese, or Palestinian; right next door to Judit's home was also a Mesopotamian establishment and a Phoenician one—all that was a little intimidating and, stuck between Catalanity and Antiquity, I preferred to take refuge in the darkness of my alleyways. Judit of course felt very much at ease up there. She had her friends there, her school, the streets where she'd grown up; sometimes she insisted on taking me out to lunch, after the Arab class, in one of those noble, ancient restaurants: the owner at the
Phoenician one hadn't come straight out of a sarcophagus in Sidon, he was a Lebanese from the mountains; he talked politics with Judit for a while, about Syria, mainly, the civil war underway, the difficult role Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar would play in it—it was all a little depressing, I felt that whatever we did, the Arabs were condemned to violence and oppression. I have to admit he was pretty intelligent and very nice, that Phoenician, which only increased my jealousy—I didn't open my mouth, he must have taken me for a grouch or a half-wit.

Judit grew more mysterious every day. She seemed sad, profoundly sad at times, absent, but I couldn't figure out why; at other times, though, she was bubbling with energy, laughed, spoke to me of her plans, suggested we go out for a walk or a drink. The first days I bugged her to make her confess she was with someone else, but she kept denying it, I stopped persecuting her, and after a while I knew so well how she used her time that I had to face facts: there was no one else in her life, aside from a few university friends and me.

That was all the more incomprehensible.

I told myself I had to give her time, she'd end up coming back to me. Sometimes, when we went out, I'd take her hand; she wouldn't withdraw it—I just felt as if it was all the same to her. And even, on one occasion, and only one, we slept together: I had invited her to see my glorious new room in the afternoon; she let herself be kissed and undressed without putting up any resistance—and I mean
without putting up any resistance,
mechanically, and all my caresses, all my love came to nothing, so much that once my business was done, she got dressed in silence, and I was overcome with shame, shame and guilt as if I had raped her. She reassured me, saying I was being ridiculous, she just didn't want to at the time, that's all.

“I told you, I don't have the strength to be with someone.”

For me, it was absolutely unfathomable, it must have been some kind of illness. So I spoiled her; I wrote her poems, gave her books,
reminded her of the perfect times in Tangier and Tunis. Those memories plunged her into melancholy. She seemed fragile, as if the slightest thing could make her crumble.

I never took my eyes off her.

BARCELONA
was beautiful and wild, I loved the elegance, the rhythm, the sounds of the city, the diversity of the neighborhoods, from Gràcia to Poble Sec, from the harbor to the mountain, the strange unity there existed in the differences and the out-of-the-way places, the surprises the city offered—a stone's throw from my place, for instance, hidden by walls, behind an arched stone gate, was the Holy Cross Hospice and its magnificent garden, planted with orange trees, its beautiful fountain and the wonderful stone staircases of the National Library of Catalonia—as soon as a ray of sunshine appeared, I would be sitting on a bench there reading, in the perfume of the orange flowers; the pretty students from the applied arts school would come out and smoke cigarettes, sitting on the steps, and it was nice to watch them for a while; a few steps away, under the porticos of the old cloister, a group of bums guzzled beers and bottles of red; they too looked as if they found the place to their liking, just like the junkies on the Street of Thieves, the hash-sellers, the tourist-robbers, everyone liked this place—though of course for different reasons. The medieval hospice continued to fulfill its fundamental purpose: it sheltered poor things, books, artists, drunks, and thieves.

At night, when Judit couldn't be bothered to go out, I would stroll for a while on the Rambla del Raval, a long oblong square planted with palm trees, dotted with benches, with a huge bronze
cat, an improbable statue, at one end—Pakis walked about in their
salwar kameez,
families took their children out in strollers, women and little Indian girls wore their beautiful multicolored dresses, gypsies got out chairs and argued on the sidewalk in front of a restaurant where there dined, before normal hours, some Brits who, from the color of their shoulders, looked as if they'd spent the day at the beach—this whole little clutch of people took the air, taking advantage of the truce of evening, and you could've believed, going up and down the Rambla del Raval, that there were no antagonisms, no hatred, no racism, no poverty—the illusion didn't last long; usually an Arab started annoying a Paki, or vice-versa, and you'd end up hearing shouts, which sometimes degenerated into something worse.

When the sun was low, I would go home; I had a new ritual: I would buy a bottle of Catalan red wine at the supermarket, some olives, and a can of tuna; I would settle myself on my tiny balcony on the fifth floor, open the bottle, the can, and the package of olives, take a book, and wait for night to fall, gently; I was the king of the world. Better than Abu Nuwas at the Baghdad court, better than Ibn Zaydún in the gardens of Andalusia, I was getting a little foretaste of Paradise, may God forgive me, I lacked only the houris. I would read a Spanish thriller (you have to make do with what's at hand) or classical Arabic poetry, with the help of the dictionary Judit had lent me—deciphering an obscure verse full of forgotten words was an immense pleasure.

I had discovered wine. A sin, indeed, I admit, but one of the most pleasant and least expensive: depending on the bottle I chose, it cost me between 1.50 and 3 euros. The powerful Kingdom of Morocco taxed alcohol pitilessly, so before I had to content myself with coffee with milk; here, beautiful Spain placed the fruit of its vines within reach of all budgets.

The sun ended up sinking almost directly opposite me, near the Sant Pau Church, I still had a mere half-hour of daylight left, then
it was too dark to read on the balcony, so I would watch the street for a little while; on the weekends, dozens of people would line up in front of the premises of the Evangelical, or Adventist, sect, or some similar minor heresy, our neighbors—they were very successful with the indigent, because they gave out free meals after service. One obviously can't prejudge the sincerity of the faith that animated these ragged flocks, who for all anyone knew might be real Protestants. In any case, this church (a former butcher shop) always had a full house—you could hear them singing hymns; then they spoke of love, the Lord and his lambs, and of Christ, who would return bringing justice at the Day of Resurrection.

It was strange to think that all our religions were essentially tales: fables in which some believed and others not, an immense storybook, where everyone could choose what he liked—there was a collection called
Islam
which didn't entirely tally with the versions contained in
Christianity,
which itself differed from the
Judaism
collection; these Protestants singing for the poor must have had their version too—I had picked up one of their instruments for evangelizing, it was a comic book in color, about a dozen pages long, in simple lines; all the characters were black, except for Christ, golden and haloed, with a beard and long hair: you saw a man building a wooden house with a hammer, getting married, having a family; his children grew up around his hut; everyone worked the earth. Then the man grew old, his hair turned white; finally he died and a gleaming Jesus accompanied him to heaven, among the angels.

The whores came out when the streetlights came on. They would arrange themselves at the entrance to the street, on the esplanade side; the Tariq ibn Ziyad Mosque must have been the only one in the world before which Amazons black as night, armed with sequined miniskirts, spangled bras, and high heels accosted the faithful—who to be sure paid them no heed. They were part of the decor, like the cops who were also starting their patrol at nightfall, in threes or fours, in rows, proud, very proud of exhibiting all the
force of order and the harshness of the law. The truth was that this was how they accelerated most illegal activities: as soon as they had turned the corner, you knew, as sure as you could tell from a watch hand or from a star, that they'd take a good five minutes to return. There were surveillance cameras, of course, but I never heard anyone in the street say they should be paid any attention to: just as God sees us all, Mr. Mayor could just as well observe us from his office on Plaça Sant Jaume—no one would find anything to object to, not the drunks who knocked back beers and raved almost directly beneath the camera in question, not the hash dealer, in the same spot all the blessed day, not the blacks, owners of a whole stable of prostitutes who were slaving away a little farther down the street for their profit, not the junkies who yelled at each other in front of the closed social aid center, not the Pakistanis who came, late at night, looking for beers in the underground coolers. No one looked the least bit bothered by these white, visible cameras attached to each side of the lane. They were the price you had to pay for fame.

And then, around eleven o'clock or midnight, I'd go for a little walk with Mounir, my co-renter. Mounir was one of the escapees from Lampedusa, one of the Tunisians who had landed in France during the Revolution thanks to the generosity of Berlusconi, to the great displeasure of the French government, ready to share anything except debts and indigents. Mounir had spent some months in Paris, well, Paris is easy to say, it was more like the suburbs, he was stuck in a wasteland next to the canal, left there to freeze and die of hunger. Those French bastards didn't even give me a single sandwich, you understand? Not even a sandwich! Ah it's a fine thing, democracy! Impossible to find work, we wandered around all day, from Stalingrad to Belleville to the République, we were willing to accept any job to survive. Nothing, nothing to do, no one helps you, over there, especially not the Arabs, they think there are too many of them already, one more poor darkie is bad for everyone. They think the Tunisian Revolution is very nice from far away, they
say, But now that you've done the Revolution, stay there, in your jasmine paradise full of Islamists and don't come bothering us with your useless mouths. You know what I think, my brother Lakhdar, all these Arab Revolutions are American machinations to bust our balls a little more.