Street of Thieves (5 page)

“Drop these stories about an attack, come on, we'll go out. The Sheikh won't come back before tomorrow.”

I saw Bassam stare at me as if I were the one who was completely crazy.

“I have to pray to purify myself.”

I sighed. I wondered what Sheikh Nureddin had done to him, or what he had promised him. Houris in Paradise, maybe. Bassam had a weakness for stories about houris, who were always virgins you could fuck for eternity on the shores of Kawthar, the Lake of Abundance in the hereafter.

But I too had my houris.

“You know what, I met two great girls last night, two Spanish students. They're staying till tomorrow. We smoked a joint together, and I'm supposed to meet up with them soon.”

“Stop joking around.”

But his eyes had lit up.

That made a big impression, in his head.

“I don't believe you.”

“That doesn't matter. I need you to come with me, to take care of the second one. I won't lie to you, she's not as pretty as the first, but she's still nice. Come on, do this for me.”

“So, what're their names?”

That was it, I had him hooked.

“Yours is Inez and mine is Carmen.”

I could have thought of something more original, but that had come out point-blank, without a second's hesitation.

“And how old are they?”

“I don't know, twenty-four, twenty-five,” I said.

“Oh man, it sucks, but I promised the Sheikh I'd stay here and wait for his orders. And spend the night praying.”

“We can stay for a little bit with them, and then you can come back and pray, what's the difference?”

I thought: if all of Sheikh Nureddin's recruits were as easy to manipulate as Bassam, the victory of Islam won't happen very soon.

He suddenly took on the relieved look of someone who'd made a difficult decision.

“Okay, but just for a little bit, alright? Afterward I'll come back.”

“Whatever you want.”

Now I'm committed, I thought. I'll be mincemeat when he finds out that the fat Inez and the beautiful Carmen stood us up.

No matter, I'll improvise.

And it will still be something that Sheikh Nureddin won't have, those few hours of prayer. A tiny victory.

Bassam combed some of my hair gel into his hair, breathed into his hand to check his breath; he was trembling with eagerness.

“Let's speak Spanish on the way, to practice a little,” he said.

“
Con mucho gusto, hijo de puta
,” I replied.

And we were off; a warm light rain was beginning to fall.

THE
shower didn't last, but the weather could provide me with an excuse for the absence of our imaginary friends; everyone knows that Spaniards never go out when it rains. We walked for half an hour to reach the center of town. Bassam kept bombarding me with questions in an Iberian mixed with French and Arabic, pretty incomprehensible but delightful; he wanted to know everything, precisely where I had met these young women, what we had said to each other, where they came from, etc. I improvised these details, hoping to remember them so I wouldn't betray myself later on—Valencia (Madrid or Seville seemed too obvious to me), students, on vacation between semesters, and so on. I wondered if Bassam was really tricked or if the game let him dream, like me. I talked about it so much I was almost disappointed myself not to find them at the meeting place, supposedly in a tearoom near the Place des Nations. I bought a cake for Bassam, who devoured it in a few minutes, nervousness no doubt. We looked sort of foolish, us two, in this pastry shop; all around guys were on dates with their fiancées, they all wore pretty, colorful veils, and were stuffing themselves with lemon tarts or rosewater milkshakes while their men, mustachioed, no doubt dreamed of groping their breasts, thinking it was a pretty good deal, a few sweets in return for a session of heavy petting afterward in the nice warmth of a car or on a sofa. I think I was a little jealous of these fellows just slightly older than us, they had acquired the right
to slip their hands into the panties of their cousins in exchange for an official engagement and a little cash for rings and necklaces. As for us, we were waiting for our phantom Spanish girls, looking like out-of-town yokels slathered in hair gel.

Bassam was fidgeting next to the crumbs of his black forest cake, whose candied cherry sat prominently, abandoned, in the middle of the plate.

I pretended to get impatient too, what the hell are they up to, what the hell are they doing, five more minutes and I'll tell Bassam we should go drown our sorrows in beer somewhere—it was raining again.

It's well known, Spanish girls don't go out in the rain.

Suddenly I saw Bassam leap out of his chair; he craned his neck like a giraffe and gave me a few kicks under the table. I turned around; two young European girls had just come in; brunettes, with long hair worn down, bangs over their eyes, they wore harem pants, dozens of bracelets on their forearms, leather handbags and clogs made from the same material: Spaniards without a doubt, incredible. Actually no, it wasn't all that incredible, but it placed me in a delicate position.

“No, it's not them,” I said to Bassam.

He looked at me disconcertedly, sighing.

The two girls must have entered the bakery for shelter from the rain.

Bassam was irritated, he began wondering if I hadn't been taking him for a ride; the fact that two Spanish girls came in as we were waiting for two other ones gave him the feeling that something wasn't right. Young Iberians strolling in pairs in Tangier in this season weren't as common as all that.

An idea came into his head:

“Go ask them if they maybe know Inez and Carmen.”

I almost replied Who?, but remembered the names of my two ghosts just in time.

“Maybe they're in the same group.”

He wore a challenging look on his face, a dangerous look; he was trying, above all, to test me, to find out whether or not I had lied to him.

I sighed; I could tell him I was too chicken, he wouldn't have understood. I saw him again the way he was the day before, cudgel in hand, beating the bookseller; I wondered what the hell I was doing there, in a tearoom with my pal the madman with the pickaxe.

“Okay. I'll go.”

Bassam was literally licking his chops, his fat tongue slid over his upper lip to gather the last bits of chocolate shavings; he picked up the candied cherry and popped it into his mouth, I turned my eyes away before seeing if he chewed it.

“Okay. I'm going.”

Never had I dared to approach a foreign girl directly; I had talked about it a lot, we'd talked about it a lot, Bassam and I, during those hours we spent looking at the Strait; we had lied a lot, dreamed a lot, rather. He was looking at me with his naïve, brotherly look, I remember having thought about my family, my family is Bassam and Meryem and no one else.

“Okay. I'm going.”

I went over to the girls' table, I'm sure of that; I know I said something to them; I have no idea in what gibberish, in what babble I managed to make myself understood; I just know—I had all the time in the world to think it over later—that I looked so sincere, so little interested in them with my story of Carmen and Inez, I so hoped they knew this Carmen and this Inez, that they didn't suspect a thing, they answered me frankly, and it all happened in the most natural way in the world, and then they saw clearly, as they heard Bassam, as they saw Bassam's face, that it wasn't a trap but that there was indeed, in Tangier, a Carmen and an Inez, floating in the air like phantoms, and they were sorry for us, but it's
raining, you know, they said, it's raining, and I laughed internally, I had a good laugh thinking that the rain, to which we never pay any attention, the rain can change a fate as easily as God himself, may Allah forgive me.

LOOKING
at them carefully, they weren't all that alike, our two Spaniards; they came from Barcelona, their names were Judit and Elena, one was darker, the other rounder; both were students and were coming—a miracle—to spend a week in Morocco, on vacation, exactly as I had imagined, on their winter break, or spring break, I don't remember anymore, but for me it was the Arab Spring arriving, let them send us nice students, that's what all revolutions were for, girls you could picture wearing extraordinarily refined lingerie and who were inclined to show it, without annoying you with questions of family, religion, propriety, or good manners, rich girls who, if they took a liking to you, could allow you to cross the gleaming Straits with a single signature, introduce you to their parents absent-mindedly, this is my friend, and the father would rightly think you looked suspiciously dark-skinned but would nod his head as if to say well, my girl, you're the one who decides, and we'd end up happy as God in Spain, home of black ham and the gateway to Europe.

Bassam's eyes said all this, all of it except for the pork, of course; he was looking at the girl in front of him like a passport with photos of naked girls instead of visas, so much so that Elena took her time arranging her T-shirt over her shoulders to hide her chest, a gesture that Bassam interpreted not as modesty but as provocation—she also pulled up her bra, annoyed by his looks, without realizing that her action called attention to these objects concealed from Bassam, that her slender hands on her own skin, grasping the strap, pushing
aside the cloth to place her fingers on it, and then effecting a slight upward movement accentuated by the involuntary sound of elastic, was making sweat bead across Bassam's forehead, who couldn't tear his eyes away from her décolleté, those salt or rather pepper shakers blocked by the whiteness of the secret and yet so-visible cloth, and Bassam licked his index finger, unconsciously licked the tip of his index finger before crushing the crumbs of black forest cake scattered over his plate so they would stick better, without saying anything, devoted to his contemplation; Elena was trying to defuse this visual trap with language, she was gesticulating and articulating words to make the boy's gaze rise twenty-five degrees and pass from her chest to her face, as is the custom with people who don't know each other, but his desire, those breasts and that hand that got caught in the cloth inspired so much shame in Bassam that he was unable to look Elena in the eyes, since that would have been like looking his own thoughts, his being, and his whole education in the face, and all this kept him from both lifting his head and from truly enjoying, sneakily the way the Europeans do, the extraordinary spectacle, the excitation provoked by chastity when, despite herself, she contradicts herself, denies herself by unveiling, to the imagination of the one contemplating her, what she is trying to hide.

Bassam was just more sincere than I, simpler perhaps; it's a question of temperament, or of patience; I talked a lot with Judit; from time to time I even had a question for Elena; I was trying, I struggled, me too, to make out what she might be hiding under her blouse, discreetly, without insisting, I managed to keep my eyes meeting hers, but when she turned her head to address her friend or stare annoyedly at poor Bassam I indulged to my heart's content, while still sadly acknowledging that the girl whom fate had placed opposite me was not the better endowed of the two, no matter, since from the start Judit seemed closer, more open, and more smiling.

Very soon my three words of Spanish were not enough for conversation, so we switched to French; it was, I think, the first time I
actually spoke with foreigners, and I had to search for my words. Fortunately Judit's Catalan accent made it easier for me to understand. Bassam said nothing, or almost nothing; from time to time he would mutter something in an impenetrable idiom; when he found out that these two angels fallen from the sky were studying Arabic in Barcelona, he began speaking in classical Arabic, just like one of Sheikh Nureddin's sermons, not counting the grammatical mistakes. He began asking Judit and Elena if they knew the Koran, if they had already read it in Arabic, and what they thought of Islam. He had to repeat each question two or three times, because he spoke quickly and articulated poorly, his eyes lowered.

The night before we were taking part in a punitive expedition, with our cudgels, and tonight we were converting two foreign girls to the religion of the Prophet. Sheikh Nureddin would be proud of us.

I found it hard to believe that they really were studying Arabic, that is, that they were interested in my country, my language, my culture; this was a second miracle, a strange miracle, which might make you wonder if it could be diabolic—how could two young women from Barcelona be so interested in this language that they wanted to learn it? Why? Judit said her Arabic was very bad, and that she was ashamed to speak it; Elena launched into it more easily, but her pronunciation was like Bassam's in Spanish or French: incomprehensible. I was a little ashamed; around us the guys who were watching their fiancées drink milkshakes and inhale deeply, eyes closed over their straws, weren't missing a scrap of our conversation. They were definitely thinking to themselves: look at those two idiots, they've unearthed a pair of tourists and they're talking to them about the Prophet, what assholes.

I suggested we go somewhere else. Bassam whispered something to me in Moroccan, very quickly, very softly.