by Becky Blake
The man called out a greeting, then came over and sat beside us, hiding his bag under the corner of our blanket. I looked around. The beach was deserted, but I guessed you could never be too careful if you were living in Spain illegally, like he probably was.
The beer seller was speaking quickly to Manu in heavily accented Spanish. I thought I heard something about money, the word marijuana maybe. After a few minutes, he turned to me, smoothing down his mustache. “Where are you from?” he asked in English.
“Canada.”
“Canada?”
“Yes.”
“My cousin lives in Canada!” He put his hand over his heart. “Céline Dion! Niagara Falls!” He started to sing “My Heart Will Go On.” He had a good voice. After a few bars he stopped. “What city?”
“Toronto.”
“Toronto! My cousin lives in Toronto! Kipling and 401! Do you know where this is?”
“Yes.” The trade school where I’d studied graphic design was out there. It was an ugly part of the city – just a bunch of highways and industrial strip malls near the airport, noisy airplanes flying overhead.
“It’s very nice – my cousin told me.” The beer seller looked out to sea. “Someday I will go there. Maybe to live.”
I recognized the expression on his face – I’d felt the same way about moving to Spain – but it was hard for me to imagine that someone’s dream could be to go to Highway 401 and Kipling Avenue in Toronto.
Down the boardwalk, people were beginning to arrive, most of them with jackets and scarves, walking little dogs. The beer seller stood up. It was time for him to go to work. He shook hands with Manu, then rummaged through his bag for a can of soda to display. “Goodbye, Canada!” he said. “Have a good day!”
I watched him walk off, then turned to Manu. I wasn’t sure how much he’d understood, so I tried to explain the conversation to him in Spanish. I was surprised at the number of words and expressions that were coming back to me from the time I’d spent with Rosa and her family growing up. The only thing I was having trouble with was conjugating the past, but maybe that didn’t matter. Sticking to the present with Manu would keep things very simple between us. It would be like nothing important had happened before we met – like everything that mattered started now.
Manu took a battered-looking apple out of his knapsack and cut it into pieces with his knife, handing me slices one by one and choosing the bruised parts for himself. We ate without talking, staring out at the endless procession of waves crashing into the shore. When the apple was finished, Manu wiped his knife clean, then used the blade to smooth flat an area of the sand.
“Do you know Jaume I metro station on the yellow line?” he asked.
“Yes.” It was the metro station closest to Peter’s apartment.
“Good. So this is the entrance,” Manu continued in Spanish, but slowed his words to make sure I could follow. He drew two sets of stripes with the tip of his knife, then pointed from one to the other. “Stairs. Escalator.”
“Okay.”
“And here, by the ticket machines” – he cut an X below the stripes – “would be the best place for you to stand.” He stopped and looked at me, reading back and forth across my face.
I studied the drawing again, and then I understood. He wanted me to help him rob someone. My face flushed as I realized I’d been waiting for him to ask me, hoping that he would.
“What would I have to do?”
“Just distract someone. Talk to him, keep him busy.”
“Would I have a disguise?”
“No. He’ll think you’re a tourist, and if you do it right, he won’t remember you at all.”
That sounded like a perfect job for me – to be there one moment and then forgotten.
Manu retraced the X in the sand. The wind was flapping the sleeves of his ratty T-shirt against his thin arms. “I have to send money to my family,” he said. “But whatever we get, I’ll share it with you.”
I took the knife from him and drew a circle around the X. “This is where you want me to wait?”
He nodded.
“Okay, I’ll be there.”
The yellow line of the metro made stops at the beach, the cathedral and the most expensive shopping street, so the trains were always packed with tourists. I hoped I’d understood Manu’s instructions. Espera. He’d said the word a number of times, but it was a verb that meant both to wait and to hope. In any case, I was doing both of those things: waiting for him by the ticket machines inside the Jaume I entrance, and hoping he was going to appear. It had been at least twenty minutes, but I didn’t think he’d abandoned me – he’d stashed my boots in his knapsack and loaned me a pair of his shoes to wear instead. I looked down at my feet, winter pale and too small against the rubber frame of his dirty white flip-flops. The shoes seemed like an obvious prop, a glaring indicator that something wasn’t right. To steady my nerves, I pretended to be waiting for a friend, pretended so hard I could almost picture her, another tourist who I’d greet with a hug before we smacked up the stairs in our unseasonal sandals, talking loudly in English.
I asked someone for the time. Ten fifteen. Peter would be at work already, no chance of running into him. Beside me on the wall there was a map of the city, sprawling and complex. At the top the streets were organized into a grid, but in the centre there was no pattern – just a broken plate that someone had tried to glue together. Superimposed over the city, the lines of the metro looked like a small child had drawn them with crayons: red, yellow, green, purple and blue.
I turned from the map just in time to see Manu coming down the corridor from the tunnel. He touched the leather cuff on his left wrist. I glanced at the man to his left and did a quick assessment: he was wearing a Pac-Man T-shirt and cargo pants, he didn’t look very fit. I watched him from the corner of my eye as he pushed through the turnstile. I guessed he would take the escalator instead of the stairs. Just before he passed, I turned and stepped on ahead of him, a shiver racing up my spine. I could feel the man at my back.
As we approached the top, I pretended my flip-flop was caught in the moving stairs. I hopped around, causing a minor traffic jam as the man reversed as far as he could on the escalator to avoid running into me. Manu was behind him.
“Sorry,” I said in English, turning and smiling. I was playing a clumsy tourist – a carefree girl backpacking around Europe on her parents’ money. I saw him glance down the front of my shirt as I bent to adjust my shoe. Then I walked off down the street, the finer details of the city leaping out at me for a moment: the lacy edge of a red fan in a shop window, the sweet smoky smell of hot chocolate and cigarettes as a café door opened and closed. After a block, I turned to look back. Both Manu and the escalator man were out of sight. I’d thought standing on Manu’s X might change me in some way, but I still felt almost the same. The only difference now was a new itch, just beginning: the question of what else I might do, how far I might go.
When I met Manu back in the courtyard, he pulled the wallet from the waistband of his jeans and handed it to me like a gift. I tore open the Velcro flap. Inside was the man’s face, an old picture on a gym membership. In just one moment, his entire day had changed. Manu and I had made that happen.
Manu frowned; I was taking too long. I dipped my fingers into the billfold and slid up the edges of the money. The colour was orange, fifty euros. I spread the bills with my fingers: one, two, three. Each of them was crisp and new, straight out of the bank machine.
Manu’s jaw relaxed. “You have good luck.”
It was funny he thought that; I wasn’t a lucky person at all. I slipped the gym membership out of its plastic sleeve to keep as a souvenir, then handed the wallet back to Manu. He held out one of the bills toward me.
I didn’t want to have a fifty-euro bill in my pocket when there were so many thieves around. “Can you keep it with yours?” I
asked. “I’ll get it from you later.”
Manu reunited the three bills and stashed them in his knapsack. “Let’s go have lunch,” he said. He wrapped the wallet in a piece of newspaper and tossed it in a trash can as we exited the courtyard. Back on the street, he stopped a passerby to ask her for a light. I watched the position of his hands to see if one would slip into her pocket, but they both stayed cupped around the tip of his cigarette. The woman tucked her lighter back in her purse, then continued up the street. She had no idea how close to a thief she’d just been. I wondered how Manu decided who to rob.
“What do you feel like eating?” he asked.
I shrugged. There was something else I needed now much more than food. We walked in silence for a moment before I could bring myself to ask.
“Hey, Manu? If we do it again –”
The corner of his mouth lifted into a half-smile; he’d been expecting me to want this. It was a relief to have someone finally know what I was really like.
“Could you show me how you choose a mark?”
He studied my face. “If that’s what you want,” he said, “we can go to La Rambla after lunch and I’ll show you some things.”
4
La Rambla was the pedestrian street that split the city down the middle. After stuffing ourselves with giant empanadas from a stall in the market, Manu and I started at the bottom of the street, down near the port where the cruise ships came in. The passengers surging from the boats looked anxious but determined: they had four hours of freedom to squeeze in as much sightseeing and shopping as possible. As we followed them around the statue of Columbus, they were all holding tightly to their purses or camera straps – they must have been given a warning on the ship – but by the second block they were already distracted. We watched a man buy a bottle of water, then absently stuff his change into his fanny pack without zipping it closed. A woman at a café set her purse on the ground beside her chair rather than holding it in her lap.
“Stupid,” I said, and Manu agreed.
We continued to follow the pack of tourists as they fanned out moving northward. La Rambla was so busy it forced people to stroll whether they wanted to or not. There were caricature artists and kiosks with exotic pets and flowers. There were men selling bird whistles or toys that lit up and went zinging into the sky. Attractive young couples handed out flyers for clubs and flamenco shows. Some of them did demonstrations, pulling the tourists into a dance.
“Anyone who touches you on La Rambla is trying to rob you,” Manu said, and after that, I looked at everyone more closely.
In between the kiosks, buskers were performing, some doing tricks, others frozen in place like statues while tourists posed beside them for photographs. As we walked by, one of the human statues jumped down off his crate. “Boo!” he said. He was spray-painted gold from head to foot and was holding an inflatable globe.
Manu introduced us: Atlas from Australia, Jane from Canada. He seemed to think we would feel some kind of connection as English speakers.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Good.” Atlas took a swig of water from a bottle. “You on vacation?”
“No, I live here now.” For the first time that actually felt true.
“Cool.” Atlas turned to Manu and switched to Spanish. Language between people was fluid in Barcelona. Catalan was the region’s official language but not everyone spoke it. This divided the city into a hierarchy of comprehension: locals from Catalan-speaking families were at the top, then Spaniards from other regions, followed by new immigrants who could speak Spanish, then those who couldn’t. Tourists were at the bottom.
The tourists passing by us now were slowing down to stare at Atlas. A couple days earlier, I would have done the same. Atlas sighed and cracked his neck. “Three more hours. Then I’m getting blitzed.” He climbed onto his crate and looked over at me. “I guess I’ll see you around.”
He froze in position, and Manu and I continued up the street. A block further along, we stopped in front of an antique-looking fountain. It was shaped like a giant urn, and it had an ornate black lamppost perched on top. When Manu twisted one of the gold taps, a gush of water came out. He bent down and turned his face skyward to drink, then stood back so I could do the same. The water was very cold, and it tasted like something metallic that had come from the sea: a moss-covered anchor, or a fish pierced by a hook. When I was finished, I stood up and wiped my chin.
Manu nodded in the direction of a passing man. “Guess,” he said.
“Guess what?”
“Tourist, local or thief?”
I looked at the man again. He was moving quickly through the crowd. “Thief?”
Manu shook his head. “Local. What about those ones?”
I followed his gaze to a pair of men holding matching tote bags. “Tourists?”
He shook his head again. “Thieves. You have to look at their eyes.”
I guessed wrong a couple more times, then I started to feel like Manu was messing with me – there was no way he could know for sure.
“I don’t get it.” A space became free on a bench and I plopped down to rest. Manu squeezed himself into the half-space beside me, and the woman on his other side got up and left. He smelled like he’d been setting off firecrackers in a damp sandbox. I wondered what I smelled like to him.
He pointed at a woman whose eyes were fixed on the scalloped roofline of a building. “Tourists: They’re looking at things to take pictures of, things to buy. Looking left, looking right, looking up.”
“Okay.”
“Locals.” He pointed again, this time to a man moving fast and focused along the edge of La Rambla, trying to avoid the crowd. “Looking straight ahead.”
I nodded. “And thieves?”
He scanned the crowd. “Do you see those two guys over by the metro entrance?”
“Yes.” I watched them for a moment. They were leaning casually against the wall, looking down into the metro stairwell as if waiting for someone to arrive. As people exited the station, the two men followed them with their eyes, assessing.
“Except for the vendors and the Mossos, thieves are the only ones on La Rambla who are looking at other people,” Manu said. “And there are almost always two of them.”
I thought about this. “Do you work with someone else?”
“Not anymore.” Manu picked up a longish cigarette butt from under the bench, straightened it out, then slid it into his almost empty pack.
It was obvious he didn’t want to tell me what had happened, but suddenly I had a lot of other questions. “Have you been doing this for a long time?”
“Not too long. Five months or so.”
Five months. That wasn’t long at all. For some reason, I’d been picturing him picking pockets since childhood, like Oliver Twist. “So before” – I was struggling with my Spanish; I moved my hand backward to indicate time reversing – “what are you doing for money?”
“What were you doing for money,” Manu corrected me. “I was working in construction.”
I thought about the security guard who’d ignored us sneaking in through the fence the night before. “At the hotel?”
“Yes.” Manu looked down and pressed the toe of his sneaker into one of the raised cobblestones. “The company brought a lot of workers from Ecuador. So they could pay us less.”
“Is that where you’re from?”
He nodded.
“And what happened to your job?”
“The financial crisis started. Now the Spaniards have to take the jobs they didn’t want before.” Manu stood. He was finished answering questions.
I jumped up to join him, reminding myself that from now on I should just stick to the present tense the way I’d planned.
Manu pointed with his chin at a man who was searching for a street sign.
“Tourist?”
I guessed.
“Good. Now you pick one.”
I looked around, the crowd splitting into three loosely braided strands. It was like a trick of the eye: once I saw the street divided, I couldn’t unsee it. I turned back to Manu. There were two of us and we were watching other people.
“Thieves,” I said. “We look like thieves.”
When we were finished with the guessing game, Manu gave me some tips on how to pick out a good mark. He explained that tourists were the safest bet because they were already distracted, and then instructed me on how to assess people for value. Older tourists were more likely to be carrying cash. Tourists wearing certain brands of watches and shoes were the ones whose wallets might be fullest.
It seemed like there were lots of potential marks, so I still didn’t really know how Manu chose one person over another – why one tourist’s vulnerability made her a target, and another’s didn’t. If he ever let me choose, I decided I would add another element. I’d try to pick a person who deserved it. To make my selection, I would have to get very close to people – close enough to see all of their flaws.
“Are you ready to try this for real?” I asked.
Manu shook his head. “Working on La Rambla is too dangerous. There are a lot of Mossos and too many other carteristas.”
I’d never heard the Spanish word for pickpocket before. It sounded like a combination of the words for wallet – cartera – and terrorist.
“What if we went somewhere else?” I asked.
“We can go back to the metro tomorrow, if you want. Today, we’ve already had our luck.”
Tomorrow. The word rippled through me in two directions. On one hand, it was disappointing to have to wait, but on the other hand, I was happy that Manu assumed we would still be together the next day. It wouldn’t hurt to stay with him for another night. I wondered if Peter had found my wallet in the kitchen yet – if he was worried about me.
“I should check my email,” I said.
“There’s a locutorio over there.” Manu pointed to an Internet café across the street. The front window was covered with flag-studded posters showing the long-distance rates for every country in the world. Inside, Manu told the woman at the counter that I needed to use a computer, and that he was going to wire some money to Ecuador. He took out two of the fifty-euro bills and passed them across the counter. I didn’t know whether the third bill was mine still, or if maybe it was ours now.