When I went back to the office after feeding the dogs, he wasn’t there; I heard a noise in the bathroom, of vomiting; he came out staggering.
“Are you okay, Mr. Cruz?”
He swallowed with difficulty, his mouth twisted, his face so tense that his eyes were rolling around like marbles.
“It’s starting, Lakhdar.”
He’s dead drunk, I said to myself.
He sat down on the sofa facing the desk; he seemed to be having trouble breathing; he crossed his arms over his stomach, looked as if he were in great pain.
“It won’t last very long . . . Watch closely . . .”
His lips were drawn out, he was grating his teeth; his face reddened, his shoulders were overcome with tremors, he lifted his knees to his stomach to relieve the pain.
“Mr. Cruz? Are you sick?”
He looked as if he wanted to answer, but no sound managed to form in his throat; he lifted his chin toward me, his hands were nervously patting each other. A dew of sweat covered his forehead, a drop of blood trickled from his nose, his lips turned purple, his head began to shake from right to left, leaning forward, as if to chase away the suffering, as if he couldn’t believe what was happening to him—but the movement transformed into a terrifying contraction of the tendons in his neck, to the side first, then backward; his Adam’s apple rose and fell, vibrated along his taut throat, like a big insect.
He was suddenly seized by a huge spasm that threw him onto the floor, his arm flung out, his legs arced as if he wanted to jump, he began shouting, I went over to him:
“Mr. Cruz, can you hear me?”
He still couldn’t manage to answer and I was overcome with terror—he couldn’t swallow, his neck was stiff, his chest lifted up, his back arched, his eyes looked as if they were about to explode. His body was a steel cable tensed with suffering, he was trying to speak, trying to grab my arm, but his wide-open hands twisted outward, the fingers stiffly spread apart—it lasted about twenty seconds, maybe a little more, and he went limp; he went limp, sighing, groaning, breathing very loudly, I shouted Mr. Cruz, what is the number for emergencies? The number for an ambulance? He didn’t answer, I rushed to the telephone, feverishly tried dialing 1-5, as in Morocco, nothing happened; I looked quickly at his desk to see if there was a phone book, but no.
Cruz was suddenly overcome by a second convulsion, even more violent than the first, if that was possible; his eyelids drew almost completely back into the sockets, disappeared behind the eyeballs, it was horrible to see, his face was blue, his feet managed to fold the thick plastic of his soles like cardboard, he rose up, moved by the absolute tension of all the muscles, in a sharp cry that seemed to come from the depths of his thoracic cage—tears started to well up in my eyes, Señor Cruz, Señor Cruz, I didn’t know what to do, I thought I should go find a neighbor, ran outside, ready to run the two hundred meters that separated us from the nearest house, or to stop a car passing by on the highway; once in the yard I remembered that bitch of a fence was always locked, instead of going all out and climbing it I chose to turn back and take the key from Cruz’s pocket, to be able to open it for the ambulance.
Cruz was resting on his left side, his body formed a horrible half-circle, his back curved like a bow without a string, pelvis forward, feet extraordinarily convex; he was a monstrous ballet dancer, whose round neck and wide-open mouth completed the atrocious pose. Even the tips of his fingers took part in this fixed contraction, whose energy could no longer be discerned. He was dead. I approached him, nothing came to my mind, not even a prayer.
Cruz had joined the drowned of the Strait.
The only movement on this mass of flesh was the second hand of his watch, which showed 6:43.
I remained stunned for a few minutes, kneeling before the inert body, before I gathered my wits, of course I didn’t understand, it took me years to try to understand the leprosy that was eating away at Cruz in his solitude; he had sprinkled me with his death, he had offered me his agony, an atrocious gift—I realized that he had poisoned himself right in front of my eyes; I went to splash water on my face, thousands, millions of contradictory thoughts were spinning in my head, now what, I saw the little bottle on the desk, the label bore a white skull on a red background. I paced in circles for a while, come on, now you have to act; I recovered Cruz’s key ring. I conscientiously searched through the desk drawers, but didn’t find anything important aside from my passport; I opened the little safe with the help of a key shaped like a cross, it contained a number of papers that had nothing to do with me, and almost five thousand euros in cash. I was becoming a thief. I had enough to live on for a while in Barcelona or elsewhere. The money of the dead, that’s the kind of idiotic thing I said to myself.
Of course there were the police. I had left my fingerprints everywhere, even on the bottle of poison, I was the king of dunces.
I gathered my things together and put them in a pretty ridiculous looking yellow and blue Cádiz soccer club sport bag that I found in the shed.
Anguish was becoming more remote. I avoided glancing one last time at Cruz, stroked the dogs for a long time to say goodbye to them, and left to wait for the bus.
A little later on in his travels, when he’s in the city of Bolghar, Ibn Battuta wants to visit the Land of Darkness, mentioned in the legend of Alexander the Great; he finally decides not to go there when he learns that in order to reach it you need a sled drawn by huge dogs, to cross the ice that surrounds it—he will be content to hear talk of it, to learn that the fur merchants trade for skins from its mysterious inhabitants, who live in total night: “After forty days of crossing this desert of ice, the travelers reach the Land of Darkness. The merchants leave large bags of merchandise some distance from their camp. The next day, they return to inspect their bags and discover in place of their things the skins of martens, squirrels, and ermines. If they like the skins, they take them, and if not, they leave them there for one more night. In that case the inhabitants of the Land of Darkness increase the quantity of furs or, if they don’t agree with the terms of exchange, replace the travelers’ merchandise. That is how one does business in the Land of Darkness, and the people who go there don’t know if they’re dealing with men or djinns, for they never see a soul.”
I left Algeciras with the sensation that the world was empty, peopled exclusively by phantoms that appeared at night to die or kill, to leave or take, without ever seeing each other or communicating with each other, and in the long night of the bus that brought me to Barcelona, city of Fate and Death, I had the terrible impression of crossing into the Land of Darkness, the real darkness, our own, and the further the bus advanced into obscurity on the highway in the middle of the desert, between Almeria and Murcia, the deeper the horror I had just witnessed seeped into me; Cruz’s face, moist and purple in its contractions, appeared to me among the flashes of truck headlights, in the midst of the reflections on my window.
Cruz was among the shadows, and so was I.
Unable to close my eyes, pursued by funereal images, bodies shriveled by the sea and the face of Cruz projecting his agony onto me, I waited for the liberation of dawn, when the bus was already drawing closer to Alicante.
III
THE STREET OF THIEVES
I arrived in Barcelona on March 3rd—I had left Tangier more than four months before. I didn’t know where to go. I must have looked like the poorest of the poor in my green parka and with my ’80s sport bag, haggard eyes, thick beard—if the cops ever arrested and searched me, I’d have trouble justifying the thousands of euros in cash I was carrying. Sheikh Nureddin’s money, Cruz’s cash, as if God always arranged to give me the means for my travels; I ate from the hand of Fate.
The bus went down Avinguda Diagonal, Diagonal Avenue, palm trees caressed the banks, the noble buildings of past centuries were reflected in the glass and steel of modern skyscrapers, the yellow and black taxis were countless wasps scattering at the sound of the bus’s horn; elegant and disciplined ped
estrians waited patiently at the crossroads, without using their superiority in numbers to invade the road; the cars themselves respected the zebra crossings and, stopping carefully at a blinking yellow light, let those traveling on foot cross when their turn came. The shop windows all looked luxurious to me; the city was intimidating but, despite my fatigue, finally arriving filled me with a new energy, as if the huge sparkling phallus of that multicolored skyscraper of the Torre Agbar over there in the distance, that pagan divinity, were transmitting its strength to me.
I blinked my eyes in the noon light and picked up my bag; the station serving points north, Estació del Nord, was apparently adjacent to a large park; a little lower down near the sea was the station for France, and then, to the right, the harbor. I found a phone booth and called Judit; she answered, and when I heard her voice I began crying like a kid, I must have been so exhausted. I said it’s me, it’s Lakhdar, I’m in Barcelona. She seemed happy to hear me, despite my sniveling; she asked me where I was, I replied at the Estació del Nord; she said she’d meet me not far from there, in a neighborhood called the Born, and then she added no, that’s complicated, you’ll never find it, don’t move, I’ll come get you, give me a quarter of an hour. I said thank you, thank you, and I hung up, I was overcome with a kind of dizzy spell and had to sit down on the ground, next to the phone booth. I thanked God, I said a brief prayer, and felt a little ashamed at addressing Him.
I stayed like that, my eyes closed, my head in my hands, for minutes on end, before gathering my wits. I wanted to look strong when Judit arrived—I felt dirty, as if I stank of corpses, the morgue, hatred; I hadn’t seen her since last summer, was she going to recognize me?
And then the energy of the Torre Abgar returned to me.
The energy of desire.
The first minutes were very strange.
We didn’t kiss, but smiled; we were both equally embarrassed. We exchanged a few banalities, she stared at me from head to toe, without coming to any conclusion—or at least, without revealing any of her conclusions; she just said, you want to have lunch? Which seemed a bizarre question to me, I answered yes, why not, and we began walking toward the center of town.
I told her about my last weeks with Cruz, obviously without mentioning the horrible end. She sympathized, and my cowardliness was such that I wanted her to feel sorry for me, to soften her. Seeing her again made my heart pound; I had only one desire, that she take me in her arms; I wanted to lie down next to her, right up against her, and sleep like that, in her warmth, for at least two days. On the way we had passed a triumphal arch in red brick that opened onto a wide promenade bordered with palm trees and elegant buildings. I secretly hoped the place where we were going wouldn’t be too chic, I didn’t want to be ashamed of my clothing. Fortunately she brought me to a bar on a pretty, quiet, shaded little square. I had to force myself to eat.
I couldn’t bring myself to ask Judit any questions, at least not the ones I wanted to ask; I questioned her about Barcelona, about the geography of the city, the neighborhoods, no personal questions; it all was terribly artificial. She avoided looking me in the eyes. Sadness began to invade me. I felt as if the ground were disappearing beneath my feet, time became thick, something heavy and tangible, Judit’s face seemed to have gotten darker, she had cut her hair, which made her look tougher. She spoke to me mostly of current politics; of the crisis in Europe, its harshness, of unemployment, of poverty that was coming back, as if from the depths of Spanish history, she said, of conflicts, racism, tensions, the insurrection that was being prepared. She had gotten very involved in the Movement of the Indignants, for some months. Also very involved in the Spanish Occupy movement, los Okupas, she said. Repression had never been so violent. The other day a twenty-year-old student lost an eye from being hit with a rubber bullet when the cops broke up a peaceful sit-in, she said. Spain is heading for its end, Europe too. Ultra-liberal propaganda would have us believe we can’t resist the diktat of the markets. Here they won’t take care anymore of the poor, the old, the foreigners. Right now the revolution is delayed because of soccer, Real, Barça; but when that’s not enough to make up for frustration and poverty, then there’ll be riots, she said.
I watched her, I wanted to take her hand, not talk about the crisis. At times, Cruz’s face came back to me, appearing between Judit and me; I had to shake my head to make it disappear.
She was fed up with school. She was in her last year, wasn’t taking many courses, didn’t have many class hours, and she felt her Arabic was still just as bad. She didn’t really know what to do, she wanted to spend some time abroad, maybe in Egypt or Lebanon, since Syria was in flames—I was hurt that she didn’t mention Morocco, I must’ve made a funny face; she immediately changed the subject.
“And you, what’re your plans? What are you going to do, are you going to try to stay here?”
“I don’t know, it depends a little on you.”
She lowered her eyes, and I knew then that everything I had imagined was true—she was with someone else.
She was suddenly shifting about nervously.
She didn’t say anything.
I was so tired, worried, broken by my stay with Cruz, the long hours awake in the bus, and the emotion of seeing Judit again that I got annoyed, it was the first time I raised my voice with her, I shouted something like you could tell me that you don’t want to see me anymore, shit, and I half-rose from my chair—the people at the table next to ours (bourgeois couple, sunglasses perched atop their heads, checked shirt, V-neck over shoulders) turned to us, I screamed at them to mind their own business, they looked offended.
Judit looked me in the eyes as if to say sit down, stop your histrionics. I became aware of my ridiculousness and sat back down.
“Listen, there’s no point getting worked up like that.”
She was whispering. She was ashamed. I took my courage in my hands, the courage that she didn’t have.
“You have someone else, don’t you?”
She denied it. She shook her head, repeating no, no.
“You’re a fucking slut.”
I had made use of my lowbrow detective-novel vocabulary, to make her react. She must not have understood what I said, since she didn’t get angry. She just added I don’t want to be with anyone at the moment, that’s all, which seemed to me an incredible piece of crap, a lie, a stupid remark.
I looked at the small oval plaza. Opposite, under the trees, there was a beautiful wooden porte cochere from another era, a chic restaurant; in front of me a pretty fountain shaped like a vase, with gold spigots; an old lady went by pulling a wheeled shopping bag.
We stayed for a while in silence, I didn’t know what to do or say.
She felt bad about leaving me like that, I could sense it.
“Where are you sleeping?”
“What the fuck do you care.”
No need even to add “bitch” or “cow,” since the phrase sounded so much like a bruise.
“Don’t get mad, it’s stupid. I’m just trying to help you.”
I didn’t know what I wanted anymore, I felt sorry for provoking her anger. The lady with the cart had crossed the entire square; a baguette stuck out of her cart; the couple next to us with the sunglasses asked for the bill.
She had only one desire, to leave, I knew that; she must have been tortured by guilt; I saw myself, with my poorly-shaved African mug, in my shitty khaki parka, without a goal, without anything, the world wasn’t even the world, it was a television set, a fake. I had a sudden burst of memories, Tangier, our neighborhood, Meryem and Bassam, I wondered what the hell I was doing there, on this square that was so pretty, so cute, facing Judit who didn’t want me anymore, God alone knows why.
I began talking in Moroccan.
I begged her, without articulating, very fast; I spoke to her of love, of my fatigue, of the Ibn Battuta, of Cruz, of the darkness of Algeciras, of our week in Tunis, of the memories on our balcony in Tangier, I told her she couldn’t throw
all that away in one fell swoop, she’d kill me.
She looked at me with a pained air. I wasn’t at all sure she had understood what I had just said.
She took my hand; she said something sort of definitive, like “I don’t have the strength,” which sounded dramatic and theatrical in Arabic; I felt as if we were acting in an Egyptian soap opera.
I was too exhausted, I muttered, whatever you want, I won’t bother you anymore; just point the way to a mosque, that’s all.
Judit looked at me with big eyes: a mosque?
A mosque, a bookseller, and a hotel that’s not too expensive, I added.
A supermarket, I’ll find that on my own.
I called the waiter, got out a nice, brand-new fifty-euro note, and didn’t let Judit pay, even though she wanted to.
CITIES can be tamed, or rather they tame us; they teach us how to behave, they make us lose, little by little, our foreign surface; they tear our outer yokel shell away from us, melt us into themselves, shape us in their image—very quickly, we abandon our way of walking, we stop looking in the air, we no longer hesitate when we enter a subway station, we have the right rhythm, we advance at the right pace, and whether you’re Moroccan, Pakistani, English, German, French, Andalusian, Catalan, or Philippine, in the end Barcelona, London, or Paris train us like dogs. We surprise ourselves one day, waiting at the pedestrian crossing for the signal to walk; we learn the language, the words of the city, its smells, its clamor—Barcelona woke up to the racket of the gas canisters being changed, to the Pakistani handling the propane gas and shouting Butaaanooooooooo in his orange uniform, accursed color, color of the worst profession in the world, since you had to cart 30-kilo canisters up the narrow staircases of apartment buildings, with no elevator, to the fifth or sixth floor for a tiny commission per bottle sold: in my neighborhood, the “Pakis,” whether they were actually Pakistani or Bengali, Indian or even Sri Lankan, were bottled gas peddlers, rose sellers, beer sellers late at night, grocers or telephone operators in the locutorios, the talking-places, that mix of phone-booth-equipped telecommunications office and internet café. In the beginning I went often, on the Rambla del Raval, right near my place, to that sort of establishment to consult the Internet—the rates were ludicrously low, and all countries and nationalities could be found there: Moroccans, Algerians, Western Saharans, Ecuadorans, Peruvians, Gambians, Senegalese, Guineans, and Chinese who called their families or sent money to their country by an international transfer system of liquid cash, from hand to hand, a system that came close to a racket since the commissions were so high, but which had the poetry of the modern world: you gave a hundred, two hundred or a thousand euros to a ticket office in Barcelona with the identity of the recipient, and the sum was immediately available in Quito or Lahore; dough doesn’t recognize the same boundaries as its owners, money that the migrants weren’t yet able to borrow by themselves in Spain could dematerialize in the innards of the Internet to transform into electrons, pulses, electronic mail, leave Dhaka and appear, instantaneously, in a computer in Barcelona.
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