My street was one of the worst in the neighborhood, or one of the most picturesque if you like, it answered to the flowery name of Carrer Robadors, Street of Thieves, a headache for the district’s town hall—street of whores, of drug addicts, drunkards, of dropouts of all kinds who spent their days in this narrow citadel that smelled of urine, stale beer, tagine, and samosas. It was our palace, our fortress; you entered through the little bottleneck on Carrer de Hospital, and you emerged on the esplanade of modern buildings at the corner of Carrer de Sant Rafael, which opened onto the Rambla del Raval; opposite, on the other side of Carrer Sant Pau, began Carrer de Sant Ramon, another fortress—between the two, the new movie theater, supposed to transform the neighborhood by the lights of culture and draw the bourgeois from the North, the well-to-do from Eixample who, without the geographical-cultural initiatives of the City, would never come down here. Of course the lovers of auteur films and the clients of the four-star hotel on the Rambla del Raval had to be protected not only from the excesses of the rabble, but also from the temptation of going to the whores or buying drugs, and so the zone was patrolled 24/7 by the cops, who often parked their van at the end of our Palace of Thieves: their presence, far from being reassuring, on the contrary gave the impression that this region was under surveillance, that there was real danger, especially when the patrol was large, armed to the teeth, and in bulletproof vests.
By day, whoring was present, but somewhat limited; by night in the high season, dead-drunk foreign tourists got lost in our alleys and sometimes let themselves be tempted by a pretty black chick they’d take from behind, in a doorway, out in the open: I often saw, late at night, the moving shimmer of white buttocks breaking through the penumbra of corner spaces.
Our building was at the start of the Street of Thieves, at its narrowest part, close to Hospital Street; it was a typical neighborhood building, old, ruined; one of those that, despite the efforts of the owners and the city hall, seemed to resist any renovation: the steps in the stairway had lost half their tiles, the woodwork was warped, the walls were ridding themselves of their coating in large sections whose debris littered the landings; electric wires hung from the ceiling, the old ceramic sockets hadn’t seen the nose of a light bulb for ages, and the rusty, dented mailboxes gaped apart, disjointed or wide open, when they still had a door. The stairway was peopled with cockroaches and rats and it wasn’t rare, climbing upstairs at night, to surprise a fat black rodent sucking at the needle of an abandoned syringe, to extract the little drop of blood—the creature would skitter away through a hole in the wall of an apartment, and you’d always shiver, thinking the same thing could happen on our floor.
The drug addicts came from the social aid center that was reserved for them a little farther down the street, and they’d look for a place to shoot up; in adjacent streets, a lot of them resold the methadone the municipality gave them. They entered buildings whose doors didn’t close properly, climbed up as far as their physical condition allowed them, sometimes to the roof, where they didn’t risk being chased out by the occupant with kicks or a broom handle. You felt sorry for them. Most of them were wrecks of stupefying thinness; they had abscesses on their arms, pustules on their faces; a lot of them spoke to themselves, cursed, swore, crushed their cans of beer, which they emptied one after the other, waiting for better; sometimes you saw them staggering, silent, blissful, emerging from a building, and you knew they had just injected themselves, in a hurry, sitting in the midst of roaches, with their dose of happiness. When they had money, they’d buy themselves a bowl of soup at the Moroccan restaurant a little farther down the street, and would stay there a long time, watching TV, looking absent; the restaurant owners were generous, they tolerated these phantoms who paid and stole nothing but teaspoons—they just didn’t let them use the bathrooms. The drug addicts even had a little park to themselves, a corner of greenery that no one denied them, not even City Hall: a little more to the south, near the harbor, against the ramparts of the Gothic Arsenal, behind an embankment that must once have protected an old moat, there was, two meters down, a square of grass invisible from the street—agents of municipal cleanliness didn’t often go down there, and even the cops, on the principle that anything invisible isn’t annoying and thus does not exist, only rarely bothered the junkies. There were women and men, even though it was sometimes hard to tell what sex they were; they lived among themselves, argued among themselves, died among themselves, and if they weren’t the most elegant or the cleanest inhabitants of the neighborhood, they were, along with the rodents and insects, among the most harmless.
Except sometimes, just as a dog at bay can show its teeth and try to bite an aggressor, you saw some of them turn violent; I remember an incredible fit of madness, one day, when I was on my balcony calmly observing the goings-on in the street, one of those guys emerged from his methadone stupor in a rage; he began shouting, then screaming incomprehensible curses, hitting his fist against the wall, then against a passing Pakistani who didn’t understand what earned him this deluge of bruises; two people came to his aid: despite his skinniness, the addict had immense, almost divine strength, three young men couldn’t manage to control him but just tear him away, trying to grab him around the waist, his clothes were much less resistant than he—first his T-shirt tore, then his belt gave out, he fought like a demon and sent his aggressors rolling with huge vengeful kicks in the shins, the balls, until he was just in his underwear, he fought in his underwear like a ridiculous warrior, thin and meager, his legs covered with sores, his arms crusted with scabs and tattoos, and it took five people, two cops, and an ambulance to bring it to an end: the fuzz managed to handcuff him, the men in white gave him an injection and then strapped him to a stretcher to take him God knows where—there was a real sad beauty in this last battle of the poor naked man, dispossessed of his brain and his body by heroin; he was fighting against himself, against God, and the social services, which to him were identical.
The whores also provoked pity, but of another kind. Some were nasty pieces of work, sharp, dangerous she-wolves who didn’t think twice about robbing customers or scratching the eyes out of a bad payer; they showered insults on males who refused their advances, calling them homos, fairies, impotents. Most of the women came from Africa, but there were also a few Romanians and even one or two Spaniards, including the one sitting under a porch at the entrance to the street, Maria, something of a concierge for our palace. Maria was in her forties, somewhat plump, usually smiling, not very pretty, but nice; she sat there in front of her door every afternoon and evening; she would spread her legs and show us her thong, calling us her little darlings when we walked by her: I would always politely reply, hello Maria, quickly checking out her cunt, it did no harm to anyone, it was good neighborliness. I never dared go up with her—because of the age difference, first of all, which intimidated me, and because of the memory of Zahra, the little whore in Tangier, which saddened me. Most of the regular customers were immigrants, broke foreigners who haggled over the price, which made Maria shout: she’d spit on the ground, screaming like a pig, Then go see the black girls, at that price! The sex business was in mid-crisis, too, apparently. Maria lived with a guy who was a truck driver, or a sailor, I forget—in any case he wasn’t there much. The African girls had pimps, mafiosi to whom they had sold their bodies in their native countries, for the price of the crossing to Europe: I don’t know how long they had to get laid by the poor and the tourists before they could get their freedom back—if they ever did.
There was also a bicycle repair shop, a poultry dealer, some illegal fridges for the beer-selling Pakistanis, some storehouses for roses for the rose-selling Pakistanis, some poor Moroccan families, some poor Bengali families, some old Spanish ladies (who had known the neighborhood since before the war and who said that, aside from the nationality of the whores and thieves, few things had changed), and some young illegal immigrants like us, mostly Moroccan, some of them underage, kids hanging around waiting for a
low trick to dispel their boredom as much as to make themselves a little dough: rob tourists, sell them fake hash, nick a bicycle.
And just at the corner, a mosque, the Mosque of Tariq ibn Ziyad, glorious Conqueror of Andalusia, which was why I had ended up in the neighborhood: it was the only one Judit knew, one of the oldest in Barcelona, situated on the ground floor of a renovated building. It was clean and quite large.
There were also two booksellers not far away, a big underground supermarket nearby, and a used-book market every Sunday within walking distance, so I was content. Sad, my heart broken by Judit, but content.
I looked for news of Cruz’s death; the only thing I could find was a tiny item in the Diario Sur:
TRAGEDY IN ALGECIRAS POISONED BY ONE OF HIS EMPLOYEES
The owner of a funeral enterprise, Marcelo Cruz, was found dead at his place of work from strychnine poisoning. It was one of his neighbors and collaborators, the Imam of the Algeciras mosque, who called emergency services. The precise circumstances of the tragedy are still unknown but, according to the National Police, Mr. Cruz was poisoned by one of his employees, who fled after robbing him.
So I was being sought for murder and theft.
It wasn’t a surprise, but seeing it in the paper brought a lump to my throat. Fortunately, Cruz hadn’t told the authorities about my presence; he didn’t have a work permit for me, hadn’t photocopied my identity papers, so there was no clue, aside, no doubt, from my fingerprints and my DNA—the Imam didn’t know my last name: but he could still describe me, indicate my name was Lakhdar and that I came from Tangier. That was much more than the cops needed to recognize me in case of arrest, especially with a first name as uncommon as mine.
I thought again of Cruz’s dogs, I wondered who would take care of them. Maybe because they were the only glimmer of light in the darkness of the last weeks, I missed their mechanical tenderness, their fur and their breathing.
To keep from being arrested, I had to lay low on the Street of Thieves.
Everything seemed very far away to me.
Judit, closer than ever, seemed far away.
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 see
med 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.
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