Street of Thieves

by Mathias Enard

  As for me, even though I was happy with my setup in Barcelona, even though I liked my readings on the balcony, the life of the neighborhood, the Arabic classes, and everything I was discovering about life in Europe, languages, newspapers, books, my situation was not an easy one. They must still be looking for me for the Cruz affair, I couldn’t reasonably go see the cops to ask them about news of their investigation or explain to them that I had not (as they probably suspected) killed the gentleman: that meant I was stuck in Barcelona, locked up once again, but in a larger territory. This absence of future was a little heavy: I’d have liked to enroll in the university, but without a residence permit it wasn’t possible; and neither was working legally. I had to wait—I had in front of me a long wait of several years, so the police could forget me and for the economic situation in Europe could improve, which didn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon. Just as someone who has a slowly-progressing illness, almost painless in the early stages, readily forgets it in daily life, these questions didn’t torment me—at least not often. Cruz had joined the world of my nightmares, of my dead. From time to time I smoked some joints, in the middle of the night, when some too-horrible dream prevented me from falling back asleep: still the same themes, blood, drowning, death.

  I missed Bassam’s smile when we watched the Strait, his cheery, laughing peasant-face.

  With university ruled out, I tried to cultivate myself, to keep from wasting my time. I was aware that it was books that had procured the best jobs I had ever had, at the Propagation for Koranic Thought and with Mr. Bourrelier; I sensed confusedly that they gave me a painful superiority over my companions in misfortune, illegal like me—not to speak of an almost free pastime. Soccer and TV weren’t much more expensive, true, but I found it hard to get passionate about the saga of Barça, which had become, who knows why, the team of the Just and the Oppressed faced with the evil Whites of Madrid. I sometimes went with Mounir to watch a match in a bar—but without much enthusiasm.

  I went to the library, read essays on the history of Spain, of Europe, I took notes in a big notebook; I tried to learn a little Catalan, I had a little notebook for vocabulary where I wrote words, fragments of sentences, verbs. God knows why, but Catalan seemed a very ancient language to me, a very old little language, spoken by medieval knights and merciless crusaders—maybe because of all those Xs and strange phonemes.

  I also improved my Spanish and kept up my French, even if my kind of books were somewhat hard to find—I sometimes came across a few in used bookstores. I thought about buying an e-reader, but I hadn’t yet made up my mind. There were thousands of titles available for free online, all of French literature practically. It was tempting, even if according to my research there weren’t that many thrillers available. Under the pseudonym Eugène Tarpon, I took part from time to time in an online forum devoted to “Detective Literature”; I made virtual friends there who knew all the web’s thriller-resources.

  So I was reasonably well occupied, the intellectual of the Street of Thieves.

  At this rate, I’d soon be sprouting glasses.

  AND then on March 29th, the insurrection started, just as a pressure cooker left on the stove explodes when no one attends to it.

  The day before, Mounir had brought me to a bar to watch Barça play Milan in the Champions League, 0-0, a pretty boring spectacle but pleasant company: there were four of us Arabs sitting at a table drinking beers, cracking jokes and snacking on patatas bravas, a nice time, even if the soccer fans would’ve liked to see some goals and a win for their team. What always impressed me in these soccer bars is that there were girls, pretty young women who wore the Barça jersey, drank beers straight from the bottle and yelled at least as much as the men, it was wonderful—we talked about them among ourselves in a lingo that was a mixture of Moroccan, Tunisian, French, and Spanish, which is the language of the future, a new language, born in the bars of the lower depths of Barcelona; we all agreed, laughing, that there was a lack of girls in our joints at home—that’s because we don’t know how to play soccer, said Muhammed, the Rif native with his Berber accent, when we have a club like Barça, we’ll have chicks drinking beers and watching the matches too. That’s how it is. The two go together.

  His explanation was actually convincing, but Mounir raised an objection: that has nothing to do with it, look at France. They don’t know how to play soccer, they don’t have a decent team, but they still have girls with beers in the bars.

  “Yes, that is troublesome,” I said. “But France already won the World Cup. So you can establish a positive correlation between the general socceristic level and the number of females in bars.”

  “Doesn’t the African Cup count?”

  “For Tunisians, maybe; you Moroccans lost in the finals because there weren’t enough chicks in your bars, no doubt about it. Plus now we have freedom, and you don’t.”

  “True, and Egypt’s won the African Cup so often that Cairo is famous for its bikini-wearing supporters, who shout and throw beers at the screen during the rebroadcasts.”

  “Just look at the seventy supporters who died in the last match in Egypt, it was exclusively women, and cute ones at that, apparently.”

  “Who won the African Cup this year?”

  “Zambia.”

  “Are you messing with me? Where is that, Zambia?”

  “Those must be some girls they have in their cafés.”

  We laughed a lot. It did good to forget the daily petty thefts, the dishwashing in restaurants, the bags of cement, or simply exile.

  The unity of the Arab world existed only in Europe.

  The next morning, the whirr of a helicopter woke me up. A helicopter that was circling, quite low, above the center of Barcelona—we would hear it for twenty-four hours. We had gone to bed late, with our jokes about beers, girls, and soccer, we had even smoked a pair of joints together before going to sleep and all of a sudden I had completely forgotten there was a general strike. Strange idea, in any case, a general strike, planned, organized, with a fixed date, and for only twenty-four hours. If refusal to work has a weight, I thought from the height of my twenty years, it’s in the length of time, in the threat of its continuation. Not in Spain. Here the unions fought against the government for a single day, just one, and by dint of numbers: their leaders viewed the strike as a success or a failure not because they had achieved anything, which would have been a real success, but when they reached such-or-such a percentage of strikers. So the strike was an immense success for the unions (eighty percent of strikers, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators) but also for the government: it didn’t have to stray one iota from its policy, and didn’t even offer to negotiate, on any point. I don’t even know if that idea was on the agenda. The principle of the strike was that no one goes to work, that everyone demonstrates, and that’s that. One could see that Spain was beyond politics, in a world beyond such things, where the leaders no longer gave a shit about anyone, they just announced the weather, like the King of France in Casanova’s day: my friends, the coffers are empty, today it’s the functionaries who are going to pay the price. They’ve lived too well for years, their time has come. Tomorrow, filthy weather for health. Storms over schools. Put your kids in private schools. The last remaining employees of heavy industry who haven’t died of cancer have been fired. We’ve made the job market flexible, reformed contracts. The trial period is extended to a year: if you’re shown the door after three hundred sixty-four days you don’t qualify for unemployment compensation. This backhand notion of a minimum wage is profoundly leftist and binds the hands of entrepreneurs who want to create jobs, it must be fought. The minimum wage per hour of work is now at the level of Morocco, which has just increased it: it’s too high already to compete effectively against the competition. To fight the competition we need slaves, Catholic slaves who are content with their lot. Malcontents shouldn’t vote. Malcontents are dangerous alternatives and as such are excluded from democracy, they deserve nothing but clubbings
and mass arrests. The Spanish Episcopal Conference recommends Catholics to be parsimonious in matters of fertility, since a high birth rate in times of crisis unreasonably increases the expenses of the State: His Holiness Pope Benedict advocates a whole series of ecumenical measures like Mass and self-flagellation to overcome the excess of desire.

  All these things were in the papers, on TV; I even saw a report one day asserting that “the fingers of black people, which are not exemplary in the quality of their manicures, shouldn’t handle condoms, since it’s dangerous, they risk puncturing them, and for that reason the Pope has forbidden blacks to use condoms; what’s more,” added the commentator, “they don’t know how to read, so aren’t up to the task of understanding the instructions, which explains,” he said, “why there is more AIDS where condoms are distributed than where they are not available.”

  A real load of crap. When you heard things like that, it wasn’t the strike that loomed, but the Revolution. The media here seemed to fabricate the Kingdom from hatred, lies, and bad faith. The Spanish should have had their Arab Spring, started burning themselves alive, maybe then everything would have been different.

  There was something I didn’t understand: Europe was admitting that it didn’t have the wherewithal for its development, that it was all just an illusion, that Spain in fact was an African country like the others and everything we saw, the highways, the bridges, the skyscrapers, the hospitals, the schools, the daycare centers, was just a mirage bought on credit that was threatening to be retaken by the creditors. Would everything disappear, burn up, get swallowed by the markets, corruption and the demonstrators? If that was the case, a lot of people would end up on the Street of Thieves; a lot of people would fail, change their lives, die young, for lack of money to take care of themselves, lose their savings; their children would inherit a kick in the ass, would no longer go to nice schools, but to sheds where everyone would huddle around a wood stove—no one saw that coming. You had to come from far away to imagine what this transformation would be, you had to come from Morocco, from Sheikh Nureddin, from Cruz and his corpses.

  The helicopter wasn’t there for nothing, everything must have seemed more beautiful seen from the sky, which was clear that day. In the street it was quite otherwise. I hadn’t cancelled my class for the day: I was a strike-breaker. I had to go there on foot, since there was no subway. It was ten in the morning, and there were already gatherings, groups of guys with caps, flags, megaphones, and cops everywhere. Half the streets in the city were blocked off. The big brand names were closed, just a few small businesses braved the picket lines—to their detriment: I saw a baker forced to close by a dozen unhappy union members shouting “Strike, strike!” and threatening to smash in his window with axe handles, he took less than ten minutes to abdicate and give his employees the day off. On the other hand, explaining to the Chinese in the Ronda shops the concept of picketing was more complicated:

  “No work today.”

  “No work?”

  “No, it’s a general strike.”

  “We not on strike.”

  “Yes, it’s a general strike.”

  “We not on strike.”

  “Exactly, you have to close.”

  “We have to go strike?”

  But in the end, used to the proletarian struggles of the Single Party, the Chinese could also recognize a big stick when they saw one, and ended up lowering their shutters, for a few hours at least.

  Their job became even more clandestine than usual.

  In Gràcia, everything seemed calm. The streets were bathed in the blue-tinged coolness of a spring morning; Judit was waiting for the class, I arrived a little out of breath. Elena and Francesc couldn’t make it, they lived too far away to come by foot. Judit’s mother was there, it was the first time I met her; I was introduced as “Lakhdar, my Arabic professor.” She seemed much younger than I’d have thought; she wore skinny jeans, a blue T-shirt on which was written I would prefer not to; her name was Núria. I thought of my own mother, they must have been about the same age—but they didn’t have the same life, you just had to look at them to see that.

  The one-on-one class went well, even though Judit was a little absent. We had read a passage by Ibn Battuta that seemed to suit current events. Ibn Battuta is in India, with the Sultan Muhammed Shah, and he relates how a Sheikh named Shihab-ud-dun, very powerful and well-respected, refused to appear before the Sultan when he had been summoned; the Sheikh explains to the court messenger that “he would never serve a tyrant.” So the Sultan sent for him to be taken by force:

  “You say I’m a tyrant?”

  “Yes,” replied the Sheikh, “you are a tyrant, and among your tyrannies, there is this and that,” and he began to enumerate on a number of them, like the destruction of the city of Delhi and the expulsion of its inhabitants.

  The Sultan held his sword out to his vizier, saying:

  “If I am a tyrant, cut off my head!”

  “The man who calls you a tyrant is a dead man, but you yourself know perfectly well that you are one,” interrupted the Sheikh.

  The Sultan had him arrested and locked up for fourteen days with nothing to eat or drink; every day he was brought to the courtroom, where the judges asked him to withdraw what he had said.

  “I will not retract my words. I am made of the same cloth as the martyrs.”

  On the fourteenth day, the Sultan had a meal sent to him, but the Sheikh refused:

  “My belongings are already no longer of this world, take away this food.”

  When the Sultan heard this, he ordered that they make the Sheikh ingest four pounds of fecal matter; some idolatrous Hindus were in charge of executing the order: they spread open the Sheikh’s jaw with pincers, mixed the excrement with water, and made him swallow it.

  The next day, they brought him before a gathering of higher-ups and foreign ambassadors, so he would repent and withdraw what he had said—he refused once again, and was decapitated.

  May God have mercy on his soul.

  Once the text was translated, as an exercise, we discussed, in literary Arabic, the Sheikh’s determination and this question: Should one give in to the powerful? I said I didn’t think the Sheikh’s sacrifice served much purpose. He would certainly have been more useful had he stayed alive and continued the struggle, even if it meant going back on his statement. Judit was wiser than me, and more courageous too, perhaps:

  “I think his sacrifice was useful—tyrants have to know what they are. The Sheikh’s determination even to the point of death showed the Sultan that there are ideas and people who cannot be conquered. What’s more, if the Sheikh had retracted, Ibn Battuta would not have told this story, and his struggle would have remained unknown to all, whereas his example is of great benefit.”

  She expressed herself well, her Arabic was fluid, with fine expressions and no grammatical errors.

  We began talking politics; I thought of the Syrians, tortured and bombed every day, and of the courage they needed to continue fighting, in the long war against their Sultan who must also have known perfectly well that he was a tyrant.

  I left Judit around one o’clock; I suggested we go out for a walk, or a coffee; she declined with a pretty smile. She had plans in the afternoon to go to the demonstration with her friends.

  So I was free as the air, I went to sit on the Plaça del Sol, on a bench, I read a thriller by Vázquez Montalbán for a few hours; his detective, Pepe Carvalho, was the most disillusioned, pretentious, antipathetic guy on earth; his plots were incredibly boring, but his passion for food, sex, and the city ended up making his books amusing. In the end, I learned quite a few things about Spain and Barcelona, and some new words and expressions that were always useful. Once I’d finished the book, I made my way to the center of town. The helicopter was still wheeling around, lower down; the wind carried a burnt smell, layers of smoke weighed down the air; distant police sirens ripped through the seeming calm of the streets and when I emerged at the corner of Avin
guda Diagonal, in front of one of the largest hotels in Barcelona, I encountered hundreds of people with signs; black and red anarchist flags floated on the obelisk, brandished by dozens of demonstrators who had climbed the pedestal; the crowd seemed to be occupying the entire Passeig de Gràcia. The window of the Deutsche Bank had been shattered by a hammer; I saw a group of young people attacking the savings bank next door, chanting and spraying graffiti with red spray-paint—the helicopter was very close now, above us, it must have been observing the activists; down below, toward the Plaça de Catalunya, immense columns of smoke rose to the sky and you could see the glimmer of flames—the city was burning, to the sound of loudspeakers shouting slogans, chants, music of all sorts, sirens, it was a deafening, brutal, blinding spectacle, which made your heart beat in unison with hundreds of thousands of motionless spectators, prevented from moving by their own numbers; the closer I got to the heart of Barcelona, along side streets, the more fires there were—in the middle of an avenue, a barricade of trashcans was burning itself out with a hellish smell. On Plaça Urquinaona, there was a pitched battle—in the flames and smoke, a multitude of young people, compact and moving, were advancing against two police vans, throwing their flagstaffs, bottles, trash at them, then spreading out in disorder when the vehicles began moving, two fat marine-blue creatures, their eyes covered by metal grills, which quickly belched out their occupants, helmeted, wearing gas masks: some were carrying rifles, they began shooting into the crowd, flashing detonations from the barrels of their weapons—the young people moved back under the hail of rubber bullets and the tear gas; some of them, scarves over faces to protect themselves from the gas, continued their offensive—they had nothing left to throw except insults.

  I was at the side of the street, sheltering with some other passersby in a doorway. Opposite us, a fire-truck was trying to control the flames emerging from a Starbucks, a glaring symbol of American capitalism, whose windows hung in tatters, a strange cloth of broken glass. From time to time, a cop would advance, shoulder his weapon, and aim calmly, before falling back in with his colleagues, like a hunter or a soldier, and one wondered what effect these projectiles could have, so extraordinarily violent and frightening were the shots.