To get to the Street of Thieves, I had to cross the police line—or else retrace my steps, walk toward the university and from there burrow into the Raval, but I thought the university square would also be on fire, if not under fire and sword.
Subversion was everywhere, you could feel the violence and hatred of the boys in blue rising: they were rushing around, restlessly brandishing their long clubs, their rifles, their shields—opposite them, the young people lowered their pants to show their asses, called the cops assholes and sons of whores; a little group dismantled some metal trashcans to throw at them, others, oddly, attacked a tree, maybe to turn it into a giant spear. The confrontation was unequal and reminded me of a battle of conquistadors, with armor and harquebuses, against a troop of Mayan or Aztec civilians I had seen an engraving of in a history book. Conquest was on the march.
The moment I decided to go behind the forces of order to try to cross, the charge began. About fifteen of the fuzz ran forward, clubs in hand; four others covered their flanks and headed toward us, shoved us bluntly aside, a respectable gentleman in his fifties began shouting, saying he lived on the other side of the street; the masked cop yelled Clear the way clear the way, he landed his club in the gentleman’s back, who ended up taking to his heels, indignant, tears of rage in his eyes—we had to surge back to the upper part of the city, which is precisely the opposite of where I had to go. Violence and hatred; I felt rage rising within me, rage and fear; I tried to call Judit on her cellphone to find out where she was—no signal. The police must have cut off the networks to prevent demonstrators from coordinating with each other via texts.
The city was wavering between insurrection and festivity—the Gran Via was still full of people, I passed an old lady carrying a sign saying “He who sows poverty reaps rage,” a little girl holding the string of a balloon that read “Enough budget cuts,” students chanting Rajoy, chulo, te damos por culo, Rajoy, you pimp, we’ll give it to you from behind, and other pleasantries along those lines, in the stench of burning trash and tear gas—strangely, a little bar tucked behind some scaffolding was open, I decided to take a rest and wait for things to calm down a little. I ordered a coffee which I eked out—the TV was showing the day’s events live, I saw the battle scene I had just been part of on Plaça Urquinaona, taken from a different angle: it was a very strange sensation to think that behind those policemen, on the left, at the corner of Carrer Pau Claris, they could have seen me. The TV was the periscope of a lost submarine.
Night fell. I was afraid of being arrested along with a group of activists by accident, so I decided to make a big detour to get to my neighborhood, my fortress, the Palace of Thieves: to go by Carrer Diputació to Villaroel, go down to the Sant Antoni Market and enter the Raval by Carrer Riera Alta. A detour that took a good forty-five minutes, but that should prevent me from finding myself by chance in the midst of a club-wielding horde of police. On Diputació, at every street corner, you could see, five hundred meters lower down on the left, around Plaça de Catalunya, the white emanations of gas mingling with the black smoke of trashcans on fire. I managed to meet up with Judit—she had left the demonstration to go back up to her place when the cops charged at the corner of Diagonal and Passeig de Gràcia; her voice was hoarse; I asked her if she was all right, yes yes, she answered, of course; I didn’t press further.
The detour was a good idea—aside from local policemen on motorbikes who prevented the cars from reaching the center, I passed only groups of store owners talking in front of their half-closed shops, or young people with grave, frightened faces climbing up from University Square.
The two temporary buildings of the Sant Antoni Market were a gateway in imaginary ramparts; behind them opened the Raval and, in its heart, the Street of Thieves—I was safe. God knows why, the neighborhood was blacked out. No street lights. Maybe an effect of the strike, or a coincidence; a few shops were open and threw a strange wavering glow onto the asphalt, adding an even more medieval look to our castle of the poor. On Carrer Robadors, nothing had changed: our blacks were keeping a lookout at the corner, waiting for God knows what that never arrived; Maria was in front of her door, skirt hiked up to mid-thigh; fat cockroaches scurried out of my way as I climbed the stairs; Mounir was in front of the TV, feet up on the coffee table, in socks. I collapsed next to him on the sofa, worn out—I had walked for almost four hours.
The TV showed the images of the day on loop.
I began to play mechanically with the knife that Mounir had placed on the table as usual; it was a short but wide weapon, very sharp; a spur of metal kept the blade from folding back in once opened, a very powerful spring you had to release to close it back up. The handle was short, steel, covered with two pieces of red wood. Solid, sharp, dangerous. I asked Mounir if he’d used it yet, he said no, in your dreams, I haven’t even taken it out of my pocket in front of anyone. It’s just a security measure, you never know.
You do, in fact, never know.
On TV, the commentaries remained the same.
The unions were delighted with the strike’s great success.
The government was delighted to be able, starting tomorrow, to resume its indispensable economic reforms.
In the distance, the helicopter still circled.
THE next day the city awoke feverish and in disbelief; the wave of violence was still trembling in the morning—curious onlookers stared at the broken windows in little groups, making comments in low voices; cleaning teams tried to erase all traces of fire as quickly as possible. In the papers, the only thing they talked about was the cost of the damage, the number of arrests.
The difference from Tunis, Mounir said to me, possibly the only difference, is that in Tunis the chaos continued the next day, the day after that, and the day after that. Here, it’s as if nothing had happened. They repair the bank façades, the government continues its work, the revolutionaries return to their skateboards, and the tourists resume control of Plaça de Catalunya.
Here, everyone still has too much to lose to launch an insurrection, believe me.
Of course, at the time, we couldn’t know.
Mounir was desperately trying to earn some money, more money—he took insane risks to steal cameras that were increasingly expensive, wallets that were never fat enough, I suggested a kind of association with him, so he wouldn’t have to steal so much, I had an idea, which came from Casanova’s memoirs—the Venetian was like Mounir, he too was always in need of money and, in Paris, he invented something extraordinary for the King of France: the lottery, that is, a money game where everyone emerged a winner, or almost. I explained to Mounir how you could earn dough by organizing the Lottery of Thieves, a nice, neat, underground operation—we were on that sidewalk café on Carrer del Cid that we liked for its quietness, five hundred meters from the Carrer Robadors, and I was making him laugh with my lottery stories, he found it hard to believe that it could work. If we don’t try, we’ll never know, I said. Of course money games are a sin, but for the player, not for the organizer, I suppose.
You think there’s a lottery in Saudi Arabia?
I found it extraordinarily funny that it was old Casanova who provided us with this magnificent idea. Of course a little investment was necessary, at least for the winnings from the first drawing, if we didn’t sell enough tickets the first time around. We’d be much less greedy than the State and we’d reinvest most of our earnings, keeping just a profit of twenty percent of the stakes—the rest would go to the owner of the winning ticket.
Mounir strongly doubted that clients would trust us, but the projections made him salivate: look, if we sell, let’s say, 50 tickets at 10 euros each, that makes 500 euros. We give 400 euros in winnings, and we keep 100 euros. If 10 euros seems too much to you, we can do the same with 5 euros.
Mounir began to understand all the magic of this beautiful invention. He made calculations. Hey, he was a clever one, your Casanova. Did he really invent that? Yes, I think so, I replied. At least that’s what he sa
ys.
Putting this plan into action was obviously more complicated than we’d thought, but one week later we had printed our tickets for our underground lottery—I was the investor, so I had taken charge of this material part of the business. In the end, we found it simpler to use the results of an existing lottery instead of organizing our own, and this way had the additional advantage of giving us a certain legitimacy: everyone could check, via the paper or the special kiosks, if he had won or lost.
This activity was very Spanish, people told me: at Christmas, everyone (associations, businesses, supermarkets, administrations) organizes lots of lotteries. So ours would have the particularity of being out of season and Casanovan.
Of course, this initiative was an almost complete fiasco: we sold three tickets, two in the Moroccan restaurant on the Street of Thieves and a third to Judit’s mother, which was a little shameful—on his side Mounir couldn’t manage to palm off a single one on his own, making the rounds of all the Chinese outfits on the Raval, and this when the (supposed) Chinese passion for gambling was going to make our fortune.
Our tickets were handsome, though, in color and in Catalan, because I thought that looked more serious: Loteria Robadors was not, on the other hand, perhaps the best name in the world.
Still, the fact is that this Casanovan action brought us thirty euros (after checking that none of the tickets was the winning one, which would have been a catastrophe, or bankruptcy) from which we had to subtract some euros for a color copier to print a hundred tickets: enough to drink some coffee and lunch lavishly with Mounir, but that’s it.
I was a far cry from Casanova.
LOCKED up waiting for violence: the month of April passed, between reading sessions, a few rare excursions to the beach (paradise peopled with pink-breasted Brits, Nordic girls blonde as the sand, Brazilians with provocative thongs) and soccer disappointments that were quite serious for my comrades but that didn’t affect me much—I was settled in my routine; I was still trying to remain vigilant, not to leave the neighborhood too much. I couldn’t lower my guard: Mounir had been arrested by a bad stroke of luck on Plaça de Catalunya when he was trying to snatch a tourist’s wallet. Of course he didn’t have his passport on him, he said he was homeless and a Palestinian from Gaza, which, according to him, was supposed to earn the sympathy of the boys in blue and make his expulsion more difficult. He spent a day in lockup before being released with a summons to appear at court the next day, with which he of course did not comply—he showed it to me, it was addressed to Mounir Arafat. When I asked him why he had chosen such a pseudonym, he answered it was the only purely Palestinian surname that had come to mind, which cracked us up. The interpreter sent to the police station had obviously glimpsed the hoax right away, but, Mounir said, he was a nice guy, a Syrian, who hadn’t given it away.
He’d been quite surprised: he was expecting a beating, but aside from a few friendly slaps and one or two humiliations, the fuzz had been pretty civil.
So Mounir was like me now, twice a fugitive, clandestine, and an established thief.
He knew that the next time, he wouldn’t get off so easily.
Aside from these legal delights, I had another cause for worry, more serious in another way: Judit’s state was becoming more and more alarming. She had almost stopped eating, spent her days in the dark because, she said, the light gave her migraines; the doctor wavered between diagnosing sinusitis and a pollen allergy, which would explain the congestion, aggravated by a depressive state. She was given masses of all kinds of medications and slept for most of the day. She no longer had the strength to concentrate on her Arabic classes: so I was content to visit her and stay with her for an hour or two. I would read her some texts, tell her a story from Ibn Battuta’s travels, and often she would fall asleep on the sofa, lulled by my voice, and woke only when I left. She told me she often had strange dreams, where she thought she was awake and struggling to find sleep: this obsession would pursue her until she actually awoke and realized that this insomnia was a dream.
Leaving Judit was heart-wrenching—I would always go down to Carrer Robadors on foot, to avoid any possible identity checks in the subway, that hostile underground world peopled with guards and muzzled dogs, and it took the entire trip to rid me somewhat of the sorrow and pain her condition caused me. Even if, according to her doctor, there was nothing alarming, just a passing weakness, a result of various factors, this illness was an unfair piece of shittiness that deprived me of the only presence that mattered to me.
So I began writing again—poems that were so bad compared to those of my role models that I destroyed them right away, which made this activity at least as distressing as the absence of Judit, locked away in her eternal drowsiness.
The world seemed suspended, arrested; I was waiting for it to topple over, for something to happen—its destruction in the flames of the Revolution, or a new blow of Fate.
Often, I would lunch alone in a little Moroccan restaurant on the Street of Thieves, where you could imagine you were in Tangier: same food, same waiters, same colors, it reminded me of the cafeteria where Sheikh Nureddin took us out to lunch after the Friday mosque, except now I went there alone; in the dining room a couple of junkies ordered a chorba for two, they sat side by side, shoulder to shoulder to support each other, and couldn’t even manage to finish the single dish.
The place filled me with nostalgia, and every time I was angry with myself: I had wanted to come to Barcelona, I didn’t come here to cry into my plate at the memory of Tangier. I thought of my mother, my family, Bassam of course.
I realized I wasn’t going to the mosque very often, just Fridays at noon, if that, from time to time. I read the Koran and its commentary, sometimes, it’s true, but less and less often. It was hard for me to find the concentration necessary for prayer; I felt as if I was no longer available for God, as if I were carrying out a mechanical imitation. Faith was a dead skin that Cruz and reading books had sloughed off me; all that was left to me was religious practice that seemed very empty, simple prostrations done by rote.
Sometimes I got caught up in imagining myself in Paris, or Venice; if I’d had a passport in order I’d have liked to go there: Paris to buy some thrillers, see the Seine; Venice to visit Casanova’s city, discover the sites of his escapades, navigate the lagoon.
At no time, in his travels, does Ibn Battuta speak of a passport, or papers, or safe-conducts; he seems to travel as he pleases and to fear nothing but bandits, just as Saadi the sailor feared pirates. It was distressing to think that today, if you were a murderer, a thief, or even just an Arab, you couldn’t so easily visit La Serenissima or the City of Light. I thought for a while of using the networks on the Street of Thieves to establish a new identity for myself, but what I knew purely from the experience of books is that it was very difficult and often not very effective, things being as they were, unless you chose a Libyan, Sudanese or Ethiopian passport and that too, without the shimmering bronze sticker of the Schengen visa, was good for nothing. If it weren’t for Judit, I think I’d have tried my chances, I’d have gone back to Algeciras, tried to cross illegally through customs in the other direction, which must not have been very complicated, and once in Morocco I would just have had to pray that the customs officers of the Motherland had never heard of me and would let me return to the cradle. Then, I’d have settled in Tangier with my loot, before returning to my dead soldiers and to Jean-François Bourrelier, the champion of typing by the kilometer. And a few years later, once my crimes had reached their statute of limitations, having gotten rich off of one million three hundred thousand dead poilus, I’d ask for a tourist visa to go to Venice and Paris, and that was it.
But I still had hope that one of my kisses would cure Judit of her illness, that one day she would wake up and decide to be with me again, full-time. And after all, despite the conditions, despite the great poverty of the Street of Thieves, I wasn’t that badly off—I just felt I was on a stopover; real life still hadn’t
begun, it was endlessly postponed: deferred at the Propagation for Koranic Thought, which disappeared in flames; delayed on board the Ibn Battuta, lost craft; put off at chez Cruz, dog among dogs; suspended in Barcelona at the mercy of the crisis and Judit. On the run, always. There were accounts that still weren’t settled and today, in my noisy monastery, my convent of thieving dervishes, when everything outside has burned, Europe, the Arab world, when flames have devoured the books, when hatred has invaded us, destroying the world of yesterday with the furious doggedness of stupidity, when the dogs are growling, attacking blindly to kill each other, the last weeks on the Street of Thieves seem to me like a somber happiness, the edge of a razor, and you don’t know whose throat it’s going to cut: just as the tightrope walker must defy the possibility of falling in order to concentrate on his footsteps—he looks in front of him, gently maneuvers the pole that saves him from the abyss, advances toward the unknown—I was walking without thinking about the fate that had pushed me toward Barcelona; like an animal, I could sense the storm to come, around me, inside me, while at the same time putting it all out of mind so I’d be able to cross the void.
IT was Sheikh Nureddin who warned me, via a brief email; life is a funny thing, a mysterious arrangement, a merciless logic of a futile destiny. He was coming to visit me. He had to pass through Barcelona for a meeting, on business. I confess I was happy to see him again, a little worried, too—the echo of the Marrakesh attack still hovered, a year later. The fire at the Group for Propagation of Koranic Thought, too. Questions that I had turned over in my mind for so long—little by little they had emptied themselves of meaning.
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