I tore myself away from my contemplation: Bassam was smiling blissfully, still cross-legged, hands on his knees; he swept his eyes across the beach like a spotlight, from one side to the other; skateboarders and bicyclists passed by on the jetty; strolling vendors paced the sand, by the water’s edge, offering beer, soda, henna tattoos, cheap baubles, sunglasses, Barça decals, caps, scarves, beach towels, African gris-gris, doughnuts, foot massages, or all of the above, it was impossible to stay by the sea for over five minutes without someone taking advantage of your immobility to try to sell you something—those hundreds of prone people comprised an infinite reservoir of potential clients stupefied by the sun. Bassam looked at all that, all those asses, all those breasts, all those Senegalese carrying their merchandise, all those neo-hippies passing by on the jetty; on the left, the brilliant colossus of the Hotel Vela protected these people with its glass and steel sail; on the right, at the other edge of the promenade, near the Olympic harbor, a welded metal whale seemed to be melting on the beach, between the Torre Mapfre and the Arts Hotel; in the distance, the chimneys of the Centrale de Badalona were lost in a halo of pollution, behind the sheet of hazy cement of the Forum of Cultures.
Suddenly I thought of Judit, of that tumor, that injustice of the body. This powerlessness was as bitter as Cruz’s poison.
We stayed a long time, absorbed by the beauty of the city, the infinite sea punctuated with white sailboats, until the sun sank behind Montjuïc and the sunbathers got dressed one by one: some just slipped a dress over their swimsuits; others, more elegant, older, or more bourgeois, undertook slow metamorphoses, hidden by a towel; one could take stock of their underwear, held out in a charitable hand by a husband or girlfriend, note their loss of balance as they slipped it on, standing on one leg, strange, clumsy birds clutching a pareo to their chest. A slight breeze had picked up, I told Bassam it was time to get back to the Street of Thieves, on foot this time. He brushed himself to get rid of the sand and began walking, seemed disoriented again—ever since we had arrived he hadn’t said a word, so that I thought he’d fallen asleep, cross-legged, like a Buddha in meditation.
He remained just as silent on the way back; he stared at the asphalt, head lowered, lifting it only to check if I was indeed still next to him.
We entered the Raval by the Arsenal, the gateway to the neighborhood from the sea, before going back up to Sant Pau and La Rambla. Suddenly Bassam seemed more interested; the Pakis were strolling around, in little groups; Arabs were chatting in front of the sandwich joints; children were playing near the giant metal cat, swung disrespectfully from its steel whiskers, tried to ride it like an elephant, perched between its ears. I thought of inviting Bassam for dinner in the Moroccan restaurant on Carrer Robadors, in memory of Tangier and the good old times—but first we had to go upstairs to drop off his bag. He had been lugging it around all afternoon without batting an eye. It was a simple travel bag, canvas with two leather handles; I don’t know why, it made me think again of the attack in Marrakesh, that bag. I realized I didn’t know what Bassam was doing in Barcelona. Or when he would leave. Or even precisely where he was coming from.
At the corner of Robadors, by the Tariq ibn Ziyad mosque, two black whores were perched on parking stanchions; blue faux-leather miniskirts, high heels, bras, breasts almost popping out.
Bassam seemed to walk into an invisible wall when he saw them; he changed sidewalks.
The entrance to our building cracked him up. Say, my friend, some class your hotel has. A real luxury hotel, khouya. Even at our place we don’t have anything this rotten, la samah Allah.
I didn’t take the bait. I just hoped we wouldn’t pass a rat roaming around.
I showed Bassam around our apartment; I introduced him to Mounir, who was calmly scratching his toes with the tip of his knife in front of the TV—Bassam barely said a word to him. Just a greeting, an empty phrase, a hand on his chest, his gaze distant. Mounir looked at me questioningly. A childhood friend, I said. He’s going to sleep on the couch for a few days.
Bassam made the rounds of the flat three times, sat down on the balcony, watched the street.
I suggested we go out for a bite to eat, he agreed.
On our way out, we passed two drunkards who were pissing copiously against the façade, provoking the shouts of the beggars waiting for the evangelists to open for their hymns and sandwiches.
It was Saturday, streetwalking activity was at its height at the crossroads; two or three dealers were pacing in the night; a junkie in need of his fix vomited a stream of bile onto the base of a lamppost, splattering two cockroaches fat as frogs emerging lazily from the restaurant next door.
The joint was almost empty—I greeted the managers warmly, introduced them to Bassam, a childhood friend from Tangier. They welcomed him to Barcelona. We sat at a table on the side; in the back of the room, Al-Jazeera was broadcasting images of various massacres in a loop, in Syria or Palestine, intercut with violent demonstrations, in Greece or Spain.
“It’s great you’re here.”
He was in a hurry to order dinner.
The prospect of food from home brought a smile back to Bassam’s face. Having him opposite me, like that, like the old days, took me back to Tangier, to Meryem. I didn’t know how to begin. Beneath the table, my leg jiggled nervously.
“Your mother accidentally gave me an old letter from you. With Meryem’s inside it. You should have told me.”
He looked very surprised, all of a sudden, wide-eyed, he wasn’t expecting that at all; he ended up saying:
“I was afraid of hurting you. When you came back I didn’t dare. Afterward it was too late. I should’ve destroyed all that, so you’d never know.”
He was looking at the tablecloth.
“Everything ends up known eventually,” I said stupidly. And I was ashamed of evoking the memory of Meryem this way, of betraying her, as if her death were a banal piece of news, a kind of weather report or the result of the Thieves’ Lottery.
“Is the tagine good here?”
“Better than at your house, asshole.”
That cracked him up.
“That’s not hard to do, you know.”
The portions were huge, Moroccan. Bassam threw himself onto the food like a wild thing.
“Judit is sick,” I said.
He looked at me for an instant, between mouthfuls, without understanding; in the end I didn’t want to explain. I’d have liked to tell him in detail about the Ibn Battuta, the Algeciras port, Cruz, the corpses; Cruz’s death throes, which I had kept secret for so long.
“What the hell have you been up to all this time?”
I repeated the question three or four times, to the rhythm of his spoon; he gulped down half his Coke, ended up mumbling nothing special, didn’t ask me any more questions, before returning to the regular ingestion of vegetables, to the greedy gnawing of chicken bones; he was still hungry, he ordered a serving of rice with dried fruit; I raised my head to the TV, reflexively, where had he gone, to Yemen, to Afghanistan, to Mali, to Syria even, possibly, who knows, there were so many places where you could fight, for what cause, the cause of God no doubt, the prime cause, I found it difficult to picture Bassam traipsing about the burning desert, rifle in hand—physically, he hadn’t changed much, he might be a tiny bit thinner, but nothing striking and once you’d gotten used to his shaved head he was the same, the same but more silent, tenser, and older. All that was unreal. His beaten mongrel’s gaze returned to his plate, was he thinking of war, no, he must’ve been content to chew, his head empty.
The name of that Frenchman, the mass killer of Jewish children in Toulouse, came to mind; unthinkable to associate Bassam with such a cowardly act—for a second I imagined a journalist questioning me about him, I’d have replied he was a nice guy, kind of funny, who liked looking at girls and eating well. If he was still the same.
“Was that you in Tangier, at the Café Hafa?”
He raised his head from his plate, fixed h
is empty eyes on mine, I looked away.
I didn’t want to know anymore.
I didn’t want to know what the war was, his war; I didn’t want to know his lies, or his truth.
I thought of Cruz again, hypnotized in front of his screen by the knives of jihadists.
I asked one final question:
“What did you come here to do?”
There was a look of great pain on his face, all of a sudden, a great sadness or a great indifference.
“Nothing special, khouya; to see you. To see Barcelona.”
It was impossible to guess if he had been hurt by my suspicions or if his own fate saddened him, like an incurable disease.
DISTANCING, in friendship as in love. Bassam was distancing himself; I was too, probably—I was no longer the backward child of Tangier, full of mediocre dreams; I was on my way to my prison, already locked up in the ivory tower of books, which is the only place on earth where life is good. Judit was disappearing into illness; I needed superhuman effort to go to the Clinic, where she was being cared for; the smell of the hallways, the cynical distance of the personnel, the false silence of those rooms murmuring secretly with death caused me a terrible, atrocious anguish; Cruz’s little morgue kept coming to mind, those bodies no longer left me; I saw the hospital like a huge factory of dead flesh: women and men went in through the main door and exited out the back, dead dogs you drag behind you to burn them out of sight. I didn’t want Judit to disappear, it couldn’t happen. She shared her room with a woman in her fifties who had a whole regiment of mourners by her bedside and was pretty quickly transferred to another part of the building: in a hospital you have to be dying to get a private room, to keep from depressing your neighbor, still struggling for life amid your death-rattles and your family’s moaning—and even though Judit’s tumor was benign, she had to undergo a whole series of treatments before the operation itself; for a little while I would’ve begun praying again, if I hadn’t been convinced, more and more, of the injustice of God, which seems a great deal like an absence. Despite everything, Judit seemed to be keeping her spirits up—she had hope, the doctors were optimistic, and only her mother, Núria, whom I saw at each of my visits, seemed to be aging visibly. She almost never left her daughter’s room, received the visitors, gave explanations on the progression of the illness, as if she herself were suffering from it; Judit was sometimes confined to bed, sometimes sitting in an armchair; I would stay for a quarter of an hour and then leave. We’d talk about any old thing, the weather, the state of the Arabic world, the war in Syria, our memories, too—of Tangier, of Tunis, and thinking back to those vanished happinesses made my voice wobble in a slightly ridiculous way, and my eyes water, so I’d leave, I’d say goodbye to Núria and gently kiss Judit, who would hug me close, I’d reenter the hallways reeking of death, between the nurses, the sick people on drips, a whole troop of guys in nightshirts, each one leaning on his IV stand with its glass bottle and tube burrowed into their veins, at the wrist or under the elbow, there they stood around smoking and talking, accompanied by a few nurses or good-natured doctors, it was the festival of bandaging and scars, of hanging catheters and cotton gowns, so I fled, I fled dreaming of being able to carry Judit away with me into a well-guarded room on the Carrer Robadors, with Bassam, who was going round in circles without any IV drip between the mosque, the Moroccan restaurant, the bicycle thieves, and the whores, whom he observed from afar, like a sort of attractive, strange fauna, like the King of Spain’s elephants. I had my own little zoo at home: Bassam and Mounir hated each other. Ideologically, personally, everything put up walls between them; Mounir saw in Bassam nothing but a narrow-minded, taciturn, uncivilized Islamist; Bassam scorned Mounir because he was a failure, a thief, a miscreant. They were both right, in a sense; I thought they could have gotten closer on other levels, girls, soccer, life, but no, there was nothing to be done—they only talked to each other when forced to, and Mounir asked me almost every day when Bassam was leaving. Life was wavering, and I could feel it; Bassam was immersed in prayer and waiting; Judit was supposed to have surgery any day now; the crisis precipitated the rhythm of strikes, demonstrations, helicopter noises; the first heat of the end of spring was making the junkies, the poor, and the mad go crazy; every day new corpses would flower somewhere, a bank would fail, a cataclysm would carry away one more scrap from this ruined world, or maybe I’m the one who, today, am tempted to read these events in the light of what followed; to think that the worst was yet to come, that the worst has come—everything was dancing before my eyes, Judit in the hospital, Bassam at the Tariq ibn Ziyad Mosque, Meryem in the grave, the world was demanding something, a movement, a change, one more step toward Fate; I sensed that soon we would have to choose our camp, that one day or another I would have to choose, that it was up to me to revolt, to make a move for once in my life, a real decisive move, and of course it’s easy to think of that today, from my prison library, surrounded by all the certainty of books, hundreds of texts, by dint of all my reading, since the man of yesterday has disappeared; the Lakhdar of the Street of Thieves has disappeared, he has been transformed, he is trying to restore their lost meaning to his actions; he is reflecting, I am reflecting, but I am going round in circles in my prison for I can never rediscover who I was before, the lover of Meryem, the son of my mother, the child of Tangier, the friend of Bassam; life has gone on since, God has deserted, conscience has gone its way, and identity along with it—I am what I have read, I am what I have seen, I have as much Arabic in me as Spanish and French, I have been multiplied in those mirrors until I have been lost or rebuilt, fragile image, image in motion. No se puede vivir sin amar, I said to Judit, and I was wrong, you can live without loving, love is one more book, one more mirror, a trace on our wax tablet, marks on our hands, lifelines, fingerprints that appear once it’s over, once the game has been played—I enjoy seeing Judit again, she comes here once a week, we talk for a long time, we exchange long cybernetic letters in which I talk to her some more about Arabic literature, about the unsurpassable beauty of Ibn Zaydún, of Jahiz the immense, of Sayyab the sad, who died of a strange illness from which only poets know how to die, and I know that Judit only visits me or writes to me out of fidelity to what we were, in that hotel in Tangier, in that apartment in Tunis, which exist only for us. I still think often of that story of Hassan the Mad, which Ibn Battuta tells when he is in Mecca—even if it means I’d have to go round in circles for eternity, I’d have liked to return for fifteen days to my mother’s house, or to the past, to relive the weeks in Tangier or Tunis with Judit; maybe it will return, the time of madmen and prodigious beggars, someday, the day that oil runs dry, the day that Mecca is once again a month away by horse and sail; a day of glory, when I’ll emerge into the new sun, when I’ll stop my mute convolutions to rediscover Judit’s arms.
Bassam was also going around in circles. He had almost stopped talking; he just opened his eyes and mouth wide when Maria’s thighs unclenched, on her threshold at the entrance to the Street of Thieves; he would stay there for three, five, ten, or even fifteen eternal seconds, stunned, his lower jaw hanging down like a halfwit’s, his gaze lost between her legs, and Maria had to make fun of him or insult him to set him on his way, grumbling; it didn’t matter that I told him it wasn’t right, to stay there like that all agog, that he could simply pay a few euros and go upstairs with her, he could have seen, touched, penetrated, and come, and that’s that, but no, he shook his head like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar, as if he had seen the devil, no no, Lakhdar khouya, he said, we don’t pay for that kind of thing, and I sort of agreed, we don’t pay, not with money so much, but with the sad memory of the dead smell of Zahra the little whore in Tangier whom he didn’t know. Then he’d go back to the restaurant to wolf down a tagine or some skewers of meat, then he’d go to the mosque, hands in his pockets, he’d spit on the addicts and thieves, ogle the black whores with a mixture of scorn and desire, try to forget them by making his ablution
s, prayed, then he’d talk with some Pakistanis, always the same ones, his friends he said, then he’d come home, sit with his eyes glued to the TV, make Mounir flee in the midst of his ritual pedicure—Mounir would close his knife, sighing, get up, then slam the door to his room with a bang.
Sheikh Nureddin had only stayed for three days, as planned; he had met all the high society of Barcelona, princes and soccer players included, had stuffed himself with petit-fours in a luxury hotel, and then had left, not without inviting us, Bassam and me, one last time out to lunch—I felt as if I were sharing the meal with an uncle from America; he was very elegant, in a dark blue jacket with a white shirt with a stand-up collar; he had money, rhetoric, and a business class ticket to the Gulf. I felt a little like his personal yokel; I couldn’t stop myself from speaking Moroccan with him, while he told us about his charity evenings in a classical Arabic mixed with eastern touches. Bassam remained silent; his gaze gave off admiration, boundless servitude. I don’t know why, I hated Sheikh Nureddin, that day; maybe because that same morning I had gone to see Judit in the hospital, and that had put me off a little, who knows. In any case, I was happy at the time to say goodbye to him. I remember his last words well, before he flagged down a taxi to get his luggage at the hotel: don’t hesitate, he said, if you want to join us, don’t hesitate, we’ll always have work for you. I thanked him without daring to mention my dream to him, that little religious-cum-pagan bookstore on the Raval in Barcelona. Then I thought how that dog had created and torn apart my life, that he had a valid passport full of visas, that he had never known either Cruz or the Street of Thieves, and that he deserved a good kick in the ass, to teach him to live—Bassam threw himself around his neck as if he were his father; I thought I could hear the Sheikh’s words murmured into his ear, be strong, the Hour may be near, it reminded me of a verse from the Koran, it was very strange and solemn as a goodbye. Nureddin saw I had heard, he smiled saying be good, don’t forget God and your Brothers, and drove off in a yellow-and-black taxi.
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