Street of Thieves (23 page)

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.

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
:

T
RAGEDY IN
A
LGECIRAS
P
OISONED
BY
O
NE OF
H
IS
E
MPLOYEES

           
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.