Street of Thieves

by Mathias Enard

  At night, when Judit couldn’t be bothered to go out, I would stroll for a while on the Rambla del Raval, a long oblong square planted with palm trees, dotted with benches, with a huge bronze cat, an improbable statue, at one end—Pakis walked about in their salwar kameez, families took their children out in strollers, women and little Indian girls wore their beautiful multicolored dresses, gypsies got out chairs and argued on the sidewalk in front of a restaurant where there dined, before normal hours, some Brits who, from the color of their shoulders, looked as if they’d spent the day at the beach—this whole little clutch of people took the air, taking advantage of the truce of evening, and you could’ve believed, going up and down the Rambla del Raval, that there were no antagonisms, no hatred, no racism, no poverty—the illusion didn’t last long; usually an Arab started annoying a Paki, or vice-versa, and you’d end up hearing shouts, which sometimes degenerated into something worse.

  When the sun was low, I would go home; I had a new ritual: I would buy a bottle of Catalan red wine at the supermarket, some olives, and a can of tuna; I would settle myself on my tiny balcony on the fifth floor, open the bottle, the can, and the package of olives, take a book, and wait for night to fall, gently; I was the king of the world. Better than Abu Nuwas at the Baghdad court, better than Ibn Zaydún in the gardens of Andalusia, I was getting a little foretaste of Paradise, may God forgive me, I lacked only the houris. I would read a Spanish thriller (you have to make do with what’s at hand) or classical Arabic poetry, with the help of the dictionary Judit had lent me—deciphering an obscure verse full of forgotten words was an immense pleasure.

  I had discovered wine. A sin, indeed, I admit, but one of the most pleasant and least expensive: depending on the bottle I chose, it cost me between 1.50 and 3 euros. The powerful Kingdom of Morocco taxed alcohol pitilessly, so before I had to content myself with coffee with milk; here, beautiful Spain placed the fruit of its vines within reach of all budgets.

  The sun ended up sinking almost directly opposite me, near the Sant Pau Church, I still had a mere half-hour of daylight left, then it was too dark to read on the balcony, so I would watch the street for a little while; on the weekends, dozens of people would line up in front of the premises of the Evangelical, or Adventist, sect, or some similar minor heresy, our neighbors—they were very successful with the indigent, because they gave out free meals after service. One obviously can’t prejudge the sincerity of the faith that animated these ragged flocks, who for all anyone knew might be real Protestants. In any case, this church (a former butcher shop) always had a full house—you could hear them singing hymns; then they spoke of love, the Lord and his lambs, and of Christ, who would return bringing justice at the Day of Resurrection.

  It was strange to think that all our religions were essentially tales: fables in which some believed and others not, an immense storybook, where everyone could choose what he liked—there was a collection called Islam which didn’t entirely tally with the versions contained in Christianity, which itself differed from the Judaism collection; these Protestants singing for the poor must have had their version too—I had picked up one of their instruments for evangelizing, it was a comic book in color, about a dozen pages long, in simple lines; all the characters were black, except for Christ, golden and haloed, with a beard and long hair: you saw a man building a wooden house with a hammer, getting married, having a family; his children grew up around his hut; everyone worked the earth. Then the man grew old, his hair turned white; finally he died and a gleaming Jesus accompanied him to heaven, among the angels.

  The whores came out when the streetlights came on. They would arrange themselves at the entrance to the street, on the esplanade side; the Tariq ibn Ziyad Mosque must have been the only one in the world before which Amazons black as night, armed with sequined miniskirts, spangled bras, and high heels accosted the faithful—who to be sure paid them no heed. They were part of the decor, like the cops who were also starting their patrol at nightfall, in threes or fours, in rows, proud, very proud of exhibiting all the force of order and the harshness of the law. The truth was that this was how they accelerated most illegal activities: as soon as they had turned the corner, you knew, as sure as you could tell from a watch hand or from a star, that they’d take a good five minutes to return. There were surveillance cameras, of course, but I never heard anyone in the street say they should be paid any attention to: just as God sees us all, Mr. Mayor could just as well observe us from his office on Plaça Sant Jaume—no one would find anything to object to, not the drunks who knocked back beers and raved almost directly beneath the camera in question, not the hash dealer, in the same spot all the blessed day, not the blacks, owners of a whole stable of prostitutes who were slaving away a little farther down the street for their profit, not the junkies who yelled at each other in front of the closed social aid center, not the Pakistanis who came, late at night, looking for beers in the underground coolers. No one looked the least bit bothered by these white, visible cameras attached to each side of the lane. They were the price you had to pay for fame.

  And then, around eleven o’clock or midnight, I’d go for a little walk with Mounir, my co-renter. Mounir was one of the escapees from Lampedusa, one of the Tunisians who had landed in France during the Revolution thanks to the generosity of Berlusconi, to the great displeasure of the French government, ready to share anything except debts and indigents. Mounir had spent some months in Paris, well, Paris is easy to say, it was more like the suburbs, he was stuck in a wasteland next to the canal, left there to freeze and die of hunger. Those French bastards didn’t even give me a single sandwich, you understand? Not even a sandwich! Ah it’s a fine thing, democracy! Impossible to find work, we wandered around all day, from Stalingrad to Belleville to the République, we were willing to accept any job to survive. Nothing, nothing to do, no one helps you, over there, especially not the Arabs, they think there are too many of them already, one more poor darkie is bad for everyone. They think the Tunisian Revolution is very nice from far away, they say, But now that you’ve done the Revolution, stay there, in your jasmine paradise full of Islamists and don’t come bothering us with your useless mouths. You know what I think, my brother Lakhdar, all these Arab Revolutions are American machinations to bust our balls a little more.

  He exaggerated about the French: he told me he had survived thanks to the Restos du Coeur and the Soupe Populaire, soup kitchens for the homeless, where if you stood in line long enough you ended up eating some beans or leaving with a package of pasta without anyone asking you any questions. The picture he painted of Paris was not an enticing one—battalions of poor to whom they handed out individual tents so they could sleep on the sidewalks, right in the middle of the streets; endless suburbs, abandoned by God and man, where everyone was unemployed, where there was nothing to do except burn cars to avoid boredom on the weekend—and above all, hatred, he said, the hatred and violence that you feel in that city, you have no idea. Every day on the news you hear about the rising hatred. I’m telling you, they don’t realize it, they’re headed straight for an explosion.

  He added a little more than that, true, but it wasn’t reassuring. The French Right wanted to close the borders, blindfold their eyes with a tricolor flag, and be hermetically sealed against everything, except cash.

  Mounir had ended up leaving Paris, disgusted, to try his luck farther south—what about Marseille, did you see Marseille? I had my memories of thrillers by Izzo and I felt as if I knew Marseille. But no, Mounir hadn’t stopped in Marseille, he had his face smashed in by two guys in front of the Montpellier train station, who had attacked him just like that, for the pleasure of it, he said. Ever since then, I never go out without a knife, he added, and it was true: he always carried a blade on him, short but sharp.

  The real good fortune of Barcelona, the only thing that still made the city a city and not an ensemble of bloodthirsty ghettos, was the tourists. A blessing from God. Everyone lived off them, in one way or another.
The restaurant owners lived off them, the hotel owners lived off them, the café owners and the vendors of soccer jerseys lived off them, the butchers lived off them, and even the bookstores, which had branches in museums to pump their share of this pink-skinned gold that irrigated the center of town. The beer hawkers lived off them, the peddlers of birdcalls, whistles, magic spinning tops, and blinking pins lived off them—Mounir lived off them too. After all, as he said, everyone steals from these tourists. Everyone robs them. They pay eight euros for their beers on La Rambla. I don’t see why taking a camera, a wallet, or a handbag from them is necessarily more evil. Because it’s haram, actually, it’s theft. No, he replied, if Al-Qaida allows infidels to be beheaded, I don’t see why it’s forbidden to pickpocket them, and he let out a big laugh.

  The truth is that it was hard to contradict him: you sometimes felt as if it was God himself (may He forgive me) who sent these creatures into our alleyways, with their innocent airs, looking up in the sky as Mounir calmly slipped his hand into their backpacks.

  Manna. The poorest survived thanks to tourism, the city survived thanks to tourism, it always wanted more, always attracted more, increased the number of hotels, of inns, of planes to bring these sheep to be fleeced, it all reminded me of Morocco, because at that period there was a promotional campaign for tourism in Marrakesh in the Barcelona subway, an assortment of orientalist photographs with a pretty slogan like “Marrakesh, the city that travels inside you,” or “Where your heart takes you,” and I said to myself that tourism was a curse, like gasoline, a trap, which brought false wealth, corruption and violence; in the Barcelona subway I thought again of the explosion in Marrakesh, of Sheikh Nureddin somewhere in Arabia, and of Bassam, somewhere in the Land of Darkness, of the attack in Tangier where that student had met death by sword—of course, Barcelona was different, it was a democracy, but you felt it was all at a tipping point, that it wouldn’t take much for the whole country to fall into violence and hatred as well, that France would follow, then Germany, and all of Europe would catch fire like the Arab world; the obscenity of this poster in the subway was proof of it, there was nothing else for Marrakesh to do than invest money in ad campaigns so that their lost manna would return, even if they knew perfectly well that it was the money from tourism that provoked underdevelopment, corruption and neo-colonialism, just as in Barcelona, little by little, you felt resentment against foreign cash mounting, cash from within as well as from without; money pitted the poor against each other, humiliation was slowly changing into hatred; everyone hated the Chinese, who were buying up the bars, restaurants, markets, one by one with the money of entire families who came from regions whose poverty couldn’t even be imagined; everyone despised the British louts who came to quench their thirst with cheap beer, fuck in doorways, and, still drunk, take a plane back that had cost them the price of a pint of ale in their obscure suburb; everyone silently desired those very young Nordic girls the color of chalk who, because of the difference in temperature, broke out their miniskirts and flip-flops in February—one quarter of Catalonia was out of work, the papers overflowed with terrifying stories about the crisis, about families kicked out of apartments they couldn’t pay for anymore, which the banks sold off cheaply while still continuing to claim their debt, about suicides, sacrifices, discouragement: you could feel the pressure mounting, violence mounting, even on the Street of Thieves among the poorest of the poor, even in Gràcia among the sons of the middle class, you could feel the city ready for anything, for resignation as well as for insurrection.

  Mounir told me about Sidi Bouzid, about the gesture of despair that had set off the Revolution: you had to lift your hand against yourself to make the masses react, as if only that ultimate motion could finally set things off—someone had to burn himself to death for people to find the courage to act; it took the irreversible death of another to realize you had nothing to lose yourself. This question tormented me; it brought me back to Morocco, to my expedition at night with Bassam and Sheikh Nureddin, to my cowardliness, a movement exactly opposite that of Sidi Bouzid, as if on one hand there was suicide and on the other the dictatorship of cudgels, as if the whole world were on the point of toppling into the dictatorship of cudgels and as if all that was left was the prospect of setting yourself on fire—or staying on a balcony reading books, the ones that weren’t burned in the meantime, or going with Mounir to sell a camera to his fence, then drink a beer or two in a neighborhood bar, bowing low to the cops when you passed them.

  At that time, in France, in Toulouse, a maniac killed three children and an adult in a Jewish school, with a pistol, point-blank; a few days earlier, he’d cut down some unarmed soldiers in the same way; it was impossible to find any sense in these shots, which resounded throughout the world. The story was spread across two or three pages in the Barcelona papers. A mad dog had stood up, had killed before dropping dead himself, what else could be said, aside from that this madman’s first name was the Prophet’s, that he had tried to take part in the Jihad, God knows where; Mounir thought the cops who had shot him had been too gentle with this degenerate, that he should have been impaled very slowly in a public square—or quartered like Damien, the regicide in Casanova’s Memoirs, perhaps, but what would that have changed. I thought of Bassam, lost somewhere in his own personal Jihad, who might have killed a student with a sword in Tangier, sometimes explaining serves no purpose; there’s nothing to understand in violence, the violence of animals, mad from fear, from hatred, from blind stupidity that motivates a guy my age to coolly place the barrel of a gun to the temple of a little eight-year-old girl in a school, to change his weapons when the first one jams, with the calm that implies determination, and to fire in order to win the respect of some rats in Afghan caves. I remembered the words of Sheikh Nureddin, provoking clashes, setting off revenges that would fan the fires of the world, would launch dogs against each other, journalists and writers at the lead, who hurried to understand and explain as if there were something truly interesting in the paranoid ravings from the brain of a bastard so frazzled that even Al-Qaida didn’t want him.

  Mounir thought that these attacks were secretly supported by the fascist extreme right to increase the hatred and mistrust of Islam and to justify the attacks on North Africans to come; I remembered the expression of Manchette in I forget which book, the two jaws of the same idiocy.

  A sky of infinite blackness, that was what was waiting for us—today in my library, where the fury of the world has been muffled by the walls, I watch the series of cataclysms like one who, in a supposedly safe shelter, feels the floor vibrating, the walls trembling, and wonders how much longer he’ll be able to preserve his life: outside, everything seems to be nothing but darkness.

  NO se puede vivir sin amar, that’s what I kept repeating to Judit, you can’t live without loving, I had found this phrase in a beautiful novel, dark and complex; she had to pull herself together, rediscover her energy, her strength, and I had only one desire, to offer her these glimmers, this fire of tenderness with which I was overflowing—offer it to her through books, through poems, through everyday gestures; I had let Meryem die, I didn’t want Judit to sink into her own darkness. I spoke to Elena about it, one day when we were walking together after class, through the strangely-named streets of Gràcia—Stream-of-Footlight Street, Flood Street, Danger Street—and she agreed with me, she could see that Judit wasn’t doing well, that she seemed more and more absent, reclusive, shut up inside herself; Elena had suggested they both go traveling together again, for the Holy Week, to go somewhere in the Arab world, to Cairo, why not, or Jordan, but no success—Judit replied that she didn’t want to ask her parents for money, her father owned a little construction company that had been flourishing before but was now on the verge of bankruptcy, and her mother, a university professor, had seen her salary reduced twice the year before. But I don’t think it’s matter of money, Elena said; it’s something else—nothing interests her anymore. Even Arabic, she keeps at it, as you see
, but without passion. She stopped looking for graduate programs and translating schools for next year. She almost never goes out anymore, aside from with you from time to time. Last year we still went to clubs, to concerts, but now not at all. She got involved with the Okupas, she took part in meetings of the Indignants, she had a whole bunch of activities and today almost none. She still goes to classes, but that’s it. I feel like most of the time she stays locked up in her bedroom, she walks a little around the neighborhood, to get some air, and that’s it. Elena seemed sad and worried about her friend, all the more so since she didn’t see what could have provoked this change in attitude. When she got back from Tunis, she said, she spoke of almost nothing except you, the both of you, Morocco, the huge progress she had made in Arabic, and so on—and in the fall, it began going not so well; she was worried you didn’t write to her a lot, even though she knew of course that you were on your boat without Internet most of the time; little by little she got tired of the Indignants, she found their movement a little empty; the festive side of the Okupas movement bored her as well, she went less and less to the sit-in on the Plaça del Sol. In short, little by little, she stopped doing much, she sank into sadness.

  That seemed exaggerated, to me, as a description, it was just a passing thing, I was sure.