Street of Thieves

IFpeople question you about the Final Hour, reply: “Only God knows about it.” What do you know about it? It could be that the Hour is near. God has cursed the Infidels and has prepared a burning furnace for them, where they will remain for eternity, without finding either ally or aid. I looked it up in the Koran the next day, after a night watching Bassam sink into silence behind a Coke, as we enjoyed the crowded terraces around the MACBA, in the overwhelming noise of skateboarders, a cascade of boards hitting the pavement, endless, disordered clatter — Bassam watched the skateboarders with an incredulous air, and it’s true that for a novice their activity was extremely perplexing; they would travel just a few feet on the square, try a move — a leap or a hop — which looked ridiculous and always ended up in the same result: the board would flip over, fall to the ground, and its owner would find himself on foot, only to recover his device and start over again, like Hassan the Mad eternally circling; the rumbling and clashing of those dozens of skateboards rose from the square with a fierce regularity; the spectators sitting on the low marble perimeter enjoyed the constant spectacle of these sonorous evolutions, tourists resting with legs dangling, loaded with cameras and backpacks, teenagers emptying beers, smoking joints, flea-ridden bums tippling their bottles on blankets stiff with filth, cheerful cops surveying the lot with an eye as skeptical as Bassam’s — after a while the noise ended up getting on your nerves; constant but irregular, it was impossible to get used to it. Bassam eyed this circus with a look of scorn; he didn’t say much, content to gesture to me when a pair of tight shorts, a miniskirt, or a particularly well-developed chest passed by. I tried to talk to him, but the conversational subjects were exhausted one after the other; he refused to discuss the past, aside from our childhood years in Tangier, a few anecdotes from elementary or high school, as if we were old men.

I was relieved when he wanted to go to bed.

So the next day I looked through a digital database for Nureddin’s words, the verse was in the Al Ahzab Sura, “The Allies”; it was about the final hour, the hour of Judgment, when an eternal fire was promised for non-believers. I wondered if I was being paranoid, yet again; it seemed to me that this harmless verse, in Nureddin’s mouth, was a coded message; Bassam must be waiting for the time to spark the flames of the apocalypse, which would explain why he was going round in circles in Barcelona without managing to explain to me what he was doing there; I knew he had a tourist visa for a month — he was just as incapable of telling me by what miracle he had obtained it.

I imagined an attack, an explosion, with his Pakistani friends from the mosque, as he called them; a revenge for the death of Bin Laden, a coup to destabilize Europe further at a time when it seemed to be wavering, cracking like a beautiful, fragile vase, vengeance for the dead Syrian children, for the dead Palestinian children, for dead children in general, that whole absurd rhetoric, the spiral of stupidity, or simply for the pleasure of destruction and fire, what do I know, I watched Bassam in his solitude and his seclusion, ricocheting like a billiard ball in the Street of Thieves against the sad whores, the addicts, the verminous, and the bearded men of the mosque, I saw him again absorbed in resentment in front of that decadent photograph on Rambla Catalunya, I saw him ogling Maria’s sex on her doorstep, I pictured him carrying suitcases to Marrakesh, and as the killer with the sword in Tangier, and as a fighter in Mali or Afghanistan, or maybe none of the above, maybe just a man just like me lost in the whirl of the Carrer Robadors, a hollow man, a walking tomb, a man who sought in flames the end of an already dead world, a warrior from a theater of shadows, who felt confusedly that there was no more reality around him, nothing tangible, nothing true, and who was struggling, moved by the last breath of hatred, in a cottony emptiness, a cloud, a silent man, a mute man who would blow up in a train, in a plane, in a subway line, for no one, perhaps the Hour is approaching, I saw Bassam’s perfectly round head in prayer, I no longer expected answers to my questions, no more answers, an unknown surgeon would soon open Judit’s skull to remove the disease from it, around us the world was on fire and Bassam was standing there, motionless like a snake charmer’s cobra, an empty man whose hour would soon toll, a soldier of despair who carried his corpses in his eyes, just like Cruz.