Street of Thieves

There were just four Moroccans in suits in the joint, talking and drinking whiskey, no lonely female tourists; I began to get a little drunk, and felt like crying. Meryem came to mind, she was sleeping at that hour no doubt, over there in the Rif. Maybe she was dreaming of me, who knows.

The TV was showing the demonstrations in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Yemen, the uprising in Libya. It isn’t over yet, I thought. Arab Spring my ass, it’ll end with beatings, stuck between God and a hard place.

I regretted not having brought a book with me, it would have taken my mind off things.

When the guy came into the bar, I was still busy watching TV; I barely saw him. It was he who approached me. He walked over, leaned on my table, stared at me with a mean smile. Little eyes, brown moustache going grey. I immediately turned to him.

“Well, if it isn’t my little fag,” he said.

I turned to the bartender with an offended air, as in customers can’t be insulted like that, my heart was pounding, my cheeks were on fire. The bartender was observing us with a surprised look.

“You remember me?”

Impossible to forget that face, the dim light and the smell of piss in the back of the parking lot.

My knees began to shake, I wanted him to disappear, as if by magic, and the shame and memory to vanish along with him.

I’d have happily smashed in his face with an axe handle.

He left in a great burst of obnoxious laughter, he was drunk, his sewer breath splattered me with a wave of rottenness and memories, I almost fell backward and the loss of balance set me moving off my bar stool, I fled in silence like a coward, shot out of the bar without looking back, couldn’t keep from hearing phrases like, Don’t go so fast, little boy, with a few obscenities that overwhelmed me with impotent rage, like when you take punches without being able to return them.