Street of Thieves

I woke up in the middle of the night with these images and for an instant, in the darkness, I mentally prayed, my first reflex against fear was prayer, to implore God, and I would have given anything for there to be someone by my side, until I chased away the mental representations by turning on the light, replacing them with the familiar objects of my tiny room. I spent a long time calming myself down. I clung to the vision of Judit’s face. She had promised that she’d return to Tangier on her way back, in five days, that she’d email me about her trip. The terrifying dream slowly disappeared as I remembered her. I would have happily gone with them to Marrakesh, I’d never been there. It was strange to think they would know my country better than me. But was it really my country? My country was Tangier, at least that’s what I thought; but in truth, I had realized that afternoon, Judit’s Tangier did not coincide with mine. She saw the international city, Spanish, French, American; she knew Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, and William Burroughs, so many authors whose remote names vaguely reminded me of something, but about whom I knew nothing. Even Mohamed Choukri, icon of Tangier, I knew who he was, but of course I had never read a word by him. I was very surprised to learn that they studied his novels in modern Arabic literature at the University of Barcelona. Speaking with Judit about Tangier, I had the feeling we were discussing a different city, two images, two foreign territories linked by the same name, a homophonic mistake. No doubt Tangier was neither one nor the other, not the memories of the old days of the international city, not my suburb, not Tanger-Med or the Free Zone. But the fact remains that with Judit and Elena, strolling about with them all afternoon and a good part of the evening, after having practically run into them by chance two hundred meters away from their hotel, my package under my arm, I had the strange sensation of being dispossessed. Finally it was Judit who told me about the history of the old city, for instance; it was she who knew, who looked for places, traces, memories; it was she, finally, who offered me a copy in Arabic of For Bread Alone, found at a random bookstore along the way. I tried to show that I knew things too; I tried to be funny, at least, to seem intelligent, but the awkwardness of my spoken French and her complete ignorance of Moroccan made me clumsy, a little coarse, without nuances; sometimes I felt as if I were being regarded frankly as an idiot. So I struggled to try communicating in classical Arabic, where I could shine, but even if she didn’t understand well but had good pronunciation, I felt a little as if I sounded like a radio announcer or a Friday sermonizer, which took any naturalness and spontaneity away from my jokes. You try acting funny and charming in literary Arabic, it’s no piece of cake, believe me; people will always think you’re about to announce another catastrophe in Palestine or comment on a verse of the Koran. But Judit seemed interested in me; she asked me questions about my family, I told her my father was from the Rif, that he came from a village next to Nador and that my mother was Arabic, from Tangier, that she had grown up in Casa Barata. I had no desire to expand on the subject, but it had to be covered. Number of brothers and sisters. Studies, high school. Tastes, hobbies. Religion. Obviously, a problem; how could I tell her I was a practicing Muslim, without coming off as an enemy of Western women, more or less reactionary. There was the Bassam method, which consisted of singing the praises of Islam for hours until he achieved the conversion or death from boredom of the Infidel. I brought out a cliché like “Faith is in every person’s heart” or “All things sing the praises of their Creator,” which sounded fine and less pompous in Arabic, and changed the subject. Judit acquiesced. Elena must still have had her endless conversation with Bassam from the night before in her head and was grateful to me. She didn’t speak much in any case, and I had to be careful that my passion for her friend didn’t exclude her from the conversation. Fiancée, girlfriend? At least as difficult as the previous subject; I thought of Meryem for an instant, I said not at the moment, which let on that I had a certain experience of women while still being available. Clever.