Street of Thieves

WHEN Ibn Battuta began his journey, as he was leaving Tangier headed east, in 1335, I wonder if he hoped to return to Morocco one day or if he thought his exile would be absolute. He spent some years in India and the Maldives, in the service of a Sultan who appointed him a Cadi, a judge, no doubt because he was learned and knew Arabic; he even married the Vizier’s daughter. When he left the archipelago, after traveling through a city where women had only one breast, he met a man living alone with his family on a small island, and envied him; he owned, Battuta said, a few coconut palms and a boat he uses to fish and to visit the neighboring islands when he wishes. By God, he says, I envied this man, and if that island had belonged to me, I would have settled on it till the end of my life. He ends up returning to Morocco, and I picture him ending his days in a little monastery for dervishes where he found peace, as he wrote the narrative of his travels, perhaps, or as he recounted to whoever was willing to listen his adventures beyond the seas. I don’t remember any mention of prostitutes in his memoirs as they have reached us; Ibn Battuta had female slaves, singers, and a few legitimate wives he married in the course of his travels. But I confess that later on, in Barcelona, in the midst of whores and thieves, among the smoke of trashcans on fire, amid the truncheons of helmeted police, Zahra’s thin face and her cunt often returned to me like a regret, like one more sadness to add to the list, an ambiguous remorse, what sort of man was I then, my youth thought, if I was incapable of enjoying a woman I had paid for and who was offering me, between her black stockings, her stubbly private parts; more than once I was tempted to slip twenty or thirty euros to the prostitute forever seated on the stoop of the building next to mine, in the Raval, and go upstairs with her just to rediscover a self-respect, a confidence in me that had mostly stayed behind with skinny Zahra and the laughter of her Madam.

Fortunately I was alone, that night in Tangier; I wouldn’t have liked Bassam laughing at seeing me flee from the alcove with the green sofa after exactly two minutes. Men are dogs who rub against each other in solitude, only the hope of Judit gleamed in my misery even if, shy as I was, assailed by memories of Meryem, I would no doubt tremble before kissing her, shiver before going to bed with her, if the occasion presented itself, and the closer this mirage got — just a few hours separated me from her return to Tangier, as I stood in the early morning on my balcony — the more terrified I became. The events of the last few days whirled in my head, the debris of nightmares reddened the dawn mist over the Strait.

The fire at the Group worried me, I wondered how long I had left before the cops arrested me.

I felt a little like a fugitive.

Despite my new job, the money I had as advance, I was at a loss, anxious, just as powerless as when I’d been faced with Zahra the night before; the suit of age was too big for me. I missed a mother, a father, a Sheikh Nureddin, a Bassam.

Judit’s arrival was a real disaster.

Maybe I shouldn’t have waited for her at the train station as a surprise; I shouldn’t have made her dizzy with talk, I shouldn’t have acted as if we had an intimate, close relationship which didn’t exist — I went too fast; I had formed my plans alone and quickly, à la Bassam, without caring about what she might have experienced in Marrakesh, a story that didn’t exist. Judit saw me as I was, a young stranger who was holding her too tight. Maybe she was scared. She told me it was horrible, the way it felt, after the attack, the square that had been so bustling where everyone acted as if nothing had happened without believing it, where all of a sudden the huge machinery for enchanting tourists had ground to a stop.

She said actually, you know, in Marrakesh I saw your friend, Bassam, the one who was with us the other night.

As she said that she looked me in the eyes. I wasn’t sure if she really had an intuition about what that meant. It was unimaginable, in any case. Unimaginable to think that she could have come across, a few hours later, one of the people who had made the bomb explode in that café. Despite all the clues I had had, I couldn’t bring myself to realize it. That this attack actually existed, beyond the images on TV, was unthinkable. That Bassam could have participated in it without talking about it to me was, essentially, almost impossible.

Judit didn’t say it’s strange he was in Marrakesh, when we had seen him the day before without him mentioning his trip.