Street of Thieves

The attack at the Café Hafa seemed to me particularly cowardly and worrisome, maybe because the victim could have been me, Judit and me, maybe because it was on my territory, here and now, and no longer a rumor — a tremendous one, true, but far away. I have to confess, for a long time I was afraid, when I’d sit down at a café in Tangier, of seeing Bassam appear, sword in hand.

I had to stop thinking about these things too much if I didn’t want to become completely paranoid.

Fortunately the dead soldiers, Casanova and my poems for Judit left me little free time. Your eyes are the last boat leaving, can you make room for me? For I am tired of wandering through the harbors of madness. Stay with me! So that the sea will keep its color, and so on, always Nizar Qabbani. My idea was, of course, to end up composing my own verses without the help of my prestigious elders, but that was a lot of work. My Poem Number One, the first that was really mine, was the following:

Start of the warm season

Here I am

Explorer lost beneath his ceiling fan

A telephone

A computer

A love made of wax I watch its drops fall

To seal my letters

Tonight I will read Casanova

Thinking of you

I will bathe in your eyes on every page there is a woman

Who will look like you

Every night

I hold a masked ball at the end of the world

For naughty ghosts like you

Judit would have preferred me to write her poems in Arabic, after all that’s your language, she said, it’s the one you know best, and she was right of course, but I couldn’t manage it: Arabic poetry is infinitely more beautiful and complex than French; in Arabic, I felt as if I were writing sub-Qabbani, sub-Sayyab, sub-sub-Ibn Zaydún; whereas in French, since I hadn’t read anything, any poet, or very little, aside from Maurice Carême and Jacques Prévert at school, I felt much freer. The ideal thing would have been to write in Spanish, that’s for sure: I could see myself composing a collection entitled El Libro de Judit, The Book of Judit, but that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

For a little change of air, every Saturday I’d go into town, in the morning to the library of the Cervantes Center, and in the afternoon to that of the Institut Français, or vice-versa, and between the two, I’d hang out in cafés, people-watching. I didn’t feel lonely, I just felt as if I no longer belonged to the city, that Tangier was leaving me, going away. It was ready to go. Judit gave me hope. I sensed I was about to leave Morocco, that I was about to become someone else, leave behind me a part of the past unhappiness and misery, forget bombs, swords, my dead; forget the ghosts of soldiers killed by the enemy, the hours and hours spent copying out, ad infinitum, fleshless names so I could finally set foot, I thought, in a country not eaten away by resentment, or poverty, or fear.