Street of Thieves

So I was going to have to travel with the dead poilus and Casanova, funny company, but fine, Judit was in class all day, I’d work at the same time as she was working, that was all. And a week was better than nothing. Plus, to go to Tunis, thanks to the Maghreb fraternity, I didn’t need a visa, just a passport, and on Friday July 15, 2011, in the late afternoon, after having made a semi-definitive hole in my savings, I took a plane for the first time. The Ibn Battuta Airport is adjacent to the Free Zone, so I went there on foot after work; I was well dressed, I had put on a jacket and shirt despite the heat; hair combed, shoes polished, a little emotional, I must have broadcast my airplane-novicehood from miles away. I tried to pass myself off as a regular, as if the airport were a nightclub or a bar where you could be refused entry, displaying a weary scorn faced with the formalities, the obligatory stripping, all the while my heart was gripped with anxiety — I was afraid something bad would happen, that the customs officer, typing my name into his computer, would learn that I was wanted by the police, his screen would start blinking, a siren would wail, and a squad of fat cops with grey hats would lay into me, but no, nothing happened, they returned my passport almost without looking at me and after a wait that seemed very long to me, opposite the huge windows looking out on the runway, I boarded the plane, not scared stiff, let’s not exaggerate, but not exactly reassured; through the porthole I saw a guy wearing a headset walking next to our plane as it backed up, as if he were leading a dog by the leash, it was very strange; I was very surprised by the noise of the engines and the power of the acceleration when the Airbus rolled onto the runway, and I thought this thing would never take off, I felt slightly nauseous when it finally lifted off, and felt a great exaltation when, looking over the wing, pressed against the porthole by the angle of takeoff, Tangier and the Strait appeared beneath me, as I had never seen them before.

Judit had returned for three days in early June, three days of happiness, complete harmony, and pleasure that had left me sad and more solitary than ever when they had finally come to an end and I had gone home back to my roommates — I hadn’t wanted to invite her to my place, first of all because I just had a single bed, and secondly because I was jealous, I didn’t want any other Moroccan to approach her, especially not the three specimens who shared my daily life. Just imagining them seeing Judit in pajamas, spying on her in the bathroom perhaps, gave me murderous thoughts. The idea of not being Judit’s sole, unique Arab made me crazy. I knew she had already had “fiancés,” as she called them, that she’d had boyfriends at the university, friends, of course, but those Catalans were a category apart in my head. I was something different. I was her Arab. I wanted to be the only Arab in Judit’s life. (So I was worried about her stay in Tunisia, I have to admit; I pictured her being the target of incessant advances of hordes of young frustrated Tunisians; I was well-placed to understand how they might feel.)

So I went out of my way to find two rooms next to each other in a small hotel — Moroccan law, champion of good morals, forbade us from taking a single room without being married. Our balconies communicated, and we didn’t even have to go out into the hallway to visit each other. It was sort of amusing, it had its adventuresome side. But still I was a little ashamed, when Judit asked me why we couldn’t share a double, to reply it was because I was Moroccan: If I had been foreign, no one would have bothered us.