Street of Thieves

I wasn’t Sinbad, that’s for sure. Despite the calm of the sea, the boat’s movements caused a strange sensation inside me, as if I had smoked too many joints — not really sick, but not entirely in form either. My body, my legs especially, no longer seemed to obey the same laws as on terra firma, and were overcome by a slight undulation, or rather oscillation, a new rhythm that made even the most ordinary movements — like climbing a staircase, or walking across a deck — require a different acuity than normal: all of a sudden, moving from one place to another was no longer such a natural phenomenon that you could do it without thinking about it; on the contrary, everything reminded you that you had to be terribly aware of it, under pain of zigzagging, slipping slightly, or even, in November, finding yourself flat on your ass, thrown unceremoniously onto the deck by a judder of the boat.

But still, it was magnificent to be there: the view was intoxicating. In the morning, when the sun was still low, the hills of Morocco grew distant, glimmering, until they became green and white spots, promontories for giants, for Hercules, and the light seemed to play with its columns, on the side of Cape Spartel; then the Andalusian coast grew nearer, and then you thought of the expedition of Tariq ibn Ziyad, the conqueror of Spain, and of those Berbers who had defeated the Visigoths: I was commanding my own army of trucks, of old Renaults and Mercedes; together we would retake Grenada, and the Guardia Civil of Algeciras port wasn’t going to stop us. First the entire country had to be anaesthetized with a few tons of good Rif hash, parachuted in for free over the big cities, our aerial offensive; regiments of Gnawas would make the walls of the last hostile cities tremble with their instruments, and finally my tractor-trailers and my cars of emigrants would leave the belly of the Ibn Battuta in a glorious procession, headed for the Alhambra: Spain would become Moroccan again, something it should never have stopped being.

The cops of the Algeciras port must have shared my way of seeing things, since they mistrusted us like the plague; they suspected us of trying to swindle them, of smuggling contraband, of letting in illegal immigrants. At least, I say “us,” but I should speak rather of the old sailors on the boat: as for me, they were content to despise me. When we reached the quay, we began unloading; I was then on European soil, and this sensation was strange, in the beginning — until the fences and sheds of Customs at my back made me realize I was actually nowhere.

At the end of October, when the Tunisians had just democratically brought Ennahda’s Islamists into power and when the Spaniards were getting ready to elect the Catholics of the People’s Party, just as the Moroccans, almost simultaneously, were on the point of going to the voting booths themselves, I began to get tired of these sterile round trips on the Strait. My salary was late in coming, they weren’t paying me, my savings were reduced to not much; the work was pretty tiring and monotonous. I had made a friend among the crew, Saadi, an old sailor in his sixties who had sailed all the seas of the globe, and who was in pre-retirement on the Strait. He told me strange stories, tales worthy of adventure novels, and I pretended to believe them; in any case, it helped pass the time.