Street of Thieves

I no longer had much of a chance to pursue my career as a poet: I came home too beat to write, and even reading became an activity for Sunday, when I didn’t work. But my apartment was very far from the port of Mediterranean Tangier and it took me a good forty-five minutes by bus to get to work or come home. In short, I wondered if I hadn’t made a huge mistake in leaving Mr. Bourrelier and the dead soldiers. Even my correspondence with Judit wasn’t kept up much. I thought of her, a lot even; in the beginning, I would take advantage of the Algeciras stop to send a handwritten letter to Barcelona—I’m writing to you from Andalusia—but very soon, we realized these missives and postcards took at least as long to reach her as if I had sent them from Tangier. Judit was getting more and more involved in anti-system opposition, as she called it; she had joined a discussion group connected to the Movement of Indignants, they were getting ready for some major actions post-elections. What she described of the situation in Catalonia was rather frightening; the nationalist right in power was systematically destroying, she said, all public services, with the University in the lead: they were reducing supplies, the teachers saw their salaries waning from one semester to the next. She was worried: the quality isn’t great as it is, we’re wondering what’s going to become of it all, she said. She was at a crossroads, in the last year before her diploma, and she had to choose her path, a master’s probably, or a long stay in the Arabic world; she wasn’t sure about trying to become an interpreter — in short, she felt a little lost, and so grew more and more indignant.

I had received one or two emails from Bassam, still just as enigmatic, each time sent from different addresses. He didn’t ask me for news; he didn’t give me any of his own; he just complained about the difficulty of existence and quoted Koranic verses. One day, the Sura of Victory: When the victory of God and the Conquest will arrive, etc.; another, the Sura of Butin: And your Lord revealed to the Angels: “I am with you: strengthen the believers. I will strew terror in the hearts of the impious. Strike above the neck.”

No one had claimed responsibility for the attack on the Café Hafa, and the papers no longer mentioned it. Only the elections held the media’s attention, the elections in Tunisia, Morocco, Spain — you felt as if a wave of democracy were unfurling onto our corner of the world.

I was suspended, I was living in the Strait; I was no longer here and not yet there, eternally leaving, in the barzakh, between life and death.

My nightmares were recurrent and were spoiling my life; either I dreamt of Meryem and rivers of blood, or of Bassam and Sheikh Nureddin; I kept seeing attacks, explosions, fights, massacres with knives. I remember one particularly horrible night I dreamed that Bassam, his eyes empty, a band of cloth around his forehead, was slitting Judit’s throat like a sheep’s, holding her by the hair. This atrocious scene haunted me for many days.

When I had the time, I tried to pray at regular hours, to rest my mind; I regained a little calm in the ritual prostrations and the recitation. God was merciful, he consoled me a little.

I had to find a way to rebuild my stock of thrillers, the only one that was left was Jean-François’s going-away present: a copy of Manchette’s Full Morgue, which he had given me because he had two. It was a good book, very good even, written in the first person, the story of an ex-cop named Eugène Tarpon who had become a private detective without any work, a drinker of Ricard whose sole prospect was to go back to live with his mother in the French sticks. Kind of despairingly funny, it took my mind off things.

Judit didn’t have enough money to come visit me; I didn’t have a visa to take the bus in Algeciras and go see her. I could only look at Spain from behind the Customs fences, just as hundreds of guys in my situation were looking at the barbed wire around Ceuta or Melilla; the sole difference being that I was on the continent. For a long time I thought about stashing myself in a truck or trying to sneak through in the line of cars, and I could’ve probably managed it, but to what purpose. Energy was starting to fail me. The strength that Judit’s presence, Judit’s body, had given me in Tunis was getting sapped away little by little. I was content to let the days go by, to sail, without much hope, ready to spend eternity between the two shores of the Mediterranean.