Street of Thieves

The time passed very slowly. In the morning I would walk around a little on the port, in the Zone; I would greet the Spaniards working there, often they’d offer me a coffee and we’d chat for a few minutes; they would ask me, So, what’s new, and I’d invariably reply, Nothing new for now. They told me it was funny, qué locuna, they could at least give you a visa to go look around town. I would always reply, oh yes, no estaría mal, hoping but not believing that one of them would one day take the initiative of going to negotiate with the cops from the Policía nacional. They should send you oranges from your place, they’re in season, one of them said, who had just unloaded a bulk carrier of citrus fruit, and he laughed, and was immediately scolded by another, showing more solidarity, who said it must not be much fun, still, put yourself in their place, if we were stuck in the port of Tangier, it definitely wouldn’t be very funny.

After the coffee I would continue my tour of the docks, mentally take note of the movements of the ships, there were boats for everything, different shapes according to what they contained; poultry boats that transported thousands of clucking chickens in cages; vessels loaded with bananas and pineapples that smelled so strong you felt as if you were plunging your head into some fruit juice; refrigerated ones overflowing with frozen products in special containers; immense barges laden with train tracks, sand, or cement; grain boats like floating silos and modern container ships, real multicolored vessels with ten floors. Some of them came from very far away via the Suez or the Atlantic, others from Marseille, Le Havre, or northern Europe; they rarely stayed docked more than a few hours. A few were new or freshly repainted, others were carting, along with their cargo, tons of rust, and you wondered by what miracle they didn’t break apart at the first wave.

Then I would return to the Ibn Battuta, there was always a chore to do, cleaning, swabbing the deck, laundry, peeling potatoes; we weren’t repainting the hull yet, as the captain said, but we were so bored out of our minds that if some good soul had given us some paint, I think we would have set about it. I was discovering life on board ship — docked, that is.

The bane of sea life is the cockroaches. They are the real owners of the boat. They’re everywhere, by the thousands, on all floors; they come out at night, so much that you’d better not wake up at three in the morning and turn on the light: you’ll always find three or four, one or two on your blanket, one on the wall and one calmly settled on your neighbor’s forehead, on the cot opposite, and you imagine that they act the same with you when you’re sleeping, that they gently stroll about on your closed eyelids, which terrified me at first, made me tremble with horror — after a while you get used to it. The roaches come from the lower decks, from the heat of the engine rooms; that’s where their numbers are highest, and the engine workers live with them. I don’t know what they could feed on, I suppose they treat themselves to our supplies and eat from our plates. All attempts to exterminate them were seemingly doomed to fail: as soon as a boat is contaminated with cockroaches, that’s it, nothing can be done. No matter how hard the deck and gangways are scrubbed with bleach and no matter how many traps are set in our cabins, they still appear. Saadi told me you could tame them, a little like birds. He confessed that before, at night, on his freighter, during the long hours of his watch, he would talk to them.

Saadi had adopted me, so to speak: we shared a cabin, and in the long boredom of evenings on board, his company was magical. He worked in the engine room; he was the one who pampered the ship’s two Crossley motors. Listening to him was like skimming through an endless book you never got tired of, since its contents were vast and slightly different every time. He told me about the Southern seas, the Leeward Islands, which are, God forgive me, he said, the earthly version of Paradise — men who have seen them always keep that wound in their heart and find no rest until they can return to them. He also knew the big seaports of China, Hong Kong, Macao, Manila. Singapore is the cleanest city in the world; Bangkok the noisiest, and the most disturbing. He told me about the interminable line of brothels and strip clubs in Patpong, where Americans flock by the hundreds; a lot of them make the trip just for that, you’d think there weren’t any whores in the United States.

He had seen the cat-shaped Celebes, Java and Borneo, long Malaysia and the strait of Malacca, where there are so many ships they have to line up like cars in a traffic jam.