Street of Thieves

He spoke to me of the cows of Bombay — anyone can milk them in the street, directly into his cup of tea — and about the port of Karachi, the most dangerous on the planet, he said, you wouldn’t last a day there. It’s the realm of contraband, drugs, weapons. Custom inspectors don’t exist over there, he said. Everything is paid for in bottles of whiskey. The whores of Karachi are so badly treated they all have scars, bruises, cigarette burns.

Saadi had been through the Suez Canal I don’t know how many times, crossed the equator to go to Brazil, Argentina, South Africa. He had seen such violent storms that an immense freighter could dance like a fishing boat and where everyone was sick, everyone, even the pilot who steered with a bucket within mouth’s reach so he could puke without letting go of the controls; he had seen sailors die at sea, fall into the water and disappear in the turbulent immensity or else drop dead of fever or of sudden sadness, without enough time to reach terra firma to take care of them: then they’d throw the body into the waves, or the corpse would be folded up and piled into a freezer, according to the captain’s wishes; he had seen drunk sailors who could only sail with bottle in hand, sailors in knife fights over a girl or a wrong word, and even pirates, in the Gulf of Aden, boarding his ship and then abandoning it after a pitched battle with a military frigate, when the entire crew was locked up in the bottom of the hold. But strangely, the places he talked about with the most emotion were Anvers, Rotterdam and Hamburg, he loved the ports of the North, immense, bustling, serious, which adjoined big cities that had all the modern comforts — subways, luxury brothels, display windows, supermarkets, all kinds of bars, where the beer was cheap and where you could walk around without the fear of taking a knife in to the back like in Karachi.

Imagine dozens of kilometers of docks, he said, harbors over ten fathoms deep where the biggest boats in the world can moor — boats of the high seas, which normally never see any port: with our containers, we looked like small craft, pleasure boats next to those colossi when we passed each other in the channels. And the cities, ah my son, unfortunately we never stayed very long, but you’ve never seen so many skyscrapers, buildings of all kinds, in all colors like in Rotterdam, for instance. You’ve never seen so many immigrants, of all possible nationalities. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I saw more than one or two Dutchmen. There was a brothel full of just Thai girls, for instance. I even learned recently that the mayor of Rotterdam is Moroccan. That tells you how they respect foreigners, up there. A little like in the Gulf, I said. That made him crack up. You idiot, Rotterdam and Doha, they’re not the least alike, fool! And Hamburg! In Hamburg there are supermarkets for choosing whores and lakes in the middle of the city. In Anvers, in the center, you feel like you’re in the Middle Ages. But not a filthy Middle Ages like the Medina in Marrakesh or Tangier, no, an elegant, well-ordered Middle Ages, with magnificent squares and buildings that take your breath away.

“Then it would be more like the Renaissance,” I said, to appear clever, to show I knew some things, too.

“What the hell difference does it make? I guarantee you’ve never seen ports like Anvers, Rotterdam, or Hamburg. Rotterdam was completely destroyed during the war, and look it at today. In our country it takes two years to fill a pothole in a street, imagine the number of centuries it’d take to rebuild Tangier if it was ever bombed, God forbid.”

Saadi had spent thirty years at sea, on a dozen different vessels, and for four years, he had been crisscrossing the Strait on board the Ibn Battuta. Saadi was divorced and had married a very young woman who had just given him a son, of whom he was very proud.

“Is that why you didn’t stay in Europe somewhere? Because of your family?”

“No, my son, no. It’s because when you spend months and months on a steel tub, you yearn for nothing except to go back to your armchair, your home. Europe is fine, it’s beautiful, it’s pleasant to be there on a stopover. But there’s nothing like Tangier, it’s my city.”