Street of Thieves

My experience of sea life had resulted only in this shipwreck in the depths of the Algeciras port, not very glorious — I asked Saadi if he had ever seen anything like it, boats stuck in a port. He told me in Barcelona, a Ukrainian freighter had been abandoned by its owner, who was unable to pay for the hull and the repairs: the entire crew had left except one sailor, who stayed to collect the results of the sale of the ship and bring the money back to his comrades. The Ukrainian stayed for over two years alone on his old tub, said Saadi, living off charity and a little cash the former crew sent him from Odessa. Everyone knew him in the port; he was a real hero. At that time we were doing a Piraeus — Beirut — Larnaca — Alexandria — Tunis — Genoa — Barcelona line, we called that the bus trip. I would see the Ukrainian every two weeks. He was an incredible man, with amazing drive. Every day he’d go annoy the offices of the ship owners and port authorities to find a buyer for his pile of rust and avoid its being auctioned off, where he would have lost everything — and believe me, Lakhdar, an old freighter, even more or less repaired, isn’t sold like a used car. I would give him a hand to make his engines run; I remember, they were magnificent Soviet models, real clockwork, even with their tens of thousands of hours on the meter, they could have gone round the world. The tub was in bad shape, that’s true, the propeller shaft needed replacing, and part of its electrical system had to be rewired, but someone would end up buying it, it was just a matter of time. So the Ukrainian waited. He had a whole series of tricks to survive. Since he was there full time, he knew all the dock workers, all the guys in the harbor master’s office, he’d play cards with them, organize little trades with passing boats, cigarettes, alcohol, even cans of Russian caviar which he’d resell to a high-end grocer uptown. A great guy. He always went to the same brothel and ended up marrying a Colombian prostitute — one day when we landed in Barcelona as usual, the boat wasn’t there. He had sold it to a Greek company. It’s still sailing, the old tub, I passed it not too long ago. The guy organized a hell of a party to celebrate his departure; he invited dozens of acquaintances into a filthy club and it was a party to remember, believe me, legendary, the bride’s friends danced half naked, everyone ended up dead drunk — at the end of the night, completely hammered, he solemnly announced he was leaving to settle with his wife in Bogotá, thanks to the few millions of pesetas the sale of the boat had brought him; he was abandoning fiancée back home and comrades to Odessa; he was going to America, far inland, with his beautiful mulatto.

Wicked tongues added that he planned on getting into contraband with the cash.

Later on we learned he’d been killed by a bullet to the head in the middle of the street in Barranquilla, but the rumors didn’t say if the Odessa sailors’ revenge had caught up with him, if a Colombian drug dealer had settled his account, or if he had simply been the victim of bad luck.

That’s the only story I know about someone who stayed very long in a port, aside from us, my son.

That was reassuring.

Saadi’s stories always had a dark, tragic side, but I never managed to find out if it was the somber aspect of his personality or if, actually, the life of sailors brought this dark side with it — we were a hundred sailors stuck in Algeciras, on four ferries; I doubted any of us would manage to flee to Colombia or Venezuela with the least penny: the news was bad; the shipping company had a huge debt, in Spain, in France, in Morocco; we would probably never see our missing salaries. After a month of waiting, demoralized, half-dead of cold and boredom, when no one seemed to be interested in our fate as economic shipwreck victims, we had the idea of addressing the media, to attract the public’s attention. The dockworkers’ union gave us a hand. There were several articles in the papers:

Like their colleagues stuck in Sète, the crew of Comanav-Comarit in Algeciras are familiar with hard times. The Tangier-Algeciras line has not been in operation since the beginning of January. Stuck in Algeciras, the sailors are seeing their situation worsen day by day. Lack of food and fuel, no salaries for several months, non-payment of health insurance. .

However, unlike the seamen presently in the French port, the sailors in Algeciras are addressing the media. They recently held a press conference with the support of the Spanish. They have had enough and they want to go home. Many of these men left wives and children in Morocco, some of whom are living in deplorable conditions.

One hundred sailors are at the Algeciras port where a total of four ferries are docked: the Banasa, the Boughaz, the Al-Mansour, and the Ibn Battuta, placed in sequestration last January for reasons of outstanding debt.