Street of Thieves

Freedom had a taste of sadness. I thought about Saadi and my friends on the boat, about Jean-François Bourrelier, about Sheikh Nureddin, Bassam, all the people who had helped me before disappearing. About Judit too, of course.

I had made one more huge mistake, I was alone, with two hundred euros loaned by Saadi, I had nothing on me except a Koran, a thriller, and a rotten parka, I had to reconstruct everything, with a charity visa, gotten as a special favor from the port authorities. My life seemed extraordinarily fragile to me; I saw myself begging in the markets as I’d done two years earlier, back to square one.

I spent the night in a bar called El Estrecho, which was well-named, narrow as the Strait itself; it had a TV, Real Madrid had played to a 1–1 draw in Moscow, it took up my entire evening.

On my way back I returned to glance at my emails and Facebook, still no news from Judit. I decided to call her on her cell, it was 11:30; there was a line of phone booths in the locutorio. I dialed her number and she answered almost immediately.

“Hola, it’s Lakhdar,” I said. “I’m in Algeciras.”

I tried to control my voice, to seem cheerful, so she wouldn’t guess my anxiety.

“Lakhdar, ¿qué tal? Kayfa-l hal?”

“Everything’s fine,” I said. “I have a visa, did you get my email?”

I could sense she was embarrassed, that something wasn’t right.

“No. . Or yes, I saw your email. .” She hesitated for an instant. “But I haven’t had time to answer.”

I knew right away she was lying.

The conversation was full of silences, she made an effort to ask me what was new, suddenly I didn’t really know what to say.

“Do you. . do you want me to come to Barcelona?”

I already knew the answer, but I waited, like a deserter facing the execution squad.

“Um, yes, of course. .”

We were in the process of humiliating each other; she was humiliating me by lying and I was humiliating her by forcing her to lie.

I tried to smile as I spoke: that’s okay, don’t worry, I’ll call back in a few days, in the meantime, we can write; and then whereas usually it took us many minutes to bring ourselves to end the conversation, I sensed her relief when she said see you soon then, and hung up.

I didn’t leave the tiny phone booth right away; I looked at the dial for a while, my head empty. Then I thought that the Moroccans outside were making fun of me, calling me little cuckolded prick, tittering; I was ashamed that my eyes were burning. I left the cabin to pay.

I returned to my luxury hotel after stopping on the way in a grocery store that was still open to buy a couple of beers, which I drank, lying on the bed, thinking I really was all alone now. I tore out the pages from an old tourist magazine to try to write a long poem or a letter to Judit, but I was incapable of doing either.

She was with someone else, you feel these things; little by little my rage grew with the alcohol, a desperate rage, in the emptiness and bustle of a continent that had just lost all its meaning, all I had left was this pathetic room, my whole life was summarized in this shitty craphole, I was locked up again, there was nothing for it, nothing, you’re never free, you always collide with things, with walls. I thought about this world on fire, about a Europe that would burn again someday like Libya, like Syria, a world of dogs, of abandoned beggars — it’s hard to resist mediocrity, in the constant humiliation life holds us in, and I was angry at Judit, I was angry at Judit for the pain of abandonment, the blackness of solitude and the betrayal I imagined behind her embarrassed words, the future was a stormy sky, a sky of steel, leaden in the north; Fate plays in little spurts, little movements, the sum of minute mistakes in a direction that hurls you onto the rocks instead of reaching the paradisiacal island so desired, the Leeward Islands or the catlike Celebes. I thought of Saadi, of Ibn Battuta, of Casanova, of happy travelers — I alone was stuck with a lukewarm beer and a heart of sadness, in the Western darkness, and there was no beacon in the night of Algeciras, none, the lights of Barcelona, of Paris, were all out, I had nothing left but to go back to Tangier, Tangier and kilometrically typing the names of dead soldiers, conquered by too many shipwrecks.