Street of Thieves

I hesitated. That was one way to leave Cruz; it would also mean saying goodbye to Judit. I was sure that if I returned to Tangier it would be almost impossible for me to return to Spain.

If Saadi guessed the reason for my hesitation, he didn’t insist.

I told him about my days with Cruz, the great sadness of this terrible job, he listened, opening his eyes wide and shaking his gray head; well son, he said, if I had known, I wouldn’t have sent you into that cesspit — I tried to reassure him, without much conviction, telling him it would allow me to make a little money to go to Barcelona in a month or two.

We stayed there till evening, sitting in the same café, taking advantage of the breeze, of the slow swaying of the palm trees that shed a little shadow on the square. And then he left. He hugged me and said, sure you don’t want to come back with me on the boat? It’s not easy for me sending you back there.

I hesitated for a second, it was tempting to stay with him, to rediscover the floating cage of the Ibn Battuta, where nothing could happen to you, aside from inadvertently crushing a cockroach with your bare feet.

Finally I refused; I promised to call him very soon, and after a final embrace I left to catch my bus.

I also took advantage of my boss’s absence to sketch out a plan. I knew he kept — at least when he was there — a certain sum of money in a little safe, so he could pay people without a middleman, that this safe had a key, and that he kept it on his key ring.

The idea of stealing it came to me from the thriller I was reading, from all the thrillers I had read; after all, wasn’t I locked up in a novel, a very noir one? It was only logical that it was these books that suggested a way out.

IBN Battuta recounts in his travels how, during his visit to Mecca, he meets a strange character, a mute whom the Meccans all know and call Hassan the Mad, who was touched with madness under strange circumstances: when he was still of sound mind, Hassan was completing his ritual circumambulations around the Kaaba at night and, every evening, he’d pass a beggar in the sanctuary — they never saw each other during the day, only at night. One night, then, the beggar addressed Hassan: Hey, Hassan, your mother misses you and is crying, wouldn’t you like to see her again? My mother? Of course, Hassan replied, whose heart had sunk at the memory of her, of course, but it’s not possible, she’s far away. One day the beggar offered to meet him at the cemetery, and Hassan the Mad agreed; the beggar asked him to hold onto the beggar’s robes and close his eyes, and when he opened them again, Hassan was in front of his house, in Iraq. He spent two weeks with his mother. Two weeks later, he met the beggar at the village cemetery; the beggar offered to bring him back to Mecca, to Hassam’s master Najm Ed-Din Isfahani, by the same means, his eyes closed, his hands clutching the beggar’s linsey-woolsey robe. He made Hassan promise never to reveal anything about this journey. In Mecca, Isfahani was worried about the long absence of his servant, two weeks isn’t nothing — so Hassan ended up telling the beggar’s story and Isfahani, at night, wanted to see the man in question: Hassan took him to the Kaaba and pointed to the vagabond with a cry to his master, it’s him! It’s him! Immediately the beggar placed his hand on Hassan’s throat and said, By God, you will never speak again, and his will was done; the beggar disappeared and Hassan, mad and mute, paced around the sanctuary for years on end, without saying any prayers, without making any ablutions: the people of Mecca took care of him, fed him like a strange saint, for Hassan’s blessing increased sales and profits; Hassan the Mad circled around and around the black stone, in orbit, in eternal silence, for having wanted to see his mother again, for having betrayed a secret. And in my shadows, near Cruz’s little corpses, among the dogs, I prayed that a magic beggar would take me out of the darkness for a while, would bring me back, to the light of Tangier, to my mother’s, into the arms of Meryem, of Judit, before leaving me spinning like a fragile meteorite around the planet, for years on end. I think today of that dark parenthesis, that first imprisonment in Algeciras, that antechamber, when around me spin the lost ones, walking, blind, without the help of books; Cruz was actually taking advantage of the world’s possibilities, of the pomp of death; he was living like those dung beetles, those worms, those insects that swarm over corpses, and he had his own sort of conscience, no doubt, he thought he was doing Good; he was being of service; he was living as a parasite on misery: might as well reproach a dog for biting. He was the guard of the castle, the ferryman of the Strait, a lost man, himself, in the depths of his deadly forest, who spun, endlessly, in the dark.