Street of Thieves

I begged her, without articulating, very fast; I spoke to her of love, of my fatigue, of the Ibn Battuta, of Cruz, of the darkness of Algeciras, of our week in Tunis, of the memories on our balcony in Tangier, I told her she couldn’t throw all that away in one fell swoop, she’d kill me.

She looked at me with a pained air. I wasn’t at all sure she had understood what I had just said.

She took my hand; she said something sort of definitive, like “I don’t have the strength,” which sounded dramatic and theatrical in Arabic; I felt as if we were acting in an Egyptian soap opera.

I was too exhausted, I muttered, whatever you want, I won’t bother you anymore; just point the way to a mosque, that’s all.

Judit looked at me with big eyes: a mosque?

A mosque, a bookseller, and a hotel that’s not too expensive, I added.

A supermarket, I’ll find that on my own.

I called the waiter, got out a nice, brand-new fifty-euro note, and didn’t let Judit pay, even though she wanted to.

CITIES can be tamed, or rather they tame us; they teach us how to behave, they make us lose, little by little, our foreign surface; they tear our outer yokel shell away from us, melt us into themselves, shape us in their image — very quickly, we abandon our way of walking, we stop looking in the air, we no longer hesitate when we enter a subway station, we have the right rhythm, we advance at the right pace, and whether you’re Moroccan, Pakistani, English, German, French, Andalusian, Catalan, or Philippine, in the end Barcelona, London, or Paris train us like dogs. We surprise ourselves one day, waiting at the pedestrian crossing for the signal to walk; we learn the language, the words of the city, its smells, its clamor — Barcelona woke up to the racket of the gas canisters being changed, to the Pakistani handling the propane gas and shouting Butaaanooooooooo in his orange uniform, accursed color, color of the worst profession in the world, since you had to cart 30-kilo canisters up the narrow staircases of apartment buildings, with no elevator, to the fifth or sixth floor for a tiny commission per bottle sold: in my neighborhood, the “Pakis,” whether they were actually Pakistani or Bengali, Indian or even Sri Lankan, were bottled gas peddlers, rose sellers, beer sellers late at night, grocers or telephone operators in the locutorios, the talking-places, that mix of phone-booth-equipped telecommunications office and internet café. In the beginning I went often, on the Rambla del Raval, right near my place, to that sort of establishment to consult the Internet — the rates were ludicrously low, and all countries and nationalities could be found there: Moroccans, Algerians, Western Saharans, Ecuadorans, Peruvians, Gambians, Senegalese, Guineans, and Chinese who called their families or sent money to their country by an international transfer system of liquid cash, from hand to hand, a system that came close to a racket since the commissions were so high, but which had the poetry of the modern world: you gave a hundred, two hundred or a thousand euros to a ticket office in Barcelona with the identity of the recipient, and the sum was immediately available in Quito or Lahore; dough doesn’t recognize the same boundaries as its owners, money that the migrants weren’t yet able to borrow by themselves in Spain could dematerialize in the innards of the Internet to transform into electrons, pulses, electronic mail, leave Dhaka and appear, instantaneously, in a computer in Barcelona.