Street of Thieves

The drug addicts came from the social aid center that was reserved for them a little farther down the street, and they’d look for a place to shoot up; in adjacent streets, a lot of them resold the methadone the municipality gave them. They entered buildings whose doors didn’t close properly, climbed up as far as their physical condition allowed them, sometimes to the roof, where they didn’t risk being chased out by the occupant with kicks or a broom handle. You felt sorry for them. Most of them were wrecks of stupefying thinness; they had abscesses on their arms, pustules on their faces; a lot of them spoke to themselves, cursed, swore, crushed their cans of beer, which they emptied one after the other, waiting for better; sometimes you saw them staggering, silent, blissful, emerging from a building, and you knew they had just injected themselves, in a hurry, sitting in the midst of roaches, with their dose of happiness. When they had money, they’d buy themselves a bowl of soup at the Moroccan restaurant a little farther down the street, and would stay there a long time, watching TV, looking absent; the restaurant owners were generous, they tolerated these phantoms who paid and stole nothing but teaspoons — they just didn’t let them use the bathrooms. The drug addicts even had a little park to themselves, a corner of greenery that no one denied them, not even City Hall: a little more to the south, near the harbor, against the ramparts of the Gothic Arsenal, behind an embankment that must once have protected an old moat, there was, two meters down, a square of grass invisible from the street — agents of municipal cleanliness didn’t often go down there, and even the cops, on the principle that anything invisible isn’t annoying and thus does not exist, only rarely bothered the junkies. There were women and men, even though it was sometimes hard to tell what sex they were; they lived among themselves, argued among themselves, died among themselves, and if they weren’t the most elegant or the cleanest inhabitants of the neighborhood, they were, along with the rodents and insects, among the most harmless.

Except sometimes, just as a dog at bay can show its teeth and try to bite an aggressor, you saw some of them turn violent; I remember an incredible fit of madness, one day, when I was on my balcony calmly observing the goings-on in the street, one of those guys emerged from his methadone stupor in a rage; he began shouting, then screaming incomprehensible curses, hitting his fist against the wall, then against a passing Pakistani who didn’t understand what earned him this deluge of bruises; two people came to his aid: despite his skinniness, the addict had immense, almost divine strength, three young men couldn’t manage to control him but just tear him away, trying to grab him around the waist, his clothes were much less resistant than he — first his T-shirt tore, then his belt gave out, he fought like a demon and sent his aggressors rolling with huge vengeful kicks in the shins, the balls, until he was just in his underwear, he fought in his underwear like a ridiculous warrior, thin and meager, his legs covered with sores, his arms crusted with scabs and tattoos, and it took five people, two cops, and an ambulance to bring it to an end: the fuzz managed to handcuff him, the men in white gave him an injection and then strapped him to a stretcher to take him God knows where — there was a real sad beauty in this last battle of the poor naked man, dispossessed of his brain and his body by heroin; he was fighting against himself, against God, and the social services, which to him were identical.