Street of Thieves

The first days were hard — I stayed in a hotel for students, totally unthinking: I had to leave my passport at the desk, the cops could have easily found me and collected me first thing in the morning. But nothing ever happens the way it does in books. Whatever the case, well hidden in the Raval, in the lower depths, between the whores and the thieves, I felt as if I had nothing to fear.

The Tariq ibn Ziyad Mosque was in the hands of the Pakis; I also ran into a few Arabs there, but few in comparison. The Imam was from the Punjab. I spent some time there, in the beginning, in order to meet people, to rest in prayer and reading. When you have no home and know no one, you have to start somewhere: bars or mosques — and I chose well: it was thanks to the mosque that I found my room in the dilapidated but livable apartment, in the heart of the Raval fortress: thirty square meters all lengthwise, with a little balcony. I shared the apartment with a Tunisian named Mounir. I paid three hundred euros per month, everything included — in fact we didn’t know who was in charge of electricity, if there was an electric bill; as to water, it came from large reservoirs on the roof, and there were no meters. I never managed to find out who the owner was — we settled the rent in cash in a bar on Sant Ramon Street, and that was it. When Mounir couldn’t pay, at the end of April, two guys gave him a good thrashing; that encouraged him to find dough quickly, he got by, took some risks to steal four nice bicycles which he sold off cheaply, nothing else.

My relationship with Judit was strange. We saw each other almost every day. She helped me with everything; she even went so far as to open an account in a savings bank in her name so I could deposit my money — she gave me the debit card and the PIN, it was all cash of course, given where I lived. It was she herself who made the deposit for me, she didn’t ask me where the cash came from and I didn’t tell her.

Judit seemed to me the most beautiful and noblest of women, even if, for a reason that was entirely obscure, she no longer wanted me. She immediately arranged to find me work — teacher of Arabic. Twice a week, I gave a special class to Judit, Elena, and Francesc, one of their schoolmates, for ten euros an hour. I was very proud. I explained the subtleties of grammar to them; I commented on classical verses with them. Often, I learned that same morning from a book what I explained in the afternoon; all of a sudden I was reading a lot in Arabic to prepare for the classes, it was enjoyable. We learned by heart some poems by Abu Nuwas, in my opinion the greatest, most subversive, and funniest of the Arab poets; I explained to them, almost line by line, the great novels of Naguib Mahfouz or Tayeb Salih which I had never read, but which were on their class list.

Judit lived with her parents, at the top of the city, in Gràcia; it was a mostly middle-class, well-kept neighborhood, an old village attached to Barcelona in the nineteenth century, with narrow streets and pleasant squares; local tradition had it that the children of these bourgeois people were mostly rebellious and alternative: there were a lot of activist organizations, there was even a squat, right in the middle of the neighborhood — youth will have its fling. Up there, the Arabs too were more fashionable, more bourgeois; the restaurants mostly Syrian, Lebanese, or Palestinian; right next door to Judit’s home was also a Mesopotamian establishment and a Phoenician one — all that was a little intimidating and, stuck between Catalanity and Antiquity, I preferred to take refuge in the darkness of my alleyways. Judit of course felt very much at ease up there. She had her friends there, her school, the streets where she’d grown up; sometimes she insisted on taking me out to lunch, after the Arab class, in one of those noble, ancient restaurants: the owner at the Phoenician one hadn’t come straight out of a sarcophagus in Sidon, he was a Lebanese from the mountains; he talked politics with Judit for a while, about Syria, mainly, the civil war underway, the difficult role Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar would play in it — it was all a little depressing, I felt that whatever we did, the Arabs were condemned to violence and oppression. I have to admit he was pretty intelligent and very nice, that Phoenician, which only increased my jealousy — I didn’t open my mouth, he must have taken me for a grouch or a half-wit.