Street of Thieves

Judit grew more mysterious every day. She seemed sad, profoundly sad at times, absent, but I couldn’t figure out why; at other times, though, she was bubbling with energy, laughed, spoke to me of her plans, suggested we go out for a walk or a drink. The first days I bugged her to make her confess she was with someone else, but she kept denying it, I stopped persecuting her, and after a while I knew so well how she used her time that I had to face facts: there was no one else in her life, aside from a few university friends and me.

That was all the more incomprehensible.

I told myself I had to give her time, she’d end up coming back to me. Sometimes, when we went out, I’d take her hand; she wouldn’t withdraw it — I just felt as if it was all the same to her. And even, on one occasion, and only one, we slept together: I had invited her to see my glorious new room in the afternoon; she let herself be kissed and undressed without putting up any resistance — and I mean without putting up any resistance, mechanically, and all my caresses, all my love came to nothing, so much that once my business was done, she got dressed in silence, and I was overcome with shame, shame and guilt as if I had raped her. She reassured me, saying I was being ridiculous, she just didn’t want to at the time, that’s all.

“I told you, I don’t have the strength to be with someone.”

For me, it was absolutely unfathomable, it must have been some kind of illness. So I spoiled her; I wrote her poems, gave her books, reminded her of the perfect times in Tangier and Tunis. Those memories plunged her into melancholy. She seemed fragile, as if the slightest thing could make her crumble.

I never took my eyes off her.

BARCELONA was beautiful and wild, I loved the elegance, the rhythm, the sounds of the city, the diversity of the neighborhoods, from Gràcia to Poble Sec, from the harbor to the mountain, the strange unity there existed in the differences and the out-of-the-way places, the surprises the city offered — a stone’s throw from my place, for instance, hidden by walls, behind an arched stone gate, was the Holy Cross Hospice and its magnificent garden, planted with orange trees, its beautiful fountain and the wonderful stone staircases of the National Library of Catalonia — as soon as a ray of sunshine appeared, I would be sitting on a bench there reading, in the perfume of the orange flowers; the pretty students from the applied arts school would come out and smoke cigarettes, sitting on the steps, and it was nice to watch them for a while; a few steps away, under the porticos of the old cloister, a group of bums guzzled beers and bottles of red; they too looked as if they found the place to their liking, just like the junkies on the Street of Thieves, the hash-sellers, the tourist-robbers, everyone liked this place — though of course for different reasons. The medieval hospice continued to fulfill its fundamental purpose: it sheltered poor things, books, artists, drunks, and thieves.

At night, when Judit couldn’t be bothered to go out, I would stroll for a while on the Rambla del Raval, a long oblong square planted with palm trees, dotted with benches, with a huge bronze cat, an improbable statue, at one end — Pakis walked about in their salwar kameez, families took their children out in strollers, women and little Indian girls wore their beautiful multicolored dresses, gypsies got out chairs and argued on the sidewalk in front of a restaurant where there dined, before normal hours, some Brits who, from the color of their shoulders, looked as if they’d spent the day at the beach — this whole little clutch of people took the air, taking advantage of the truce of evening, and you could’ve believed, going up and down the Rambla del Raval, that there were no antagonisms, no hatred, no racism, no poverty — the illusion didn’t last long; usually an Arab started annoying a Paki, or vice-versa, and you’d end up hearing shouts, which sometimes degenerated into something worse.

When the sun was low, I would go home; I had a new ritual: I would buy a bottle of Catalan red wine at the supermarket, some olives, and a can of tuna; I would settle myself on my tiny balcony on the fifth floor, open the bottle, the can, and the package of olives, take a book, and wait for night to fall, gently; I was the king of the world. Better than Abu Nuwas at the Baghdad court, better than Ibn Zaydún in the gardens of Andalusia, I was getting a little foretaste of Paradise, may God forgive me, I lacked only the houris. I would read a Spanish thriller (you have to make do with what’s at hand) or classical Arabic poetry, with the help of the dictionary Judit had lent me — deciphering an obscure verse full of forgotten words was an immense pleasure.