Street of Thieves

I had discovered wine. A sin, indeed, I admit, but one of the most pleasant and least expensive: depending on the bottle I chose, it cost me between 1.50 and 3 euros. The powerful Kingdom of Morocco taxed alcohol pitilessly, so before I had to content myself with coffee with milk; here, beautiful Spain placed the fruit of its vines within reach of all budgets.

The sun ended up sinking almost directly opposite me, near the Sant Pau Church, I still had a mere half-hour of daylight left, then it was too dark to read on the balcony, so I would watch the street for a little while; on the weekends, dozens of people would line up in front of the premises of the Evangelical, or Adventist, sect, or some similar minor heresy, our neighbors — they were very successful with the indigent, because they gave out free meals after service. One obviously can’t prejudge the sincerity of the faith that animated these ragged flocks, who for all anyone knew might be real Protestants. In any case, this church (a former butcher shop) always had a full house — you could hear them singing hymns; then they spoke of love, the Lord and his lambs, and of Christ, who would return bringing justice at the Day of Resurrection.

It was strange to think that all our religions were essentially tales: fables in which some believed and others not, an immense storybook, where everyone could choose what he liked — there was a collection called Islam which didn’t entirely tally with the versions contained in Christianity, which itself differed from the Judaism collection; these Protestants singing for the poor must have had their version too — I had picked up one of their instruments for evangelizing, it was a comic book in color, about a dozen pages long, in simple lines; all the characters were black, except for Christ, golden and haloed, with a beard and long hair: you saw a man building a wooden house with a hammer, getting married, having a family; his children grew up around his hut; everyone worked the earth. Then the man grew old, his hair turned white; finally he died and a gleaming Jesus accompanied him to heaven, among the angels.

The whores came out when the streetlights came on. They would arrange themselves at the entrance to the street, on the esplanade side; the Tariq ibn Ziyad Mosque must have been the only one in the world before which Amazons black as night, armed with sequined miniskirts, spangled bras, and high heels accosted the faithful — who to be sure paid them no heed. They were part of the decor, like the cops who were also starting their patrol at nightfall, in threes or fours, in rows, proud, very proud of exhibiting all the force of order and the harshness of the law. The truth was that this was how they accelerated most illegal activities: as soon as they had turned the corner, you knew, as sure as you could tell from a watch hand or from a star, that they’d take a good five minutes to return. There were surveillance cameras, of course, but I never heard anyone in the street say they should be paid any attention to: just as God sees us all, Mr. Mayor could just as well observe us from his office on Plaça Sant Jaume — no one would find anything to object to, not the drunks who knocked back beers and raved almost directly beneath the camera in question, not the hash dealer, in the same spot all the blessed day, not the blacks, owners of a whole stable of prostitutes who were slaving away a little farther down the street for their profit, not the junkies who yelled at each other in front of the closed social aid center, not the Pakistanis who came, late at night, looking for beers in the underground coolers. No one looked the least bit bothered by these white, visible cameras attached to each side of the lane. They were the price you had to pay for fame.