Street of Thieves

At that time, in France, in Toulouse, a maniac killed three children and an adult in a Jewish school, with a pistol, point-blank; a few days earlier, he’d cut down some unarmed soldiers in the same way; it was impossible to find any sense in these shots, which resounded throughout the world. The story was spread across two or three pages in the Barcelona papers. A mad dog had stood up, had killed before dropping dead himself, what else could be said, aside from that this madman’s first name was the Prophet’s, that he had tried to take part in the Jihad, God knows where; Mounir thought the cops who had shot him had been too gentle with this degenerate, that he should have been impaled very slowly in a public square — or quartered like Damien, the regicide in Casanova’s Memoirs, perhaps, but what would that have changed. I thought of Bassam, lost somewhere in his own personal Jihad, who might have killed a student with a sword in Tangier, sometimes explaining serves no purpose; there’s nothing to understand in violence, the violence of animals, mad from fear, from hatred, from blind stupidity that motivates a guy my age to coolly place the barrel of a gun to the temple of a little eight-year-old girl in a school, to change his weapons when the first one jams, with the calm that implies determination, and to fire in order to win the respect of some rats in Afghan caves. I remembered the words of Sheikh Nureddin, provoking clashes, setting off revenges that would fan the fires of the world, would launch dogs against each other, journalists and writers at the lead, who hurried to understand and explain as if there were something truly interesting in the paranoid ravings from the brain of a bastard so frazzled that even Al-Qaida didn’t want him.

Mounir thought that these attacks were secretly supported by the fascist extreme right to increase the hatred and mistrust of Islam and to justify the attacks on North Africans to come; I remembered the expression of Manchette in I forget which book, the two jaws of the same idiocy.

A sky of infinite blackness, that was what was waiting for us — today in my library, where the fury of the world has been muffled by the walls, I watch the series of cataclysms like one who, in a supposedly safe shelter, feels the floor vibrating, the walls trembling, and wonders how much longer he’ll be able to preserve his life: outside, everything seems to be nothing but darkness.