Street of Thieves

With university ruled out, I tried to cultivate myself, to keep from wasting my time. I was aware that it was books that had procured the best jobs I had ever had, at the Propagation for Koranic Thought and with Mr. Bourrelier; I sensed confusedly that they gave me a painful superiority over my companions in misfortune, illegal like me — not to speak of an almost free pastime. Soccer and TV weren’t much more expensive, true, but I found it hard to get passionate about the saga of Barça, which had become, who knows why, the team of the Just and the Oppressed faced with the evil Whites of Madrid. I sometimes went with Mounir to watch a match in a bar — but without much enthusiasm.

I went to the library, read essays on the history of Spain, of Europe, I took notes in a big notebook; I tried to learn a little Catalan, I had a little notebook for vocabulary where I wrote words, fragments of sentences, verbs. God knows why, but Catalan seemed a very ancient language to me, a very old little language, spoken by medieval knights and merciless crusaders — maybe because of all those Xs and strange phonemes.

I also improved my Spanish and kept up my French, even if my kind of books were somewhat hard to find — I sometimes came across a few in used bookstores. I thought about buying an e-reader, but I hadn’t yet made up my mind. There were thousands of titles available for free online, all of French literature practically. It was tempting, even if according to my research there weren’t that many thrillers available. Under the pseudonym Eugène Tarpon, I took part from time to time in an online forum devoted to “Detective Literature”; I made virtual friends there who knew all the web’s thriller-resources.

So I was reasonably well occupied, the intellectual of the Street of Thieves.

At this rate, I’d soon be sprouting glasses.

AND then on March 29^th, the insurrection started, just as a pressure cooker left on the stove explodes when no one attends to it.

The day before, Mounir had brought me to a bar to watch Barça play Milan in the Champions League, 0–0, a pretty boring spectacle but pleasant company: there were four of us Arabs sitting at a table drinking beers, cracking jokes and snacking on patatas bravas, a nice time, even if the soccer fans would’ve liked to see some goals and a win for their team. What always impressed me in these soccer bars is that there were girls, pretty young women who wore the Barça jersey, drank beers straight from the bottle and yelled at least as much as the men, it was wonderful — we talked about them among ourselves in a lingo that was a mixture of Moroccan, Tunisian, French, and Spanish, which is the language of the future, a new language, born in the bars of the lower depths of Barcelona; we all agreed, laughing, that there was a lack of girls in our joints at home — that’s because we don’t know how to play soccer, said Muhammed, the Rif native with his Berber accent, when we have a club like Barça, we’ll have chicks drinking beers and watching the matches too. That’s how it is. The two go together.

His explanation was actually convincing, but Mounir raised an objection: that has nothing to do with it, look at France. They don’t know how to play soccer, they don’t have a decent team, but they still have girls with beers in the bars.

“Yes, that is troublesome,” I said. “But France already won the World Cup. So you can establish a positive correlation between the general socceristic level and the number of females in bars.”

“Doesn’t the African Cup count?”

“For Tunisians, maybe; you Moroccans lost in the finals because there weren’t enough chicks in your bars, no doubt about it. Plus now we have freedom, and you don’t.”

“True, and Egypt’s won the African Cup so often that Cairo is famous for its bikini-wearing supporters, who shout and throw beers at the screen during the rebroadcasts.”

“Just look at the seventy supporters who died in the last match in Egypt, it was exclusively women, and cute ones at that, apparently.”

“Who won the African Cup this year?”

“Zambia.”

“Are you messing with me? Where is that, Zambia?”

“Those must be some girls they have in their cafés.”

We laughed a lot. It did good to forget the daily petty thefts, the dishwashing in restaurants, the bags of cement, or simply exile.

The unity of the Arab world existed only in Europe.