Street of Thieves

I left Judit around one o’clock; I suggested we go out for a walk, or a coffee; she declined with a pretty smile. She had plans in the afternoon to go to the demonstration with her friends.

So I was free as the air, I went to sit on the Plaça del Sol, on a bench, I read a thriller by Vázquez Montalbán for a few hours; his detective, Pepe Carvalho, was the most disillusioned, pretentious, antipathetic guy on earth; his plots were incredibly boring, but his passion for food, sex, and the city ended up making his books amusing. In the end, I learned quite a few things about Spain and Barcelona, and some new words and expressions that were always useful. Once I’d finished the book, I made my way to the center of town. The helicopter was still wheeling around, lower down; the wind carried a burnt smell, layers of smoke weighed down the air; distant police sirens ripped through the seeming calm of the streets and when I emerged at the corner of Avinguda Diagonal, in front of one of the largest hotels in Barcelona, I encountered hundreds of people with signs; black and red anarchist flags floated on the obelisk, brandished by dozens of demonstrators who had climbed the pedestal; the crowd seemed to be occupying the entire Passeig de Gràcia. The window of the Deutsche Bank had been shattered by a hammer; I saw a group of young people attacking the savings bank next door, chanting and spraying graffiti with red spray-paint — the helicopter was very close now, above us, it must have been observing the activists; down below, toward the Plaça de Catalunya, immense columns of smoke rose to the sky and you could see the glimmer of flames — the city was burning, to the sound of loudspeakers shouting slogans, chants, music of all sorts, sirens, it was a deafening, brutal, blinding spectacle, which made your heart beat in unison with hundreds of thousands of motionless spectators, prevented from moving by their own numbers; the closer I got to the heart of Barcelona, along side streets, the more fires there were — in the middle of an avenue, a barricade of trashcans was burning itself out with a hellish smell. On Plaça Urquinaona, there was a pitched battle — in the flames and smoke, a multitude of young people, compact and moving, were advancing against two police vans, throwing their flagstaffs, bottles, trash at them, then spreading out in disorder when the vehicles began moving, two fat marine-blue creatures, their eyes covered by metal grills, which quickly belched out their occupants, helmeted, wearing gas masks: some were carrying rifles, they began shooting into the crowd, flashing detonations from the barrels of their weapons — the young people moved back under the hail of rubber bullets and the tear gas; some of them, scarves over faces to protect themselves from the gas, continued their offensive — they had nothing left to throw except insults.

I was at the side of the street, sheltering with some other passersby in a doorway. Opposite us, a fire-truck was trying to control the flames emerging from a Starbucks, a glaring symbol of American capitalism, whose windows hung in tatters, a strange cloth of broken glass. From time to time, a cop would advance, shoulder his weapon, and aim calmly, before falling back in with his colleagues, like a hunter or a soldier, and one wondered what effect these projectiles could have, so extraordinarily violent and frightening were the shots.

To get to the Street of Thieves, I had to cross the police line — or else retrace my steps, walk toward the university and from there burrow into the Raval, but I thought the university square would also be on fire, if not under fire and sword.

Subversion was everywhere, you could feel the violence and hatred of the boys in blue rising: they were rushing around, restlessly brandishing their long clubs, their rifles, their shields — opposite them, the young people lowered their pants to show their asses, called the cops assholes and sons of whores; a little group dismantled some metal trashcans to throw at them, others, oddly, attacked a tree, maybe to turn it into a giant spear. The confrontation was unequal and reminded me of a battle of conquistadors, with armor and harquebuses, against a troop of Mayan or Aztec civilians I had seen an engraving of in a history book. Conquest was on the march.