Street of Thieves

THE next day the city awoke feverish and in disbelief; the wave of violence was still trembling in the morning — curious onlookers stared at the broken windows in little groups, making comments in low voices; cleaning teams tried to erase all traces of fire as quickly as possible. In the papers, the only thing they talked about was the cost of the damage, the number of arrests.

The difference from Tunis, Mounir said to me, possibly the only difference, is that in Tunis the chaos continued the next day, the day after that, and the day after that. Here, it’s as if nothing had happened. They repair the bank façades, the government continues its work, the revolutionaries return to their skateboards, and the tourists resume control of Plaça de Catalunya.

Here, everyone still has too much to lose to launch an insurrection, believe me.

Of course, at the time, we couldn’t know.

Mounir was desperately trying to earn some money, more money — he took insane risks to steal cameras that were increasingly expensive, wallets that were never fat enough, I suggested a kind of association with him, so he wouldn’t have to steal so much, I had an idea, which came from Casanova’s memoirs — the Venetian was like Mounir, he too was always in need of money and, in Paris, he invented something extraordinary for the King of France: the lottery, that is, a money game where everyone emerged a winner, or almost. I explained to Mounir how you could earn dough by organizing the Lottery of Thieves, a nice, neat, underground operation — we were on that sidewalk café on Carrer del Cid that we liked for its quietness, five hundred meters from the Carrer Robadors, and I was making him laugh with my lottery stories, he found it hard to believe that it could work. If we don’t try, we’ll never know, I said. Of course money games are a sin, but for the player, not for the organizer, I suppose.

You think there’s a lottery in Saudi Arabia?

I found it extraordinarily funny that it was old Casanova who provided us with this magnificent idea. Of course a little investment was necessary, at least for the winnings from the first drawing, if we didn’t sell enough tickets the first time around. We’d be much less greedy than the State and we’d reinvest most of our earnings, keeping just a profit of twenty percent of the stakes — the rest would go to the owner of the winning ticket.

Mounir strongly doubted that clients would trust us, but the projections made him salivate: look, if we sell, let’s say, 50 tickets at 10 euros each, that makes 500 euros. We give 400 euros in winnings, and we keep 100 euros. If 10 euros seems too much to you, we can do the same with 5 euros.

Mounir began to understand all the magic of this beautiful invention. He made calculations. Hey, he was a clever one, your Casanova. Did he really invent that? Yes, I think so, I replied. At least that’s what he says.

Putting this plan into action was obviously more complicated than we’d thought, but one week later we had printed our tickets for our underground lottery — I was the investor, so I had taken charge of this material part of the business. In the end, we found it simpler to use the results of an existing lottery instead of organizing our own, and this way had the additional advantage of giving us a certain legitimacy: everyone could check, via the paper or the special kiosks, if he had won or lost.

This activity was very Spanish, people told me: at Christmas, everyone (associations, businesses, supermarkets, administrations) organizes lots of lotteries. So ours would have the particularity of being out of season and Casanovan.

Of course, this initiative was an almost complete fiasco: we sold three tickets, two in the Moroccan restaurant on the Street of Thieves and a third to Judit’s mother, which was a little shameful — on his side Mounir couldn’t manage to palm off a single one on his own, making the rounds of all the Chinese outfits on the Raval, and this when the (supposed) Chinese passion for gambling was going to make our fortune.

Our tickets were handsome, though, in color and in Catalan, because I thought that looked more serious: Loteria Robadors was not, on the other hand, perhaps the best name in the world.

Still, the fact is that this Casanovan action brought us thirty euros (after checking that none of the tickets was the winning one, which would have been a catastrophe, or bankruptcy) from which we had to subtract some euros for a color copier to print a hundred tickets: enough to drink some coffee and lunch lavishly with Mounir, but that’s it.

I was a far cry from Casanova.