Street of Thieves

Sometimes I got caught up in imagining myself in Paris, or Venice; if I’d had a passport in order I’d have liked to go there: Paris to buy some thrillers, see the Seine; Venice to visit Casanova’s city, discover the sites of his escapades, navigate the lagoon.

At no time, in his travels, does Ibn Battuta speak of a passport, or papers, or safe-conducts; he seems to travel as he pleases and to fear nothing but bandits, just as Saadi the sailor feared pirates. It was distressing to think that today, if you were a murderer, a thief, or even just an Arab, you couldn’t so easily visit La Serenissima or the City of Light. I thought for a while of using the networks on the Street of Thieves to establish a new identity for myself, but what I knew purely from the experience of books is that it was very difficult and often not very effective, things being as they were, unless you chose a Libyan, Sudanese or Ethiopian passport and that too, without the shimmering bronze sticker of the Schengen visa, was good for nothing. If it weren’t for Judit, I think I’d have tried my chances, I’d have gone back to Algeciras, tried to cross illegally through customs in the other direction, which must not have been very complicated, and once in Morocco I would just have had to pray that the customs officers of the Motherland had never heard of me and would let me return to the cradle. Then, I’d have settled in Tangier with my loot, before returning to my dead soldiers and to Jean-François Bourrelier, the champion of typing by the kilometer. And a few years later, once my crimes had reached their statute of limitations, having gotten rich off of one million three hundred thousand dead poilus, I’d ask for a tourist visa to go to Venice and Paris, and that was it.

But I still had hope that one of my kisses would cure Judit of her illness, that one day she would wake up and decide to be with me again, full-time. And after all, despite the conditions, despite the great poverty of the Street of Thieves, I wasn’t that badly off — I just felt I was on a stopover; real life still hadn’t begun, it was endlessly postponed: deferred at the Propagation for Koranic Thought, which disappeared in flames; delayed on board the Ibn Battuta, lost craft; put off at chez Cruz, dog among dogs; suspended in Barcelona at the mercy of the crisis and Judit. On the run, always. There were accounts that still weren’t settled and today, in my noisy monastery, my convent of thieving dervishes, when everything outside has burned, Europe, the Arab world, when flames have devoured the books, when hatred has invaded us, destroying the world of yesterday with the furious doggedness of stupidity, when the dogs are growling, attacking blindly to kill each other, the last weeks on the Street of Thieves seem to me like a somber happiness, the edge of a razor, and you don’t know whose throat it’s going to cut: just as the tightrope walker must defy the possibility of falling in order to concentrate on his footsteps — he looks in front of him, gently maneuvers the pole that saves him from the abyss, advances toward the unknown — I was walking without thinking about the fate that had pushed me toward Barcelona; like an animal, I could sense the storm to come, around me, inside me, while at the same time putting it all out of mind so I’d be able to cross the void.

IT was Sheikh Nureddin who warned me, via a brief email; life is a funny thing, a mysterious arrangement, a merciless logic of a futile destiny. He was coming to visit me. He had to pass through Barcelona for a meeting, on business. I confess I was happy to see him again, a little worried, too — the echo of the Marrakesh attack still hovered, a year later. The fire at the Group for Propagation of Koranic Thought, too. Questions that I had turned over in my mind for so long — little by little they had emptied themselves of meaning.