Street of Thieves

DISTANCING, in friendship as in love. Bassam was distancing himself; I was too, probably — I was no longer the backward child of Tangier, full of mediocre dreams; I was on my way to my prison, already locked up in the ivory tower of books, which is the only place on earth where life is good. Judit was disappearing into illness; I needed superhuman effort to go to the Clinic, where she was being cared for; the smell of the hallways, the cynical distance of the personnel, the false silence of those rooms murmuring secretly with death caused me a terrible, atrocious anguish; Cruz’s little morgue kept coming to mind, those bodies no longer left me; I saw the hospital like a huge factory of dead flesh: women and men went in through the main door and exited out the back, dead dogs you drag behind you to burn them out of sight. I didn’t want Judit to disappear, it couldn’t happen. She shared her room with a woman in her fifties who had a whole regiment of mourners by her bedside and was pretty quickly transferred to another part of the building: in a hospital you have to be dying to get a private room, to keep from depressing your neighbor, still struggling for life amid your death-rattles and your family’s moaning — and even though Judit’s tumor was benign, she had to undergo a whole series of treatments before the operation itself; for a little while I would’ve begun praying again, if I hadn’t been convinced, more and more, of the injustice of God, which seems a great deal like an absence. Despite everything, Judit seemed to be keeping her spirits up — she had hope, the doctors were optimistic, and only her mother, Núria, whom I saw at each of my visits, seemed to be aging visibly. She almost never left her daughter’s room, received the visitors, gave explanations on the progression of the illness, as if she herself were suffering from it; Judit was sometimes confined to bed, sometimes sitting in an armchair; I would stay for a quarter of an hour and then leave. We’d talk about any old thing, the weather, the state of the Arabic world, the war in Syria, our memories, too — of Tangier, of Tunis, and thinking back to those vanished happinesses made my voice wobble in a slightly ridiculous way, and my eyes water, so I’d leave, I’d say goodbye to Núria and gently kiss Judit, who would hug me close, I’d reenter the hallways reeking of death, between the nurses, the sick people on drips, a whole troop of guys in nightshirts, each one leaning on his IV stand with its glass bottle and tube burrowed into their veins, at the wrist or under the elbow, there they stood around smoking and talking, accompanied by a few nurses or good-natured doctors, it was the festival of bandaging and scars, of hanging catheters and cotton gowns, so I fled, I fled dreaming of being able to carry Judit away with me into a well-guarded room on the Carrer Robadors, with Bassam, who was going round in circles without any IV drip between the mosque, the Moroccan restaurant, the bicycle thieves, and the whores, whom he observed from afar, like a sort of attractive, strange fauna, like the King of Spain’s elephants. I had my own little zoo at home: Bassam and Mounir hated each other. Ideologically, personally, everything put up walls between them; Mounir saw in Bassam nothing but a narrow-minded, taciturn, uncivilized Islamist; Bassam scorned Mounir because he was a failure, a thief, a miscreant. They were both right, in a sense; I thought they could have gotten closer on other levels, girls, soccer, life, but no, there was nothing to be done — they only talked to each other when forced to, and Mounir asked me almost every day when Bassam was leaving. Life was wavering, and I could feel it; Bassam was immersed in prayer and waiting; Judit was supposed to have surgery any day now; the crisis precipitated the rhythm of strikes, demonstrations, helicopter noises; the first heat of the end of spring was making the junkies, the poor, and the mad go crazy; every day new corpses would flower somewhere, a bank would fail, a cataclysm would carry away one more scrap from this ruined world, or maybe I’m the one who, today, am tempted to read these events in the light of what followed; to think that the worst was yet to come, that the worst has come — everything was dancing before my eyes, Judit in the hospital, Bassam at the Tariq ibn Ziyad Mosque, Meryem in the grave, the world was demanding something, a movement, a change, one more step toward Fate; I sensed that soon we would have to choose our camp, that one day or another I would have to choose, that it was up to me to revolt, to make a move for once in my life, a real decisive move, and of course it’s easy to think of that today, from my prison library, surrounded by all the certainty of books, hundreds of texts, by dint of all my reading, since the man of yesterday has disappeared; the Lakhdar of the Street of Thieves has disappeared, he has been transformed, he is trying to restore their lost meaning to his actions; he is reflecting, I am reflecting, but I am going round in circles in my prison for I can never rediscover who I was before, the lover of Meryem, the son of my mother, the child of Tangier, the friend of Bassam; life has gone on since, God has deserted, conscience has gone its way, and identity along with it — I am what I have read, I am what I have seen, I have as much Arabic in me as Spanish and French, I have been multiplied in those mirrors until I have been lost or rebuilt, fragile image, image in motion. No se puede vivir sin amar, I said to Judit, and I was wrong, you can live without loving, love is one more book, one more mirror, a trace on our wax tablet, marks on our hands, lifelines, fingerprints that appear once it’s over, once the game has been played — I enjoy seeing Judit again, she comes here once a week, we talk for a long time, we exchange long cybernetic letters in which I talk to her some more about Arabic literature, about the unsurpassable beauty of Ibn Zaydún, of Jahiz the immense, of Sayyab the sad, who died of a strange illness from which only poets know how to die, and I know that Judit only visits me or writes to me out of fidelity to what we were, in that hotel in Tangier, in that apartment in Tunis, which exist only for us. I still think often of that story of Hassan the Mad, which Ibn Battuta tells when he is in Mecca — even if it means I’d have to go round in circles for eternity, I’d have liked to return for fifteen days to my mother’s house, or to the past, to relive the weeks in Tangier or Tunis with Judit; maybe it will return, the time of madmen and prodigious beggars, someday, the day that oil runs dry, the day that Mecca is once again a month away by horse and sail; a day of glory, when I’ll emerge into the new sun, when I’ll stop my mute convolutions to rediscover Judit’s arms.