Street of Thieves (14 page)

                  
Start of the warm season

                  
Here I am

                  
Explorer lost beneath his ceiling fan

                  
A telephone

                  
A computer

                  
A love made of wax I watch its drops fall

                  
To seal my letters

                  
Tonight I will read Casanova

                  
Thinking of you

                  
I will bathe in your eyes on every page there is a woman

                  
Who will look like you

                  
Every night

                  
I hold a masked ball at the end of the world

                  
For naughty ghosts like you

Judit would have preferred me to write her poems in Arabic, after all that's your language, she said, it's the one you know best,
and she was right of course, but I couldn't manage it: Arabic poetry is infinitely more beautiful and complex than French; in Arabic, I felt as if I were writing sub-Qabbani, sub-Sayyab, sub-sub-Ibn Zaydún; whereas in French, since I hadn't read anything, any poet, or very little, aside from Maurice Carême and Jacques Prévert at school, I felt much freer. The ideal thing would have been to write in Spanish, that's for sure: I could see myself composing a collection entitled
El Libro de Judit,
The Book of Judit, but that wasn't going to happen anytime soon.

For a little change of air, every Saturday I'd go into town, in the morning to the library of the Cervantes Center, and in the afternoon to that of the Institut Français, or vice-versa, and between the two, I'd hang out in cafés, people-watching. I didn't feel lonely, I just felt as if I no longer belonged to the city, that Tangier was leaving me, going away. It was ready to go. Judit gave me hope. I sensed I was about to leave Morocco, that I was about to become someone else, leave behind me a part of the past unhappiness and misery, forget bombs, swords, my dead; forget the ghosts of soldiers killed by the enemy, the hours and hours spent copying out, ad infinitum, fleshless names so I could finally set foot, I thought, in a country not eaten away by resentment, or poverty, or fear.

On May 2
^nd
, the day after May Day, Osama bin Laden was killed at night by American commandos and his body thrown out of a plane into the Indian Ocean. The news was in all the papers: the thin man with the long beard and spellbinding stare had been crushed like an insect, in the midst of his wives and medications, trapped in his own strange villa, with fortified walls like a fortress—at least that's what the journalists told us. The most sought-after terrorist in the world was thirty miles away from Islamabad, and had been for years, the article said. People wondered why they had unearthed him today, and not yesterday or tomorrow; why they hadn't arrested him, why they had thrown his remains to the fish. It didn't matter much, you sensed that Bin Laden had lost his body,
his physical presence, a long time ago—he had become a voice who spoke from time to time from an imaginary cave, hidden in the depths of the centuries; the very reality of his existence seemed increasingly doubtful and his submersion completed his transformation into a character, a demon or a saint: someone who for me, in the confusion of childhood, inspired both horror and admiration, hope and terror, someone who had victoriously defied the United States of America by spreading destruction now became a slightly disturbing myth, a lame symbol, who limped between greatness and wretchedness. I remembered that at school, he was one of Bassam's heroes; we used to play in the schoolyard at being Afghan fighters; today Bassam had disappeared and Bin Laden had met his fate in the form of black-hooded Navy Seals, ‘seals,' who had dragged him down into the depths of the abyss. In itself, it made no sense, aside from one more farewell to the world of yesterday.

When Judit told me she was going to enroll in an Arabic course at the Institut Bourguiba in Tunis for all of July and when she suggested I join her there, I said to myself that would be a first journey, just as Ibn Battuta, leaving Tangier for the East, paused in Tunisia. I very much wanted to see with my own eyes what a revolution in progress was like; I felt as if I were living in the age of Revolt and actually felt much closer to a young twenty-year-old Tunisian than to anyone else—I imagined that Tunis must be a little like Tangier, that I wouldn't feel out of place there, the Tunisians were Maghrebs, Arabs, and Muslims, and what's more all those young people, my brothers, or rather my cousins, had managed to get rid of their dictator—the prospect of seeing all that close up delighted me. So I ran to negotiate my vacation with Mr. Bourrelier—I naively imagined that one must have a right to days off, and in fact, that was the case, but it was not possible to take them (except in precise cases linked to the registry office, marriage, births, deaths to which I could not lay claim) except after a year of work. Jean-François was very annoyed. He told me he couldn't make an exception that would risk creating
a precedent, but on the other hand, he said, and just for a week, we can arrange something; you set your mind to doing your files and pages, and we'll close our eyes to your obligation to be present at the office for five days. If ever any of your colleagues ask, we'll say you're sick and working from home, and that's it. But above all don't let anything happen to you over there and don't miss the plane back, okay, we'd have to fire you.

So I was going to have to travel with the dead poilus and Casanova, funny company, but fine, Judit was in class all day, I'd work at the same time as she was working, that was all. And a week was better than nothing. Plus, to go to Tunis, thanks to the Maghreb fraternity, I didn't need a visa, just a passport, and on Friday July 15, 2011, in the late afternoon, after having made a semi-definitive hole in my savings, I took a plane for the first time. The Ibn Battuta Airport is adjacent to the Free Zone, so I went there on foot after work; I was well dressed, I had put on a jacket and shirt despite the heat; hair combed, shoes polished, a little emotional, I must have broadcast my airplane-novicehood from miles away. I tried to pass myself off as a regular, as if the airport were a nightclub or a bar where you could be refused entry, displaying a weary scorn faced with the formalities, the obligatory stripping, all the while my heart was gripped with anxiety—I was afraid something bad would happen, that the customs officer, typing my name into his computer, would learn that I was wanted by the police, his screen would start blinking, a siren would wail, and a squad of fat cops with grey hats would lay into me, but no, nothing happened, they returned my passport almost without looking at me and after a wait that seemed very long to me, opposite the huge windows looking out on the runway, I boarded the plane, not scared stiff, let's not exaggerate, but not exactly reassured; through the porthole I saw a guy wearing a headset walking next to our plane as it backed up, as if he were leading a dog by the leash, it was very strange; I was very surprised by the noise of the engines and the power of the acceleration when
the Airbus rolled onto the runway, and I thought this thing would never take off, I felt slightly nauseous when it finally lifted off, and felt a great exaltation when, looking over the wing, pressed against the porthole by the angle of takeoff, Tangier and the Strait appeared beneath me, as I had never seen them before.

Judit had returned for three days in early June, three days of happiness, complete harmony, and pleasure that had left me sad and more solitary than ever when they had finally come to an end and I had gone home back to my roommates—I hadn't wanted to invite her to my place, first of all because I just had a single bed, and secondly because I was jealous, I didn't want any other Moroccan to approach her, especially not the three specimens who shared my daily life. Just imagining them seeing Judit in pajamas, spying on her in the bathroom perhaps, gave me murderous thoughts. The idea of not being Judit's sole, unique Arab made me crazy. I knew she had already had “fiancés,” as she called them, that she'd had boyfriends at the university, friends, of course, but those Catalans were a category apart in my head. I was something different. I was her Arab. I wanted to be the only Arab in Judit's life. (So I was worried about her stay in Tunisia, I have to admit; I pictured her being the target of incessant advances of hordes of young frustrated Tunisians; I was well-placed to understand how they might feel.)

So I went out of my way to find two rooms next to each other in a small hotel—Moroccan law, champion of good morals, forbade us from taking a single room without being married. Our balconies communicated, and we didn't even have to go out into the hallway to visit each other. It was sort of amusing, it had its adventuresome side. But still I was a little ashamed, when Judit asked me why we couldn't share a double, to reply it was because I was Moroccan: If I had been foreign, no one would have bothered us.

We hadn't left the hotel much during those three days, aside from a few excursions, Cape Spartel, the caves of Hercules, the Kasbah Museum and the Marshan Cemetery to see Choukri's grave;
the remarks of the café waiters, the museum employees or even the passersby, when they saw me alone with Judit, didn't encourage me to go out: it was as pleasant as a kick in the ass, that mixture of scorn, jealousy, and crass vulgarity that made me want to give them the finger with a heartfelt phrase about the sisters or mothers of the parties concerned. Walking with Judit was to receive, at every street corner, a serious quantity of symbolic gobs of spit, because I was a young Moroccan, and strolling in the company of a European girl without, seemingly, belonging to the social class that visited the private beaches or bars of luxury hotels, a class that could allow itself anything. Judit herself realized it, and I felt she was sorry for me, which made me even sadder. Even at Choukri's grave, a moron my age came over to bother us; he asked me in Arabic what we were doing there, which is a funny question to ask in a cemetery—I replied, we're coming to get ourselves buried, of course, when I wanted to say “We're coming to your funeral, ass,” but I didn't dare. After all, he might have been sincere, maybe he wanted to help us.

I'd become a little savage, in fact, I think. Locked up with my books, in my solitude, alone with Judit, I no longer had any contact with the outside world, aside from my three co-renters, who couldn't really be called the “outside world.”

In the meantime, I had read
For Bread Alone,
and even the next one,
The Time of Errors
; I had to apologize to Judit: this Choukri was something else. His Arabic was dry as the sticks his father beat him with, hard as famine. A new language, a way of writing that seemed revolutionary to me. He wasn't afraid, he told his story without hiding anything—sex, violence, or poverty. His wanderings reminded me of my months of vagabondage, at times; the feeling was so strong that I had to close the book, the way you walk away from a mirror when its reflection doesn't suit you. Judit was happy I had seen the light; she told me about the unique history of the text of
For Bread Alone
: published first in translation, banned in Morocco in Arabic for almost twenty years. It wasn't hard to see
why: poverty, sex, and drugs must not have been the taste of the censors of the time. The advantage is that today the books have so little weight, are so little sold, so little read that it's not even worth banning them anymore. And Choukri was buried in great ceremony, with ministers and representatives from the Palace, in Tangier about twenty years ago—as if all those higher-ups were celebrating the fact of his death by accompanying him to the grave.

Judit's departure, after our three days and three nights, had plunged me into sadness and solitude; I fought them as usual, by work, reading until my eyes were burning with fever, and love poetry. I thought about the forty-five days that separated me from my trip. I looked at pages and pages of information about Tunisia, about the Revolution. Ibn Battuta just devoted a few lines to Tunis, where there were, he said, many important ulemas; he was there at the end of Ramadan, and took part in the celebration. I myself would be there just before the start of the fast, which meant I was barely a month behind my illustrious predecessor.

AS
if on purpose, a new blow of fate, I received the first email from Bassam two days before my flight. I confess I was thinking a little less often about him and Sheikh Nureddin, that I hadn't returned to the neighborhood since the fire at the Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought, that I was living a little like an exile, and one morning, glancing over my inbox as always just after getting up, to see if I'd already gotten a reply from Judit to my missive from the day before, I noticed a bizarre message, which I took at first for one of those emails offering to effortlessly lengthen your virility by five centimeters, or to buy Viagra at a discount price to strengthen it, with the sender's name as “Cheryl Bang” or something like that. What intrigued me was the subject line:
News,
and I opened it—the note had just three lines: