Mathias Énard - Street of Thieves

I never took my eyes off her.

BARCELONAwas beautiful and wild, I loved the elegance, the rhythm, the sounds of the city, the diversity of the neighborhoods, from Gràcia to Poble Sec, from the harbor to the mountain, the strange unity there existed in the differences and the out-of-the-way places, the surprises the city offered — a stone’s throw from my place, for instance, hidden by walls, behind an arched stone gate, was the Holy Cross Hospice and its magnificent garden, planted with orange trees, its beautiful fountain and the wonderful stone staircases of the National Library of Catalonia — as soon as a ray of sunshine appeared, I would be sitting on a bench there reading, in the perfume of the orange flowers; the pretty students from the applied arts school would come out and smoke cigarettes, sitting on the steps, and it was nice to watch them for a while; a few steps away, under the porticos of the old cloister, a group of bums guzzled beers and bottles of red; they too looked as if they found the place to their liking, just like the junkies on the Street of Thieves, the hash-sellers, the tourist-robbers, everyone liked this place — though of course for different reasons. The medieval hospice continued to fulfill its fundamental purpose: it sheltered poor things, books, artists, drunks, and thieves.

At night, when Judit couldn’t be bothered to go out, I would stroll for a while on the Rambla del Raval, a long oblong square planted with palm trees, dotted with benches, with a huge bronze cat, an improbable statue, at one end — Pakis walked about in their salwar kameez, families took their children out in strollers, women and little Indian girls wore their beautiful multicolored dresses, gypsies got out chairs and argued on the sidewalk in front of a restaurant where there dined, before normal hours, some Brits who, from the color of their shoulders, looked as if they’d spent the day at the beach — this whole little clutch of people took the air, taking advantage of the truce of evening, and you could’ve believed, going up and down the Rambla del Raval, that there were no antagonisms, no hatred, no racism, no poverty — the illusion didn’t last long; usually an Arab started annoying a Paki, or vice-versa, and you’d end up hearing shouts, which sometimes degenerated into something worse.

When the sun was low, I would go home; I had a new ritual: I would buy a bottle of Catalan red wine at the supermarket, some olives, and a can of tuna; I would settle myself on my tiny balcony on the fifth floor, open the bottle, the can, and the package of olives, take a book, and wait for night to fall, gently; I was the king of the world. Better than Abu Nuwas at the Baghdad court, better than Ibn Zaydún in the gardens of Andalusia, I was getting a little foretaste of Paradise, may God forgive me, I lacked only the houris. I would read a Spanish thriller (you have to make do with what’s at hand) or classical Arabic poetry, with the help of the dictionary Judit had lent me — deciphering an obscure verse full of forgotten words was an immense pleasure.

I had discovered wine. A sin, indeed, I admit, but one of the most pleasant and least expensive: depending on the bottle I chose, it cost me between 1.50 and 3 euros. The powerful Kingdom of Morocco taxed alcohol pitilessly, so before I had to content myself with coffee with milk; here, beautiful Spain placed the fruit of its vines within reach of all budgets.

The sun ended up sinking almost directly opposite me, near the Sant Pau Church, I still had a mere half-hour of daylight left, then it was too dark to read on the balcony, so I would watch the street for a little while; on the weekends, dozens of people would line up in front of the premises of the Evangelical, or Adventist, sect, or some similar minor heresy, our neighbors — they were very successful with the indigent, because they gave out free meals after service. One obviously can’t prejudge the sincerity of the faith that animated these ragged flocks, who for all anyone knew might be real Protestants. In any case, this church (a former butcher shop) always had a full house — you could hear them singing hymns; then they spoke of love, the Lord and his lambs, and of Christ, who would return bringing justice at the Day of Resurrection.

It was strange to think that all our religions were essentially tales: fables in which some believed and others not, an immense storybook, where everyone could choose what he liked — there was a collection called Islam which didn’t entirely tally with the versions contained in Christianity, which itself differed from the Judaism collection; these Protestants singing for the poor must have had their version too — I had picked up one of their instruments for evangelizing, it was a comic book in color, about a dozen pages long, in simple lines; all the characters were black, except for Christ, golden and haloed, with a beard and long hair: you saw a man building a wooden house with a hammer, getting married, having a family; his children grew up around his hut; everyone worked the earth. Then the man grew old, his hair turned white; finally he died and a gleaming Jesus accompanied him to heaven, among the angels.

The whores came out when the streetlights came on. They would arrange themselves at the entrance to the street, on the esplanade side; the Tariq ibn Ziyad Mosque must have been the only one in the world before which Amazons black as night, armed with sequined miniskirts, spangled bras, and high heels accosted the faithful — who to be sure paid them no heed. They were part of the decor, like the cops who were also starting their patrol at nightfall, in threes or fours, in rows, proud, very proud of exhibiting all the force of order and the harshness of the law. The truth was that this was how they accelerated most illegal activities: as soon as they had turned the corner, you knew, as sure as you could tell from a watch hand or from a star, that they’d take a good five minutes to return. There were surveillance cameras, of course, but I never heard anyone in the street say they should be paid any attention to: just as God sees us all, Mr. Mayor could just as well observe us from his office on Plaça Sant Jaume — no one would find anything to object to, not the drunks who knocked back beers and raved almost directly beneath the camera in question, not the hash dealer, in the same spot all the blessed day, not the blacks, owners of a whole stable of prostitutes who were slaving away a little farther down the street for their profit, not the junkies who yelled at each other in front of the closed social aid center, not the Pakistanis who came, late at night, looking for beers in the underground coolers. No one looked the least bit bothered by these white, visible cameras attached to each side of the lane. They were the price you had to pay for fame.

And then, around eleven o’clock or midnight, I’d go for a little walk with Mounir, my co-renter. Mounir was one of the escapees from Lampedusa, one of the Tunisians who had landed in France during the Revolution thanks to the generosity of Berlusconi, to the great displeasure of the French government, ready to share anything except debts and indigents. Mounir had spent some months in Paris, well, Paris is easy to say, it was more like the suburbs, he was stuck in a wasteland next to the canal, left there to freeze and die of hunger. Those French bastards didn’t even give me a single sandwich, you understand? Not even a sandwich! Ah it’s a fine thing, democracy! Impossible to find work, we wandered around all day, from Stalingrad to Belleville to the République, we were willing to accept any job to survive. Nothing, nothing to do, no one helps you, over there, especially not the Arabs, they think there are too many of them already, one more poor darkie is bad for everyone. They think the Tunisian Revolution is very nice from far away, they say, But now that you’ve done the Revolution, stay there, in your jasmine paradise full of Islamists and don’t come bothering us with your useless mouths. You know what I think, my brother Lakhdar, all these Arab Revolutions are American machinations to bust our balls a little more.