Mathias Énard: Street of Thieves

Bassam was also going around in circles. He had almost stopped talking; he just opened his eyes and mouth wide when Maria’s thighs unclenched, on her threshold at the entrance to the Street of Thieves; he would stay there for three, five, ten, or even fifteen eternal seconds, stunned, his lower jaw hanging down like a halfwit’s, his gaze lost between her legs, and Maria had to make fun of him or insult him to set him on his way, grumbling; it didn’t matter that I told him it wasn’t right, to stay there like that all agog, that he could simply pay a few euros and go upstairs with her, he could have seen, touched, penetrated, and come, and that’s that, but no, he shook his head like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar, as if he had seen the devil, no no, Lakhdar khouya, he said, we don’t pay for that kind of thing, and I sort of agreed, we don’t pay, not with money so much, but with the sad memory of the dead smell of Zahra the little whore in Tangier whom he didn’t know. Then he’d go back to the restaurant to wolf down a tagine or some skewers of meat, then he’d go to the mosque, hands in his pockets, he’d spit on the addicts and thieves, ogle the black whores with a mixture of scorn and desire, try to forget them by making his ablutions, prayed, then he’d talk with some Pakistanis, always the same ones, his friends he said, then he’d come home, sit with his eyes glued to the TV, make Mounir flee in the midst of his ritual pedicure — Mounir would close his knife, sighing, get up, then slam the door to his room with a bang.

Sheikh Nureddin had only stayed for three days, as planned; he had met all the high society of Barcelona, princes and soccer players included, had stuffed himself with petit-fours in a luxury hotel, and then had left, not without inviting us, Bassam and me, one last time out to lunch — I felt as if I were sharing the meal with an uncle from America; he was very elegant, in a dark blue jacket with a white shirt with a stand-up collar; he had money, rhetoric, and a business class ticket to the Gulf. I felt a little like his personal yokel; I couldn’t stop myself from speaking Moroccan with him, while he told us about his charity evenings in a classical Arabic mixed with eastern touches. Bassam remained silent; his gaze gave off admiration, boundless servitude. I don’t know why, I hated Sheikh Nureddin, that day; maybe because that same morning I had gone to see Judit in the hospital, and that had put me off a little, who knows. In any case, I was happy at the time to say goodbye to him. I remember his last words well, before he flagged down a taxi to get his luggage at the hotel: don’t hesitate, he said, if you want to join us, don’t hesitate, we’ll always have work for you. I thanked him without daring to mention my dream to him, that little religious-cum-pagan bookstore on the Raval in Barcelona. Then I thought how that dog had created and torn apart my life, that he had a valid passport full of visas, that he had never known either Cruz or the Street of Thieves, and that he deserved a good kick in the ass, to teach him to live — Bassam threw himself around his neck as if he were his father; I thought I could hear the Sheikh’s words murmured into his ear, be strong, the Hour may be near , it reminded me of a verse from the Koran, it was very strange and solemn as a goodbye. Nureddin saw I had heard, he smiled saying be good, don’t forget God and your Brothers, and drove off in a yellow-and-black taxi.

Bassam watched him go as if the Prophet himself were disappearing.

It was time to take him in hand again, as before; I said to him okay, now we’ll go down a few beers and hit on some girls, my treat.

He looked infinitely sad, shifted from foot to foot as if he suddenly had to pee, and took my hand, like a lost girl.

“Come on,” I said, “we’ll live it up.”

He let himself be dragged along like the puppy or child he had never stopped being.

IFpeople question you about the Final Hour, reply: “Only God knows about it.” What do you know about it? It could be that the Hour is near. God has cursed the Infidels and has prepared a burning furnace for them, where they will remain for eternity, without finding either ally or aid.I looked it up in the Koran the next day, after a night watching Bassam sink into silence behind a Coke, as we enjoyed the crowded terraces around the MACBA, in the overwhelming noise of skateboarders, a cascade of boards hitting the pavement, endless, disordered clatter — Bassam watched the skateboarders with an incredulous air, and it’s true that for a novice their activity was extremely perplexing; they would travel just a few feet on the square, try a move — a leap or a hop — which looked ridiculous and always ended up in the same result: the board would flip over, fall to the ground, and its owner would find himself on foot, only to recover his device and start over again, like Hassan the Mad eternally circling; the rumbling and clashing of those dozens of skateboards rose from the square with a fierce regularity; the spectators sitting on the low marble perimeter enjoyed the constant spectacle of these sonorous evolutions, tourists resting with legs dangling, loaded with cameras and backpacks, teenagers emptying beers, smoking joints, flea-ridden bums tippling their bottles on blankets stiff with filth, cheerful cops surveying the lot with an eye as skeptical as Bassam’s — after a while the noise ended up getting on your nerves; constant but irregular, it was impossible to get used to it. Bassam eyed this circus with a look of scorn; he didn’t say much, content to gesture to me when a pair of tight shorts, a miniskirt, or a particularly well-developed chest passed by. I tried to talk to him, but the conversational subjects were exhausted one after the other; he refused to discuss the past, aside from our childhood years in Tangier, a few anecdotes from elementary or high school, as if we were old men.

I was relieved when he wanted to go to bed.

So the next day I looked through a digital database for Nureddin’s words, the verse was in the Al Ahzab Sura, “The Allies”; it was about the final hour, the hour of Judgment, when an eternal fire was promised for non-believers. I wondered if I was being paranoid, yet again; it seemed to me that this harmless verse, in Nureddin’s mouth, was a coded message; Bassam must be waiting for the time to spark the flames of the apocalypse, which would explain why he was going round in circles in Barcelona without managing to explain to me what he was doing there; I knew he had a tourist visa for a month — he was just as incapable of telling me by what miracle he had obtained it.

I imagined an attack, an explosion, with his Pakistani friends from the mosque, as he called them; a revenge for the death of Bin Laden, a coup to destabilize Europe further at a time when it seemed to be wavering, cracking like a beautiful, fragile vase, vengeance for the dead Syrian children, for the dead Palestinian children, for dead children in general, that whole absurd rhetoric, the spiral of stupidity, or simply for the pleasure of destruction and fire, what do I know, I watched Bassam in his solitude and his seclusion, ricocheting like a billiard ball in the Street of Thieves against the sad whores, the addicts, the verminous, and the bearded men of the mosque, I saw him again absorbed in resentment in front of that decadent photograph on Rambla Catalunya, I saw him ogling Maria’s sex on her doorstep, I pictured him carrying suitcases to Marrakesh, and as the killer with the sword in Tangier, and as a fighter in Mali or Afghanistan, or maybe none of the above, maybe just a man just like me lost in the whirl of the Carrer Robadors, a hollow man, a walking tomb, a man who sought in flames the end of an already dead world, a warrior from a theater of shadows, who felt confusedly that there was no more reality around him, nothing tangible, nothing true, and who was struggling, moved by the last breath of hatred, in a cottony emptiness, a cloud, a silent man, a mute man who would blow up in a train, in a plane, in a subway line, for no one, perhaps the Hour is approaching, I saw Bassam’s perfectly round head in prayer, I no longer expected answers to my questions, no more answers, an unknown surgeon would soon open Judit’s skull to remove the disease from it, around us the world was on fire and Bassam was standing there, motionless like a snake charmer’s cobra, an empty man whose hour would soon toll, a soldier of despair who carried his corpses in his eyes, just like Cruz.