Street of Thieves (17 page)

I no longer had much of a chance to pursue my career as a poet: I came home too beat to write, and even reading became an activity for Sunday, when I didn't work. But my apartment was very far from the port of Mediterranean Tangier and it took me a good forty-five minutes by bus to get to work or come home. In short, I wondered if I hadn't made a huge mistake in leaving Mr. Bourrelier and the dead soldiers. Even my correspondence with Judit wasn't kept up much. I thought of her, a lot even; in the beginning, I would take advantage of the Algeciras stop to send a handwritten letter to Barcelona—
I'm writing to you from Andalusia
—but very soon, we realized these missives and postcards took at least as long to reach her as if I had sent them from Tangier. Judit was getting more and more involved in anti-system opposition, as she called it; she had joined a discussion group connected to the Movement of Indignants, they were getting ready for some major actions post-elections. What she
described of the situation in Catalonia was rather frightening; the nationalist right in power was systematically destroying, she said, all public services, with the University in the lead: they were reducing supplies, the teachers saw their salaries waning from one semester to the next. She was worried: the quality isn't great as it is, we're wondering what's going to become of it all, she said. She was at a crossroads, in the last year before her diploma, and she had to choose her path, a master's probably, or a long stay in the Arabic world; she wasn't sure about trying to become an interpreter—in short, she felt a little lost, and so grew more and more indignant.

I had received one or two emails from Bassam, still just as enigmatic, each time sent from different addresses. He didn't ask me for news; he didn't give me any of his own; he just complained about the difficulty of existence and quoted Koranic verses. One day, the Sura of Victory:
When the victory of God and the Conquest will arrive,
etc.; another, the Sura of Butin:
And your Lord revealed to the Angels: “I am with you: strengthen the believers. I will strew terror in the hearts of the impious. Strike above the neck.”

No one had claimed responsibility for the attack on the Café Hafa, and the papers no longer mentioned it. Only the elections held the media's attention, the elections in Tunisia, Morocco, Spain—you felt as if a wave of democracy were unfurling onto our corner of the world.

I was suspended, I was living in the Strait; I was no longer here and not yet there, eternally leaving, in the
barzakh,
between life and death.

My nightmares were recurrent and were spoiling my life; either I dreamt of Meryem and rivers of blood, or of Bassam and Sheikh Nureddin; I kept seeing attacks, explosions, fights, massacres with knives. I remember one particularly horrible night I dreamed that Bassam, his eyes empty, a band of cloth around his forehead, was slitting Judit's throat like a sheep's, holding her by the hair. This atrocious scene haunted me for many days.

When I had the time, I tried to pray at regular hours, to rest my mind; I regained a little calm in the ritual prostrations and the recitation. God was merciful, he consoled me a little.

I had to find a way to rebuild my stock of thrillers, the only one that was left was Jean-François's going-away present: a copy of Manchette's
Full Morgue,
which he had given me because he had two. It was a good book, very good even, written in the first person, the story of an ex-cop named Eugène Tarpon who had become a private detective without any work, a drinker of Ricard whose sole prospect was to go back to live with his mother in the French sticks. Kind of despairingly funny, it took my mind off things.

Judit didn't have enough money to come visit me; I didn't have a visa to take the bus in Algeciras and go see her. I could only look at Spain from behind the Customs fences, just as hundreds of guys in my situation were looking at the barbed wire around Ceuta or Melilla; the sole difference being that I was on the continent. For a long time I thought about stashing myself in a truck or trying to sneak through in the line of cars, and I could've probably managed it, but to what purpose. Energy was starting to fail me. The strength that Judit's presence, Judit's body, had given me in Tunis was getting sapped away little by little. I was content to let the days go by, to sail, without much hope, ready to spend eternity between the two shores of the Mediterranean.

IT
happened in January. A blow of Fate, once more; at a point when we hadn't seen a penny of our wages since September, when I had ended up in despair, very seriously contemplating signing up again for the dead poilus, when Judit had almost completely stopped sending me news, replying very laconically to my messages, and when I was beginning to suspect she had met someone else, one night, when we had arrived at Algeciras early that morning as usual and had waited all day for the order to cast off without understanding why we weren't leaving, the captain called us all together. There were thirty-two of us in the cafeteria. He wore a funny expression, surprised, maybe, or defeated, or both at once. He didn't beat about the bush. He said, well boys, the boats have been seized by the Spanish court. We can't move from here until we receive word. The company owes millions of euros in gas and harbor rights. There you are. He raised his eyes to the room. Everyone began talking at the same time. He answered the nearest questioners. Yes, you can return to Tangier on a ferry belonging to one of our competitors, they'll take you, of course. But that will be regarded as abandoning your post, a breech of your contract, and you'll lose all your rights over your unpaid wages in case the ships are sold. At least that's what I thought I understood.

It seemed completely absurd. We were stuck in the port of
Algeciras. Fine, me, I'm going back, I thought. Back to Mr. Bourrelier and the War of '14, which I never should've left.

The captain kept answering questions.

“Luckily the tanks are full, we have enough oil for electricity and heat for a good while. And we should be able to get by and not die of hunger. Worst case we could get our colleagues to send in supplies from Tangier.”

“I have to stay here, yes. But you . . . It's your choice.”

“Two weeks, possibly. Perhaps less. The company has to pay part of the bill for the seizure to be lifted.”

“At least we have enough room—we have all the cabins . . . There should even be some spare sheets and blankets.”

“I don't know, we could play charades. If we were in the navy, we'd take the opportunity to repaint the hull.”

He began cracking up. A lot of guys were laughing. But there were others who found it much less amusing. The ones who had wives and children in Tangier, for example. It was a strange feeling to be stuck here, ten miles from home: less than an hour by bike on solid ground.

The next day, we were news in the local paper, which the Spanish dockworkers brought us:

           
Un nuevo drama laboral en el sector maritime recala en el Puerto de Algeciras. Un total de 104 marineros, los que componen la tripulacíon de los buques
Ibn Battuta, Banasa, Al-Mansour
y
Bouhaz,
afrontan una situación muy precaria, abandonados a su suerte por la naviera marroquí Comarit, que se encuentra en graves problemas económicos que están motivando un drama social que salpica también a otros purtos del Mediterráneo.

There was a photo of the
Ibn Battuta
; you could see some of the crew on board, including me. It was the first time I had been
in the paper, I'd have liked to email the link to Judit, but obviously we had no Internet. I sent her a text to tell her, she replied almost immediately
Wow! Incredible! Keep me posted!

For a bit I thought she might take a bus and come see me, after all she could enter the customs zone without any problem. I dreamed of being the last crew member on the
Ibn Battuta
—we'd have the whole boat to ourselves, I'd have gotten hold of the nicest cabin and we'd have spent a dream vacation together, a magnificent motionless cruise, looking at the containers waltzing on the cranes and the to and fro of the transporters.

But there were still a good thirty or so crewmembers between me and my dreams. I couldn't quite see myself telling the Captain or Saadi “I need a double cabin, I invited my girlfriend to spend a few days with us,” as if our ferry were a country house. We received a few visits—journalists or dockworkers, mainly—but no one stayed overnight, of course.

The time passed very slowly. In the morning I would walk around a little on the port, in the Zone; I would greet the Spaniards working there, often they'd offer me a coffee and we'd chat for a few minutes; they would ask me, So, what's new, and I'd invariably reply, Nothing new for now. They told me it was funny,
qué locuna,
they could at least give you a visa to go look around town. I would always reply, oh yes,
no estaría mal,
hoping but not believing that one of them would one day take the initiative of going to negotiate with the cops from the
Policía nacional.
They should send you oranges from your place, they're in season, one of them said, who had just unloaded a bulk carrier of citrus fruit, and he laughed, and was immediately scolded by another, showing more solidarity, who said it must not be much fun, still, put yourself in their place, if we were stuck in the port of Tangier, it definitely wouldn't be very funny.

After the coffee I would continue my tour of the docks, mentally take note of the movements of the ships, there were boats
for everything, different shapes according to what they contained; poultry boats that transported thousands of clucking chickens in cages; vessels loaded with bananas and pineapples that smelled so strong you felt as if you were plunging your head into some fruit juice; refrigerated ones overflowing with frozen products in special containers; immense barges laden with train tracks, sand, or cement; grain boats like floating silos and modern container ships, real multicolored vessels with ten floors. Some of them came from very far away via the Suez or the Atlantic, others from Marseille, Le Havre, or northern Europe; they rarely stayed docked more than a few hours. A few were new or freshly repainted, others were carting, along with their cargo, tons of rust, and you wondered by what miracle they didn't break apart at the first wave.

Then I would return to the
Ibn Battuta,
there was always a chore to do, cleaning, swabbing the deck, laundry, peeling potatoes; we weren't repainting the hull yet, as the captain said, but we were so bored out of our minds that if some good soul had given us some paint, I think we would have set about it. I was discovering life on board ship—docked, that is.

The bane of sea life is the cockroaches. They are the real owners of the boat. They're everywhere, by the thousands, on all floors; they come out at night, so much that you'd better not wake up at three in the morning and turn on the light: you'll always find three or four, one or two on your blanket, one on the wall and one calmly settled on your neighbor's forehead, on the cot opposite, and you imagine that they act the same with you when you're sleeping, that they gently stroll about on your closed eyelids, which terrified me at first, made me tremble with horror—after a while you get used to it. The roaches come from the lower decks, from the heat of the engine rooms; that's where their numbers are highest, and the engine workers live with them. I don't know what they could feed on, I suppose they treat themselves to our supplies and eat from our plates. All attempts to exterminate them were seemingly doomed to
fail: as soon as a boat is contaminated with cockroaches, that's it, nothing can be done. No matter how hard the deck and gangways are scrubbed with bleach and no matter how many traps are set in our cabins, they still appear. Saadi told me you could tame them, a little like birds. He confessed that before, at night, on his freighter, during the long hours of his watch, he would talk to them.

Saadi had adopted me, so to speak: we shared a cabin, and in the long boredom of evenings on board, his company was magical. He worked in the engine room; he was the one who pampered the ship's two Crossley motors. Listening to him was like skimming through an endless book you never got tired of, since its contents were vast and slightly different every time. He told me about the Southern seas, the Leeward Islands, which are, God forgive me, he said, the earthly version of Paradise—men who have seen them always keep that wound in their heart and find no rest until they can return to them. He also knew the big seaports of China, Hong Kong, Macao, Manila. Singapore is the cleanest city in the world; Bangkok the noisiest, and the most disturbing. He told me about the interminable line of brothels and strip clubs in Patpong, where Americans flock by the hundreds; a lot of them make the trip just for that, you'd think there weren't any whores in the United States.

He had seen the cat-shaped Celebes, Java and Borneo, long Malaysia and the strait of Malacca, where there are so many ships they have to line up like cars in a traffic jam.

He spoke to me of the cows of Bombay—anyone can milk them in the street, directly into his cup of tea—and about the port of Karachi, the most dangerous on the planet, he said, you wouldn't last a day there. It's the realm of contraband, drugs, weapons. Custom inspectors don't exist over there, he said. Everything is paid for in bottles of whiskey. The whores of Karachi are so badly treated they all have scars, bruises, cigarette burns.

Saadi had been through the Suez Canal I don't know how many times, crossed the equator to go to Brazil, Argentina, South Africa.
He had seen such violent storms that an immense freighter could dance like a fishing boat and where everyone was sick, everyone, even the pilot who steered with a bucket within mouth's reach so he could puke without letting go of the controls; he had seen sailors die at sea, fall into the water and disappear in the turbulent immensity or else drop dead of fever or of sudden sadness, without enough time to reach terra firma to take care of them: then they'd throw the body into the waves, or the corpse would be folded up and piled into a freezer, according to the captain's wishes; he had seen drunk sailors who could only sail with bottle in hand, sailors in knife fights over a girl or a wrong word, and even pirates, in the Gulf of Aden, boarding his ship and then abandoning it after a pitched battle with a military frigate, when the entire crew was locked up in the bottom of the hold. But strangely, the places he talked about with the most emotion were Anvers, Rotterdam and Hamburg, he loved the ports of the North, immense, bustling, serious, which adjoined big cities that had all the modern comforts—subways, luxury brothels, display windows, supermarkets, all kinds of bars, where the beer was cheap and where you could walk around without the fear of taking a knife in to the back like in Karachi.