Street of Thieves

I. STRAITS

Men are dogs, they rub against each other in misery, they roll around in filth and can’t get out of it, lick their fur and their genitals all day long, lying in the dust, ready to do anything for the scrap of meat or the rotten bone they want someone to throw them, and I’m just like them, I’m a human being, hence a depraved piece of garbage that’s a slave to its instincts, a dog, a dog that bites when it’s afraid and begs for caresses. I can see my childhood clearly, my puppy dog’s life in Tangier; my young mutt’s strayings, my groans of a beaten mongrel; I understand my frenzy around women, which I took for love, and above all I understand the absence of a master, which makes us all roam around looking for him in the dark, sniffing each other, lost, aimless. In Tangier I would walk five kilometres twice a day to go look at the sea, the bay and the Strait, now I still walk a lot, I read too, more every time, a pleasant way to trick boredom, death, to trick thought itself by distracting it, by distancing it from the truth, the only truth, which is: we are all caged animals who live for pleasure, in obscurity. I have never gone back to Tangier, but I’ve met guys who dreamed of going there, as tourists, to rent a pretty villa with a view of the sea, drink tea at the Café Hafa, smoke kif and fuck natives, male natives for the most part but not exclusively, there are some who want to screw princesses from the Arabian Nights, believe me, I’ve been asked so many times to arrange a little stay for them in Tangier, with kif and locals, to relax, and if they had known that the only arse I ogled before I was 18 was my cousin Meryem’s they’d have fallen down laughing or wouldn’t have believed me; they so associate Tangier with sensuality, with desire, with a permissiveness that it never had for us, but which is offered to the tourist in return for hard cash in the purse of misery. In our neighbourhood, nobody ever came, not a single tourist. The building I grew up in was neither rich nor poor, my family likewise, my old man was pious, what they call a good man, a man of honour who mistreated neither his wife nor his children – aside from a few kicks in the backside now and then, which never harmed anyone. He was a man of a single book, but a good one, the Koran: that’s all he needed to know what he had to do in this life and what awaited him in the next, pray five times a day, fast, give alms, his only dream was to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, which they call the Haj, Haj Mohsen, that was his sole ambition, it didn’t matter if he worked hard to transform his grocery shop into a supermarket, it didn’t matter if he earned millions of dirhams, he had the Book-prayer-pilgrimage period; my mother revered him and combined an almost filial obedience with domestic servitude: I grew up like that, with suras, morality, stories about the Prophet and the glorious times of the Arabs, I went to a totally average school where I learned a little French and Spanish and every day I would go down to the harbour with my buddy Bassam, to the lower part of the Medina and to the Grand Zoco to check out the tourists, as soon as we sprouted hair on our balls that became our main activity, eyeballing foreign women, especially in summer when they wear shorts and miniskirts. In the summer there wasn’t much to do, in any case, aside from following girls, going to the beach, and smoking joints when someone handed us a little kif. I would read old French detective novels by the dozen, which I bought used for a few coins at a bookshop, detective novels because there was sex, often, blondes, cars, whisky and cops, all things that we lacked except in dreams, stuck as we were between prayers, the Koran and God, who was a little like a second father, minus the kicks in the rear.

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