Street of Thieves (19 page)

“Son, I actually think it's time you made yourself scarce.”

IT
took more time than expected to organize “my escape,” as Saadi called it, but once again, chance, Fate, or the Devil smiled on me and, two weeks later, in mid-February, I was walking for the first time on European soil, and not just between containers; I remember going by foot, without any luggage, to the center of Algeciras, and I spent my first euros there, in a bar, on a beer and a tuna sandwich. No one paid any attention to me, no one looked at me, I was a poor Moor like any other; I tried to read the paper, but I was too feverish to concentrate. The beer tasted like happiness, may God forgive me. On my passport I had a one-month visa granted “for humanitarian reasons,” that is, to go make my life miserable somewhere else—I neither had the right to work nor to go to another European country; I could only crawl to Tarifa to board a ferry for Tangier. But before that I wanted to go to Barcelona to see Judit.

As I left the bar I asked the owner where there was an Internet café, he pointed me toward a kind of telecommunications office with free computers. The place was managed by Moroccans—I don't know why, I was a little ashamed, I'd have preferred the owners to be Spanish. I sent an email to Judit: Ya habibati,
I'm on my way, if you want me. I have a visa, I've left the port. I can take a bus from Algeciras and be in Barcelona tomorrow. If you want.
I didn't ask her all the questions that had been eating away at me about her silence, but the slightly despairing phrasing of the message, I thought, did it for me. Then I made the rounds of Algeciras; I looked at the shops,
people-watched. I bought myself another beer in a bar I found rather chic. There were women in the café; all kinds of women. Young women, talking in groups with their friends; older ones looked like they were having a drink on their way back from work. And even a waitress, who must have been my age; she's the one who brought me my draft beer. I was trying to pass unseen, to pretend as if all this weren't new—the language, the faces. I felt as if I had passed into a television and all of a sudden, with my khaki parka slightly blackened at the elbows, I imagined that everyone was staring at me, guessing it came from the Salvation Army.

Two hours later I went back to see if Judit had given a sign of life, but no reply. I decided to give her a little more time, I crossed the city looking for the least expensive hotel. I found it—it was pathetic, not to say disgusting; there were hairs on the pillow, pubic hairs in the shower, it stank of frying oil from the restaurant downstairs, and you had to pay in advance, but the rates were almost Moroccan.

Freedom had a taste of sadness. I thought about Saadi and my friends on the boat, about Jean-François Bourrelier, about Sheikh Nureddin, Bassam, all the people who had helped me before disappearing. About Judit too, of course.

I had made one more huge mistake, I was alone, with two hundred euros loaned by Saadi, I had nothing on me except a Koran, a thriller, and a rotten parka, I had to reconstruct everything, with a charity visa, gotten as a special favor from the port authorities. My life seemed extraordinarily fragile to me; I saw myself begging in the markets as I'd done two years earlier, back to square one.

I spent the night in a bar called El Estrecho, which was well-named, narrow as the Strait itself; it had a TV, Real Madrid had played to a 1-1 draw in Moscow, it took up my entire evening.

On my way back I returned to glance at my emails and Facebook, still no news from Judit. I decided to call her on her cell, it
was 11:30; there was a line of phone booths in the
locutorio.
I dialed her number and she answered almost immediately.

“
Hola,
it's Lakhdar,” I said. “I'm in Algeciras.”

I tried to control my voice, to seem cheerful, so she wouldn't guess my anxiety.

“Lakhdar, ¿
qué tal? Kayfa-l hal?
”

“Everything's fine,” I said. “I have a visa, did you get my email?”

I could sense she was embarrassed, that something wasn't right.

“No . . . Or yes, I saw your email . . .” She hesitated for an instant. “But I haven't had time to answer.”

I knew right away she was lying.

The conversation was full of silences, she made an effort to ask me what was new, suddenly I didn't really know what to say.

“Do you . . . do you want me to come to Barcelona?”

I already knew the answer, but I waited, like a deserter facing the execution squad.

“Um, yes, of course . . .”

We were in the process of humiliating each other; she was humiliating me by lying and I was humiliating her by forcing her to lie.

I tried to smile as I spoke: that's okay, don't worry, I'll call back in a few days, in the meantime, we can write; and then whereas usually it took us many minutes to bring ourselves to end the conversation, I sensed her relief when she said see you soon then, and hung up.

I didn't leave the tiny phone booth right away; I looked at the dial for a while, my head empty. Then I thought that the Moroccans outside were making fun of me, calling me little cuckolded prick, tittering; I was ashamed that my eyes were burning. I left the cabin to pay.

I returned to my luxury hotel after stopping on the way in a grocery store that was still open to buy a couple of beers, which I drank, lying on the bed, thinking I really was all alone now. I tore
out the pages from an old tourist magazine to try to write a long poem or a letter to Judit, but I was incapable of doing either.

She was with someone else, you feel these things; little by little my rage grew with the alcohol, a desperate rage, in the emptiness and bustle of a continent that had just lost all its meaning, all I had left was this pathetic room, my whole life was summarized in this shitty craphole, I was locked up again, there was nothing for it, nothing, you're never free, you always collide with things, with walls. I thought about this world on fire, about a Europe that would burn again someday like Libya, like Syria, a world of dogs, of abandoned beggars—it's hard to resist mediocrity, in the constant humiliation life holds us in, and I was angry at Judit, I was angry at Judit for the pain of abandonment, the blackness of solitude and the betrayal I imagined behind her embarrassed words, the future was a stormy sky, a sky of steel, leaden in the north; Fate plays in little spurts, little movements, the sum of minute mistakes in a direction that hurls you onto the rocks instead of reaching the paradisiacal island so desired, the Leeward Islands or the catlike Celebes. I thought of Saadi, of Ibn Battuta, of Casanova, of happy travelers—I alone was stuck with a lukewarm beer and a heart of sadness, in the Western darkness, and there was no beacon in the night of Algeciras, none, the lights of Barcelona, of Paris, were all out, I had nothing left but to go back to Tangier, Tangier and kilometrically typing the names of dead soldiers, conquered by too many shipwrecks.

THIS
whole series of coincidences, chances, I don't know how to interpret them; call them God, Allah, Fate, predestination, karma, life, good luck, bad luck, whatever you like—I didn't go to Barcelona right away, I didn't run to find Judit, because I was convinced she was with another guy, true, but also because I was afraid, afraid of falling back into wandering, poverty, because I was a little cowardly too; who knows. I was tired. No revolution, no books, no future. I couldn't go back to Tangier because I knew it would be impossible for me to leave it again, not northward, at least, or illegally; on board the
Ibn Battuta
I had heard a lot of stories, terrible stories of exile, of men drowned in the Strait or the Atlantic coast, between Morocco and the Canaries—Africans preferred the Canaries because the archipelago was harder to monitor. Since all those blacks and North Africans wandering around the streets with nothing to do were bad for tourism, the Canary government sent them packing somewhere else by plane, to the continent, at its own expense, and the sub-Saharans, Moors, Nigerians, and Ugandans wound up in Madrid or Barcelona, trying their chances in a country with the highest unemployment rate in Europe—the girls became whores, the men ended up in illegal, squalid camps out in the country, in Aragon or La Mancha, stuck between a couple of trees, living out in the open in the middle of garbage dumps, discarded trash, and the cold, and they developed magnificent diseases of the skin, abscesses,
parasites, chilblains, waiting for a farmer to give them a little menial work in exchange for stale bread and potato peelings for their soup, they cleared stones out of fields in the winter, picked cherries and peaches in the summer—not for me, thanks. You always find people worse off than you, compared to these galley slaves I was well-off, I had a little education, a little money, and a country where, in the worst case, you could scrape together a living—I was a city boy, I had read books, I spoke foreign languages, I knew how to use a computer, I'd end up finding something, and in fact I did very quickly find a job near Algeciras, thanks to Saadi of course, it would never have occurred to me to explore that branch, supposing such a branch actually exists: when I was moping around in my stinking hovel a few hundred meters away from the
Ibn Battuta,
picturing Judit with her new guy, he sent me a text asking me to call, which I did right away. At the port he had spoken to an “entrepreneur” from the region who needed a Moroccan for a small job, and that's how I entered the service of Marcelo Cruz, funeral services: my Fortune was playing tricks on me, it hadn't had its fill, it always wanted more. Señor Cruz scheduled a meeting with me in a café in the center of Algeciras, he had a black SUV which he unhesitatingly double-parked, he recognized me because of the green parka, said is that you Lakhdar? Yes, I answered and smiled, that's me, I'm a friend of Saadi's. Of who?, he asked. I said of the sailor on the
Ibn Battuta,
oh yes, good, he said, would you like to work for me, I answered, of course, of course, what exactly is involved? Well it's a very simple job, he said, you have to look after dead people.

Mr. Cruz had a mournful, sweaty face, a shirt open to the middle of his chest, and a black leather jacket.

I didn't quite see what that meant, looking after dead people, aside from my experience with the poilus, but I accepted, obviously.

Marcelo Cruz's business had been flourishing; for years, he was the one who gathered, stored, and repatriated all the bodies of illegal immigrants in the Strait—drowned men, men who died from fear
or hypothermia, bodies the Guardia Civil gathered on the beaches, from Cadiz to Almeria. After the judge and the pathologist, when they were assured the poor guy or guys had indeed croaked, their faces turned gray by the sea, their bodies swollen, they would call Marcelo Cruz; he would then put the remains in his cold-storage room and would try to guess the stiff's origins, which wasn't a piece of cake, as he said.
There aren't any easy jobs,
Señor Cruz repeated to me during the trip in his SUV, which brought me to the funeral enterprise, a few kilometers away from Algeciras toward Tarifa. If there weren't any material leads and no surviving witnesses, if it was impossible to put a name to the corpse, they'd end up burying the body at the expense of the State in an anonymous grave in one of the cemeteries along the coast; when they guessed its origins, either because it had a passport on it, or a handwritten note, or a telephone number, they'd keep it cold until its possible repatriation in a fine lead-lined, zinc coffin: Mr. Cruz would then climb into his hearse, take the ferry in Algeciras and bring the deceased to his final resting place. He knew Morocco like the back of his hand, most of his “clients” were Moroccan; entire villages would start mourning when they saw his wagon of death arriving. According to him, Marcelo Cruz was sadly famous there.

Lately, the crisis and better radar at sea had obviously put a slight dent in his business, so he was mostly repatriating workers who had died entirely legally in Spain—accidents, illnesses, or old age, whatever the Grim Reaper was willing to hand him, who mowed down my compatriots along with everyone else, thank God; but he always hoped, at the end of winter, for a good cargo of illegal corpses—the waters of the Strait were dangerous in that season, the
pateras
were going farther east to avoid patrols and were taking more risks: they sailed when the heavy swells made radar observation difficult. My work would be simple, it would mainly involve warehousing, loading, unloading, placing the bodies in coffins, etc.; he needed a Muslim, he explained, so the remains would be treated with respect for
religion—the Imam from the neighborhood mosque would come and give me a hand.

So I would be a Muslim dogsbody. Paid on the black market. Housed on site. I was replacing another young Moroccan who had left him not long before, to try his luck in Madrid.

I thought of that bastard Saadi, who hadn't warned me about the nature of this job. Three hundred euros plus room and board, with laundry included. It wasn't that bad.

The idea of sending real stiffs back to Morocco after having imported dead soldiers to it virtually was rather amusing, I thought. I had never seen a corpse. I wondered how I would react. I thought about Judit, I wasn't at all sure of wanting to tell her what my new job entailed. In any case it would be all the same to her.

THE
weeks with Mr. Cruz were an abyss of unhappiness. I lived in death. I stayed in a garden shed in back of the business, a cubbyhole full of tools and jugs of weed-killer, it stank of lawnmower gas; the generator for the cold-storage chamber was behind my wall and its vibrations woke me up every night. Mr. Cruz would lock me up in the enclosure when he went out at night, and would free me when he arrived in the morning—with rare exceptions he limited my movements, from fear of identity checks by the cops or social services. When I needed something—clothes, toiletries—he'd buy it for me himself. I didn't have any visitors. After 7
PM
,
when Mr. Cruz got into his SUV to go home, I was alone with the coffins.