The Forgiven (13 page)

S THEY SAT IN THE QUARRY THAT DAY, DRISS CONTINUED
his story to Ismael. The younger boy listened with a spooked attentiveness, his eyes unblinking as they stared as far into Driss’s eyes as they could. Ismael wanted to know if he was telling the truth, if the story of his emigration was not a little exaggerated, as such stories almost always were. The man coming back from France was always a little Marco Polo. He could make up what he wanted. He could weave a thousand tales and no one could contradict him about any details, because those who had also been there also had a vested interest in the exaggerations.

“As I was saying,” Driss said, a little portentously, “I jumped ship and swam ashore a mile south of the marina of Sotogrande.”

He waded ashore onto a small dirty beach next to a cannery, where the sand shelved steeply. It was a starless night and there was no one
there. Just a road bordered by high umbels and weeds, wooden stakes, the edges of tattered vineyards. He walked into Sotogrande along the shore, undisturbed, without witness. He crept through the arcades of the marina, which was a few miles north of Algeciras, and as he did so, he felt light in his wet sandals, subtly justified, and in his element.

The land smelled like Morocco. Cypresses, resin, lemons, and dry dust. The breeze had forest in it and parched hillsides and the smell of algae drying on stones. He had been on the boat all night long and his limbs shook as he went unnoticed past the terraced fish restaurants and the tapas bars where the yachters reveled with their wives. He heard nothing as he went past the closed shops and made his way out to the small road that ran past the marina’s outer gates. The cicadas shrilled along this road, which wound through darkness toward a village called San Martín. His feet left wet prints behind him on the dusted tarmac, the trail of a dripping thief.

How could it be so easy? Like a dream, he said to Ismael, a dream where you get everything you want.

An hour through the gentle night, to the gas station in San Martín. High trees sheltered the last stretch of the road, poplars with tapered tips, and birds still singing higher up where eucalyptus stood. Its peacefulness astounded him. So this was Spain. Encouraged, he sat down in the verge and collected his energy. There were no cops about, and no cars either, and the hills around him were as dark as the Rif, and maybe even darker. For the first time in his life he was about to do something truly illegal.

The gas station was a self-service with credit card pumps lit up all night. Its roof murmured with hundreds of moths. Underneath, picked out by the excessive lights, an old woman stood fueling her car. She was white, maybe not even Spanish, in slacks and open-toed sandals and a coquettish head-scarf and, by God, she was not attractive to the eyes. He watched her for some time as she filled her tank and until he was sure that she was entirely alone. He could not know why she was filling her car at four in the morning. Perhaps she had insomnia or she
preferred the cooler hours. It didn’t much matter. Finally reassured, he dusted himself down and walked slowly up to the station, his sandals scraping the road alerting her to his presence and causing her to wheel around with the pump still in her hand. He did not walk up to her but hesitated by the closed-up station shop, where he feigned surprise (as if he had wanted to buy something, though he had nothing in the way of cash) and then sat down on the curb and said to her in Spanish, “
Buenos días
,” the only thing he had learned in that language.

She said nothing back, and he noticed the small things: her finger releasing the trigger of the pump, the shifty look to the darkness to be assured that the Muslim was alone and not part of a gang. He knew at once that she, too, was a foreigner. One can always tell. So they were two foreigners in a gas station at four in the morning and they had nothing to say. All she thought was: “This man knows I have a credit card.”

By God, Driss said, I was dripping all over that gas station. I looked as if I had just emerged from the sea like a monster, and this old woman simply stared at me and waited for me to say something. I was astonished, and all I could do was walk toward her with my hands held up.

“Ah,” Ismael said, “that must have been funny. She must have feared for her life.”

She did, Driss said. He was sure of it.

He walked toward her and she let go of the pump. But then, surprisingly, she calmly took out her credit card, stepped to the machine, and swiped it. She waited for her receipt, folded it, and pocketed it. She then looked up and said something to him in Spanish.

“
Vous ne comprenez pas?
” she went on when he shook his head, and he could tell at once that she was English.

They spoke in French then.

“You look awfully wet,” she said kindly, and then asked him if he had eaten anything in the last twenty-four hours, and in fact he had not.

“How dreadful,” she said in her funny accent.

“I ate two nights ago.”

“Over there?”

He nodded.

“I see. And how did you come over?”

The explanation sounded like the truth to her.

“How marvelously brave of you,” she said gravely.

“It was what it was.”

“Well, I am Angela. My husband, Roger, and I have a bed and breakfast on the hill up there outside of the village.”

They both looked up at nothing, at the outline of the hill that was somehow visible. First light, he thought.

“Where are you going to stay?” she asked. “You can’t sit around in a gas station.”

He had had no idea.
Stay?

“I was going to hitch a ride.”

“So that’s why you came to a gas station. Hitch a ride to where?”

“Paris.”

“You’re just a boy. That’s quite unreasonable. You’ll never get there dressed like that.”

She walked around the little cheap car, the kind of car Moroccans would have, and she seemed irritated by the impracticality of his plan. There was an old “Nukes? No thanks” sticker on the rear fender.

“And what are you going to do in Paris?”

“Get a job as a janitor.”

She laughed, and in her face was the phrase “What a people you are.”

“Get in,” she said. “You may as well come up and have some soup before you die of hunger. If you don’t have papers, they’ll pick you up on the road.”

“If?” he thought with dry amusement.

“You are very kind,” he muttered as he slipped into the passenger seat and then sat very still, waiting. He could have robbed her right there and then, and he could have driven away in her car all the way to Paris and no one would have known. He knew how far it was. A day’s
drive, and nothing more, and all on expensive roads. He could have done it easily.

He watched her fumble with the keys, her foot depressing the pedals, small feet in espadrilles like an ancient hippie. She could have been his grandmother, and yet she was dressed like a free young spirit, with bangles on her wrists and a floral dress that was, to his taste, borderline impertinent.

BY EITHER SIDE OF THE ROAD AT THE TOP OF THE HILL
stood commercial greenhouses covered with plastic sheeting. The Bloodworths had bought a walled farmhouse at the summit and from its high windows the valley could be seen, and the greenhouses sprawled around it. Sunflowers pressed against the outer walls, thousands of them, and beyond them were walnut trees, pale lemon trees, sloped fields of white grapes.

She led him through a handsome house with Spanish
baúls
and dressers and polished tables and whitewashed walls, and on the far side of the kitchen lay a pool within three walls and gardens of snapdragons. It was lit from below. The husband was asleep, and in the morning, she said, she would explain everything to him. Meanwhile, eat some gazpacho.

She turned off the light and left the oil lamp on the table. He ate savagely. She had dry clothes for him, and flip-flops, pillows, sheets, a small room under the rafters in the guest wing, where no one was staying at that moment. Why was she doing it? Because of his youth, because of his hopelessness? Or for other reasons.

He ate alone at the table downstairs, with damselflies whirling around him, and salted the bread from a silver cellar shaped like a chess bishop. Angela locked up the house. She gave him a key to his room and told him not to go out on the road by himself until she had discussed things with her husband. Roger always had good ideas.

Impulsively, he kissed her hand and she drew it back abruptly.

“No, no,” she said. “It’s our pleasure to do it. Don’t be silly now.”

He slept deeply in the attic. His nightmares were novel. He woke on the floor surrounded by the cast-off pillows, and there was a sound of cuckoos coming from deep inside the landscape as if they and only they belonged there. He thought: It’s a trap. Now Driss is doomed among the unbelievers. He is in their attic naked and alone.

At noon the Bloodworths were waiting for him downstairs by the pool, an elderly English couple in wicker chairs reading the British papers with their coffee and a jug of iced orange juice, pale as ghosts in the Spanish heat amid the aging color of their subtropical gardens. The husband was a retired chemical engineer. He was about seventy, thin and piercing in his way, and when Driss appeared in his borrowed clothes, he got up cheerily and shook his hand and invited him to eat some brioches, which, by God, he was sure were poisoned. But, as it happened, and as God willed, they were not poisoned, and the unbelievers were not evil of heart. They were merely simpletons. Allah had written it thus.

“Angela here says you are on the run from the Spanish police,” Roger said in English. “Just for being an immigrant. Well, we think that’s rotten, don’t we, Angela? How would you like to work for us for a while as our gardener? Board and lodging and three hundred euros a month?”

When this was translated, Driss had to quell his confusion, and he said yes, that he would, though something in his heart told him not to.

“It will be easy,” the Englishman went on. “We’ll give you time to settle down and learn some Spanish and whenever you want, you can move on more safely. How does that sound to you?”

That was how it began, he told Ismael. He had no choice but to go along with it, and soon he was gardening every day under the old man’s supervision, for the infidel was an expert gardener and he knew the name and habits of every flower and plant that grew in that land. He knew all about sunflowers and how to make saxifrage grow on rocks and how to rear sage and thyme among his beds of petunias.
And Driss had never seen a valley like that, a place so blindingly green and colored with flowers that it made you feel you had been excluded hitherto from something sweet and nameless, a place where there were water echoes and smoke from hunting guns and a sound of distant dogs, and cypresses dark as green ink with a shade he had never seen cast by trees. Lemons and almonds on the near slopes, and the musky smell of tomatoes ripening in the greenhouses. Yes, Driss said, as if agreeing himself and turning a regrettable memory inside himself like something being rotated on a spit: it was a vision of paradise to me at that time.

Ten

ICHARD LIT A CIGARETTE AND COLLAPSED ON HIS
sofa. He was already exhausted and dying for the charade of a weekend to be over. It was a total failure. Things carried on, but there was a feeling of deceit and unease hanging over everything. The old man in the garage, the gang waiting by the gates, and the muttering, superstitious staff suddenly turning against him. David was the bringer of jinxes and bad luck, and Richard’s sympathy for him was diminishing by the hour. Paid? He would now have to have a mad scene with David about this. The doctor would throw a fit; Richard would play devil’s advocate while actually believing the advocacy. “Pay him,” he would say, “and make him go away.” And when David was actually in the room half an hour later, that was exactly what he said.