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 a
nd 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.
I never got used to contact with the corpses, which fortunately didn’t come in very often—you had to unload them, take them out of their plastic bags, while wearing a mask over your nose; the first time I almost fainted, it was a poor drowned guy, a young one, in a horrible state; fortunately Cruz was there—it was he who gently turned the body over on the stainless steel table, who placed the remains in the waterproof zinc box, who got out the electric screwdriver to seal the casket, all in silence. I couldn’t breathe. The special mask was suffocating, its camphor or bleach smell mingled in my throat with the mustiness of the Strait, and the cadaverous fetidness of sadness, and the decay of the forgotten carcass, and even today, sometimes, years later, the smell of cleaning products makes the stench of those poor creatures come again to the back of my throat, creatures that Cruz manipulated without blinking an eye, without trembling, respectfully, calmly.
Then the Imam would come, and we would pray in front of the remains or the coffin, depending on the state of the body, one behind the other, as is the custom; Cruz would leave us. The Imam was a Moroccan from Casablanca, a middle-aged man to whom the solemnity of the task gave the aged and well-worn appearance of serious business, without a smile, without a mark of sympathy or antipathy, sure as he was of the equality of all before God, perhaps.
Praying for unknown dead people, for the vague remains of the existences of total strangers, was sadly abstract. Some of them we weren’t even sure were Muslim; it was presumed, and maybe we were sending them to the wrong God, to a Paradise in which they’d be illegal immigrants yet again.
After praying, we would line the waterproof zinc coffins up in the cold-storage room, where they joined the other “pending” deceased. The oldest one had been there for three years, another drowned man from the Strait.
The government paid sixty euros per body and per day of storage: that was Señor Cruz’s cut.
When Mr. Cruz had received the money for repatriation or had discovered the origin of an unknown body, he would organize “a loading”; he’d put two or three macabre boxes in his van and would take the ferry in Algeciras; the customs formalities were fussy, he had to seal the mortuary crates with lead, declare the freight, etc.
The business was surrounded by tall walls surmounted by broken bottles, which encircled a little garden; Mr. Cruz’s house was a few hundred meters away—at night, I was locked up with the dead, in this suburb next to the highway, and it was sad, sad and frightening.
I also took care of the cleaning and gardening; I washed Mr. Cruz’s car and fed his dogs, two handsome, blue-eyed, polar mutts that looked like wolves of the steppes—these animals were wild and gentle, they seemed to come from another world. I wondered how they bore the crushing summers of Andalusia with so much fur. Cruz was a mystery, somber and shifty; his face was yellow, his eyes wrinkled; when no bodies arrived, he would spend all day behind his desk, whiskey in hand, listening absent-mindedly to the police radio scanner so as to be the first one on the scene in case a body was discovered; he drank nothing but Cutty Sark, hypnotized by the Internet and hundreds of videos, war reports, atrocious clips of accidents and violent deaths: this spectacle didn’t seem to excite him, on the contrary; he spent his time in a kind of lethargy, of digital apathy—only his hand on the mouse seemed alive; he was stupefied by bestiality and whiskey all day long and, when night fell, he staggered a little when he got up, he’d put on his leather jacket and leave without saying a word, bolting the door with two turns of the key. He called me his little Lakhdar, when he addressed me; he had a tiny voice that contrasted with his large size, his corpulence, his thick face: he spoke like a child and this false note made him even more frightening.
He was a poor guy, and I didn’t know if he inspired fear or pity in me; he was exploiting me, locking me up like a slave; he spread a terrible sadness, the rotten smell of a soul in solitude.
I had to get out of there; the first time he let me stroll around town one afternoon, I thought for a while of disappearing without leaving a trace, of getting into a bus headed north, or a ferry to go back to Morocco—but I had nothing, no money, no papers, he had kept my passport, which I had been idiotic enough to give him, and I would probably have been arrested and thrown in jail before being expelled if I was asked to produce my documents.
I confided in the Imam from the mosque who came to pray for our dead; I explained to him that this Mr. Cruz was pretty strange, which he did not deny, only shrugging his shoulders with an air of powerlessness. He told me he thought my predecessor had run away for this excellent reason, because Cruz was a strange man, but one who had respect for the dead and for religion. That’s all.
Seen from here, the long days on board the Ibn Battuta seemed like paradise.
I imagined climbing the wall, after all it wasn’t so hard, Cruz wouldn’t go so far as to run after me; but first I had to get back my papers and some money.
One day, Mr. Cruz left at dawn with the hearse; he returned with a load of dead bodies—seventeen, a patera had capsized off of Tarifa and the current had dotted the beaches with corpses. He was very happy with this harvest; a strange happiness, he didn’t want to seem happy to be getting fat off the backs of these poor stiffs, but I could sense, behind his mask for the occasion, from the way he stroked his dogs, and called me my little Lakhdar, that he was delighted with the resumption of business, but was ashamed at the same time.
Seventeen. That’s a huge little number. You don’t realize, when you listen to the radio or the TV, the number of corpses left by some catastrophe or other, what seventeen bodies represent. You say, oh, seventeen, that’s not so much, tell m
e about a thousand, two thousand, three thousand stiffs, but seventeen, seventeen isn’t anything extraordinary, and yet, and yet, it’s an enormous quantity of vanished life, dead meat, it’s cumbersome, in memory as well as in the cold-storage room, it’s seventeen faces and over a ton of flesh and bone, tens of thousands of hours of existence, billions of memories gone, hundreds of people touched by mourning, between Tangier and Mombasa.
One by one, I wrapped these guys up in their shrouds, and wept; most of them were young, my age, or even younger; some had broken limbs or bruises on their face. The great majority looked Arab. Among these bodies was a girl’s. She had tattooed a telephone number in henna on her arm, a Moroccan number. She had long hair, very black, a gray face. I was disturbed; I didn’t want to see her breasts, her sex; normally I shouldn’t have placed her in the casket myself, a woman was supposed to do that. I was afraid of my own gaze on this female body; I imagined Meryem dead—it was her I was placing in the coffin, her I was burying finally, alone in the night of my nightmares, I imagined the police calling this tattooed phone number, a mother or brother picking up, an almost mechanical voice informing them, repeating very loudly to be understood, of the end of their sister, their daughter, just as the phone must have rung at my uncle’s house, one day, to announce this terrible news, just as it will ring one day for us, too, one after the other, and shyly, tenderly, fraternally, I placed this unknown girl in her metal sarcophagus.
Perhaps we can’t really picture death unless we see our own corpse in others’ bodies, young as me, Moroccan as me, candidates for exile like me.
At night I would write poems for all these dead people, secret poems that I would then slip into their coffins, a little note that would disappear with them, a homage, a ritha’; I gave them names, tried to imagine them alive, to guess their lives, their hopes, their last moments. Sometimes I saw them in my dreams.
Street of Thieves Page 14
