‘Is this where you came across?’ I asked.
‘Further over,’ he said. ‘Nearer Algeciras.’
‘It looks closer than I imagined.’
‘I can come and go as I please,’ he said. ‘Just like you.’ I wasn’t sure if he was bluffing, boasting or just dreaming aloud. I knew how hard it had been for him to come over, how much he missed Morocco. Weren’t the Spanish girls he’d picked up his way of finding respite from loneliness? The man had smuggled himself away from home, only to be abused and enslaved. Now he was living off his wits, with no money, hitching a ride to what might turn out to be another dead-end job: a few weeks picking fruit, perhaps. No more. Nothing was certain in Zine’s life. You couldn’t condemn someone in his position.
We left the car by the side of the road on the outskirts of the town and walked down a dirt track towards the beach. The sun seemed to lift very slowly, taking its time to push away the night, as though hung-over from the excesses of the day before. Zine still looked weak, and he lagged behind me a little on the path. The sea air would blow some freshness back into him, I thought. After our visit to the clinic in Seville, we’d wandered around the city trying to wake up, downing coffees in bars and taking refuge in the afternoon shade. The phone call to the girl in Granada had been short and, by the looks of things, curt: she’d already known she was infected when she’d had sex with him. Zine still looked unwell, but at least we knew he wasn’t about to die. The day when we’d arranged to drop him off in Niebla at Uncle Sergio’s had come upon us faster than we’d realized, and I’d wanted him to be as recovered as possible. And so I’d had the idea of bringing him down to the coast to see the southern tip of Spain at dawn – I’d always wondered if you could see Africa from here.
A quick stroll, some breakfast if he could manage it, and we could be in Niebla by lunchtime. I’d have to remember to give Uncle Sergio a call.
A fine spray-like fog was blowing in off the angry waves, while two tankers on an apparent collision course steamed headlong towards one another on the horizon. The water was so much more violent here on the Atlantic coast. I had grown used to the picture-postcard sea of the Mediterranean, with its elegant little waves, no tide and inviting temperatures. This, though, was a sea to be feared, great swells and troughs opening up as currents battled with one another above and below.
Zine walked away on his own for a while, his shoulders hunched and his head bent down against the wind. Sand and grit blew from where his footsteps disturbed it. It affected him more than he cared to admit, being so close here to Morocco. More so even than in Almería, where the country was just a concept, a memory, a possibility at the end of a ferry trip. Here it was staring him in the face. On a good day, I imagined you might even be tempted to swim to Africa just for fun, or row over and have a picnic. Except that you’d probably be shot at by over-zealous Spanish soldiers thinking you were out to invade some forgotten outcrop of rock they’d conquered back in the seventeenth century.
Turning away from the sea, I started following in Zine’s footsteps, placing my feet in the holes he’d left in the sand, staring down at the stripy stones and shells that glistened with the salty water.
Zine spotted her first: I heard a yelp, partially muffled by the rushing noise of the sea, but enough to make me raise my eyes for a second. He was standing over a black heap of something, waving towards me with eyes like moons.
I ran over, slipping annoyingly as my feet failed to grip, my heart already sure of what my eyes were not.
The girl was naked save for a single white sock on her left foot. Her skin was wet and shining like the sea creatures washed up on the shore around her; her legs were doubled up under her in an unnatural position. It was as though a single rejecting wave had coughed her up and landed her here halfway up the sand, breaking her like a doll. Her eyes were closed and her mouth hung open, as if she might snort or cough, change position and roll back to sleep on her other side. But she didn’t move. There was no life left in her, no breath in her lungs. To be doubly sure I leant down and put my fingers to her throat, searching for a pulse, anything. Her young face was small and round, full cheeked, and her hair was braided back against her scalp. I couldn’t really tell her age – eighteen? Twenty, perhaps. She looked West African, I thought. Guinean. It would have been a long journey already to get this far. And now nothing. Her naked flesh, so normal and natural on a beach, looked monstrous; it was ice-cold and already beginning to harden.
I turned away back to the sea, hot tears flooding my face. Seeing her was hard enough, but touching her deadness brought on a sudden, uncontrollable sorrow. Zine just stood still, eyes fixed on the girl, soft words from the Qur’an spilling from his mouth.
‘Qul a’udhu birrabi l-ghalaqi, min sharri ma ghalaqa – I seek refuge in the Lord of Daybreak, from the evil of what He has created …’
Above our heads grey clouds like ink smudges on the pale-blue sky, edged with the pink light of dawn, moved in overland from the sea with heavy inevitability. Some dry orange peel and an empty packet of Fortuna cigarettes littered the ground by our feet, left by some happier bodies that had lain here once upon a time. Zine, I could tell, was looking at a version of himself, the Zine that never made it across the water a year before, but who drowned just as this girl had, perhaps capsizing after a freak wind, the boat sinking under its own weight of people, or perhaps just cast off by the captain some two hundred yards or so from the shoreline – more than enough to be drowned in if you didn’t know how to swim and the current was against you.
Turning back to look at the girl, I stood motionless next to Zine, the two of us frozen by the cold morning breeze, the icy spray coming off the waves and the horror of what lay before us.
Zine looked up at me.
‘We need to tell someone,’ I said.
He had an intense, resolute look on his face. Of course we should call the police straight away, but there was a problem.
‘Jasie, perhaps I should just go now.’ He looked back down at the girl on the sand. He knew: you didn’t do this, you didn’t just walk away from a corpse without doing something – even just a gesture. But Zine had to remain invisible if he were to stay in Spain. If we called the police now, the least that could happen to him would be an immediate ticket back to Tangier. But it could be a lot worse, as he’d already worked out.
‘They might think I did this,’ he said, his hand pointing at the body, then quickly drawing away, as though fearful of violating some sacred space that surrounded her. ‘The men that do this, that bring these people over, are Moroccans,’ he said. ‘I’ve never heard of blacks crossing here – they usually go to the Canaries. But they’ll think it was me. That I was the captain of the boat, or something.’ He stopped for a moment, his mouth half-open with fear. ‘I have to go. Now.’
He turned to leave.
‘Zine, wait,’ I called. ‘Stop!’ But he kept on walking, moving up to the higher dunes where the sand was firmer.
I looked back down at the girl; her teeth were white against her blue skin. I had to do something for her, cover her up at least. But how was I going to do that apart from by digging a shallow sandy grave and making her harder to find when the police did come? Zine, meanwhile, was moving further away, his ringletted hair split by the wind. I couldn’t let him disappear. He was on his own.
‘Zine!’
He kept walking, unhearing in the sea wind. No way were they going to get him, not after everything else. As far as this – just an afternoon’s drive from finally getting some work, within sight of the very land he’d left behind – and he was perhaps minutes away from losing every opportunity he had. From not only being sent back to Morocco, but the risk of imprisonment. The girl was dead; nothing could change that. He, though, was still alive, and needed to preserve what chances he had.
Making a snap decision, I ran up to the dunes, looking for something that might serve as a marker. I could make an anonymous call to the police, just not get involved.
Grabbing a stick and a piece of bright-orange plastic washed up on the beach, I returned to the girl’s body and made a makeshift flag, not much of a memorial but at least some recognition of what had happened here.
I caught up with Zine and grabbed him, and we ran back towards the car, our nerves jangling from not having slept for almost two days, and with the strange manic energy that seems to come with daybreak. Up here, away from the beach and the waves, it was as if none of this had happened. But the image of the girl’s face was imprinted on my mind and I wouldn’t be able to forget it.
Some minutes later we were driving into the centre of town looking for a phone box when we saw a Guardia Civil helicopter heading towards the beach. A couple of squad cars drove past; no sirens, but the men inside had fixed looks on their faces, as though they knew only too well what was waiting for them. Zine slid down in his seat and I hissed at him not to draw attention to himself.
The operator on the other end of the line took it very matter-of-factly, and seemed more concerned about me.
‘Lo siento por usted.’
I gave her the details and hung up, but I was merely confirming what they already knew.
The complicated, contrasting colours of dawn had blanched into the usual white of midday as we headed back north – away from the coast, the view of Morocco, the body on the beach. Past two-tone cork oaks, bark stripped halfway, revealing the raw bloody brown flesh of the tree underneath. We were both exhausted and my hands shook slightly as they gripped the wheel. Zine tried to doze off, but his eyes refused to close, staring out unblinkingly at the road ahead.
‘I’m sorry, Jasie,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
NIEBLA
We reached Niebla in the late afternoon. I rang Uncle Sergio, who gave us directions to his finca just north of the town. Zine and I exchanged a glance as we finally arrived at the farm. The earth felt thick underfoot, a smell of manure clinging to the air like cigarette smoke the morning after a long party.
‘We’ll have to take him to Javier’s place,’ Sergio said when I introduced him to Zine. ‘Got no space for anyone here myself. But we’ll find him something,’ he added quickly when he saw my face drop. ‘There’s always work somewhere or other.’
He slapped me on the back.
‘So you’re the novio of my flamenco niece?’ he said. ‘She came down here and danced for us, ooh, about ten years ago. She had a concert on and called me up. “Uncle Sergio! I’m in Niebla.” Ha! How’s everyone back in Valencia? Haven’t been there for years now.’
It was hard to believe this garrulous and cheery farmer was the younger brother of Salud’s largely silent father. His neighbours still called him El Valenciano, yet he seemed at home in the south. Though why Sergio had chosen this forgotten corner of the country close to the Portuguese border, whiplashed by the Atlantic, was anyone’s guess. But for the excellent serrano ham from the village of Jabugo half an hour’s drive away, there was little to recommend it. To the north, the region of Extremadura had been the birthplace of many of the great Conquistadors of the New World – sweeping through Mexico and Peru must have been infinitely preferable to staying here. While on the coast just to the south was the town of Palos, the port from which Columbus made his first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492, just seven months after the fall of Granada. I got the impression this was a place most people were trying to get away from.
Columbus had planned his voyage at the monastery near Palos which stood on the site of a former Almohad religious retreat, from which it derived its name, La Rábida. An archway from the Moorish structure was still visible. He set sail in the Santa María,a sluggish and cumbersome square-rigged European nau. But also in his fleet were the Pinta and the Niña, both fast caravels – a lateen vessel used by the Arabs for centuries in the eastern Mediterranean. The name caravel came from the Arab qarib. Columbus would have used seafaring knowledge learned from the Moors, and was almost certainly aware of the work of medieval Arab cartographers such as Al-Idrisi – Arab geographers, influenced by the Alexandrine Ptolemy, had always said the Earth was a sphere. The astrolabes which he used to plot his course had been introduced to Europe via Spain some five hundred years earlier. Expecting to arrive in Asia on the other side of the Atlantic, Columbus took with him an Arabic-speaking Jew, Luis de Torres, to act as ambassador once they arrived. So it is possible that the first words spoken to American Indians by the Spanish conquerors were in Arabic. Ironic, as it was only because Granada had fallen earlier in the year that Queen Isabel agreed to back the voyage in the first place. Something of Moorish Spain had survived the military conquest and would play a part at the start of the new chapter in the country’s history.
I took Zine back into Niebla for something to eat after we’d got him fixed up at Javier’s farm. There was plenty of fruit picking to be done, and he set him up with one of the teams of workers that were inching their way through one of his fields. No acreage of white plastic here, I noticed with relief. I hadn’t fancied taking Zine back into the conditions in which I’d found him, and I trusted Sergio and his friends to treat their workers decently.
We sat at a metal table at a bar with large windows overlooking the old red Moorish walls that ringed the town. They looked dusty and worn, like an octogenarian’s favourite childhood toy lovingly brought down from years of storage to be given to an ungrateful grandchild. Neither of us spoke, the weight of what we had seen that morning still pressing on our minds. It isolated us, and made us feel apart from the buzzing life that surrounded us. Children were starting to pour out onto the pavement from the school opposite. The television, as in a thousand other Spanish bars, was on full blast, blaring out high-pitched nonsense.
‘Where now?’
‘Portugal,’ I said.
He nodded, taking up a fork to pick at the potato and onion tortilla the barman had just placed on our table.
‘What will you do?’
‘Drive around; have a look. There are some people there I want to meet.’
He sighed, the skin above his nose folding as he tightened his brow. He’d found his job – the promise I’d made had been kept. Yet this didn’t feel like the end even though the script said we had to part company here – he needed work and I needed to carry on. Much as I was tempted to, I knew it would be a mistake to suggest he keep travelling with me. The whole journey so far had been designed to bring him here.
The television blared more news of the build-up to conflict: the Pope had come out against an attack on Iraq, the Catholic government in Madrid sidestepping his comments awkwardly as the anti-war mood grew. People were warning of a humanitarian catastrophe.
‘I think he’s a good man, Javier,’ Zine said after a pause. ‘I can tell this is going to be better than the other farm.’
I laughed. ‘It wouldn’t take much to improve on that place.’
‘And he doesn’t carry a baseball bat, either.’ And so the decision was made: he was staying.
‘Look,’ I said as I drove him back, ‘you’ve got my mobile number. If you …’
‘It’s all right, Jasie. I’ll be fine. Perhaps I’ll give you a ring if I’m ever back in Valencia.’
He smiled, but I felt sure that if we ever saw each other again it was more likely to be in Morocco.
‘Give my love to Salud,’ he said. ‘And to Lucía.’ His eyes fell with a look of sadness and resignation, the knot in his forehead tightening. ‘She’s a lovely girl.’
We got out of the car and embraced in the darkening evening air. He patted me on the cheek then turned and walked away – just a split-second too soon, a note of abruptness to a moment I had begun to think would never actually arrive.
THE SECRET MOSQUE
A madman ran the museum at Serpa, standing alone in the great moss-covered courtyard inside the old castle walls with half a dozen cats, wordlessly pointing things out in the rain to non-existent visitors. Sheltering under my umbrella, I skipped over the puddles towards the entrance: I couldn’t tell if h
e’d seen me, so engrossed was he in explaining the structure of the phallic-shaped battlements to his invisible tourists. I’d seen the same design on the Arabic walls at Cordoba. A giant lump of the fortress hung precariously overhead, having been dislodged during a Spanish siege several hundred years earlier – it still hadn’t fallen down completely, so it was left there: a reminder of the attack, but making the point that the invaders hadn’t quite managed to destroy everything. It seemed very Portuguese, somehow.
On the upper floor of the museum I looked down onto the rest of the town, a muddle of white buildings and terracotta roofs squashed together within the limits of the ancient city walls. It was a quiet place: had it been a Spanish town, kids on scooters would have been riding down the wiggly streets at top speed, silencers removed from their exhaust pipes. Or music would be blaring from somewhere: dance music, pop. Noise of some sort. Here was just silence, even in the middle of the day. And it wasn’t even lunch time.
Odd minaret-like chimneys rose from every house – tall cylinders capped with a dome and little stone ball on top, like the golden spheres that had once graced the Giralda in Seville, and which you could still see on her sister minaret in Marrakesh, the Kutubiyya. Geese, chickens and pigeons scrabbled among the gardens huddled at the foot of the castle defences, safe from the cats inside, sheltering from the downpour underneath lemon and fig trees, morning glories and Virginia creeper with the first shades of red showing in its leaves.
Across the square I could just make out the bar where the night before I’d eaten the most delicious fish stew – sopa de cossão – stuffed with coriander, garlic and lemon juice, slices of chewy bread floating on top. The Spanish had almost eradicated the use of coriander from their cooking, a herb the Moors used all the time – kuzbara, they called it; here its influence had lasted. I had been enjoying the meal, but for the bitter-tasting wine, when suddenly a ferocious middle-aged woman stormed into the restaurant looking for her husband. Just when I was beginning to think the Portuguese never made any noise at all.
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