The Forgiven: A Novel

by Lawrence Osborne

  He groaned, and they managed a moment of black humor.

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Right now. He wants to leave in an hour. The body …”

  “I am coming, too,” she announced after a dead silence.

  “Out of the question. Pas de gazelles, the old geezer said. No women, which means no you. You are staying. You would be an insufferable complication.”

  She tried to make a faint argument out of it, but it was like rolling a ball uphill, and soon enough the struggle fizzled out. She didn’t want to go, after all, and no amount of rhetoric could hide the fact. She felt a sadistic triumph. It was right that he went, and somehow she didn’t think it was dangerous at all, merely worrying. For the following few minutes she packed a shaving bag for him, taking care to do it well. She stowed away his toiletries and toothbrush, his aftershave and razors, his vitamin pills and his cotton balls. She folded a few clothes into his sports bag and zipped both bags up. It was like packing a kid off to school. Her mind raced ahead. It never occurred to her that they might harm him. But for a moment, she stuffed a knuckle into her mouth and felt the tears surge. They weren’t for him. They were for their past, which had suddenly disappeared. When she came back outside, he was drinking heavily, staring fixedly at the gold outline of the house and its filigree windows.

  “You shouldn’t,” was all she said.

  “I don’t care about offending them. I am an infidel. I am allowed to drink.”

  “But you shouldn’t … for yourself.”

  She cupped his neck in her hand, leaned down, and kissed the wet forehead.

  “That’s precisely the reason I drink,” he murmured.

  She didn’t know what to say to him. Come back safe? Don’t mortgage the house?

  “Have you seen the place on a map?” was what she did say.

  He shook his head. He said he didn’t much care where it was.

  “I’m sure Richard wouldn’t let you go if there was a risk. It’s not that big a country.”

  He took her hand for a while, and in some sick way he was also quite relieved to be going. One wanted to cross the bridge and have done with a lot of things. He stared glumly down at the two ice cubes at the bottom of his glass swimming about in a diluted Johnny Walker, and his mind clouded. It’s all my fault, he wanted to say, so it’s for the best. Stay and have fun.

  “I order you to have a good time.” He smiled. “I’ll be fine. Tutto bene. Think of it as a jaunt in the desert. Tea in the Sahara. The whole thing will be silly and I’ll probably enjoy myself in the end.” He almost snarled. “I think they just want closure. A gesture of solidarity. They want me to say I’m sorry. That’s what people always want. It’s like being on Oprah.”

  “And will you say sorry?”

  “I’ll say sorry, yes. I am sorry.”

  “That’s a relief to hear. For a while I thought you weren’t sorry.”

  He rolled his eyes, and her fingers went through his heat-coarsened hair, springy with salt and pepper curls. He was sulking, feeling like a victim. His hand trembled as it gripped the drink that was gradually poisoning him. They were playing Lucio Dalla in the disco, pop of the Italian seventies. He wouldn’t miss that, would he? He turned to her, caressing the knuckles of her hand as it pressed against his shoulder, and there was the unspeakable thing passing between them, the dribs and drabs of the old complicity. Laugh at the world together. Enjoy the same wine. Remember the little hotel in Rome? But the bag was packed in the other room, and up at the gate the men of the Aït Kebbash were waiting for him. Their mood was not grim, but they were anxious to perform a legitimate burial. When they got there, the car was already running; the body had been scrupulously wrapped like a mummy and had been loaded into the back of the jeep, its awkward length bent in the middle slightly. Abdellah waited impatiently for the murderer of his son to appear with his traveling bags. His mood was indescribable, even to himself. But, then, he would never have tried to describe it to himself.

  His soul was in darkness, just as his mind was. He licked his lips and cast a dry, scornful look at the pitiful Source des Poissons. But deep down, he was envious of it, bitterly covetous.

  Eleven

  T WAS AUGUST NOW, DRISS SAID, AND ROGER MADE him coffee every morning in the outbuilding when there were guests in the rooms, and he would see human visions in slippers and gowns come down to the pool with bowls of strawberries and halfhearted cigarettes like delicate animals coming down to a watering hole. The European guests. French couples and families from London and Dublin. Some of them kept yachts at Sotogrande for the summer. Roger kept him away from them, closing the door of the outbuilding while he sipped his coffee and making sure no one saw him until he was dressed up in his straw hat and gardening jacket, an anonymous scarecrow they would not ask questions about. Then, disguised, he ventured out into the sunlight with his pruning shears and pail.

  Roger showed him the gardens he and Angela had built since they had moved to Spain eleven years earlier. They were English gardens by inspiration, but given “new blood” by a better climate. Driss had to learn every shrub and petal. He had to learn to trowel and seed and trim as carefully as you would trim your nails.

  “Well,” Roger would say as they walked slowly through the gardens in the mornings, “I would like it if you could teach me some Arabic. I might as well take advantage of you.”

  The infidels were always telling jokes. But were their jokes really jokes? They were always jolly and sweet, those two, but was it really jolliness and sweetness? A dark screw turned in his heart, since he knew that unbelievers were as devious as they come, and sought in the end only the undoing of believers. It was their nature, about which they could do nothing.

  Within the parameters of this doubt, however, he felt affection for the Bloodworths. In the main house, whose shutters could be closed against spying by the guests, he played chess with Roger while strangely soothing music came from the sound system and Angela made them dinner in painted dishes that were not unlike Moroccan dishes. He could not beat the old man at chess and it vaguely annoyed him, but in the center of the table there were bowls of apricots and dusty figs and they ate them with a knife while the cicadas sang close to the windows. The old infidels had such a calmness about them, such a contentedness, that he wondered where such a quality came from. He had not encountered such old people before, but then he had not lived with old people at all, apart from his own father. Were they Christians or were they godless? It was a question that vexed him as he lay awake at night.

  But at dinner they asked him gentle questions. Where was he from? What had he done as a living?

  He said, “I am a fossil prepper. That is my trade.”

  “So you are a skilled man?” Angela asked.

  “I am skilled in that. But in France I am going to be a janitor.”

  “But you could stay with us,” Roger said to him one night. “Isn’t gardening better than being a janitor?”

  But being a janitor, Driss thought, you have the keys to all the apartments.

  They made careful plans for his time in San Martín. He was not allowed to walk down to the gate or wander along the road or go down to San Martín itself. He might be seen, they said, and the local police were always looking out for illegals working in the farms and greenhouses. He was to stay at the property, lying low and working on the grounds. He could telephone his family from the house if he wished, but the idea of phoning to Issomour made him smile. The idea of his father’s picking up a phone and saying “Hello?” So he worked for weeks in this way, hidden by a straw hat, pruning fruit trees and hedges and living from the table of the Bloodworths. The infidels gave him wine, which he politely refused.

  It was not, he said to Ismael, that he hated them. He loved them. It was their pity he hated. They seemed not to be aware that he, Driss, could destroy them at any moment he chose. Destroy them and loot the little safe in their office, where Roger kept all their earnings from the bed and breakfast. T
hey were not even aware of the compassion he was showing them. They looked right past his manhood and ignored it, as if it didn’t exist and he was just a child who needed a bowl of milk every day.

  “HE’S LYING,” ISMAEL SUDDENLY THOUGHT. “HE NEVER went to France at all. He was in Spain. He stayed at the house of the old ones.”

  Driss sucked on his joint and he knew what the other was thinking, but his concentration was elsewhere: the past, which he never thought about, that considerable landscape haunted by ruined factories, poisoned rivers, and battle sites.

  “I was just biding my time, Ismael. I was wondering what to do. Depart for Paris or wait and see what the English people would do for me? I was making more money than I had in my life. Three hundred euros a month.”

  By October he had a thousand saved up. But he knew that the office held thousands of euros more, maybe tens of thousands. The old ones kept as much as they could in cash to avoid paying taxes. So they were sly in their way, too, like everyone else. He noticed the sheaves of banknotes the Englishman tied up every night with rubber bands, oblivious to his presence, and the way he ordered them inside the safe in the neatest way imaginable. But however much he quietly observed the combinations Roger used to close the safe door, he could not memorize them. Nevertheless, he began to think about them. He was sure that eventually he would memorize the numbers, and when he did, he would have to think carefully about what to do. One might call it theft, but he would have called it something else. He would have called it necessity and law-of-life.

  He knew his duties well, and the routines expected of him. He went to bed in the attic room late, so the guests would not run into him. He went up with an oil lamp after all the doors had been closed for the night, and he went down the long corridor at the top of the house listening to the faint sounds coming from the far side of the doors. A man of the desert, he would think gleefully, a man of Tafal’aalt, alone in the house of the unbelievers with an oil lamp and a piece of chewing gum, going to his bed with a kitchen knife on his person. His meekness and obedience amused him. He was playing along, of course, while he figured out the vast gaouri world and how it ticked, and while he did so, he permitted himself an unnatural humility that would prove useful to him if he was patient. He lay low.

  He read into the night in his room—magazines that Roger gave him, Paris Match and Der Stern—and entered the wider world he had never seen through their photographs. When he turned off the lamp, he thought about his years at Issomour—truly stupid, wasted years.

  Only now did he think of his father getting him up at five in the morning to climb the cliff faces with his hammers and chisels, beating him when he was surly and reluctant and telling him he was a lazy nonentity who would come to nothing and was no use to his father or his mother. A boy like him, disobedient and work-shy, would bring them all down if he didn’t take his work seriously. At age ten, he was working the face of the cliff for ten hours a day, from dawn till the beginning of dusk and sometimes longer, alone at the end of a secured rope tied around his middle, dancing from hole to hole and tapping at the shells of trilobites with his chisel until they came away from the rock. Sometimes he would lie down in the caves from exhaustion and look out over the desert, over the huddled cement houses and the graveyard and the parched line of the oued and its diseased oasis and the gardens soaked in sand. Already he felt a hatred for this place, which was his home, and his eyes strained to the horizon to see what there might be beyond it.

  They said the desert was once a vast sea, but if only it were now. There was the road that went up to Alnif, but it was not a road, just a scar on the land’s surface. Along it came the jeeps carrying off the trilobites, and the men walking with their flocks as if lost. On the roof of Issomour, where they sometimes climbed to escape the rites of work, the trenches were filled with aquifers.

  In November the rains came and the tourists dried up. Part of the house was boarded up, and the Bloodworths retreated to their winter routines, living in the heated ground floor of the house. The gardens became dewy and misted, and he wandered through them with a growing impatience. He began to think about Paris. The afternoons became shorter and the sound of hunting guns louder and closer. “By God,” he admitted to Ismael, “I did not have the courage to think of anything but Paris.”

  He thought about it incessantly, and he began to ask Roger about the roads that led there. They were wide roads that swept through the mountains into France, and they cost a fortune to use. But he knew that the Moroccans drove on them all the way from Algeciras, and he might hitch a ride with some of them. The English seemed dismayed when he announced to them this scatterbrained plan, and they tried to talk him out of it. It was curious, he thought, how bored and lonely they seemed when the summer had passed, as if they dreaded the winter alone with each other in their chilly house on top of the hill. They wanted him to stay, and not because they needed help in the gardens, not because they couldn’t clean the swimming pool by themselves. One night he heard them arguing in the main house, the man shrieking like a girl. Something broke, a dish perhaps, or a ceramic cup, and a door was slammed shut. Small disturbances in a small teacup. About what could an old couple argue with such force? Some nights they told him about their past, their hippie days wandering Asia with knapsacks and going to the famous Tangerine Dream concert in Reims Cathedral with Nico. They had always wanted to get out of England either way, and nothing had been able to hold them back. Yes, they said humorously, they understood all about the urges of migrants! One is born to wander the earth, Angela said, on one’s own two feet, with no barriers or walls. The persecution of migrants was an injury against basic human nature. But Driss, for his part, had no idea what they were talking about. He wanted to get to Paris without the police knowing, and that was all. Human nature?

  Sometimes he wanted to climb the wall and walk down to San Martín just to see the girls sitting in the cafés, but there was no way to do it. The English made it clear that if he did so, he would be compromising not just himself but themselves as well. But at night he could see the village’s lights at the bottom of the valley, and the Bloodworths went there every night for a glass of fino and a chat. He began to feel imprisoned, and in need of opening the doors. He just lacked money, enough money to live in Paris for a winter. There was a simple solution.

  “BUT,” SAID ISMAEL, “THEY WERE NOW YOUR FRIENDS.”

  Driss extinguished his joint and turned on his side to look down at the road, from where he seemed to expect some small miracle. It was on this road that his dope arrived, or his payments for black market fossils.

  “We have no friends when we are making our way upward. Wasn’t I just their house slave? What was the point of it all?”

  “They were lonely.”

  “Yes, but is it my fault? Am I a dog? They could buy a pet if they wanted one.”

  “By God, it is true.”

  “They were unbelievers, and they took me in for their own reasons. Did I owe them obedience?”

  “You did not.”

  “Well, then. I took stock of the situation.”

  “I can understand,” Ismael concurred.

  “Am I beholden to them? I had no agreement with them. God only knew what was in their hearts. The pictures they hung in their rooms—I am telling you—they were demonic. Things I have never seen before. Pictures of their prophet with blood coming out of his mouth. Well, and pictures of naked women painted by Italians. I owed them only the food they gave me, and, it’s true, they took me in.” Perhaps, he thought to himself, they thought of me as a son. But sons are not pet dogs. They are unpredictable and strong and they go their own way.

  He thought wistfully of the bed they had given him, the thick mattress, the head-enveloping pillows, and the night table with the carved ashwood lamp and the antique Cinzano ashtray and the books in German. The slippers left out for him, the bottle of water and the dried lavender in the vase on the sill, the shutters pinned with hooks and the sage suspended in a clo
th packet from the rafter beams. The crucifix pinned to the white space above the bed. A meticulous cleanliness with a tint of lavender and a smell of laundry powder. It was a room made by the delicate, lovely Angela, who herself was like a piece of ancient paper shaped into a human form. It had all her precision and softness of touch, and as he thought of it, he felt a forlorn amazement and regret at its passing, for he had never found a room like that since then and most probably never would. It was that softness and cleanliness and crispness that he would never find again. Their guests, after all, paid a hundred and thirty euros a night to stay in such rooms.

  All the same, he reflected, such things did not accord with the kind of man he wanted to be. He wanted to be dry, hard, adamant, decisive, and ruthless, without stain and without undue obligation. A desert man is a desert man; he is not seduced by pillows, of all things. He is not seduced by anything that men or women can fabricate. He is isolate and cruel, without being petty or mean-spirited. He takes what he can take because God has given him permission to take from those who deny Him. Was it not perfectly simple? No one could dispute the logic.

  What he could not understand about the Bloodworths was that they had helped someone who was not one of them. It was the thing that troubled him most about them, the thing that most baffled and enraged him, because he himself would never have helped an unbeliever over a believer or at least before doing so, he would have to have a great powwow with himself and explain it to himself. But they had seemed to do it spontaneously, out of the goodness of their hearts. It checkmated him, and he didn’t want to be checkmated by two old English hotelkeepers. It was he who should be checkmating them, not the other way around.

  He began to prowl about at night, not taking the oil lamp but allowing the darkness to conceal him, skirting the house so that he could see into the lighted windows. This, at least, suddenly gave him power over his benefactors.

  He saw Roger in his tiny study with his fox skulls and his maps and his bookcases, bowed over some enormous book by the light of a lamp with a rectangular green shade. He saw the pen move and the cup of coffee steam and the faint music percolating out of the windows. At one, the light went off and the old man padded his way to their sleeping quarters, and Driss was alone between the tall cypresses, abandoned in a way, waiting for the last sound to come from the old ones and then creeping to the kitchen door to see if he could force it. It was always locked.