Street of Thieves

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.