Street of Thieves

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 and 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.