Street of Thieves

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.