Street of Thieves (20 page)

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.

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.

Seventeen. That's a huge little number. You don't realize, when you listen to the radio or the TV, the number of corpses left by some catastrophe or other, what seventeen bodies represent. You say, oh, seventeen, that's not so much, tell me about a thousand, two thousand, three thousand stiffs, but seventeen, seventeen isn't anything extraordinary, and yet, and yet, it's an enormous quantity of vanished life, dead meat, it's cumbersome, in memory as well as in the cold-storage room, it's seventeen faces and over a ton of flesh and bone, tens of thousands of hours of existence, billions of memories gone, hundreds of people touched by mourning, between Tangier and Mombasa.

One by one, I wrapped these guys up in their shrouds, and wept; most of them were young, my age, or even younger; some had broken limbs or bruises on their face. The great majority looked Arab. Among these bodies was a girl's. She had tattooed a telephone number in henna on her arm, a Moroccan number. She had long hair, very black, a gray face. I was disturbed; I didn't want to see her
breasts, her sex; normally I shouldn't have placed her in the casket myself, a woman was supposed to do that. I was afraid of my own gaze on this female body; I imagined Meryem dead—it was her I was placing in the coffin, her I was burying finally, alone in the night of my nightmares, I imagined the police calling this tattooed phone number, a mother or brother picking up, an almost mechanical voice informing them, repeating very loudly to be understood, of the end of their sister, their daughter, just as the phone must have rung at my uncle's house, one day, to announce this terrible news, just as it will ring one day for us, too, one after the other, and shyly, tenderly, fraternally, I placed this unknown girl in her metal sarcophagus.

Perhaps we can't really picture death unless we see our own corpse in others' bodies, young as me, Moroccan as me, candidates for exile like me.

At night I would write poems for all these dead people, secret poems that I would then slip into their coffins, a little note that would disappear with them, a homage, a
ritha
'; I gave them names, tried to imagine them alive, to guess their lives, their hopes, their last moments. Sometimes I saw them in my dreams.

I never forgot their faces.

My hatred for Cruz grew; it was irrational; aside from my semi-captivity, he wasn't mean; he was crumbling beneath the weight of the corpses; he just had this strange perversion that consisted in looking at, scrutinizing all day, extraordinarily violent videos; beheadings in Afghanistan, hangings from the Second World War, all kinds of car accidents, bodies incinerated by a bomb.

I had to get away as soon as possible.

I missed Casanova and my soldiers every day. I thought of Judit, sometimes I sent her texts and called her; most of the time she didn't reply to the messages or pick up the phone, and I felt as if I were in limbo, in the
barzakh,
unreachable between life and the beyond.

For books, all I had was the Koran and two Spanish thrillers bought used in town, not great, but OK, they helped pass the time.
Then I had three days of vacation because Cruz left to deliver a load of corpses on the other side of the Strait. He couldn't leave me locked up the whole time, so he gave me a little pocket money (until then I hadn't yet seen the color of my wages) to amuse myself in town, as he said. I spent my days at sidewalk cafés, quietly reading and drinking my small beer.

I went to check my email and there, surprise: a message from Sheikh Nureddin. He was writing to me from Arabia, where he was working for a pious foundation; he asked me for news. I replied saying I was in Spain, without telling him about my pitiful activity. I hesitated about telling him about the fire at the Propagation for Koranic Thought, I wondered if he knew about it. His letter was kind, even brotherly; my suspicions about his possible participation in the Marrakesh attack seemed ridiculous to me now, even if the mystery of his sudden disappearance remained intact—I asked him if he knew where Bassam was.

I thought nostalgically about the long reading sessions at the Group, lying on the rugs. Tangier was far away, in another world.

I wrote a long note to Judit explaining in brief my slave's life in Algeciras; I didn't mention the corpses, just the gardening, cleaning, and the strange Cruz. I told her I hoped to see her soon.

I called Saadi, inviting him for coffee in downtown Algeciras; he had a visa, he could come and go as he liked, that was the injustice of the administration: the older you were and the less you wanted to, the easier it was to move around.

He was happy to see me again, as was I. I asked him if there was news of the company—he told me the Moroccan government was going to find a solution any day now. I still had time to profit from it, he said.

I hesitated. That was one way to leave Cruz; it would also mean saying goodbye to Judit. I was sure that if I returned to Tangier it would be almost impossible for me to return to Spain.

If Saadi guessed the reason for my hesitation, he didn't insist.

I told him about my days with Cruz, the great sadness of this terrible job, he listened, opening his eyes wide and shaking his gray head; well son, he said, if I had known, I wouldn't have sent you into that cesspit—I tried to reassure him, without much conviction, telling him it would allow me to make a little money to go to Barcelona in a month or two.

We stayed there till evening, sitting in the same café, taking advantage of the breeze, of the slow swaying of the palm trees that shed a little shadow on the square. And then he left. He hugged me and said, sure you don't want to come back with me on the boat? It's not easy for me sending you back there.

I hesitated for a second, it was tempting to stay with him, to rediscover the floating cage of the
Ibn Battuta,
where nothing could happen to you, aside from inadvertently crushing a cockroach with your bare feet.

Finally I refused; I promised to call him very soon, and after a final embrace I left to catch my bus.

I also took advantage of my boss's absence to sketch out a plan. I knew he kept—at least when he was there—a certain sum of money in a little safe, so he could pay people without a middleman, that this safe had a key, and that he kept it on his key ring.

The idea of stealing it came to me from the thriller I was reading, from all the thrillers I had read; after all, wasn't I locked up in a novel, a very noir one? It was only logical that it was these books that suggested a way out.

IBN
Battuta recounts in his travels how, during his visit to Mecca, he meets a strange character, a mute whom the Meccans all know and call Hassan the Mad, who was touched with madness under strange circumstances: when he was still of sound mind, Hassan was completing his ritual circumambulations around the Kaaba at night and, every evening, he'd pass a beggar in the sanctuary—they never saw each other during the day, only at night. One night, then, the beggar addressed Hassan: Hey, Hassan, your mother misses you and is crying, wouldn't you like to see her again? My mother? Of course, Hassan replied, whose heart had sunk at the memory of her, of course, but it's not possible, she's far away. One day the beggar offered to meet him at the cemetery, and Hassan the Mad agreed; the beggar asked him to hold onto the beggar's robes and close his eyes, and when he opened them again, Hassan was in front of his house, in Iraq. He spent two weeks with his mother. Two weeks later, he met the beggar at the village cemetery; the beggar offered to bring him back to Mecca, to Hassam's master Najm Ed-Din Isfahani, by the same means, his eyes closed, his hands clutching the beggar's linsey-woolsey robe. He made Hassan promise never to reveal anything about this journey. In Mecca, Isfahani was worried about the long absence of his servant, two weeks isn't nothing—so Hassan ended up telling the beggar's story and Isfahani, at night, wanted to see the man in question: Hassan took him to the Kaaba and pointed
to the vagabond with a cry to his master, it's him! It's him! Immediately the beggar placed his hand on Hassan's throat and said, By God, you will never speak again, and his will was done; the beggar disappeared and Hassan, mad and mute, paced around the sanctuary for years on end, without saying any prayers, without making any ablutions: the people of Mecca took care of him, fed him like a strange saint, for Hassan's blessing increased sales and profits; Hassan the Mad circled around and around the black stone, in orbit, in eternal silence, for having wanted to see his mother again, for having betrayed a secret. And in my shadows, near Cruz's little corpses, among the dogs, I prayed that a magic beggar would take me out of the darkness for a while, would bring me back, to the light of Tangier, to my mother's, into the arms of Meryem, of Judit, before leaving me spinning like a fragile meteorite around the planet, for years on end. I think today of that dark parenthesis, that first imprisonment in Algeciras, that antechamber, when around me spin the lost ones, walking, blind, without the help of books; Cruz was actually taking advantage of the world's possibilities, of the pomp of death; he was living like those dung beetles, those worms, those insects that swarm over corpses, and he had his own sort of conscience, no doubt, he thought he was doing Good; he was being of service; he was living as a parasite on misery: might as well reproach a dog for biting. He was the guard of the castle, the ferryman of the Strait, a lost man, himself, in the depths of his deadly forest, who spun, endlessly, in the dark.