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.
PERHAPS it was this long familiarity with corpses that facilitated things; those two months of death made the prospect of robbing Señor Cruz easier to imagine—he had returned as planned after three days, exhausted, he said, by the truck journey into the depths of Morocco. He seemed happy to see me again.
He told me about his trip, which had gone well, he had brought his five corpses to Beni Mellal, all by chance to the same place, it was both practical and horrible. As usual, the women had cried terribly, their wailing had bored into his ears, the men had dug the graves, and that was it. He had only enough time to stop in Casa for a night to pig out, he said these words with such sadness in his reedy voice, pig out, that it could just have easily have been referring to his last meal.
Cruz poured himself some whiskey.
He had me sit down across from him in an armchair, offered me a drink, which I refused.
He said nothing, the whole scene seemed to call for conversation, confidences, b
ut he was silent; he drank his Cutty Sark, glancing at me from time to time, and I felt more and more nervous.
I tried to speak, to ask questions about his trip to Morocco, but when he replied his answers were monosyllabic.
He finished his drink and politely offered me another before helping himself again.
After an endless quarter of an hour of silence, which I spent looking in turn at my knees and at his impassive face, I left, asking him to excuse me, I had to feed the dogs; he motioned with his head, accompanied with a brief smile.
Once in the yard I breathed a sigh of relief, I was trembling like a frail thing. Through the window, I saw Cruz’s fat face, haloed by the electric blue of the computer screen, resume his stupefied contemplation of the forms of death.
I felt in danger; fear overcame me, powerful, irrational; I went to kneel down with the mutts, their muzzles nosed into my armpits, the softness of their fur and their clear gaze comforted me a little.
CRUZ always seemed to be hovering on the verge of speech.
I had never encountered madness before, if Cruz was mad—he didn’t launch into unreasonable diatribes, didn’t bang his head against the walls, didn’t eat his excrement, wasn’t overcome with delirium or visions; he lived in the screen, and in the screen, there were terrible images—old photos of Chinese tortures where men bled, attached to posts, their chests cut open, their limbs amputated by executioners with long knives; Afghan and Bosnian decapitations; stonings, stomachs ripped open, defenestrations, and countless war reports—strange, I thought, fiction is much better filmed, much more realistic than documentaries or the photos from the beginning of the century, and I wondered why, above all, Cruz always looked for the mention of “reality” in his pictures; he wanted the truth, but what difference could it make: he had his storage room full of corpses, he knew them intimately, he had frequented them for years, and I still wonder today what could have motivated this pathological virtual observation, he should have been cured of death yet he was gorging on miles of scenes of tortures and massacres. What was he looking for, an answer to his questions, to the questions the stiffs didn’t answer, a questioning about the moment of death, the instant of passage, perhaps?—or perhaps he had simply been engulfed by the image, the bodies had made him leave reality and so he was burrowing into cyber-reality to find there, in vain, something of life.
As the days went by, he frightened me more and more, for no reason—he was the most inoffensive of creatures; he was gentle with me, gentle with his dogs, respectful of the dead. Every day I thought about asking him for my passport and up and leaving, too bad about the cash, farewell Mr. Cruz, the drowned and the bluish light of tortures on YouTube, come what may—but every night, in my cubbyhole, reassured by the company of the dogs, by the softness of their fur, by their panting calm, I would resume my dreams of theft, of the two or three thousand euros that Cruz’s safe might deliver to me. I had sketched out a plan, one of those schemes that only work in books, until you try them: go into town to buy a similar key, it might be a common model, and substitute it on the key ring, which he often left in the entryway—of course the new key wouldn’t open the safe, but when he realized it, with a little luck I’d be far away.
All the corpses I washed and put into their boxes justified my petty theft, I thought—but Mr. Cruz had an honest profession, he wasn’t killing these poor people himself, he was charitable, he didn’t bleed the families of the deceased, his prey was the State, the autonomous Community of Andalusia that paid his per diem for the carcasses of my compatriots, but all the riches I saw him accumulating, his gold rings, the chains around his neck, his black shirts, his car, his two huskies with their blue eyes in the sheltering shade of his creeping vines, all that seemed to me to be stolen from the Dead, seemed to belong to those nameless stiffs who had dreamed for a while of a better life, who had thought, like me, that they could make themselves a place in the world, and out of respect for this dream I thought I could appropriate some of his cash, as a little revenge for these poor martyrs who had known the pangs of drowning, experienced agony in the black solitude of the waves.
The more my determination increased, the more the possibility of putting my thoughts into action kept me awake at night; how could I get hold of the key to the safe, when should I run away, how—I had to go by foot to the bus stop, three hundred meters away, and I had to await the pleasure of the very erratic Andalusian intercity transportation system. That’s when I would be most vulnerable, just like in novels. Books and prisons were full of guys who made huge blunders and who were nabbed without any difficulty whatsoever, just like that, at a bus stop or a sidewalk café. That wouldn’t be my way. The bus, the bus station, the 11 PM coach, and the next day I’d be in Barcelona, lost in the crowd.
I couldn’t make up my mind to act. Cruz was hypnotized by the Internet more and more; he stayed late, sometimes till ten at night, exploring videos—he had discovered a site called faces of death where hundreds of violent deaths could be found: a young Iranian demonstrator killed by the forces of order, Egyptian revolutionaries beaten to death by the police, Libyan soldiers burned alive in their Jeep, Syrian children massacred—current events filled the Internet with documents for Cruz.
One particularly dark day, the Strait vomited up an old, very damaged corpse that people walking on the beach had discovered—the judge visited, gave notice that this detritus on the sand could be chucked, the pathologist concluded death by drowning, and Cruz rushed there with his hearse to take charge of the remains before any of the competition: it was very sad and very gruesome, the guy had tattooed “Selma” in Arabic over his heart, that’s all that could be used to identify him: he no longer had a face, at least nothing recognizable, and we quickly, very quickly closed him up in his zinc box so as not to see him anymore. Señor Cruz threw on his rubber gloves, then his mask; he had a little tear in the corner of his right eye, which he erased by rubbing his face against his bicep, arm outstretched. He sighed, turned toward me, without saying anything, he crossed the yard to walk to my hut, the dogs followed him wagging their tails, thinking he wanted to play or give them some food; he re-emerged from the garden shed holding a bottle, I wondered if he had hidden a liter of Scotch there without my ever noticing it, but the container looked smaller than his eternal Cutty Sark. He made a sign to me to follow him into the office; he said in his tiny voice:
“We’ve earned a drink, haven’t we, Lakhdar?”
He sat down as usual behind his screen, shook the mouse, entered his password; I remained standing.
“Sit down, sit down, we’ll have a drink and talk a little.”
I searched for an excuse to escape, but couldn’t find any; I was too exhausted from taking care of the corpse to think—I ended up worn out every time.
I sat on the sofa. I looked at the bottle he had placed on his desk; it was a half-liter glass flask, the label was facing him. Mr. Cruz needed a stiff one; his long face was pale, his eyes red-rimmed. He put on a video, out of force of habit—he stared at the screen for a second before stopping the procession of images of death that I couldn’t see.
“So, Lakhdar, a little whiskey?”
Suddenly he was extraordinarily nervous, he went to the kitchen, returned with two glasses and some ice in a metal bucket.
I didn’t want to annoy him, so I agreed. It might do me good, too.
He immediately seized a bottle of Cutty on the shelf, opened it, poured whiskey into two glasses, threw two ice cubes into each, and downed his in one gulp, even before I could pick mine up. He breathed out an ahhh of relief, poured himself another, handed me my glass before collapsing into his armchair, looking relaxed.
I emptied half the liquid in one gulp as well. I had never drunk whiskey. For me it was a legendary drink you had to taste in a bar in London, or Paris, with a girl at your side. Taste of crushed bedbugs, burning sensation in the esophagus. Hard to understand the interest of my authors in this beverage. Especially in a situation like this.
I prayed to get out of this place as soon as possible. Too bad about the money, too bad about everything; I was going to get my passport back and leave. Go back to Morocco, find Tangier again, forget Algeciras, forget the dead, forget Judit and Barcelona.
I was just about to say to Cruz that I wanted to go home. It was the right moment, he looked a little placated by the alcohol; he hesitated again, articulated Lakhdar? without saying anything else. He seized the little flask, poured himself a large swig, and added a hefty dose of whiskey until the glass was three-quarters full. Then he stared at the mixture; he swirled around the ice that hadn’t melted yet.
I got up, I couldn’t sit still anymore. I said Mr. Cruz . . . He looked at me with such a look of pain, such suffering marked his fat face, all of a sudden, that I muttered that I had to go feed the dogs.
He passed his hands over his face, as if to wipe away some absent sweat.
“Lakhdar?”
“Yes, Mr. Cruz?”
“Come back soon, I’ll wait for you.”
And he downed his cocktail all at once, with an air of relief.
He had one of his silences, as if he were hesitating about adding something, and then he whispered:
“You’re in luck, you’ll see.”
The phrase was cryptic; I imagined, as I played a little with the huskies before getting out their food bowl, that Cruz had realized I wanted to leave, that he wanted to wish me luck for the future.
Street of Thieves Page 15