Despite my disillusion, I made dazzling progress on the career front. My colleagues will say I must have slept with a lot of people. Or in the cruder version that made it back to me: there must have been kilometres of cops’ dicks involved, etc., etc.
It’s true that the police decide which translator will be called to translate the telephone intercepts or interviews of those they are holding in custody. To get started as a translator, all you have to do is swear solemnly and sincerely to assist in the exercise of justice, which is one reason why you see all sorts in this job. You should understand that a lot of French interpreters of North African origin only know their parents’ dialect, whereas there are seventeen different Arabic dialects that are as removed from each other as French is from German. It’s impossible to know all of them if you haven’t studied Arabic seriously at university level. So let’s say we’re talking about the intercepts of a Syrian or a Libyan, and they’ve been translated by, say, a Moroccan model, or a cop’s Tunisian wife, or a police superintendent’s Algerian personal trainer… How should I say this? I’m not judging, but I’d like to see them.
I think I owe my success partly to my availability, but most of all to my name. Patience Portefeux. Especially now that every Arab is seen as a potential terrorist, since the attacks. Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? Who will guard the guardians? Who will keep tabs on the Arab translators? Uh… nobody! All you can do is pray that they remain immune to the verbal abuse which they and their children are forced to suffer… A paranoid, racist society forced to trust its foreigners. It’s a farce!
They were always on the phone with offers of work, and I have to say, in almost 25 years, I never turned down the smallest job, even if I was sick. Then, thanks to the respect I’d earned by my reliability, they started offering only the kind of work I wanted, leaving the rest to less experienced translators.
Little by little, I was able to steer clear of interpreting in court or in interrogations, and concentrate instead on translating phone-taps for the drug and organised crime squads. I no longer had to consort with people who only wanted to tell me all about their trials and tribulations, them in their handcuffs, and me the first and only person in the assembly line of repression to speak their language. Unlike left-wing paternalistic bourgeois types, I’ve never felt the need to hang out with nice Arabs in order to justify my existence. There are all sorts of Arabs, just like there are all sorts the world over. Polite, well-mannered types and disgusting pigs. Progressive ones and stone-age hicks from the village. Lonely, lost souls and entire villages of young people who’ve only been sent to France to commit crimes and bring the money back home. Like I say, all sorts.
Once I even tried my hand at terrorism, but I didn’t last long – it gave me dreadful nightmares. The older I get, the less violence I can take. The beatings by the cops right under my nose, as if I didn’t even exist. The spitting in the face and the insults. You filthy whore of a traitor! Or: you harki bitch! The raids where I was made to stand in the front-line outside the door without so much as a bullet-proof vest, so I could shout in Arabic: Police! Open up!
At some point, enough was enough.
Mainly I translated telephone intercepts: for the drug squad at 36 Quai des Orfèvres, for the Central Bureau for Illicit Drug Traffic Control in Nanterre, or for criminal investigations at the Second District of the police judiciaire, aka the DPJ. But with technological progress, and because I’m Patience Portefeux, the-French-woman-who-speaks-Arabic – that is, a woman above suspicion – I was allowed to withdraw to my own home and work on audio files at my computer. And when my mother had her stroke and my daughters wisely fled my cantankerous presence to rent with friends, I shut myself away like a hikikomori.
It was around this time that I threw myself into translating the inane conversations of drug traffickers. To afford the 3,200 euros a month I was being charged by the aged care facility where I’d had to send my mother, I was forced to churn through them at a rate of knots. Translation pays if you work like a dog. You get 42 euros for the first hour, 30 euros thereafter, and when you calculate the number of hours yourself, you quickly arrive at quite a tidy sum. You also end up with a head about to explode – with horror stories often, because it’s the interpreters who filter out the baseness of human nature before the police and judges have to confront it.
I’m thinking in particular of the death agonies recorded on mobile phone that I once had to listen to during a case involving a settling of scores. Did anybody rush me off to a psychologist to look after me? And yet it was truly awful.
Asba, Patience, fissa – just do the translation, and hurry up about it…
Just one of the many reasons I couldn’t give a shit about any of them.
At work I mostly hung out with cops. A lot of them are just like they are in the movies: always really angry because they can never get on top of anything, ever. Guys with deplorable domestic hygiene whose female companions have departed a long time ago and whose evenings, if they’re not spent wiping their own arses, end in lousy screws with sad, lonely women. I’ve always kept these types at a distance by insisting on being known as widow Patience Portefeux, as the law entitles me to do. True, it takes people by surprise, but it does command a certain respect.
Because I’m not some sad, lonely woman. I’m a widow.
I owed my working conditions to a divorced cop by the name of Philippe, who lived with his son. I met him next door to the Nanterre Drug Squad Bureau one day when I’d been called in to help. It was at a supermarket check-out, to be precise, where he was buying hotdogs in plastic packages. I’m not at all the sort of woman who flirts, but it made me laugh, seeing those sausages stuck into their little pre-cut rolls. I couldn’t resist making a comment, along the lines of ‘Excuse me, but I’ve always wondered who could possibly buy those things?’ ‘A single cop,’ was his answer, smiling, and we had a laugh… Then we slept together.
He wasn’t the reason my services were constantly in demand, but I did owe it to him that I was paid by the hour and was trusted to work from home.
He was only ever good to me, and I behaved very badly towards him. Though it has to be said, his unfailing honesty ended up being one hell of a pain.
2
SAY, WHAT HAVE YOU SEEN?
Intercept No. 1387: Haribo warns Cortex that he has to call Juju because he’s not answering. Intercept No. 1488: Cortex asks Juju to bring the stuff up. Intercept No. 1519: Juju has no more of the chocolate but he’s got some of the green. Intercept No. 1520: Juju needs Cortex to bring him two lots of twelve and a salad. Intercept No. 1637: Haribo’s ordering a thousand euros of yellow and is sending a boy in half an hour. Intercept No. 1692: Haribo is at Place Gambetta, the boy isn’t there. Intercept No. 1732: Gnocchi asks him for ten records. Cortex tells him he’ll meet him in half an hour at the Balboa hookah bar…
I translated this stuff endlessly, over and over, like a dung beetle. One of those sturdy little black insects that use their rear legs to make balls of shit that they then roll along the ground. Well, that’s about as gripping as my daily routine was for almost 25 years: pushing a ball of shit, losing it, finding it again, being crushed by the load, never giving up in spite of all obstacles and diversions. That was my professional life all over… My life full stop, in fact, seeing as I spent every waking hour slogging away.
On those (very rare) occasions when I mentioned my profession at dinner parties, people were uniformly fascinated by what I overheard in those conversations. A bit like in Baudelaire’s poem, Le Voyage:
Show us the treasure chest of your rich memories,
Those wondrous jewels of ether and stars…
Say, what have you seen?
Nothing! I’ve seen nothing because… well, because there really isn’t anything to see.
At first I would listen to all this verbal sewage with a naturalist’s interest, searching for some sort of meaning that might have a bearing on my own life, but there’s nothing in it that’s any di
fferent to what you’d hear at the bakery. What would you like? Anything else with that? Will that be all? I could write a thesis on drug traffickers, that’s how much I’ve listened to them and how well I know them. But their small lives are just like those of any suit working in an office at La Défense – utterly devoid of interest.
In general, they have two phone lines: the business line, the number of which is always changing, and the halal line, which is more constant, and which is dedicated to their private life. The thing is, they speak to the same people on both lines and they often mix up their phones:
Guy 1: Yeah, bro, salam alaikum, bring me 10 to the hookah bar
Guy 2 hangs up without saying a word. Guy 1 makes two, three more attempts but Guy 2 isn’t picking up. Text message from Guy 1 to Guy 2: Eh, dude, not cool not to pick up, bro… expletive… uh, I’ll call you on the other one.
And so the halal line is cooked. Very quickly you work out whose it is, from the calls from Dad, Mum, brothers and sisters, who don’t use the moronic nicknames they give each other when they’re doing business so as not to be identifiable.
Even the most paranoid ones, the ones who only communicate on WhatsApp, Telegram or Blackberry PGP, at some point, because they need to let rip about something or other, can’t help picking up their regular phone line and showing themselves to be the idiots they are.
During the week, their working day starts at around two o’clock in the afternoon and finishes at about three in the morning. It basically involves them coming and going on their scooters or in their SmartCars between their supply point, the place where the deal is going down and their office at the local kebab shop or gym.
If I had to film them going about their business, I’d set it to the soundtrack of Louis Armstrong’s What a wonderful world.
All their conversations revolve around money: the money they’re owed, the money they should have been paid, the money they dream about having. And then on the weekend they go and blow that very money in the clubs – the same clubs frequented by those La Défense suits, who are also their clients – except when the 1,000 euro bottle of champagne arrives at their table, they tip it upside down and empty it into the ice bucket because they don’t drink alcohol. Often, when they’re leaving the club, they get into a fight and then they’re systematically arrested and sentenced without anybody even bothering to find out if it was them or one of the suits who started it.
Like their clients, they spend their winters in Thailand, also in Phuket, but in a different part of town, namely Patong, now rechristened The 4,000, after the Courneuve housing development in Seine-Saint-Denis. The locals call them the French Arabics.
It’s holiday time over there; they don’t deal because just using gets you twenty years. In summer, they hit the bled, the village back home, with the family. They don’t deal there either, for the same reasons.
Their favourite films are Fast and Furious 1, 2, 3, etc., up to 8, and Scarface. They’re all on social media – whether they’re in the slammer or on the outside – and from their posts you’d think they were working at Louis Vuitton and studying at Harvard. They exchange grand statements in which Sunni Islam (the part relating to polygamy, mainly) is cut with Tony Montana’s cult comebacks and lines from rappers with over five hundred million YouTube views.
As for their capacity for introspection, they’re like business people the world over. Grossly lacking.
… and I think to myself, what a wonderful world…
It may not sound like it, but I feel something approaching affection for some of them. They remind me of my father’s brand of right-wing anarchism and, like him, they speak the universal language: money.
So, I’d been working on phone taps for the drug squad for a while, translating the shockingly bad Arabic with which the dealers punctuated their speech, thinking nobody would be able to understand them.
Generally speaking, I’m working on four to five cases at any one time. They’re usually the result of a tip-off by a rival who wants to set up his own business, or a local resident fed up with the constant comings and goings of dealers outside their place.
One of these cases was generating a lot more work than the others. The protagonists, of Moroccan origin, spoke only in Arabic, which meant I had to translate the whole recording and not just a few words here and there as was usually the case.
It involved short-supply-chain dope dealing, straight from small grower to consumer, a far cry from the Go Fast trafficking convoys and their elaborate protocols. Dealers from outside the usual criminal milieu, and denounced not by a competitor but by a neighbour back in the bled because of some dark history involving a fresh water spring. Shades of Marcel Pagnol’s Jean de Florette, you might say.
The grower, Mohamed Benabdelaziz, lived in Oued Laou, a small Moroccan village that occupies a strategic position on the coast, at the foot of the Rif mountains with its cannabis plantations, 40 kilometres from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. On a little parcel of just six hectares, he was growing khardala, a high-yield variety of grass – shortish plants, weighed down with flowers, very rich in THC – which he was harvesting himself and, rarer still, from which he was then extracting the resin and pressing it, all himself. Once the drugs made it to Spain, he was paid the entire sum owing for the cannabis in Morocco via a saraf – banker in Arabic – who discounted the amount payable. Having paid Mohamed in advance, the saraf would then be responsible for recovery from the French wholesalers via debt collectors who were as discreet as they were respected. These collectors worked for a number of drug traffickers but also for retailers who had nothing to do with that world. Once the money had been recovered, it was used to buy electrical household appliances or cars that were reimported back into the country, thereby evading the ultra-strict currency exchange controls imposed by Morocco to protect its economy.
It all operated within a sealed, exclusively Moroccan environment where everybody knew each other both in France and back in the bled. A short sale-and-laundering process, completely modelled on the real economy. From farm to table, just like the champagne socialists’ baskets of organic vegetables.
Mohamed Benabdelaziz, the producer, had his drugs transported by his nephew, a 24-year old Frenchman originally from Vitry on the outskirts of Paris.
When I first started listening to this family, the drugs were loaded onto a truck transporting vegetables. The truck crossed the border at Ceuta thanks to the complicity of a customs official cousin, then headed across Spain towards France, all the way to the banlieue where the wholesalers were waiting with their teams to sell it across Paris (business line).
I have to say, I’d taken a liking to all these young people. They were very different types to the immature, sociopathic trash I was used to.
Afid, in particular, the nephew of the producer from the Rif, was serious, respectful and conscientious. Another fact worth noting: he always spoke proper Arabic to his wholesalers – in this instance, his childhood mates – even though they didn’t always understand everything he said (business line).
His mother was living in France. She was separated from her husband, an Algerian who had returned to the bled to marry a much younger woman (halal line).
Based on information I had gleaned from the thread of conversations, I had worked out that the reason Afid was speaking in Arabic, even though his native tongue was French, was to demonstrate, in his own way, that the country in which he had been raised had let him down. His dream had been to set up a workshop for luxury vehicles on the Côte d’Azur. He had done everything society had asked of him: he hadn’t loitered about the place, he’d kept himself on the straight and narrow, had clearly applied himself at school where he’d received his Advanced Vocational Training certificate with distinction in auto bodywork design and manufacture. Then, on finishing his studies he had come face to face with the Great French Lie. The educational meritocracy – opium of the people in a country where nobody is being hired anymore, least of all an Arab – would not be
providing him with the means to finance his dreams. Instead of sitting there on the steps of his housing estate block whinging with his mates like something out of Madame Bovary, or providing Daesh with cannon fodder, he went off to live in his parents’ homeland with his certificate in his pocket and a plan to get back out as fast as he could.
And since his uncle Mohamed was producing bricks of cannabis resin, he had found himself putting his expertise in automotive bodywork to use, making undetectable false bottoms for the trucks carrying over the family drugs (the uncle’s business line, also tapped).
As for the famous garage he was dreaming of, he would open it in Dubai when he had put enough money aside.
I liked the Benabdelaziz family. They had plenty of get-up-and-go and a healthy love of life – something I myself was utterly lacking at the time, mainly due to my mother’s hospitalisation. It was a period during which I did nothing but cry, sleep and work to pay for her aged care facility. Putting on headphones and listening to them and their stories was one way of getting out of my miserable apartment, or the even-more-miserable offices of the drug squad. I was able to live their life vicariously, and it did me good.
I never translated their private calls, always marking them not relevant to current investigation – which didn’t stop me following their movements just for the hell of it, as if they were daily updates from a distant branch of my own family.
Sometimes I would even go onto Google View. I would push my little arrow along the long pink road which hugged the blue sea, with one of Tinariwen’s songs playing as the soundtrack. And I would imagine myself walking behind Afid to Oued Laou, sea breeze in my hair.
3
WHERE THERE’S A WILL, THE INTREPID JEWISH WOMAN WILL FIND A WAY
When I wasn’t busy following the twists and turns in the saga of my new Moroccan family’s life for relaxation purposes, I would visit my mother in her end-of-the-road nursing home.
The Godmother Page 3