The Forgiven: A Novel

by Lawrence Osborne

  He regretted maligning the men from Tafal’aalt as blackmailers, though he knew that they were exactly that. A man can be both a blackmailer by culture and a bereaved father, can he not? Abdellah was frail and stringy, and he must have had a son late in life. His clothes were wretched. Hamid wondered what fossils the Aït Kebbash specialized in. They made no money either way. They were people surviving at a subsistence level, unimaginable even to the poorest peasants in greener parts. They had the Toyota, and probably little else of value. He felt for them. Could anyone really imagine their lives? One look at them was enough to confirm that they made their living as fossil diggers and preppers. That they eked out a miserable existence trading second-rate trilobites in the tourist shops of Erfoud and Rissani. One saw types like that all over the place, shabby desperadoes wandering from table to table at the hotels, offering trays of their wares, quietly hustling Westerners on the side, swearing their trilobites were the rarest of the Sahara but going home empty-handed to their shacks on the edge of the desert. The oases were dying because of a tree infection called Bayoud disease, and all that was left them, it was popularly observed, was a trickling trade in fossilized fish. So he was polite to the Aït Kebbash, good Muslims from the scorched corners of the earth, who had nothing and who gave nothing either.

  The desert men came in warily, holding their bodies delicately apart from their surroundings as if they were long used to doing so. They looked around themselves at the Cherokee jeeps with their state-of-the-art CD players, and their eyes went heavy and calculating. They had never been inside the house of a foreigner before. They could not imagine how it could be inhabited. The infidels had no comforts, no delicacy. They had no sense of order or cleanliness or properness.

  “It is like a stables,” one of them quipped.

  “Truly,” Abdellah said with great seriousness.

  At once, however, their thoughts were swept up by the dead boy laid out in the center of the room, and the father was allowed to step out alone to approach his dead son. The staff gathered to watch this as well, because it was a drama that they both dreaded and were compelled by. At its heart was an injustice. A young life had been cut short, a Muslim father propelled into unimaginable grief, and the guilty ones had not even appeared before the people to explain their actions or to offer their heartfelt apologies. They had been let off by the police without so much as a light reprimand; indeed, the police had probably apologized to the detestable visitors, for money speaks to the impure of heart, and those who possess it can do as they wish, even among the pure of heart. The onlookers therefore watched the old man totter toward his son and their eyes filled with tears. A quiet, communicable rage spread among them and they clenched their fists out of view. The old man, meanwhile, conducted himself with considerable restraint. His stupefaction was written all over him, but his lips did not move; he did not blink. He did not give way to that same stupefaction. He merely approached the terrifying object and drank it in with his eyes. It did not seem to move him outwardly. It merely sucked him into its supernatural spell. The son that was living had gone through a metamorphosis that he could not comprehend or accept; gaiety and love had turned into pure materiality. It was as if his son’s beauty was only now revealed to him and he was stunned by it, so much so that his motor reflexes could not respond to this emergency. His hands dangled limply at his sides and he absorbed and absorbed until he could absorb no longer, and when his capacity to absorb was exhausted he found himself not full with grief but emptied with it, and at that moment his mind went away, and his heart with it, and he was left standing like something hanging by a filthy little string, a small animal that has been strung up by a primitive trap and is about to die.

  At length, however, his lips did begin to move. They pronounced nothing, but they moved. A cool dread spread around him, so that the onlookers were ruffled yet again by a restless mood. They felt themselves growing dark and suspicious. Abdellah lost all consciousness of them as his grief came upon him. His mind whirled and all was indistinct at its edges. Where was he? He felt the words of the Prophet simmering at its deepest part and the words of his own father murmuring behind them, and he looked up at the ceiling and the stalactites of cobwebs looked like dusty daggers pointed down at his heart. The killers. Where were the killers?

  IT WAS A QUESTION THAT ALSO OCCURRED TO THE STIFFLY overdressed boys as they laid the napkins around that evening’s dinner table, whose theme was Bandits and Corsairs. They laid out the heavy French forks with agile and hostile minds, stifled by their bow ties, crimped by the cuff links they had to sport, thinking to themselves with quiet fever about the whereabouts of les anglais, whom no one had seen all afternoon.

  They didn’t speak among themselves except to ask one another questions about the utensils. Another generation of flies, exterminated with the aerosols, had to be swept away from under the windows, and they did this with solemn brooms, performing long, graceful strokes. Later, they were going to have to dress as either bandits or corsairs, and some of them would even wear swords. With apprehension, they listened to the Ella Fitzgerald purring away in the library and the clink of glasses that went perfectly with glissando female laughter. It was a sound texture that embodied things they both desired and detested. The sound of women and whiskey glasses could be counted as belonging to the desirable or the undesirable side according to temperament, but that of clacking billiard balls was unambiguously positive. They would have crept into the house at night and played the table if there were any way of muffling the sound. They could hear the men from London and New York talking in bold voices about their wives. The sandwich services rolled from room to room and there was a padding of spoiled Irish greyhounds, and the village boys dreamed of castles and luxury villas and orgies with Jaguars waiting outside. These weird, faithless men, they thought, were reprehensible in many ways, but they had nevertheless succeeded at purely material things. They had a grudging envy of them on that account, but the envy never quite became respect. But who can say that the two things are not sometimes identical?

  As they swept up the dead flies and laid out the large Talavera plates upon which Rif cuisine and seafood would be served later in the evening, they scanned the doors for scenes that might be revealed beyond them, pricking their ears to detect morsels of scandal. As Moroccans, they were expert linguists, adept in several tongues: French, English, Spanish, Arabic, Berber dialects, and, in the case of one or two from the deep south, Hassaniya. Their ears were subtly attuned to the slipping between these various languages. They were born observers and critics, because that’s the way history had made them.

  Hamid swept into the dining room and seemed pleased. He clapped his hands impatiently and shooed them into the corridor.

  “The bowls of nuts are running low in the library. The dogs haven’t been fed. The wine is still warm. The fans are at the wrong speed. Must I do everything myself?” And under his breath, he added, “Dogs.”

  Then he went up to the second floor, where Monsieur Richard was alone on the telephone with a look of vexation. “I can’t help it,” he was saying quietly, straining his neck muscles. “One doesn’t plan these things.” Hamid hung by the door with the worried expression that he knew annoyed Monsieur but which also goaded him into action. Richard looked up quickly and cupped a hand over the mobile telephone.

  “What is it, Hamid?”

  Hamid stepped carefully into the room. Richard was in a smoking jacket, which was so old it must have belonged to a grandfather. He looked a little shabby with the desert behind him fading out into darkness. There was a smell of whiskey in the room, of male sex. The hand that cupped the phone was wet from the olives in the bowl by the sofa.

  “The father,” Hamid began, “says the English must pay him.”

  Nine

  S THEY SAT IN THE QUARRY THAT DAY, DRISS CONTINUED his story to Ismael. The younger boy listened with a spooked attentiveness, his eyes unblinking as they stared as far into Driss’s eyes as they could. Ismael
wanted to know if he was telling the truth, if the story of his emigration was not a little exaggerated, as such stories almost always were. The man coming back from France was always a little Marco Polo. He could make up what he wanted. He could weave a thousand tales and no one could contradict him about any details, because those who had also been there also had a vested interest in the exaggerations.

  “As I was saying,” Driss said, a little portentously, “I jumped ship and swam ashore a mile south of the marina of Sotogrande.”

  He waded ashore onto a small dirty beach next to a cannery, where the sand shelved steeply. It was a starless night and there was no one there. Just a road bordered by high umbels and weeds, wooden stakes, the edges of tattered vineyards. He walked into Sotogrande along the shore, undisturbed, without witness. He crept through the arcades of the marina, which was a few miles north of Algeciras, and as he did so, he felt light in his wet sandals, subtly justified, and in his element.

  The land smelled like Morocco. Cypresses, resin, lemons, and dry dust. The breeze had forest in it and parched hillsides and the smell of algae drying on stones. He had been on the boat all night long and his limbs shook as he went unnoticed past the terraced fish restaurants and the tapas bars where the yachters reveled with their wives. He heard nothing as he went past the closed shops and made his way out to the small road that ran past the marina’s outer gates. The cicadas shrilled along this road, which wound through darkness toward a village called San Martín. His feet left wet prints behind him on the dusted tarmac, the trail of a dripping thief.

  How could it be so easy? Like a dream, he said to Ismael, a dream where you get everything you want.

  An hour through the gentle night, to the gas station in San Martín. High trees sheltered the last stretch of the road, poplars with tapered tips, and birds still singing higher up where eucalyptus stood. Its peacefulness astounded him. So this was Spain. Encouraged, he sat down in the verge and collected his energy. There were no cops about, and no cars either, and the hills around him were as dark as the Rif, and maybe even darker. For the first time in his life he was about to do something truly illegal.

  The gas station was a self-service with credit card pumps lit up all night. Its roof murmured with hundreds of moths. Underneath, picked out by the excessive lights, an old woman stood fueling her car. She was white, maybe not even Spanish, in slacks and open-toed sandals and a coquettish head-scarf and, by God, she was not attractive to the eyes. He watched her for some time as she filled her tank and until he was sure that she was entirely alone. He could not know why she was filling her car at four in the morning. Perhaps she had insomnia or she preferred the cooler hours. It didn’t much matter. Finally reassured, he dusted himself down and walked slowly up to the station, his sandals scraping the road alerting her to his presence and causing her to wheel around with the pump still in her hand. He did not walk up to her but hesitated by the closed-up station shop, where he feigned surprise (as if he had wanted to buy something, though he had nothing in the way of cash) and then sat down on the curb and said to her in Spanish, “Buenos días,” the only thing he had learned in that language.

  She said nothing back, and he noticed the small things: her finger releasing the trigger of the pump, the shifty look to the darkness to be assured that the Muslim was alone and not part of a gang. He knew at once that she, too, was a foreigner. One can always tell. So they were two foreigners in a gas station at four in the morning and they had nothing to say. All she thought was: “This man knows I have a credit card.”

  By God, Driss said, I was dripping all over that gas station. I looked as if I had just emerged from the sea like a monster, and this old woman simply stared at me and waited for me to say something. I was astonished, and all I could do was walk toward her with my hands held up.

  “Ah,” Ismael said, “that must have been funny. She must have feared for her life.”

  She did, Driss said. He was sure of it.

  He walked toward her and she let go of the pump. But then, surprisingly, she calmly took out her credit card, stepped to the machine, and swiped it. She waited for her receipt, folded it, and pocketed it. She then looked up and said something to him in Spanish.

  “Vous ne comprenez pas?” she went on when he shook his head, and he could tell at once that she was English.

  They spoke in French then.

  “You look awfully wet,” she said kindly, and then asked him if he had eaten anything in the last twenty-four hours, and in fact he had not.

  “How dreadful,” she said in her funny accent.

  “I ate two nights ago.”

  “Over there?”

  He nodded.

  “I see. And how did you come over?”

  The explanation sounded like the truth to her.

  “How marvelously brave of you,” she said gravely.

  “It was what it was.”

  “Well, I am Angela. My husband, Roger, and I have a bed and breakfast on the hill up there outside of the village.”

  They both looked up at nothing, at the outline of the hill that was somehow visible. First light, he thought.

  “Where are you going to stay?” she asked. “You can’t sit around in a gas station.”

  He had had no idea. Stay?

  “I was going to hitch a ride.”

  “So that’s why you came to a gas station. Hitch a ride to where?”

  “Paris.”

  “You’re just a boy. That’s quite unreasonable. You’ll never get there dressed like that.”

  She walked around the little cheap car, the kind of car Moroccans would have, and she seemed irritated by the impracticality of his plan. There was an old “Nukes? No thanks” sticker on the rear fender.

  “And what are you going to do in Paris?”

  “Get a job as a janitor.”

  She laughed, and in her face was the phrase “What a people you are.”

  “Get in,” she said. “You may as well come up and have some soup before you die of hunger. If you don’t have papers, they’ll pick you up on the road.”

  “If?” he thought with dry amusement.

  “You are very kind,” he muttered as he slipped into the passenger seat and then sat very still, waiting. He could have robbed her right there and then, and he could have driven away in her car all the way to Paris and no one would have known. He knew how far it was. A day’s drive, and nothing more, and all on expensive roads. He could have done it easily.

  He watched her fumble with the keys, her foot depressing the pedals, small feet in espadrilles like an ancient hippie. She could have been his grandmother, and yet she was dressed like a free young spirit, with bangles on her wrists and a floral dress that was, to his taste, borderline impertinent.

  BY EITHER SIDE OF THE ROAD AT THE TOP OF THE HILL stood commercial greenhouses covered with plastic sheeting. The Bloodworths had bought a walled farmhouse at the summit and from its high windows the valley could be seen, and the greenhouses sprawled around it. Sunflowers pressed against the outer walls, thousands of them, and beyond them were walnut trees, pale lemon trees, sloped fields of white grapes.

  She led him through a handsome house with Spanish baúls and dressers and polished tables and whitewashed walls, and on the far side of the kitchen lay a pool within three walls and gardens of snapdragons. It was lit from below. The husband was asleep, and in the morning, she said, she would explain everything to him. Meanwhile, eat some gazpacho.

  She turned off the light and left the oil lamp on the table. He ate savagely. She had dry clothes for him, and flip-flops, pillows, sheets, a small room under the rafters in the guest wing, where no one was staying at that moment. Why was she doing it? Because of his youth, because of his hopelessness? Or for other reasons.

  He ate alone at the table downstairs, with damselflies whirling around him, and salted the bread from a silver cellar shaped like a chess bishop. Angela locked up the house. She gave him a key to his room and told him not to go out on the ro
ad by himself until she had discussed things with her husband. Roger always had good ideas.

  Impulsively, he kissed her hand and she drew it back abruptly.

  “No, no,” she said. “It’s our pleasure to do it. Don’t be silly now.”

  He slept deeply in the attic. His nightmares were novel. He woke on the floor surrounded by the cast-off pillows, and there was a sound of cuckoos coming from deep inside the landscape as if they and only they belonged there. He thought: It’s a trap. Now Driss is doomed among the unbelievers. He is in their attic naked and alone.

  At noon the Bloodworths were waiting for him downstairs by the pool, an elderly English couple in wicker chairs reading the British papers with their coffee and a jug of iced orange juice, pale as ghosts in the Spanish heat amid the aging color of their subtropical gardens. The husband was a retired chemical engineer. He was about seventy, thin and piercing in his way, and when Driss appeared in his borrowed clothes, he got up cheerily and shook his hand and invited him to eat some brioches, which, by God, he was sure were poisoned. But, as it happened, and as God willed, they were not poisoned, and the unbelievers were not evil of heart. They were merely simpletons. Allah had written it thus.

  “Angela here says you are on the run from the Spanish police,” Roger said in English. “Just for being an immigrant. Well, we think that’s rotten, don’t we, Angela? How would you like to work for us for a while as our gardener? Board and lodging and three hundred euros a month?”

  When this was translated, Driss had to quell his confusion, and he said yes, that he would, though something in his heart told him not to.

  “It will be easy,” the Englishman went on. “We’ll give you time to settle down and learn some Spanish and whenever you want, you can move on more safely. How does that sound to you?”

  That was how it began, he told Ismael. He had no choice but to go along with it, and soon he was gardening every day under the old man’s supervision, for the infidel was an expert gardener and he knew the name and habits of every flower and plant that grew in that land. He knew all about sunflowers and how to make saxifrage grow on rocks and how to rear sage and thyme among his beds of petunias. And Driss had never seen a valley like that, a place so blindingly green and colored with flowers that it made you feel you had been excluded hitherto from something sweet and nameless, a place where there were water echoes and smoke from hunting guns and a sound of distant dogs, and cypresses dark as green ink with a shade he had never seen cast by trees. Lemons and almonds on the near slopes, and the musky smell of tomatoes ripening in the greenhouses. Yes, Driss said, as if agreeing himself and turning a regrettable memory inside himself like something being rotated on a spit: it was a vision of paradise to me at that time.