On the Edge
ON THE EDGE
CONTENTS
I
The Discovery
December
26, 2010
THE FIRST
to spot the carrion is Ahmed Ouallahi.
Every morning, ever since Esteban closed his carpentry business over a month ago, Ahmed walks down Avenida de La Marina. His friend Rachid drives him to the restaurant where he works as a kitchen porter, and Ahmed walks from there to a secluded part of the lagoon where he usually sets up his fishing rod and casts his net in the water. He prefers fishing there in the marshy area, far from the eyes of passersby and the police. When the restaurant kitchen closes—at 3:30 in the afternoon—Rachid comes to join him and they eat their lunch, sitting on the ground in the shade of the reeds, with a cloth spread out on the grass. They’re bound together by friendship, but also by mutual need, sharing the cost of the gas for Rachid’s old Ford Mondeo, a “bargain” that he bought for less than a thousand euros, but which has turned out to be something of a white elephant because, as he puts it, the car drinks gas as greedily as a German drinks beer. It’s about nine miles from Misent to the restaurant and, just there and back, the car gollops down three quarters of a gallon of gas. At nearly six euros a gallon, that comes to about four euros a day just for fuel, which means a hundred and twenty euros a month to be deducted from an income of less than a thousand euros; at least those are the figures Rachid gives Ahmed (although he may be exaggerating a little), which is why Ahmed pays his friend ten euros a week for transport. If he could find a job, he’d get a driver’s license and buy his own car. With the crisis, you see, it’s easy enough to find second-hand cars and vans at absurdly low prices, but how they perform afterward is another matter: cars that people have had to get rid of before the bank repossesses them, vans owned by companies that have gone bankrupt, mobile homes, station wagons; it’s a golden opportunity for anyone hoping to buy cheap and with a little money to invest. What you don’t know is what kind of poison might be concealed beneath the hood of these bargains. High gas consumption, replacement parts, components that break the moment you look at them. You get what you pay for, mutters Rachid, as he puts his foot down. That’s another quarter gallon gone. He accelerates again. And another. They both laugh. The crisis is making itself felt everywhere. Not only among those at the bottom of the heap. Companies are going broke too or are struggling. Rachid’s brother used to work in a warehouse that owned seven trucks and employed seven drivers, but that was four years ago. Now, they’ve fired everyone, and the trucks stand idle in the parking lot behind the warehouse. When the company has a delivery to make, they hire a freelance driver, who does the job in his own truck, charges them by the hour and the mile and then sits, clutching his cell phone, waiting for the next call. Ahmed and Rachid discuss the possibility of setting up a business buying old cars and reselling them in Morocco.
The restaurant where Rachid works is at the far end of Avenida de La Marina, which, despite the grand-sounding name, is actually a road running parallel to the beach, but behind the back of the first row of apartment buildings, and continuing through the suburbs of Misent for another twelve or so miles, as far as the lagoon’s first drainage canal. Ahmed has to walk for just under a mile to reach the spot where he usually fishes. He carries his rod on his shoulder, his net tied round his waist beneath his tracksuit top, and a basket slung on his back by two chains, like a rucksack. Three years ago, countless building sites lined this stretch of La Marina. On either side of the road you’d see piles of rubble and buildings in various stages of construction: sites filling up with machinery; others where a bulldozer was opening up the ground, removing the reddish clay, or where cement mixers were filling in the foundations. Pillars bristling with iron rods, struts, sheets of steel reinforcement mesh, pallets full of bricks, piles of sand, bags of cement. There were teams of bricklayers everywhere. Some houses where the construction work had been completed would be covered in scaffolding heaving with painters, while, nearby, groups of men would be digging and gardening and planting trees and shrubs that are, according to the guidebooks, typical of the ornamental flora of the Mediterranean: oleanders, jasmines, carnations, rosetrees and clumps of aromatic herbs—thyme, oregano, rosemary and sage. The roads in the area used to be filled with endless lines of trucks bringing in palm trees, leafy carob trees and ancient olive trees, all bursting out of the vast pots in which they were transported. The air was filled with the metallic sounds of vehicles carrying building materials or dumpsters, dump trucks and trailers for transporting bulldozers and cement mixers. The whole place was a hive of activity.
On this sunny morning, everything seems quiet and deserted, not a single crane punctuates the horizon, no metallic noises trouble the air, no buzzing or hammering assails the ears. The first time they made the journey together after Ahmed lost his job, his friend Rachid laughed at him when he said he was going there to look for work on the building sites. Work? Only if you want a job digging graves for suicides, Rachid said mockingly.
Ma keinch al jadima. Oualó
. There’s no work, none. There’s nothing being built in La Marina. In the good times, a lot of laborers would take their week’s wages, then not bother to turn up again because they’d found somewhere else offering more. Now, discouraging signs hang from balconies. Anyone looking for work has become a bit of a pest.
NO GARDENING OR MAINTENANCE STAFF REQUIRED. PLEASE DON’T ASK
says the sign on the apartments next to the restaurant. Everywhere there are signs in red or black letters—
FOR RENT—FOR SALE—AVAILABLE FOR RENT WITH AN OPTION TO BUY—FOR SALE GREAT OPPORTUNITY—40% DISCOUNT
—with telephone numbers underneath. All they talk about on the radio every morning is how the building bubble has burst, about the huge national debt, risk premiums, savings banks going bust and the need to cut public spending and reform the country’s labor laws. The crisis. Unemployment in Spain stands at more than twenty percent and this could rise to twenty-three or twenty-four next year. A lot of immigrants live on unemployment benefits, as he will start to do in a few days’ time, or so he hopes, because after filling in pages and pages of forms at the social security office and standing in various lines, he was told that it will take some time before he receives his first payment. Five or six years ago, everyone was working. The whole area was one big building site. It seemed that not an inch of land would be left unpaved; now it looks rather like an abandoned battlefield, or a territory under armistice: sites overgrown with weeds, orange groves transformed into building lots; neglected, withered orchards; walls enclosing nothing at all. When he first arrived in Spain, most of the bricklayers in the area were from Morocco like him, and his first jobs were on construction sites; then men from Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia began to arrive. Now no one comes from any of those places. The Moroccans are leaving for France or Germany, and the Latin Americans are going back home, even though they had become the most sought-after workers. Employers trusted them—they spoke the same language, they shared a religion and a culture—and, above all, anyone from Morocco, ever since the 2004 Madrid bombings, was considered suspect (most of the bombers were thought to have been Moroccans) as was having anything to do with Islam or Islamism. Ahmed thinks the Moroccans themselves have contributed to increasing this distrust and making things more difficult. His fellow bricklayers, who, before, had always been perfectly happy to drink and smoke and share a joint with the Spaniards on the construction teams, were now declaring themselves to be strict Muslims, haughtily rejecting the bottle of booze being handed round at lunchtime, and never to be seen in a bar after work. They refuse to eat what the company gives them, demanding a halal menu. Some even insist that the work timetable should be changed during Ramadan.
Hamak y Jamak
. Fools and madmen, Ahmed calls them. Muslims and Christians only get together to find out which one can best screw the other. On Sunday afternoons, when the streets of Olba are deserted because everyone’s gone to the beach or to have lunch with their families, the Moroccans take solitary walks or sit on the handrails along the Misent road, on the bollards along the pavement. Ahmed quarrels with his fellow Moroccans who, during Ramadan, want the foremen to abandon the lunchbreak and, instead, shorten the work day. When he was still working at the carpentry workshop and went to deliver a load of doors to one of the sites belonging to Pedrós, one of the managers there said to him: You goddamn Moroccans are mad! I never go to mass, I’ve got nothing to do with priests, and yet you expect me to fast during Ramadan. What am I supposed to tell the crane operator or the guys driving the bulldozers or working the cement mixers? That they skip lunch and eat later on when they get home? That they don’t drink a drop of water while they’re slaving away in the sun, when it’s humid and ninety or more degrees? To his fellow Moroccans Ahmed says: As if the Christians didn’t already have it in for us! It’s as if you
wanted
them to get rid of us, he said to Abdeljaq, who had persuaded their other roommates not to drink beer with Spaniards. But no, Abdeljaq had said: Keep away from the unclean. When he got excited, he would say that it wouldn’t be long before they saw the color of the blood of those Christians. They need us, argued Abdeljaq, and, for as long as they do, they’ll have to put up with us, and if they stop needing us, they’ll get rid of us soon enough, even if we pray the our-father-stuff they spout or make the sign of the cross.
Abdeljaq had celebrated the bombings at Atocha station. He said he could see the face of Allah more clearly in the sky. He’d performed his ablutions, prayed facing Mecca and cooked a
mechui
of lamb, which he ate wearing a white gandora. It was all done with great formality; he was celebrating martyrdom and vengeance. Look, he said, pointing at the TV screen while puffing on his joint, look, infidel blood.
Bismillah
. On the television, they were showing twisted metal, people covering their faces with bloodied hands. When he was alone with Rachid, Ahmed would criticize Abdeljaq: You see? The Christians don’t need us any more, and so we’re the first people they get rid of, because we’re the ones who make life difficult for them. They’d rather keep the Colombians and the Ecuadorians. Anyway, Abdeljaq is blaspheming when he says he can see the face of Allah. That’s the worst blasphemy a Muslim can commit. But Abdeljaq’s eyes light up as if he really was seeing that face. A fierce, satisfied face. He talks like some fanatical preacher, a prophet of revenge: the Christians trample on us now, we clean the shit from their toilets, we serve their disgusting wine in bars, we build the houses where they eat
jaluf
and fuck uncleanly, without washing the semen from their foreskins, our women make their beds and smooth their impure sheets, but the day is coming when we will be the ones who lead
them
, on all fours, with a chain about their necks. They will bark outside the doors of our houses, revealed as the things they are: dogs; and they’ll polish our leather slippers with their tongues. Our Muslim brethren in America were taken there in ships, in chains, caged up like horses, goats, chickens or pigs. The Black Muslims were just farm animals as far as the Yankee Christians were concerned. The time has come for us to show them that we are men and know how to fight for what is ours. Ahmed argues: But there are rich Muslims too. What about all those sheikhs in the Gulf states. Aren’t rich Muslims even worse than rich Christians? Besides, most of the slave traders in Africa were Arabs. Muslims enslaving Muslims. Abdeljaq shakes his head indignantly: Those are infidel lies. But Ahmed has seen documentaries on television and knows that it’s true. Those Arabs, those traders in human flesh, were feared from one end of Africa to the other, they were feared in India too, in Indonesia, on the southern coast of China. They didn’t care about the religion of the slaves they captured, Christians, Muslims, Animists, Hindus, Buddhists. Any flesh was good enough to fill the cages in the ship’s hold. And what about the Turkish khedives? They were far crueler in their tortures than the Christians. What about our kings? Are we not here because the late Hassan and his son Mohammed and his family threw us out? We are serving the Christian dogs because our own dogs are even fiercer and sink their teeth into us far more deeply. Here they treat us like servants, there they treated us like slaves. All men are bastards, all human beings, regardless of what God they believe in or say they believe in. We’re all born from a woman’s
tabún
. Do you believe that Allah blesses those filthy rich bastards in Fez or Marrakech who return from Mecca banging tambourines and sounding the horns of their imported Mercedes just so that everyone can see that they have enough money to have made the pilgrimage and be able to call themselves
hajji
? Are they fulfilling the teachings of the Koran any better than the rest of us? Why? Because they’ve walked seven times round the Kaaba, because they’ve traveled back and forth seven times between As-Safa and Al-Marwah, and drunk from the Zamzam well? I travel back and forth every day just to scrape a living. And I drink the salt water from the well of my sweat. And yet they, from their luxury hotels in Mecca, humiliate you by telling you that they’re better believers because they can go where you can’t. Just because they can afford the flight to Mecca—first-class pilgrims in a Boeing—they’re convinced that they’ll enter Paradise before you do, you poor unfortunate wretch. Do you really think there will be rich and poor in Allah’s heaven, people who drive Mercedes and people who clean other people’s toilets? What kind of shitty religion is that? Is that Islam? I can assure you, Abdeljaq, that those pilgrims will go to hell before any Christians do. You can be quite sure of that.