The Forgiven (23 page)

“The safe?”

“Yes, I have been watching Roger do it and I cannot figure it out.”

“Why do you need to figure it out?”

She stood up and he suddenly noticed that hours had gone by somehow and that it was already the end of the afternoon and the olive trees were growing gray outside the windows as they stood under the rain.

“Because,” he said quietly, “I need the money in it.”

Slowly, they evolved into the same scene they had enacted at the petrol station, except that now they were months along the same lines of thought and everything had changed in Driss’s favor. He saw, superimposed upon the face of the woman he had grown fond of, the face of the ancient unbeliever who would never give him what he wanted.

“Driss, don’t be silly,” was all she said. “There’s only two thousand euros in there. Is that worth it?”

By God, he thought, it is.

He came around the table, and one of his hands reached out like a whiplashing cable that has snapped.

“No, you can’t,” she said softly, and wriggled out of his grip, though he reasserted it. They began to dance.

He dragged her silently toward the safe, which stood inside a large kitchen cabinet where cookbooks and pots of dried herbs also stood. His free hand searched for a weapon with which to intimidate her into some kind of informative submission. A drawer was opened, and inside were the household knives. “I was not thinking of such a thing,” he said to Ismael, who had gone quiet, “but how else was I to cut through this troublesome knot?” He found a serrated bread knife and raised it against the side of her neck as she sank down toward the floor and
tried to twist away. There was something immensely gratifying about this pose of purely subconscious supplication and the way those hippie sandals slipped off and lay in the middle of the kitchen floor. Finally, he felt, the positions of power were as they should be, and if that involved a humiliation for this weak old lady, it was distasteful but not unnatural. It was the reverse that was unnatural. “Let me go,” she was crying, but why should she not cry such things and why should he let her go? When the tip of the bread knife bit into her neck, she revealed the numbers of the combination and he memorized them.

When he had taken the money, however, he was not sure what to do with the enormous situation that had suddenly opened before him. He had no real plan, he suddenly realized. Night had fallen and he could not very well just walk out of the house without a thought, leaving behind him an angry unbeliever who would now call the police at once. What would he be then? Hunted through the fields by infidels with rage in their gut. It was foolish to think he would get away with it. He needed a little time to get to the road and hitch a ride.

He thought all this as the knife still lay against her neck. One exertion, he thought, and all your problems are solved. Ignore the look of disbelief in her eyes. She is old anyway. Her time has come.

“You cannot do that,” she said to him inside his head.

“Oh, yes, I can,” he replied calmly.

So much blood for so little a reason. He let go when it was done, and he felt a cool, surprising elation as he cleaned the blade in the sink and put it back in the drawer. The house was suddenly as quiet as a house can be, with only the sound of birds calling through the olive grove behind it. There was just him and his lungs and his beating heart.

Sixteen

E WENT DOWN WITH A BAG FILLED WITH CASH AND
clothes to the road that ran past San Martín and soon found his way back to the gas station where he had started. A few trucks idled there and some beat-up cars of immigrants that had obviously just disembarked from the ferry. The Moroccan families sat about on the shoulder of the road eating oranges and pastries, and among them he could move with his proposition without difficulty. All of them, without exception, were going to Paris and, in that regard, his ambition to get there himself was sensible. He talked to them quietly and persuasively, asking them who they were and from where they had come and where they were going, and when he offered to pay all their petrol to the French capital, several relented and offered space in their cars. He went with a young family who owned a grocery store in a place called Marx Dormoy. He asked them if this place was in Paris and they said,
“Assuredly, it is.” Very well then, he thought. It had not been as difficult as he had anticipated, not by a long shot.

At this point in his narrative, Driss got up and went down to the trench to relieve himself. He was well satisfied by the effect his tale had had on the impressionable Ismael and he was sure, in fact, that the kid believed every word of it. He chuckled to himself. The fossils all around them gave him the goose bumps, because he knew they were evil, that they were not of this world. But now he was entertained enough to forget the damned things. He loved telling stories.

“You were cold as ice, brother,” the kid said as he came back and sat down again by the fire they had assembled on the bare rock. He had a waxed paper bag of figs from the market in Erfoud, and they cut them open with the penknife. Driss nodded.

“Necessity, brother.”

“The world is cruel. My father keeps saying so.”

“He is right.
Cruel
is the word.”

Driss could sense that Ismael suddenly admired him more than he had ten minutes earlier, and this had been his intention. The boy looked at him with wide-open eyes in which the newly minted wonder was mixed with a little fear. It was perfect. The balance between them had shifted in his favor, and he felt more assured as he stirred the fire with a stick and ate into the figs. More than assured, he felt mightily pleased with himself. For the job he had in mind, he needed Ismael wrapped around his little finger, and there he was, like human thread. He would, from now on, be a more willing partner in whatever Driss had in mind; he would look up to the older boy and do what he was told. Driss cut up a fig for him and offered half, and all the while he talked, because Ismael wanted to know about Paris. Paris was where they all wanted to go. Paris, where the girls are true sluts.

“So,” he said to Driss, “you went to Paris after all?”

“Of course I did. Didn’t I say so?”

The family from Essaouira drove him all the way there through the night. They stopped at autoroute filling stations in the dark and
during the following day, and he and the father took turns driving the car. The father was a fat brute from the coast; he had made a living making chessboards for tourists in the
souk
of Essaouira. Sly and rolling and overcurious. He explained to Driss the arcane ways of the French, which were different from the more familiar ways of the Spaniards. Driss listened without retaining a single word. He remembered a place near Perpignan in the early morning with cattle standing submerged in mist, and he thought, “It was not so hard after all. The Nazarenes are not as clever as we make them out to be.” He wandered with the family into a food court in an autoroute mall, where the unbelievers ate in open-plan cafeterias awash with alcohol. The French girls were in cutaway jean shorts and tiny T-shirts, and they looked over at him with a short, momentary disdain. The bread was stale. In the shops there were hams wrapped in silver foil and model fire engines, and there were chairs where the truck drivers were massaged electronically. Everyone stood around automated coffee machines and said nothing. Strange, the ways of the unenlightened.

But then he decided not to tell Ismael too much about Paris. It was better left as a mystery. The weeks on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis behind the Gare du Nord, in the Indian neighborhood of tandoori houses and sari stores filled with gold jewelry (he thought with a smile of the glass busts of women in the windows with vulgar necklaces draped around them); the
hammam
on the rue d’Aboukir; and the long nights alone in the Brady cinema on Sébastopol watching soft-porn movies. What was the good of describing it? His fruitless search for a job in the newspapers, the useless economies, the endless boredom and loneliness. Nothing had happened there but failure anyway. He had not found a job even as a janitor, nor even as a supermarket stocker, which everyone had said was a surefire thing. And the two thousand euros? Ismael asked.

“Even when you buy a sandwich,” Driss replied sternly, “it costs the same as a week of tagines here. The infidels steal every centime you have. It flows through yours fingers like sand.”

“Ah, I thought so.”

Every night, Driss had been forced to walk the streets around Château d’Eau, following clusters of middle-aged Chinese whores who dressed in black like female undertakers and who migrated to the bus stop there when the Métro was winding down. Nocturnal solitudes on the well-named Passage du Désir and the African cafés all along the rue du Château d’Eau, which was the only place he could afford to pretend to have a nightlife. Paris.

“The City of Light,” Ismael said hopefully.

A bitch of a den of infidelity, Driss said, a sewer. Though one night, having decided to relinquish his sixty euros and seeing as he was already lost amid Unbelief, he followed a sad Chinese girl back to the
chambre de bonne
on the very same street where he lived, into a courtyard filled with sacks of cement exactly like his own, and up a winding staircase to a room exactly like his own, six feet by six, with a cat that smelled of carpet cleaner. And this girl, who spoke no French, took off her clothes and stuffed her sixty euros into a box under the bed and asked him, he imagined, if he wanted
la pipe
.

Well, of course he wanted
la pipe
, he said. Would he go to a streetwalker and not get
la pipe
? He would not spend sixty euros and not get it. They laughed and Ismael said, “By God.”

“And these Chinese girls walk the streets at night?”

“They are the only girls left on the street apart from the Albanians, who are all thieves and cutthroats. So that is how we do it there.”

“And they are all dressed in black?”

“Like the undertakers of the unbelievers. They are dressed in black, and I must say they are fearsome to look upon.”

“But nevertheless you had
la pipe
?”

“I had to see what it was like. So I did.”

“It was well done. How was it?”

“Less than magnificent.”

They laughed again, but more uneasily.

Driss said that he used to walk over the bridge that crossed the
railway lines behind the Gare du Nord and pass from the neighborhood of the Hindus to that of the North Africans—the lines divided them—and once on the far side, he walked all down the boulevard de la Chapelle under the Métro, where the boozers lay in their calms and the blacks sold their drugs; past the Lariboisière Hospital to Barbès and the Tati store, where he bought his cheap shirts; and from there into the rue de la Goutte-d’Or, which made him think comfortingly of a Moroccan town, and the rue de la Charbonnière, where the restaurants with
grillades
and the halal places were. Here gathered the Muslims with their food and their gossip.

It was like a dream, he said to the impressionable Ismael, but not necessarily a very nice one. He walked and walked, he admitted, and the more he walked down the rue Myrha and the rue de Sofia and the boulevard Barbès and even the small and orderly rue Cail that was around the corner from where he lived—with its line of garish Indian restaurants and the blossoming trees at the far end—the more he realized that life was elsewhere and not in Paris, and that he was not the one to live in this place and make it his. So, in a sense, he said to Ismael, he had wasted his time and everyone else’s, and soon, though it was against his will, his thoughts were turning back to the desert and especially when he was alone in the Brady or wandering down the rue de l’Aqueduc toward nowhere, adrift among the migrants from countries he had never heard of, among the skins darker than his own, eating a peach or a bag of nuts and feeling that he was slipping down a long slope toward a pit, for that was how walking down the rue de l’Aqueduc always felt to him.

“How so?” the younger boy asked.