From Madrid to Heaven E-Book

Leslie Croxford

• Herausgeber: DIWAN
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 320

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Characters in From Madid to Heaven unexpectedly find themselves in impossible circumstances. In fourteen short stories, set between Iberia and North Africa, they come nevertheless to face the strange possibility that when nothing is possible, everything may suddenly be possible.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Transit in Tarifa

Le Vrai Paradis

The Valuation

Bobby

One Foot

Homecoming

The Empty Time

An Answer

Platero y Tú

The Safe

Open Ticket

The Wisdom of the Stairs

Café Gijón

From Madrid to Heaven

With love and gratitude to my first and continuing hosts in Madrid.

Transit in Tarifa

The man seemed to come out of the wall, dark by the silent grandfather clock. But the concierge did not look at him. He was waiting for the previous arrival to pick up his key, then suitcase. He watched him leave the pension’s reception desk, a shadow ascending the stairs.

‘I’d like a room for a day or two’.

‘Let’s see,’ the concierge said automatically holding out his hand, still without looking through or even over his half-moon glasses at this next arrival. Speaking Spanish with an accent but easily, suggesting he had been here for years, the concierge waited motionlessly for the man to produce a document from his attaché case. He glanced at it without reacting to the flimsiness of the page, his face albino in the light of his strong lamp. Copying details on a list as mechanically as for the others surely transiting through the pension, he said:

‘Fifty euros now’.

The guest surrendered notes peeled off a crumpled wad and received the key.

‘Room four, first floor. Breakfast at seven.’

Another shadow ascended the creaking stair.

In room four, first floor, ‘Alhamdulillah,’ sounded beneath the long breath of the man casting his jacket on the bed. He had finally overcome the apprehension of the day. The moon caught sweat on his face as he stared at the sea’s silvery sheen. Beyond the Straits he had just crossed, he made out the lights of the further shore. He might be seeing Africa for the last time.

There was another sigh: longer, deeper, now wordless.

A wardrobe creaked open in the next room, number five. It was so impregnated with the smell of mothballs that no light was required to reveal they had faded into nothingness years ago. They left only their cellophane packages attached to coat hangers like the one this new inhabitant was using for his windcheater. But he would need no further space for his clothes. Having no intention of unpacking his suitcase, he just stood in shadow, looking vaguely, unobserved, after finally arriving by train today at Europe’s furthermost point, then in a back-breaking local bus at his destination: this entry port to Africa.

The occupant of room five did not draw the curtains. The window creaked more and more in its frame through the night. Long awake before dawn, the man lay in bed vainly watching for the sky to grow luminous. It was dark grey when he eventually got up for breakfast.

The maid explained it was normally served on the wrought iron tables set out before the pension. Later in the day they became a café on the narrow road ending, only metres away, beyond the pebble beach at the small harbour. But this morning seagulls were shrieking rather than crying as they wheeled over upturned fishing boats covered with nets that had not dried as usual in the previous hours. A violent storm had broken out last night: spray had been blown inland by high waves. The path bordering the pension was drenched, strewn with seaweed and plastic refuse, as well as foliage from the trees nearby.

A common room for guests had been opened for breakfast instead. Closed out of season, when its few visitors were hardly the sort wanting to lounge, it smelled of mildew. Damp stains on its walls were more evident than the map hanging there. Or a map it appeared to the man from room five entering this gloom, his worn windcheater giving him the same non-descript appearance as most other urban Spaniards in their late sixties with dimming vision and thinning hair.

He found the person arriving just after him last night already sitting at one of the small tables. He looked as if he had been there waiting considerably before seven, holding his attaché case in his lap. It was made of soft brown leather, with a small gold combination lock and initials. But the other man could not read them with his sidelong glance, taking in the odour of cigar and eau de cologne as he moved several places apart to a table of his own.

Now they were both sitting in a chill gust entering despite the closed window. It gave onto a furious cloudscape over the Straits. Neither spoke: they awaited coffee. Yet the man with the attaché case, sensing he was being observed, adjusted his suit, creased from travel. It must have appeared well-cut while he was still portly. It had a thin scarlet line in the dark grey worsted, not that the other man took it in any more intentionally than anything else around him.

His lack of specific interest did not deter his neighbour however, any more than the empty places between them. Instinctively assuming something is always at play when in another’s presence, whatever it might turn out to be, he faced him with his balding head, moustache, and readiness to smile a swarthy Good Morning.

The other, with long-practiced wariness of exposing himself to signs of curiosity, lest unguarded responsiveness prove more disastrous than mere shipboard friendship, continued immobile. Or, rather, he turned his eyes if only to the sea and that desired further shore, so blurred by the changed weather as to be almost unrecognizable from last night. Then, when the maid reappeared, he submerged his gaze, if not himself, in the bowl of coffee steaming before him.

Further along the beach there was a large café. It had big windows from which the locals could see from Spain to North Africa. It was less than an hour’s crossing by ferry, or recently hydrofoil, unpredictable as currents between the Atlantic and Mediterranean could be in the Straits. So while most customers scratched a living from fishing they also cultivated a plot of land and raised goats. Other business could be picked up too, evident from the occasional scandal of someone knowingly renting his boat to traffickers bringing Moroccan hashish ashore.

The café’s regulars would sit in their black fedoras with coffees and early cognacs, gauging through the windows the mood of the temperamental sea. For some decades now tourists had joined them, drawn by the winds of the Straits. But it was in summer that they came to kite surf. They were not currently in evidence – certainly not on a day of such tempest. The season had yet to start.

That was not the only reason for the light policing hereabouts. In recent years the Guardia Civil were urgently needed in cities such as Algeciras where migrants sought finally to set foot in Europe after journeys starting not only in the Maghreb but also in the Sahara and beyond. Boatloads were returned or, when capsized, brought ashore to face the stretched authorities. And the number of migrants was increasing alarmingly.

Still, this place was off the map except for the underused link with Africa and a rickety bus to the city’s main line railway. It was remote from a world heard, if at all, through the café’s local television news channel. Its customers were as indifferent to football, the weather and provincial politicians in their ill-fitting suits as they were to blurred reports on migrants making for the coast elsewhere. They lounged, all-but-lost to view in this intersection between continents and seas.

The man with the attaché case wore a dark trilby. Entering the café’s close-fitting door, he had to hold it down in a gust of wind arising in the hour since his mute breakfast. But unlike the regulars’ hats his was shapely, fashionable, perhaps from one of Europe’s capitals. His dark eyes, adept at taking in human life, flickered in this fug with a group closed around a game of dominoes.

He sat, setting his hat by the attaché case on a cracked marble-topped table, and waited to order. Though his absent gaze was not drawn to the sea. He followed through the window the pension’s other guest, the Spaniard from room five, scurrying along the shore past its small church and beached boats. He arrived at the port, a hand to his wispy hair. Then he walked over to the docked hydrofoil to talk to someone emerging from the ticket office. An old man, no different from these in the café, pointed to the sea, roiled and dirty grey beneath surging clouds.

The Spaniard appeared not to react. The old man, having retreated to his booth, the Spaniard continued out on the pier, his hair now fully adrift, as if taking stock of the Straits. Only after some minutes, buffeted, did he start walking back. He paused repeatedly to cast an eye at the fishing craft. Never once did the man watching him from the café see him succeed in summoning up one of the boat owners sheltering at these chipped tables from a stormy day.

‘Mr Martín! Excuse me Sir!’

The Spaniard, admitting a blast of air with his entry to the café, was drawn in spite of himself to the man reticent at breakfast.

‘I found your name in the pension register while I was looking for a train timetable. Forgive me. Of course there was no one to help.’

‘What d’you expect: a world class concierge?’ Martín said in surprisingly good English.

‘Hardly in a pension like that. It’s not exactly the hotels where I stayed in Biarritz, Monte Carlo, or Cannes. In Geneva they remembered us, the whole family, from summer to summer. And M. Robert, in that spotless white jacket of his, with the gold cross keys on his lapels, came right out onto the pavement to greet us all when our limousine arrived from the plane, to make sure the luggage was taken straight up to our rooms – the same ones as last year, overlooking the Lake. Hardly like our poor Lebanese fellow, or so I’d say to judge by his accent. Used to dealing with passers through; people whose lives,’ he sighed, ‘make them grateful for someone who knows how to handle their papers ... An understanding soul – when he’s around.

‘Because what I really wanted to know is if there’s a bus to the train for Madrid.’

‘There’s the rattletrap I came in on last night,’ Martín said tonelessly, sitting beside the other whose insistent amiability he was as unable to resist any longer than a puppy’s. ‘But it won’t be running today. They tell me,’ he went on, glancing in the direction of the booth by the hydrofoil, ‘the mountain subsided onto the road last night. And there’ll be no crossing today either,’ he said gloomily as if not intending to voice this additional thought surely meant only for himself.

‘Well, I found my trip here rough enough yesterday although the sea was supposed to be calm.’

‘The hydrofoil eh?’

‘Mm … Mr – or should I say Señor Martín? You are Spanish I presume.’

‘I went to school in England.’

‘Not that I mean to pry. One has to be so careful these days. There was a terrible time we once lived through when it wasn’t even safe to talk in front of the children. Yet we thought we’d passed beyond all that … Though I can’t blame you for preferring to sit and just look out like that, instead of having to hear about it all from, well, a stranger. Though, by the way Sir, I am Mostafa Salama.’

Martín could not avoid shaking the small, soft, ringed hand.

‘Of course everybody has the right to bury himself in his own thoughts instead of listening to what someone else brings with him. Because we’re snails, aren’t we? … And yet if only one could carry one’s house on one’s back?’ Mostafa added woefully, his dark eyes large and liquid with long lashes.

‘But then tomorrow might be better. The weather’s famously changeable here. Like women’s moods. Take my wife and daughter, still back there …’

Martín made no reply as Mostafa choked on his words. Silence won the upper hand again. Martín’s eyes were lost to the Straits, though not to this morning’s turbulent waves. They were inward, fathoming some inner sea.

The men’s silence was submerged beneath the locals’ hubbub by the time the young waiter arrived to take their orders. Mostafa indicated, with a loose hand gesture natural from dealing with servants, that the youth should wait. Instinctively adopting the role of host, he offered Martín orange juice as well as coffee - and, if he would like, a croissant. Martín shook his head. The waiter departed, leaving Mostafa to mutter in near reverie:

‘I never imagined I’d find myself here again – not like this, alone …

‘We would come here all together,’ he finally added, clearly finding it painful to remember, after the ruinous turn of events in his country, like others, with the Arab Spring.

But Mostafa had started recalling a life which, with his relatives and friends continuously around him, he had never before needed to think about. It had been enough to live it. This was the first time he was setting it all out in words, with his poorly knotted tie and rumpled sleeve unexpectedly summoning forth in his neighbour something Martín could not remember feeling previously, at least not recently. It was concern, such as a wife, a daughter, might have, in this case to straighten the appearance of what was suddenly less a caricature, a stock Middle Eastern figure, than some vulnerable being awaiting not merely this coffee, now being served to him, but whatever might be demanded of him here at the Straits.

Yet Martín did not linger to marvel at Mostafa’s instantaneous transformation in his eyes, or wonder what provoked his uncharacteristic, long evaded empathy. He was distracted by Mostafa nervously fidgeting with the paper from a sugar cube dropped into his cup, then gulping back his anguish in a mouthful of coffee as he continued to recall how he and his entire family would arrive every summer to enjoy Europe’s difference from the rest of their life with its crowds, disorder and ever-present servants.

They looked forward to the sheer organisation, the quiet, the ease of having a drink in a café – although Mostafa personally did not take alcohol, he said. Not that he was particularly pious, but they all appreciated being temporarily relieved of the social constraints of their religion.

Friends went with them. And they were joined by those already living on the continent. They met them every day, the whole group of them, for lunch, for dinner, in the nightclubs and casinos. And their wives and daughters passed up the chance to go sightseeing, even the Islamic monuments in Cordoba and Granada, in order to go shopping.

‘Of course we husbands were chivalrous and took the ladies’ wishes into account. And it was natural for all of us to want to stay together in our summer ‘‘movement of the tribe’’,’ Mostafa said. ‘That’s how it was described by Joan, the American wife of one of my cousins. She amused herself ridiculing it as one of those migrations that have taken place throughout human history.

‘Well, I wonder what Joan must be thinking now. We certainly aren’t all together anymore, moving to Europe … I’m sorry … We’re free with our feelings; emotional in a way Westerners aren’t. But although no one can ever really understand what it’s like for me to find myself here alone, I feel you, Mr Martín, won’t simply mock me like Joan, hearing about it.’

Mostafa had been tracking the slow way in which Martín, stirring his coffee, raised the cup and sipped, his eyes now having moved to the window and stormy weather restricting them here to each other’s company.

‘Yet Alhamdulillah. I must be grateful. I’m here at least thanks to a rare business trip to the Maghreb just when the uprising broke out. But it’s trapped my family. I’ve received no news of them for weeks. There have only been vague reports in the media about aerial bombardment of the city. I’m at my wits end. I don’t know how to make contact with them. And it’s impossible to return now that the terrorists – murderers - have taken over our part of the country. I’ve no choice but to go on alone.’

Someone had turned up the television. Martín, with a sudden twitch, apparently nervous, looked back at it. He took in the screen, the reception blurred by the weather. Mostafa continued breathing deeply, controlling his feelings, while Martín followed the loud commentary on a new boatload of migrants from Libya.

Mostafa drained his coffee. He drew himself up to smooth his moustache and review the immigrants.

‘They’re desperate to come to Europe. There’s nothing for them at home – assuming marauding Islamist militias haven’t already razed it to the ground. They pay human traffickers their family’s life savings for crowded passages on unseaworthy boats. But whoever doesn’t drown comes ashore on a continent where he’ll never be welcome. Europe may be their Cape of Last Hope. But home is still home even if it’s Hell.’

Mostafa went on smoothing his moustache, saying: ‘This is fine for vacations with all the restaurants, boutiques and museums. But it’s nowhere to start a proper life. Because whatever the reason for leaving one’s life, it was one’s life.

‘We had a life there was never any question of wanting to change. It would not have occurred to us to ask whether it was good or not. Joan was the one helpfully raising those kinds of questions. She’s written a book about us they say – unpublished. But that hasn’t stopped her showing it around.’

‘Samizdat,’ Martín said dryly. Mostafa might as well not have heard him.

‘Nasty!’ he said. ‘No, our life was our life. Living it was enough.’

It was Mostafa’s refrain. And Martín suspected it was leading to a detailed account of an existence, doubtless with oriental colour, recreated by this garrulous person from a face-to-face society beside his reticent European listener. Although Mostafa was not only finding a way of passing time, thrown cheek to cheek with a stranger, accidentally held up by a storm. Martín, his attention caught as by little else for years, sensed something more urgent compelling Mostafa to expose his life so far. Wasn’t he recycling his past from an inability to relinquish it? Or was he repeatedly suffering the painful but unavoidable need to accept that it really had gone?

‘We were complete. We were content to be together not only travelling to Europe for summer vacations.’

There were invitations for lunches and dinners throughout the year. Or they went dancing or played cards. Families had villas with large gardens and receptions surviving from the colonial period. They had the cooks, the staff, to entertain on a grand scale. That was before the Revolution, coup d’état, or whatever one called it, and they were all sequestrated. Then came the new distractions: television, video, and the internet. But their entertainment continued to be with each other, whether family, accounting for the first twenty guests in any party, or friends.

They appreciated one another’s company, despite Joan sarcastically implying that they were unimaginative and boring for always being the same people carrying on the same conversation. Of course, Joan wasn’t one of them. As often happened with foreigners marrying into their families, there was a problem in her own background. She was adopted or something.

‘We’re generous in making up for what they lack,’ Mostafa said, ‘though it doesn’t stop them criticizing us. Despite which I can tell that you, Mr Martín, are open minded. I feel it, looking at you. Unlike Joan who has never been able, or wanted, to understand that we had all known each other for years, grown up together, and were each other’s second cousins. We didn’t meet to discuss intellectual topics or items of world news – other than America’s faults - but to feel at home with each other. We drew who we were from just being together.’

‘Like royal jelly,’ Martín said.

Mostafa, not quite knowing how to take it, did not react.

‘It’s not deliberate,’ he continued. ‘It comes naturally.’ And they were natural with one another, which was exactly what Joan couldn’t understand. She expected them to analyse people, themselves even, along with every situation, instead of taking life in one’s stride. But if they acted like that there’d be no living together with the relative, friend, or neighbour one had just demolished as Joan did.

‘How could we go on seeing them, Mr Martín, day after day at dinners, in the club, at marriages, funerals and weekends on the coast? I suppose we’re just too accepting, easy going, to want to share in the hypocritical way Joan deals with us.

‘All we wish is to be happy in the moment. Why deny us, Mr Martín, our long summer days on the beach with only the sun, the sea and one another?’

They were not, Mostafa emphasised, trying to become someone or something else. And they didn’t want to keep discussing their circumstances and how to change them, regardless of how shallow Joan thought they were being. She wanted them to analyse things intellectually, ‘objectively’ as she said.

Not-so-secretly she thought they were uneducated and stupid. She was too blind to see they were perfectly aware of how they lived. They automatically accepted the way they were, especially with each other, because it always worked. It pleased and satisfied them, offering the perfectly good life they all enjoyed.

‘We’re certainly intelligent enough to know it doesn’t need altering,’ Mostafa said.

He was remembering one particular occasion. They had all attended it, including Joan who defied the adage: ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. It was held in a friend’s villa, its garden adjoining a golf course without a fence. They sat on the patio overlooking the links surrounded by other villas whose occupants had been invited.

In troubled moments of the country’s history since independence, some had emigrated to the New World or Europe. ‘Not that they’re ever really happy,’ Mostafa said. ‘They are constantly trying to escape the Canadian winter by returning but without losing their newfound way of living. They talk about nothing but the food they miss, the servants and our beaches with the finest white sand in the world.

‘The only people they know are the others who’ve left. They’re a small émigré community. And they’ve never really found a new life, except for the children who know nothing about their homeland. They speak little or no Arabic and behave with their boyfriends and girlfriends in ways our generation can’t understand.

‘They might as well have remained at home as I did,’ Mostafa says. ‘Not that I wasn’t offered jobs abroad at various times. I was invited to manage a large property in Nice, with apartments our friends could rent for the summer or even buy. Another time it was suggested that I move to Montreal. With my good French and legal background I might have set up in business. My wife was eager for me to do so.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ Martín said.

The question was clear. But Mostafa was taken aback.

‘How could I? It would have meant leaving my mother. She would never leave her home.

‘Of course, I was aware that Joan and others were saying I used my mother as an excuse. They thought I was too lazy, afraid and set in my ways to emigrate. But how could I go, starting at a menial level, without an appropriate position - without status? For remaining, everybody knew who I was – and that meant not only me but my father and whole family with its connections for generations. I was a big name, essential for getting anything done there. And without that name and history in the place where I was born, brought up and lived; without the human network anyone meeting me encounters, smoothing a path not only for me but for anyone connected with me, how could I possibly re-establish myself?’

Establishing themselves was what the friends at lunch had done in Canada. Not entirely successfully Mostafa presumed from their eagerness to purchase a villa on the golf course. He said that like others he had encouraged them to buy with his talk about how pleasant it was here with the clubhouse and social events. Joan, on the other hand, inevitably spoke to the son who had just graduated about how badly the city’s services were deteriorating.

‘‘‘Take the traffic: the main arteries are so blocked that it’s on the verge of a heart attack. A famous surgeon has just been unable to perform a transplant with a donated organ flown in from London. It was packed in dry ice but the car delivering it couldn’t reach the hospital in time because of a traffic jam.’

‘Somebody overhearing the story doubted it.’ Mostafa said. ‘People were too negative these days. Everything was basically fine – especially after a good lunch like this, with everyone.’

But there was a bang, far off in the city. Other explosions had occurred in the last few days. The man did not continue. Nor did anyone else.

They sat in silence before a magnificent sunset. They watched it break over the golf course, the villas, this patio, family and friends. It continued fading. Only when the light died did someone, Joan, mutter:

‘‘‘Après moi …”

‘It was the last time we were all together.’ Mostafa said it with a deep sigh. ‘At least the last time I was among them.’ Suddenly he exclaimed: ‘God knows what’s happened to them!’ His voice surged with alarm.

It reverberated till Mostafa, calm again, said:

‘I left for my business trip that weekend. Not that I wanted to go. I had a feeling something wasn’t right as you do with the early onset of fever: knowing without recognizing it. Yet it was urgent for me to clinch a business deal. My itinerary was all booked. I had no choice. And I thought I’d return without delay – which shows how long a short time can be - enough for a city, a family, my whole life to collapse, stranding me on the shores of Europe. Do you think it can ever be recovered here, Mr Martín?’

The hum of the café stole over the two strangers. They sat with their empty coffee cups, staring at the troubled grey of the impassable Straits.

‘No, Europe offers me nothing. At least I know it, unlike those boat people desperate for a chance just to exist. The last thing I want, Mr Martín, Sir, is to be here, heading alone to the Madrid branch of my bank, trying to make contact with whatever exists of my family through the remains of our embassy.’

Mostafa inhaled loudly again, barely stifling his emotion.

‘I’ve lost every one of my personal coordinates: the cleaner and doorman who know me; the bank manager who welcomes me and asks about everyone from my parents to the grandchildren; the government minister who calls for my coffee when I visit him unannounced in his office. And my father, his father, our family with its lands, generations of servants and workers on our farm and their dependents in the villages – all our history, distinctions, and renown: they’re stripped away, one after the other. Without them I’ve lost my reputation, my importance, my very name, who I am. It’s all evaporated.

‘You’re sitting, Mr Martín,’ Mostafa said to the non-descript Spaniard listening intently, ‘with someone who no longer exists. I’m lost to myself. How can I ever go on from these Straits and still be?’

There was a wailing somewhere. Far off in the murky sea a vessel sounded. Mostafa’s face was a sudden grimace. He gesticulated wildly. Panic overcame him like a tidal wave sweeping away the painfully measured, if distressed, way in which he had just been speaking. His hands fumbled as though from a nervous disease. He could not find the attaché case with his personal documents. Irreplaceable, its records were the final traces of who he had been, hurriedly assembled for an abruptly overridden business trip to the Maghreb about which he lacerated himself for having ignored his misgivings.

The case had merely slipped down from the chair next to Mostafa. But finding it he became even more nervous. Mentally poring over its contents, he feared they might not continue to help in this unplanned addition to his itinerary. Especially so with further alarm welling up in him at unsought images of his annihilated city; of its aerial bombardment; of his family – silent as photographs of a dead past condemning him irreversibly to Europe.

Mostafa collapsed inwardly with a barely audible gasp.

Martín heard it though, with the ship’s renewed siren. Once more he realised how attuned he was to the man and his reactions, despite an indifference verging on cold shouldering that had long become second nature to him. Yet perhaps Martín had been simultaneously experiencing anxiety of his own. He had just glimpsed with alarm through the café window, misted by locals escaping rough weather, a pair of men heading for the pier.

Martín watched closely as they talked to the official at the hydrofoil’s ticket booth, regardless of the day’s suspended service. He swallowed, keeping down an attack of acid indigestion. The coffee here was bitter. Though this was also a condition to which Martín was prone. It erupted without warning, as when he sighted someone, or something, unexpected on a street, in traffic, or beside a building.

The acidity faded. The men had disappeared from the jetty. It was deserted once more.

Martín, with his long-developed ability to keep anxiety under control, to prevent it spreading wildly through his nervous system like flame accelerating along a track of petrol, turned calmly to Mostafa, holding tightly the handle of his attaché case.

‘Alhamdulillah.’

He sounded tired, as if with vanished illusions. For Martín took it that, whatever else Mostafa meant, he had at some level faced an appalling truth. He might never establish contact with his family or succeed in bringing them out of their ruined city.

Martín now understood something about the full account Mostafa had given of his life so far. It was a reckoning. Abruptly shorn of his bygones, standing naked as if in some Final Judgement, he had laid bare what had made him, who he was, what it was to be.

Mostafa had stripped it all away, exposing himself as he was to a stranger more even than people do in the anonymity of confessions such as Martín had said in earlier years. In churches, like the one visible through the café window, they cited all-too predictable wrongdoings often specifically crafted for the occasion. Yet Mostafa had dismantled all of himself to date, casting off every prop and solace. It left him at the Straits to wonder what of him there might now be to live on through such as lay ahead.

Doing it so disturbingly, so intimately, before his neighbour, he had implicated him, Martín felt, in the moment, in Mostafa himself.

Brother Man, Martín, turned to the reflecting café window before the Straits, also at his crossroads.

They sat in silence, uncharacteristically for Mostafa. Finding perhaps there was no further for his thoughts to plummet, he said: ‘You are quiet Sir. I don’t want to disturb you.’ He spoke gently, composed now. ‘But I can’t help wondering, Mr Martín, what brings you here. Where are you headed?’

Martín was not used to being asked questions, let alone Mostafa’s implicit ‘and why?’ Certainly he had never been tempted to answer, least of all about something so important to him. Yet this had been so frankly posed by a genial soul too open about himself and his predicament to threaten. It was, besides, a moment when replying, far from being risky anymore, seemed almost called for, even inevitable: this long-awaited time when Martín was finally leaving Europe and his past to cross to that other side.

He found himself answering, with a dry mouth:

‘Wanderlust. Although something’s held me back over the years. Still, I’ve always wanted to move on; known that I would.’ He was picking his way through these clauses. ‘Restlessness kept coming upon me, without warning. I’d just be looking out at a road, across a plaza, towards some trees. I’d always force myself to keep still, however, learning to let the surge subside.

‘Of course it came back repeatedly, this wanderlust. Now it’s come to a head. It’s irresistible, bringing me here finally, to this point of departure I’ve always really known I’ve been approaching.’

‘Departure for what?’ Mostafa said, perplexed.

‘Who knows what will be?’ Martín said, realising Mostafa must suppose he knew well who foretold the future. ‘In the long run, that is. But I’ll begin as Professeur Sans Frontières. Education is the great laissez passer, isn’t it? Tangier is the obvious place to start – and not just as the landing stage. The stateless from Europe found a toehold there after the War. It’s full of expatriates now.

‘Then one can travel south, crossing the Atlas. There, in the river valleys with their date-palm oases, are the mud-built Kasbahs of the pre-Sahara. Each has a profound stillness.’ He paused. ‘It’s a world in itself. You can lose yourself in it.’

Mostafa found the man saying it almost to himself. He seemed lost there already, willingly – till Martín roused, saying:

‘Even further down, the post-Sahara eventually leads one to the Congo basin. The Congo River runs through massive tropical rain forest, the largest forest in the world.’

‘You could certainly lose yourself there,’ Mostafa said, reacting primly to his neighbour’s creeping lyricism. ‘But as a teacher - in the jungle!’

‘Maybe not by then.’

‘Well, you seem to be heading for exactly where the migrants are leaving. They’re crossing Africa like cattle merely for the chance of a life that’s impossible precisely in the desolate places you’re going to.’

Mostafa was shrugging his shoulders, hands outstretched and open. Quizzical, neither polite nor pained, he was no longer remotely a caricature.

‘My life there will be different.’

‘A white man,’ Mostafa said, his dark eyes flashing. ‘But,’ he went on, reviewing his rings, his sting passing, ‘are you sure that’s what you want? Won’t you miss the life you’re leaving behind?’ He asked almost solicitously of the man whose fate he was now following.

‘You mean like the British traitor who craved English sausages and Scottish whisky during his long winters in Moscow? Well no. Travelling with oneself alone is conveniently light. Besides, I don’t know what there is to stay for. It’s something I’ve long felt.

‘I’ve had my moments; early successes with a sense of achievement. But soon enough I saw how different I was from everyone else. I realized their good opinion of me could never prove my worth to myself. So it became irrelevant to demonstrate my accomplishments to them; to be famous – or infamous; to outstrip contemporaries and lay doubts about my value to rest, proving it was worth my having been born.

‘Simply put, I could never be myself through competing with others. So, not competing, who might I be?

‘I merely existed then without complying with everyone else’s standards. It was a small fissure between me and them initially. Then it stretched into a wide gap, becoming a gaping hole invisible except to me. I saw no point in letting others know about it since it would have been intolerable to live in constant opposition. Which meant that seemingly living, yet unable to be myself in my life there, I floated - until this moment that’s finally right for me to disappear, unnoticed by anyone from their impossible world.’

‘A fish out of water,’ Mostafa said.

Martín sensed criticism from the man used to living in a close-knit society – the water. Yet he knew Mostafa himself was landed here too, though neither of them was merely a beached migrant like the wretched boat people on the television beside them. Martín, Mostafa, each in his different way, longed to go in the reverse direction to that desired by those bedraggled souls, the lucky ones saving life and limb, docking at last in aluminium sheeting.

Europe, Madrid, was inconceivable as a place to be, Martín thought, finding the voice on television belonged to a government minister. He implored his compatriots to open up their hearts and homes to those who, having been denied entry first by Malta then Italy, were finally being permitted to land in Valencia, seeking the security, prosperity and respect that defined ‘our beloved continent’.

‘It depends on what one’s looking for,’ Martín said. ‘If it’s oneself, it may take one far from home.’

‘To the Congo?’ Mostafa blurted out, indignant at the bewildering vagueness of Martín’s account of himself. ‘Black Africa!’

There was a lull in the weather. The wind had dropped. It allowed the men to leave the stuffy café and stand outside it, breathing in the sea air.

‘Shall we head back to the pension?’ Mostafa said.

Martín, still self-absorbed, did not answer. He followed mechanically, hands in his pockets.

The concierge was at the desk. Over his glasses he took in last night’s shadows, today’s fugitives from a storm. Martín walked straight past, up the stairs. Mostafa lingered, having left his room key at reception.

‘We had a grandfather clock in our family house,’ he said in Arabic. ‘This one needs winding.’

‘It’s never worked.’ The concierge spoke handing over the key without looking up from his register. ‘The owners haven’t bothered to get it fixed. There’s no one who can mend it locally. And it would be impossible to find new parts. Besides, what would be the point? Time’s stopped here.’

‘For you maybe. Not for passers through,’ Mostafa insisted to himself, going up to his room.

He lay his attaché case on the bed. Entering his combination on the gold lock, Mostafa raised the lid. He took out each document, carefully preserved with its signatures and stamps on crisp, unfolded paper. It was as if he was putting everything to rights. Yet sweating, despite the wintery buffeting the window repeatedly received and that had brought Tarifa to a standstill, Mostafa recalled with dread the one missing item: a visa to enter Spain, Europe.

It had led him to travel here with a Tangier fisherman. It was expensive and dangerous, given not only the Guardia Civil but currents in the Straits. The boat had left him some way from here on a deserted stretch of beach alleged to be under-policed. He had carried his suitcase in the dark all the way to this pension, happily uninquisitive.