The Bloodworths Shelter and Hire Driss

The Bloodworths’ shelter and employment of Driss mark his passage from hunger and fear of detention to a provisional place in their household. Angela Bloodworth first brings him to the farmhouse she shares with Roger outside a Spanish village, then Roger offers him board, lodging, and a monthly wage to work as their gardener. Driss receives their kindness with deep suspicion, but the landscape and daily work make the household seem, for a time, like a vision of paradise.

Encounter at the gas station

Driss meets Angela at a gas station after approaching her as she uses the payment machine. Rather than leave immediately, she calmly finishes paying, collects her receipt, and speaks to him. When he shakes his head at her Spanish, she recognizes that he is English and they continue in French. She notices that he is wet and asks whether he has eaten in the past day. He has not; when he explains that he last ate two nights earlier, she responds with concern.

Angela introduces herself and explains that she and Roger run a bed and breakfast on the hill outside the village. When Driss has nowhere to stay, she invites him into her car and offers him soup, warning that without papers he may be detained if he remains on the road. Driss accepts, but he also recognizes the vulnerability of the situation: he thinks he could take her car and drive away. Instead, he waits as she handles the keys and brings him to the house. Her welcome interrupts both his immediate hunger and his imagined route to Paris, but it does not instantly dissolve his distrust.

Refuge becomes a job

The Bloodworths’ farmhouse stands among commercial greenhouses, with cultivated slopes and gardens around it. Angela leads Driss through a house furnished with Spanish chests, dressers, and polished tables to the kitchen and a pool enclosed by garden walls. Roger is asleep, so she explains that she will speak with him in the morning. She serves Driss gazpacho, supplies dry clothes and flip-flops, and gives him a small room beneath the rafters in the guest wing. She also gives him a key and tells him not to go out alone on the road until she and Roger have discussed what to do.

The next day, Driss meets both hosts beside the pool. Roger is a retired chemical engineer, but he is also an experienced gardener who knows the plants growing in the valley. He offers Driss work as their gardener for three hundred euros a month, with board and lodging. The offer is not simply an extension of the previous night’s meal: it gives Driss a regular place to stay and a way to earn money while he settles in and learns Spanish. Roger also says that Driss could move on more safely whenever he wished. Driss agrees, though he feels an inward warning even as he accepts.

Work, suspicion, and the valley

Driss later tells Ismael that he felt he had no choice but to go along with the arrangement. He works in the garden every day under Roger’s supervision. Roger teaches him about sunflowers, saxifrage growing on rocks, and the sage and thyme among beds of petunias. The work gives Driss close contact with a cultivated landscape far greener than the one he has known: the valley has lemons and almonds, greenhouses where tomatoes ripen, and trees and flowers around the farmhouse. He remembers its water, color, and shade as an abundance from which he had previously felt excluded.

That sense of welcome coexists with religious and cultural suspicion. In the attic, Driss fears that the house may be a trap and worries that he is alone among unbelievers. When Roger greets him the next day and offers food, Driss suspects the brioches may be poisoned; when they are not, he interprets the couple’s kindness as evidence that they are not evil, but simple. His account therefore records more than a change in circumstances. Angela and Roger provide practical help, while Driss has to revise, without entirely abandoning, the assumptions through which he first understands them.

Later significance of the offer

Driss’s recollection gives the employment its double character: the Bloodworths provide genuine assistance, but the help is organized through a household, a job, and the couple’s decisions about when he may go out. The arrangement offers shelter and income without removing the vulnerability created by his lack of papers. His gratitude is consequently bound up with dependence and uncertainty, rather than presented as uncomplicated trust.

Later, the novel places this form of aid beside David Henniger’s attempt to transfer money to Anouar. Before travelling to make amends, David asks Hamid how much money he should take; Hamid advises him to take everything and present it as all he has. Much later, David gives Anouar a bag containing two thousand euros, asks him not to open it until he returns to the village, and calls him a decent man. The episodes differ in form: the Bloodworths offer Driss paid work and lodging, while David makes a substantial gift. Together they show assistance passing between people whose resources and circumstances are unequal, while leaving open how far a kind act can overcome the power relations surrounding it. Driss’s memory of the Bloodworths remains especially charged because the refuge that begins in hunger and mistrust becomes, for a time, his experience of a beautiful and generous place.