Driss and Ismael

Driss and Ismael are childhood friends and fellow fossil workers whose relationship joins shared labor to a difference in age and experience. They began working at the quarry together, and, after Driss’s return from France, their renewed companionship gives Ismael both a close view of his older friend’s altered life and an imaginative route beyond the town he has never left. Driss offers stories rather than emotional explanations; Ismael listens, watches, and makes his own future plans from what he hears.

Shared Work and Early Companionship

Driss and Ismael had been together since childhood and started at the quarry together. By the time of their later conversations, Driss is the older of the two, while Ismael is eighteen. Their common history matters: Ismael is not simply an audience for a stranger’s travel tales but someone who knew Driss before his departure and can compare the returned man with the boy he remembers.

Both know the labor of preparing fossils. Driss works in the yards in Erfoud, chipping at Tridents acquired on the black market with a technique described as meticulous; Ismael has prepped fossils all his life too. The work is familiar to Driss, but familiarity has not made it a source of satisfaction. He hates it precisely because it is what he knows. Their shared trade therefore connects them while also marking the narrow prospects from which Driss has tried to escape and Ismael still hopes to move beyond.

Driss’s Return and Ismael’s Attention

Driss had emigrated to France and, on returning, went back to work at the Mirzan quarry for the same wage he had earned a year earlier. He lodged in Erfoud and sometimes prepared fossils near the town’s central telecommunications tower, his head covered with sacking against the sun. Ismael saw him there and gradually spent time with him again. Driss appeared badly dressed, irritable, thinner, and more anguished than before; he smoked kif in the evenings with workers from Alnif and no longer spoke with the loose charm that had once made him popular with girls. Ismael interprets these visible changes through his own assumptions about unbelievers, but the account establishes the transformation in Driss’s appearance and manner without explaining all that lies behind it.

Driss also presents a more boastful face in public. Ismael sees him at the Green Coconut and the Hotel Tafilalet, talking loudly at the ammonite bar about money earned from tourists at five-star ksour hotels outside town. The contrast between these claims and his return to the same quarry wage makes his foreign adventure appear unresolved: he speaks of success, yet his work and circumstances have brought him back to familiar ground. Ismael’s view holds both impressions at once, registering Driss’s public display and the strain that shows through it.

Their companionship takes shape around the quarry as well as in town. On days off, Driss comes to the quarry before first light, waiting by the entrance with a teapot and harmonica while little girls bring pieces of bread from the foreman. He and Ismael work through intolerable afternoons, chiseling a great ancient fish commissioned by a customer from Spain for a private bar. After dark they make fires on the cliff and look down at walls where ammonites and crinoids remain partly exposed. In another evening scene, after the flies finally disperse, they lie beneath the honey moons with their pipes. These stretches of work and waiting give their conversations room to unfold; friendship is shown through repeated proximity and shared routines, not through declarations of affection.

Stories, Trust, and Unequal Experience

Driss becomes voluble after sunset, when the stars appear, and sometimes sleeps in the quarry’s geometric trenches wrapped in tarpaulin. He can lie on bare stone for hours without moving. His face gives little away, and Ismael is left to infer what is happening behind its mildness and coldness. The narration draws a distinction between what Driss shares and what he withholds: he reveals experiences to Ismael, not his emotions. That limit does not prevent confidence; it defines its form. Ismael receives accounts of a life beyond their shared work, while Driss keeps the feelings attached to those experiences largely concealed.

Driss tells Ismael about arguments with his father and the journey he made by hitchhiking to Midelt, then Azrou, and then Fez. He says Fez was a city like no other but that he would have stayed only if there had been work beyond the tanneries. Ismael, who has never gone farther than Midelt, listens as someone for whom these places remain largely beyond direct experience. The difference between them is consequently not only an age gap: Driss can describe routes taken, whereas Ismael’s knowledge of such journeys comes through another person’s telling.

Ismael does not accept every detail uncritically. When Driss continues his emigration story, Ismael listens with intense, almost spooked attention and wonders whether the account has been exaggerated. The returning migrant, he thinks, can become like Marco Polo: those who have not been there cannot verify the details, while other returnees may also have reason to embellish. Yet this doubt does not cancel the bond. Ismael is still the listener Driss chooses, and their childhood acquaintance gives the stories a personal weight that a stranger’s account would lack. What Ismael can question in factual detail, he cannot simply replace with his own experience.

Aspiration and the Limits of Example

Driss turns their difference in experience into a rebuke. As they watch the sunset after the quarry workers have left for town, he tells Ismael that he has stayed a child because he has never left the local world; Ismael answers that he will leave one day. Driss insists on the distinction between a future intention and a completed act: what matters is what someone has done, not what he says he will do. His words make their friendship briefly confrontational. The older man’s experience gives his criticism force, while the younger man’s answer preserves an ambition that has not yet become action.

Driss’s stories also carry a lesson in how little Ismael can independently confirm. Driss smiles at the younger boy’s naïveté because Ismael has to take his word for things. That smile places them in an unequal position, but it is not evidence that Ismael is indifferent or merely gullible: he listens closely, tests the credibility of the tale, and recognizes the limits of his own knowledge. His private response is to promise himself, without speaking, that by Driss’s age he will have gone beyond Midelt and done something. Driss’s life thus works on him in two directions at once: it demonstrates that departure is possible, and it warns that leaving does not guarantee a settled success.

The relationship’s significance lies in this tension between intimacy and reserve. Ismael knows Driss from childhood and watches the changes that followed France, but Driss shares his adventures more readily than his emotions. In return, Ismael makes the stories part of his own imagined future without surrendering his judgment about their truth. Their bond is sustained by the quarry they know together, the evenings when Driss talks, and the distance between one friend’s journeys and the other’s still-unfulfilled resolve.