Driss’s illegal entry into Spain and stay with the Bloodworths is told as a story within a story: at a quarry, Driss answers Ismael’s questions about crossing the border by recounting how he reached shore near the Sotogrande coastal resort and was taken in by Angela and Roger Bloodworth. What begins as an apparently easy passage into Spain becomes a precarious bargain—shelter and work offered to a young man without papers, and accepted despite his suspicion of the people offering them.

The account Driss gives Ismael

Ismael presses Driss to explain how he reached Spain with no money and no papers. Driss first resists a neat account, saying that he made it up as he went along and had no real plans. When Ismael repeats the suggestion that he went by an illegal boat, Driss continues the story later in the quarry, where Ismael listens intently but wonders whether the returned migrant’s tale has been embellished. The framing matters: this is not an official record of the crossing but Driss’s retrospective telling to a listener who wants to know what is true.

Driss’s account begins in July, in the heat. He says he walked through the marina at three in the morning with nothing—not even a bag or a watch—and that nobody noticed him. In the fuller version, he says he jumped ship and swam ashore about a mile south of the marina. These details form successive stages of his narrated arrival: he makes land on a small, dirty beach beside a cannery, then walks north along the shore and through the marina’s arcades. The emphasis is on movement without being seen, not on a planned route or a prepared refuge.

From the shore to the road

The beach is unoccupied on a starless night. From there, Driss walks past weeds, wooden stakes, and the ragged edges of vineyards toward the marina, where restaurants and tapas bars are closed. His wet sandals leave prints on the road. The place feels familiar in its smells, though he is now in Spain; the account makes the crossing feel at once like an escape and a continuation of the landscape he has left behind.

Driss describes the quiet walk toward San Martín as almost dreamlike. The road is empty, there are no police or cars, and the dark hills remind him of the Rif. He is astonished by how easy the passage seems, yet recognizes that he is about to do something truly illegal. This contrast gives the scene its tension: the absence of immediate interference offers relief, but does not make his status safe. At a brightly lit, self-service gas station, he approaches an older woman who is alone at the pump. He believes she fears him, but she calmly pays by card, takes her receipt, and speaks to him. When he cannot understand her Spanish, she switches to French; Driss realizes she is English.

Angela’s offer of shelter

The woman introduces herself as Angela and explains that she and her husband, Roger, run a bed and breakfast outside the village. She asks where Driss intends to stay and tells him to get into her car, offering soup before he dies of hunger and warning that, without papers, he may be picked up on the road. Driss accepts, but his account makes clear that he also sees the danger and opportunity in the moment: he knows he could rob her and take the car toward Paris. He does not. Instead, he waits while she handles the keys and drives him uphill.

At the Bloodworths’ farmhouse, Angela leads him through the house to the kitchen and gives him gazpacho. She supplies dry clothes, flip-flops, bedding, and a small room in the guest wing. Roger is asleep, so Angela says she will explain the situation to him in the morning; she also gives Driss a key and tells him not to go out alone before she has spoken with her husband. The practical generosity is paired with a boundary. Driss has a place to sleep, but his movement is initially restricted, and he does not know why the couple has chosen to help him.

Work, mistrust, and the remembered refuge

At noon, Driss meets Roger, a retired chemical engineer. Roger has heard that Driss is being pursued by the Spanish police for being an immigrant. He and Angela offer him a gardener’s position, with board and lodging and three hundred euros a month. Roger also says that Driss will have time to settle in, learn some Spanish, and move on more safely whenever he wants. Driss agrees, although something in his heart tells him not to. His acceptance is therefore neither uncomplicated trust nor a free choice between equal alternatives: he is hungry, undocumented, and in need of somewhere to stay.

The work places him under Roger’s supervision in a garden whose unfamiliar abundance becomes central to Driss’s memory. Roger knows the plants and their habits, from sunflowers and saxifrage to sage and thyme. Driss recalls the green valley, flowers, water sounds, cypresses, lemons, almonds, and tomatoes ripening in the greenhouses as a vision of paradise. Yet this remembered beauty does not erase his earlier suspicion: alone in the attic, he wakes from a nightmare and fears that he is trapped among unbelievers. The episode’s decisive change is material—he moves from an exposed, hungry arrival to shelter and paid work—but the narration preserves the insecurity beneath that improvement. The refuge feels like paradise to him, while remaining a place whose inhabitants and terms he does not initially know how to trust.