Driss’s failed escape to Paris

Driss’s failed escape to Paris is a journey undertaken with ingenuity and sustained by hope, but remembered as an encounter with joblessness, expense, and estrangement. In recounting it to Ismael, Driss first presents departure as readily achieved, then lets the account disclose what that confident beginning cannot conceal: the city offered neither work nor a life he could make his own, and his thoughts turned back toward the desert.

The Road to Paris

Driss sets out from the road near San Martín with a bag of cash and clothes, returning to the gas station where his journey had begun. The place is a meeting point for travelers: trucks idle nearby, battered cars hold immigrants newly arrived by ferry, and Moroccan families sit at the roadside eating oranges and pastries. Driss can approach them without attracting notice. He asks who they are, where they have come from, and where they are going; when he offers to pay their petrol to Paris, several families consider the proposal and make room for him. His resourcefulness is practical rather than grand: he finds a route by joining people already traveling in the direction he wants to go.

The family who takes him is bound for Marx Dormoy, where they have a grocery store. Driss asks whether Marx Dormoy is in Paris and accepts their assurance that it is. In his telling, the uncertainty of the destination does not stop him. He has found a way north, and the first stage appears easier than he expected. His account briefly makes the escape sound like a success achieved through negotiation and nerve.

The family from Essaouira drives him through the night and into the following day, stopping at motorway filling stations. Driss and the father take turns driving. The father, who makes chessboards for tourists in Essaouira’s souk, explains how French customs differ from the Spanish ways Driss knows better. Driss listens but retains none of the explanation. What stays with him instead is a place near Perpignan at daybreak, where cattle stand submerged in mist, and the realization that the journey has not been as difficult as he had feared. The passage north thus offers him both a physical crossing and a first encounter with a society whose codes he does not absorb.

Paris as Lived Experience

The city he reaches is not the uncomplicated opportunity implied by his effort to get there. Driss stays around the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, behind the Gare du Nord, in a neighborhood of Indian tandoori restaurants and sari shops displaying gold jewelry. He also remembers the hammam on the rue d’Aboukir and long nights alone at the Brady cinema on Sébastopol, where he watches soft-porn films. These places give the account its map of Paris, but not the stability he had sought: he searches newspaper advertisements for work, makes useless economies, and experiences boredom and loneliness.

The failure is specific. Driss finds no job as a janitor and none as a supermarket stocker, even though people had assured him that such work would be easy to obtain. The two thousand euros he had brought up as a measure of his prospects become a measure of how far money goes in the city. Driss explains to Ismael that the price of one sandwich equals a week of tagines at home and that money disappears like sand. The comparison is not simply between two prices; it makes Paris’s everyday costs legible against the food and scale of life he knows. He has traveled to find a livelihood, but even ordinary expenses press on the means he carried with him.

His nights deepen rather than relieve the isolation. Around Château d’Eau, he walks among middle-aged Chinese sex workers waiting near the bus stop as the Métro winds down. He remembers the Passage du Désir and the African cafés on the rue du Château d’Eau as places where he can only pretend to have a nightlife. The phrase Paris, in the telling, gathers these scenes of movement without arrival: he walks through the city, but does not find work, companionship, or a place that feels like his own.

A City That Cannot Be Made Home

Driss’s account follows his walks across Paris in close detail. He crosses the railway bridge behind the Gare du Nord, leaving the Indian neighborhood for the North African one, then walks beneath the Métro along the boulevard de la Chapelle. He passes drinkers lying in their stupors and Black people selling drugs, continues by Lariboisière Hospital to Barbès and the Tati store, where he buys cheap shirts, and reaches the rue de la Goutte-d’Or. That street comforts him because it brings a Moroccan town to mind; the rue de la Charbonnière, with its grilled-food restaurants and halal establishments, gathers Muslims around food and conversation.

Recognition, however, does not become belonging. Driss walks farther along the rue Myrha, rue de Sofia, boulevard Barbès, and rue Cail, near his home, with its gaudy Indian restaurants and trees blossoming at the far end. The more he walks, the more he feels that life is elsewhere and that Paris is not a place where he can settle and make a life. His description of the city as dreamlike is qualified by the admission that the dream is not necessarily pleasant. The accumulating street names do not chart a route toward a future; they record repeated movement through a place that remains unavailable to him.

His account also sets his material failure beside a cultural judgment. Driss characterizes life among unbelievers as a source of anxiety and unhappiness. The narrative gives that judgment particular weight because it follows his concrete disappointments: the fruitless job search, the expense of food, the solitary cinema visits, and the long walks. His explanation turns personal alienation into a broader claim about the world he entered, while the scenes he supplies show how that alienation took shape in daily experience.

The Return of the Desert

As Driss walks the rue de l’Aqueduc toward nowhere, among migrants from countries he has never heard of, he feels himself slipping down a slope toward a pit. Eating a peach or a bag of nuts does not alter the direction of the walk in his mind. The desert increasingly occupies his thoughts, especially when he is alone at the Brady cinema or adrift in unfamiliar streets. Paris, which had represented escape and advancement, becomes the place from which his imagination turns back toward home.

The framing of the episode matters: Driss is telling the story to Ismael, and he has withheld much of Paris from the younger boy because he thinks the experience is better left a mystery. The account moves between what Driss wants his listener to believe about his initiative and what his memories reveal about its outcome. His resourcefulness gets him to the city, but it cannot supply work or overcome his sense of not belonging. The gap between the easy journey and the failed stay makes the episode more than a travel anecdote: it tests the promise that departure alone can produce a new life.

After the story, Driss and Ismael sit by the quarry, listening to the wind over the fossil trenches and Hmor Lagdad. As the fire dies, Driss proposes finding a way to make money and then leaving for the city, a prospect Ismael accepts. The destination is not specified here. What is clear is that Paris has not ended Driss’s desire to depart; instead, the failure complicates that desire. He still imagines movement as a route to another life, even as the remembered streets have taught him that getting somewhere and being able to live there are not the same thing.