Paris

Paris is the destination Driss imagines as a way out of confinement, but his stay there turns the promise of escape into a lesson in displacement. Seen through his plans and later recollections to Ismael, the city is at once a route toward another life, a network of migrant neighborhoods, and a place where he cannot find work or belonging.

An imagined escape

In November, as rain returned and tourists disappeared from the Bloodworths’ Spanish home, Driss began thinking incessantly about Paris. The household had shifted into its winter routine, with part of the house boarded up and its English residents staying on the heated ground floor. Driss, meanwhile, wandered through the gardens with growing impatience. He admitted to Ismael that Paris had crowded out every other possibility in his mind.

The city first existed for him as a destination beyond the restrictions of his present life. He asked Roger Bloodworth about the roads that led there: broad routes through the mountains into France, expensive to travel, but used by Moroccans driving from Algeciras. Driss imagined that he might get a ride. The plan seemed scatterbrained to the English couple, who tried to dissuade him. Their reluctance also showed him how much they wanted him to stay, though he could not reconcile that wish with the practical reasons they gave. Their home’s limits were reinforced by a rule against leaving for the nearby village; at night, Driss could see its lights while the Bloodworths went there themselves. Paris thus gathered force not simply as a place on a map, but as the opposite of being kept in place.

The distance between his motive and the Bloodworths’ understanding of migration is telling. They spoke from their own past as travelers, recalling journeys through Asia and their wish to move freely across borders. Angela Bloodworth expressed sympathy for migrants’ freedom to wander. Driss did not share the abstract language of human nature: what mattered to him was reaching Paris without the police knowing. The city promised a private, practical escape, not an idea of travel shared with his employers.

The journey and first impressions

Driss eventually reached Paris with a family from Essaouira, who drove through the night and into the following day. At autoroute filling stations, he and the father took turns driving. The father, a maker of chessboards for tourists in Essaouira’s souk, tried to explain French customs, but Driss retained little of what he heard. Near Perpignan, he remembered seeing cattle standing in the morning mist and concluded that the journey had not been as difficult as he had expected. That early confidence gives the arrival a brief air of possibility, before the city’s demands become clearer.

The route also placed him in unfamiliar spaces. At an autoroute mall, the family entered a food court where alcohol was openly available and cafeterias faced one another across a shared space. Driss observed the shops, the packaged food, the model fire engines, and the electronic massage chairs used by truck drivers. The scene registered as a collection of unfamiliar customs and commercial objects. His judgments about the people around him preserved the distance between himself and the society he had crossed into, even as he depended on its roads and facilities to reach his destination.

A city mapped by neighborhoods

In his later account to Ismael, Paris becomes less a single promised place than a sequence of districts and streets. Driss stayed near the Gare du Nord, on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, in an Indian neighborhood of tandoori restaurants and sari shops. He also recalled a hammam on the rue d’Aboukir and long nights at the Brady cinema on Sébastopol. These details establish the texture of his daily geography without making the city a home: he could move through its neighborhoods, but movement did not give him a secure place within them.

The railway bridge behind the Gare du Nord offered a particularly clear map of separation. Driss crossed it between the neighborhood of the Hindus and that of the North Africans; the railway lines divided the two. From there, his account follows an extended walk past the boulevard de la Chapelle, Lariboisière Hospital, Barbès, and the Tati store, where he bought inexpensive shirts. He continued into the rue de la Goutte-d’Or, which reminded him comfortingly of a Moroccan town, and to nearby streets with grilled-food restaurants and halal establishments where Muslims gathered to eat and talk. Familiarity was available in pockets, but it did not erase the sense of being a newcomer moving between communities.

Failure and the turn back

Driss described Paris to Ismael as dreamlike, but not necessarily pleasant. The more he walked—along the rue Myrha, the rue de Sofia, boulevard Barbès, and the orderly rue Cail near his lodging—the more he felt that life was elsewhere, and that he was not the person who could settle in Paris and make it his own. The effort to understand the city became a repeated encounter with distance rather than a route to belonging.

That recognition had material causes. Driss searched newspaper advertisements for work and made economies, but found no job, not even as a janitor or supermarket stocker, positions others had described as easy to obtain. In conversation, he emphasized how quickly ordinary expenses accumulated: a sandwich in Paris cost what a week of tagines cost back home. The two thousand euros Ismael asked about belonged to the same accounting of the trip, though Driss’s answer focused on how money disappeared in the city rather than explaining the sum’s full history.

His recollections end not with a new plan in Paris but with his thoughts turning back toward the desert. Even when alone at the Brady cinema or walking along the rue de l’Aqueduc among migrants from unfamiliar countries, he felt himself slipping toward failure. Paris therefore reverses the meaning it had carried during the winter at the Bloodworths’ home: departure was possible, but arrival did not deliver work, independence, or a lasting sense of place. In Driss’s account, the city remains significant as the setting of a failed attempt to escape, and as the point from which the desert begins to seem like the place to which his thoughts return.