The Bloodworths’ restrictions on Driss’s movements

The Bloodworths’ restrictions on Driss’s movements make their offer of refuge conditional: he can live and work on their property, but he must remain out of sight. The rules are presented as protection from police attention and as a safeguard for his hosts, yet they also isolate him from the village and leave his next move dependent on money and permission. Their domestic kindness and Driss’s sense of confinement remain in tension throughout his stay.

Refuge and the terms of employment

After Driss reaches the Sotogrande area by jumping ship, Angela Bloodworth tells him that she and her husband, Roger Bloodworth, run a bed and breakfast outside San Martín. Roger offers him work as a gardener, with board, lodging, and three hundred euros a month, saying that he can settle in, learn Spanish, and move on more safely when he chooses. Driss accepts, although he has reservations about the offer. The job gives him shelter and a way to earn money, but it also places his everyday life within the limits set by the Bloodworths.

The boundaries of the property

The couple’s plan is explicit: Driss is not to walk down to the gate, follow the road, or go into San Martín. They fear that he may be seen and that the local police are watching for undocumented immigrants working on farms and in greenhouses; his presence beyond the property could also compromise them. He is to lie low and work on the grounds. He remains there for weeks, pruning fruit trees and hedges beneath a straw hat, living from the Bloodworths’ table and declining the wine they offer. The arrangement protects his concealment, but its practical effect is to restrict his movement to the place where he works and sleeps.

Dependence, pity, and resentment

Driss does not describe his hosts as people he hates; he says he loves them, while resenting what he perceives as their pity. He believes they regard him as helpless, overlooking his capacity to act for himself. Their apparent failure to recognize that he could rob them sharpens the imbalance in his account: they understand their restrictions as prudent care, while he sees himself being treated as a child. His awareness of the small safe where Roger keeps the bed-and-breakfast earnings further shows how the household’s protective arrangement coexists with his own calculation of the power he possesses within it.

Confinement and the wish to leave

The rules become harder to bear as the tourist season ends. In November, rain drives the tourists away, part of the house is boarded up, and the Bloodworths settle into winter life on the property. Driss grows impatient and fixes on Paris, asking Roger about the roads through the mountains into France and considering whether he might hitch a ride with Moroccans travelling north. The Bloodworths try to dissuade him, and the movement they allow themselves—going down to San Martín each night—contrasts with the village he is forbidden to visit. Driss longs to see the girls in its cafés and considers climbing the wall, but recognizes that doing so would expose both himself and his hosts. Without enough money to live through a Paris winter, he feels imprisoned; the restrictions that began as a means of keeping him safe have become an obstacle to the escape he wants.