TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Carlos Gámez Pérez

compliments would become sweetly stabbing, like a bee’s sting, I don’t know how to explain it. He told me I had just conquered his heart and I would always reign in the most intimate depths of his being; then he branded me a virginal, perfect creature and, after caressing my face, he invited me to go and visit him in Tangier; he gave me his card, which included his email address: escritorespañolexpatriado@gmail.com. While I accompanied himback to the transport station, I lost hold of myself. I still treasure in my memory, like a precious elixir, that kiss on the cheek with which he inoculated me with his breath and said goodbye. After that, he would respond hastily to my first emails, which I wrote from an Internet booth close to my family’s house; in those messages, he adulated me again; I still keep them in my inbox, consulting them from time to time in sadness to give myself a shot of good spirits. It was predictable that, although I was a good Muslim, when I turned sixteen I would decide to run away in search of him; the option presented itself as the only alternative to the poverty that surrounded me. I escaped from my home to live close to him; I was just a boy; now I’m the Kid. That was how I came to Tangier; images I recall at this moment, although I know they are fragments that only pool together as I speak them: the sun at the top of the sky; the music played on a flute; the coins of the golden-haired European tourists with their devices at the ready: video cameras, tablets, iPhones; the Sons and Daughters of the French Revolution before the facade of the old, dilapidated Grand Socco, beside the newly opened shopping malls; and after that, the alley by the old synagogue, in ruins, next to the artisanal whips made of Moroccan leather displayed on the wall, near the new neighborhood of brothels where the 120