TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Carlos Gámez Pérez

Ben Charki: walk by the alleyway with a solid wooden door: and then the rooftop café: turn right down Tapiro: pass in front of Les Aliments Sherezade: and come face to face with your fate: the luxurious mansion where, from this moment on, you would live. I stayed there for a while, just a few months; but one day the Spanish writer decided to stop being an expat of the country that was once called Spain and that now forms part of the newly re- established European Union; an entity that was abstract until it started controlling the flow of people across its borders; an entity that, as if overnight, surrounded itself with walls. At that time, when the Spanish writer left, they kicked me out of the luxurious mansionwith its couches and rugs; I had to scrapeupa living from the streets of Tangier; and I started hanging around with those young men with copper skin and white teeth–my rivals before, my comrades from that moment on–who were already starting to wither from the glue they inhaled and the drugs they consumed; young men with little, wandering souls, much like the jobs with which they fed themselves, almost all related to prostitution, whether with the local smattering of old queens or with the other foreign gays who lived in the city: a few numeraries in exchange for an invasion of foreign fluids into the body. My life was like theirs until I found out about the contest and decided to show up to the qualifying challenge. As you all know, in our area the challenge involves crossing the fence, a fence six meters tall that surrounds all the contestant admission centers in North Africa. It was a failure; it was tricky to scale the rope due to the anti- climbing mesh they had installed; and to avoid the mechanical 122