TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Carlos Gámez Pérez

control towers on the fences; that’s why I’m the Kid this season, just like I was for the Spanish writer while he was living as an expat in Tangier; nobody younger than me can compete here. It took weeks for my wounds from the razor wire to heal; I must admit that at first I promised myself I would never participate again; if I couldn’tgetpast the initial selection, howwould I survive the later challenges? So I settled for taking long walks, looping around Tangier until I was standing before the sea; there, I would lookoutat theStraitalongwithmynewco-adventurers: theyoung men with copper skin and white teeth, with little, wandering, souls. I looked at the unsettled waters, the rafts, the infected, open wound, and behind it The Big Fence, the membrane that separated me from the fate I longed for on the other shore, and from the expat Spanish writer, whom I was beginning to forget. Then he appeared on cable television; it was on a show about books on the Art channel that I had discovered during those months that were, for me, a first and passionate immersion in the world of culture. Now I tuned in from an Internet booth with pirated Netflix, to learn more so he would feel shamefully proud of me if we met again; the expat Spanish writer always said, and I’mquoting verbatim, that I should boast about my culture, about the music of my land, whichwas popular yet elevated; but I didn’t see it like that, I wanted to treasure the knowledge he possessed, and I thought that was only possible through accumulating the greatest possible awareness of that other elevated knowledge: his own. There, on the television program, I saw him speaking that complex, rich Spanish he taught me, riddled withMozarabic loan words; like my own, although I used them unconsciously while he did so consciously, combining Arabic and Berber terms with 124