Every week, Mohamed drives a tour bus across the Spanish-Moroccan border. He has an ex-wife and something like nine kids. His plump and friendly face is speckled with stubble. When he is not working as a bus driver for tourists, he gets around on his motorcycle. He is a man of God and enjoys apple cake. He is proud of his oldest daughter, the first Muslim woman to get a certain scholarship at the University of Madrid, and he calls me a friend.
Over the summer, I spent two weeks in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in Northern Morocco. Traveling on Princeton’s dime, I had loose plans to research migration. In 2021, around 9,000 migrants took advantage of Morocco’s momentary negligence of the border—the result of a diplomacy skirmish—to cross into the European Union. The “avalanche,” as the event was somewhat tastelessly dubbed in Spanish, was a peak in a broader trend. Thousands of migrants enter Ceuta each year. I was interested in the ways migration shapes the culture of a place that is European but not in Europe, Catholic but heavily Muslim, and, maybe most importantly for me, like nowhere I had been or heard of. After crossing a border, and then a strait, and then a brown door of an Airbnb in the eastern part of the city, I was setting up something like a comfy vantage point from which to make an insight people might find somewhat valuable. The circumstances were absurd, when I thought of it. One day I had looked at my bank account and found a check to take to another continent, just to see where an idea would go.
The cabinets in my Airbnb were bright red. I bought a plastic spatula for less than three euros, and it spat off melty flakes of black rubber as I prodded chicken on the stove. It is strange to feel embarrassed when no one is watching.
I talked to three migrants, all young men from Morocco, who had swum in the dark around the border fence, empty bottles tied to their limbs as floaties. One of them showed me a photo of him in the local news, clad in a blue North Carolina varsity jacket which glowed neon against the street-lit dark. The article told the story of how he crossed with two friends, one of whom drowned, while the third swam back to Fnideq, Morocco, the city that shares a border with Ceuta. None of the migrants I spoke to planned to stay long in Ceuta. They were all passing through, hoping to find work in peninsular Spain or in some other European country
Common measures grounded their stories, and gave my notes a format. The migrants had been in Ceuta for twenty days, a few days, five months. They had been in the water for eight hours, five hours, six hours (“Or two days? Unclear,” I wrote in my notes). Without meaning to, I collected data, perhaps an attempt to permeate the patchwork of translation with facts and figures. I don’t speak Darija, the Northern African variety of Arabic native to the migrants I talked to. An administrator at an NGO that provides meals to vulnerable groups in Ceuta, and the place where I volunteered in the mornings, translated between me and the migrants. I jotted down numbers and details, trying to hold eye contact with the stranger in the plastic chair beside me. I croaked the few words of gratitude in Darija I had rehearsed. I silently thanked my height, my demeanor, my gender and my age, the sum of things that made me look approachable. I wondered if I had trespassed into a world completely unfamiliar to me and overstayed my welcome, and I wondered if this inkling was borne of anxiety or prudence. The border between transgression and immersion seemed fine but worth discerning. In spare moments I repeated basic Darija phrases after a stranger on YouTube shorts, parroting around a big kitchen with no sharp knives.
The staff at the NGO taught me how to cut zucchini in precise quarters, my hands floating above a pool of water in the bucket below. They giggled at my botched pronunciation of the Darija words they taught me. Over breakfast one morning, a staff member spooned canned tuna on toast and joked that her coworker was up all night thinking about a boyfriend. In the kitchen, a man entered yodeling as he drummed his hand against a pot. Another staff member looked at me and said that they let him work there because, well, he isn’t right up there and tapped her head. She doubled over in laughter when she saw that I bought it. There was comfort in peeling carrots and laughing at other people’s jokes. A nine-to-five job, or a ten-to-two volunteer shift, for that matter, was a beautiful way to keep from loafing.
In the afternoons I invented errands for myself. I convinced myself that I needed a camera that also printed stickers. I had to paint my nails red. I bought tomatoes. I bought a pastry. I bought beer and remembered how great Angelina Jolie and Winona Ryder are in Girl, Interrupted. I had a lot of time and little, concretely, to accomplish. It was hard to write alone and hard to eat alone. I asked the fruit vendor for his name and where he traveled on vacation. I took up more of a salesman’s time than I needed in a sunglasses shop. There was freedom in every exchange. Nobody could tell me I was faking it. It was like being the new kid. But it is one thing to talk to people and quite another to shape your day around their routines. Too rigid for spontaneity, I filled empty hours with arbitrary tasks. I walked everywhere because it took longer than taking taxis or public transportation. I read about Ceuta in books on the beach. Certain things next to each other can be dreadful. I read about fourteen immigrant deaths on the border beach at the hands of Civil Guards, put down the book spine-down, and swam in the ocean. A sense of duty to this little project I had deemed important was laced with an inkling that perhaps I should enjoy myself.
I went to three travel agencies before I found a way to visit Morocco. My advisor at Princeton had said that to understand the border, if something like that can be done, you should see it from both sides. It is some measure of the difference between the pre-pandemic and post-pandemic border that there are no longer daily trips to Morocco, just weekly ones (and some measure of Ceuta’s ties with other places that physical travel agencies still exist there). I paid sixty euros for a day trip to Tetuán. I saw walnuts sandwiched in dates. A rug vendor told me his young co-worker has always wanted an American girlfriend. An old woman stepped out of her house to share an Arabic proverb. On the bus, I sat right behind the driver, Mohamed, who I realized was perhaps better positioned than anyone to understand what I wanted to learn. His interactions with the border and people trying to cross it had been firsthand and frequent. And, importantly, he liked to talk. Before I left the parking lot at the port in Ceuta, we exchanged numbers, and on the long walk home, I drafted in my head a request to interview him, which I sent in a voice message that night.
His response was a four-minute recording.
I had made a great impression on him, he said. I would love to be friends. It was so easy, I thought, to win people’s sympathy simply by letting them talk. He offered to take me on his motorcycle and show me the parts of Ceuta where the tour bus cannot reach: a couple lookouts in the mountains, the unofficial border to the West where migrants also cross. I leaned back on the counter and considered the offer, pretending, perhaps just for myself, that I was going to say no. It was, on paper, a bad idea to hop on a stranger’s motorcycle alone. I had zero close friends in Ceuta. I did not own pepper spray. Maybe it was boredom, but my gut and my rational self were out of alignment. Safety was so mental. Couldn’t I just decide this was safe?
I told Mohamed that sounds great.
Honestly, I feel like I’ve known you a long time, he said. You’re a good kid. He told me Ceuta is beautiful at night, we could go now, but it was too cloudy. Cultural barriers explain—or maybe just offer an excuse to dismiss—so many potentially creepy suggestions. Spaniards: they’re just night owls!
The following afternoon, I waited for Mohamed on a bench in front of a bar. A large woman sporting heavy bags and two small children sat down right next to me.
“You’re still here?” she said after a few long seconds.
“Sorry,” I said, and got up.
A couple minutes later Mohamed pulled up across the street on a giant motorcycle, an extra helmet in hand.
We went to one lookout, and then another. Our conversation moved from migrants to pretty views. Riding on the back of the motorcycle eased the pressure to talk. If I loosened my grip on his shoulders, I could feel how fast we were really going. I felt stable enough to take a video on my phone. I was over the novelty of it all, but the view of the curved sea peeking up from behind the dry spiny mountains begged documentation. We also passed migrants, meandering in the wooded streets. Sub-Saharans, Mohamed said, who were residing at the CETI, the shelter for unaccompanied minors. We passed the CETI. Towels hung off the rails outside the two-story complex of ramshackle dorms.
We stopped at a cement picnic table at some high hill for the interview. It was strange to suddenly grow severe, to steer the conversation to the border and kids who had tried to cross it slinking under the fender flares of Mohamed’s tour bus. I could not get over and still am not over the sheer randomness of my visiting Ceuta, trying to get closer to a topic I have nothing to do with, trying to cross borders that an American passport seems to make vanish, like magic or like the luck of where you were born.
Later, sitting across from each other in the bar on the upper level of the port’s waiting area, we shared the few dishes on the menu that didn’t have pork. He complained about the new owners of the bar, and the incompatibility of Ceuta’s culture with some Islamic rituals. He told me about the shouting matches him and his cousins have over the correct interpretation of the Qur’an. He condemned divisions among Jews, Muslims, and Christians. I told him I grew up with minimal religion.
“Do you exist?” he asked, staring at me behind olive eyelids.
“Yes.”
“God exists.”
Now, listening back to his audio messages, I am tempted to reduce Mohamed’s generosity to mere advertisement. He had told me about his plans to split from his tourism business and go independent, taking people to Tangier, Tetuán, and the desert in Morocco. I could bring friends next summer, he would organize everything, hotels, everything. And I thought this sounded great. I left convinced it could happen, convinced that next summer, I would speak Darija and ride a motorcycle through dunes in Morocco.
I probably will not. But there is some glee in such a hypothetical. I think often about this line from The Idiot, by Elif Batuman: Selin says, “For all my life there had been another world, and no one had come out, and no one had gone in–until one day the borders turned out to be fictitious.” I went to Ceuta naively hoping to find some fiction in borders. I found that Selin is wrong. The borders are not fictitious; the borders are in fact quite real. But some borders easily slacken. To amble is too high a privilege not to seize, the borders between nerves and guts, between religion and atheism, between me and you, too permeable not to touch.