On the Edge

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THE FIRST to spot the carrion is Ahmed Ouallahi.

Every morning, ever since Esteban closed his carpentry business over a month ago, Ahmed walks down Avenida de La Marina. His friend Rachid drives him to the restaurant where he works as a kitchen porter, and Ahmed walks from there to a secluded part of the lagoon where he usually sets up his fishing rod and casts his net in the water. He prefers fishing there in the marshy area, far from the eyes of passersby and the police. When the restaurant kitchen closes — at 3:30 in the afternoon — Rachid comes to join him and they eat their lunch, sitting on the ground in the shade of the reeds, with a cloth spread out on the grass. They’re bound together by friendship, but also by mutual need, sharing the cost of the gas for Rachid’s old Ford Mondeo, a “bargain” that he bought for less than a thousand euros, but which has turned out to be something of a white elephant because, as he puts it, the car drinks gas as greedily as a German drinks beer. It’s about nine miles from Misent to the restaurant and, just there and back, the car gollops down three quarters of a gallon of gas. At nearly six euros a gallon, that comes to about four euros a day just for fuel, which means a hundred and twenty euros a month to be deducted from an income of less than a thousand euros; at least those are the figures Rachid gives Ahmed (although he may be exaggerating a little), which is why Ahmed pays his friend ten euros a week for transport. If he could find a job, he’d get a driver’s license and buy his own car.

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