The Expelled (8 page)

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don't know, it's just what I say.”

“But we believe that you are a terrorist from Al-Qaeda.”

“The only attacks that I commit are attacks against myself.”

“And that seems small to you?”

“Well, it's cosa mía
^[5]
.”

“Cosa Nostra
^[6]
.

“It was a figure of speech, a metaphor.”

“Me too.”

“What?”

“I am from Morocco too.”

“Not me. I was born in France, in Blois. I already told you that.”

“Well I was, I was born in Morocco.”

“Good for you.”

“Not really.”

“Then, no.”

“Well yeah, but I don't know, last night I dreamed that all my life had been a spirit, a nothing, that I hadn't lived. The dream begins in a castle, in an enormous hall and everyone is scared to get to the front part of the hall which leads to the garden, but they tell us that we have to go. And they are afraid because there is a shadow, an evil spirit, but at the same time they all try to seem very modern and they say they're not afraid, and when I get to that place something envelops me, and I hear the others say ‘he is flying’. Then it's 25 years later and there's a party in that same garden and I scare a few guests, but the others tell people not be afraid that I am a friendly ghost and that I won't hurt anyone, and then I say to myself or I tell someone, I don't remember precisely, I say that I wanted to get to the front of the hall, that it wasn't a coincidence, and that I had finally understood that the evil spirit was the result of the lies of those who were visiting the castle, and at that moment I realized I had to expose those lies, and I woke up.”

“Why?”

“That's the dream, the twenty-five years represent the years since I left Morocco, you see? You understand?”

“The same twenty-five years since I've returned, and I don't stop returning.”

“But it is not the same, I cannot return. I'm Jewish and the Jews can never go back, or if they can it's after hundreds or thousands of years. When they're gone, they're gone for good.

“You’re probably exaggerating a little bit...”

“Well, maybe a little yes, physically I can go to Morocco, but my community doesn't exist, which means my Morocco no longer exists, it's another country.”

“I can return to France, and although there I am
the Moroccan
I can still go back, but you can go to Israel.”

“That's where I went after Morocco, they promised the moon and they gave me the salt of the sea. Without water. And after two years I came here, and I cannot go back to Israel either.”

“And where is here?”

“Europe.”

“Where in Europe?”

“You don't need to know more.”

“Let's see if we can finish now, I'll tell you the rest real quick, so the bus turned back and we drove for two hours to find another wall of about ten yards long, we saw a house next to it, well, half a house, the people who lived there told us that the wall passed in the middle of their house, and went up suddenly in the middle of the night so the children are on one side and the parents on the other, and they don't know how it all happened without any noise. So we turned back again and it took us two hours of trees to realize that the other wall hadn't disappeared, and something incredible happened, a young man with one of those laptop computers told the driver that, I think it was after six or seven turns, he said that it wasn't possible that gas wasn't depleted, that something wasn't logical, and he had made many calculations, and that he believed that the walls were imaginary, that they did not exist and that what we had to do was ignore one of them and keep going. I thought he was right, we discussed it and suggested that those who wanted to get off the bus should do it and the others would drive to the wall. We discussed that for hours, and the back people were also entitled to get off or to vote, and well in the end the kid was right, we crossed the wall but what happened was worse, we found ourselves between two trucks on the highway, stuck on both sides, we appeared right in the middle, and that was the cause of the accident.”

“And you expect me to believe that just because your father was from Morocco?”

“He still is, he's still alive.”

“Whatever, but you think I'm going to believe your story?”

“No, I can tell you other versions and make up a thousand things, but that's what I remember. That is if I'm still sane. Maybe I'm already delirious, or maybe I was before.”

4.

I told my boyfriend, well, Severio, I told him that I did not like it in the back, I like sitting in front, I want to see the road, but they were the last two remaining seats, and I told him, I told him a thousand times, that a couple sits together, but he was in a hurry, I don't know what for, we were both unemployed and had nothing to do, but the next bus was in twelve hours and Severio was suddenly in a hurry, I don't know what got into him, he was unbearable, well, he is unbearable when he gets nervous, you can't talk to him, and it must be that women's intuition or whatever but I saw that back and front people thing coming, like an arrow, because couples must travel together, if not, then the woman sits next to another man and they start talking, and maybe she even falls a bit in love and then her boyfriend is not the same boyfriend, he changes in her eyes, and I love Severio, and I hope he's ok, I haven't seen him since the accident. I hope he is alive, but nobody says nothing to me, neither here nor in the hospital, I have no clue what they want but I imagine that they would want to know about the crime, about who shot Cash, I say he committed suicide, that's what I believe, of course I didn't see anything, nobody saw, it was nighttime, and I heard the shot better than the others, because I was sitting next to him in the back seat, the one with the five joined seats, the last one, Severio was on my right, glued to the window, and he was sleeping too, well, at least that's what he claimed, although some said that he was the one who shot him, out of jealousy, although why would he even be jealous, I didn't even get to exchange one word with Cash, not a hello, nor a “where are you headed?”, or “where do you come from?”, absolutely nothing, but sometimes, of course, he heard me say love things to Severio, that must've turned him on, that is if he actually understood our language, I don't even know that, but the shot, you see, it woke me up and I jumped toward the exit door from fear, I jumped forward, and I only saw the body when I got to the door, and then I noticed it was the guy who was sitting next to me, and after a lot of commotion, and noise, the driver stopped the bus and ordered everybody to stay in their place, he said we had to go to the police, he ordered us not to move, and told the back people not to come to the front part of the bus, and the limit of the front part was the bathroom, that everyone called the can, because that way it made it sound more like a border. I was shaking and my boyfriend came and hugged me, and well, I don't know if I should say this, but he was so horny and he had a huge boner, so I told him to calm down, but only then did he understand what I meant, he hadn't realized he had a boner.

That scared me. I had never seen him like this before. I saw him differently, like a wild animal about to devour a chicken, something like that. But you know when facing death there are all sorts of reactions, they say that men have boners at the time of death. There was a Japanese movie in which the woman drowned her lover little by little so he would have a bigger boner. It's physiological, something about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Maybe something like that happened to him, I don't know, but I thought it was very strange, and for a moment I feared that he was the criminal, but he said he wasn't and I believed him, and anyway there was no shred of evidence. They found the gun in the hands of one guy from the front, who couldn't explain how it got into his hands, nobody saw a thing, nobody knew anything, everyone was asleep, at least everyone but the criminal, or perhaps even the criminal was asleep and he or she did it in his sleep, nobody knew, but then we heard screams and arguments in front and suddenly we were stopping to bury the dead guy.

And then all hell broke loose. For starters, before we stepped off the bus, a black cat walked by on the grass. That's not good at all, and I told Severio. And to top it all off the front people accused the back people of the crime, all of them, not only one of us had died, we were also responsible for his death. And he sang pretty well, someone said, maybe it was Severio, who had nothing to do with Severo, because he was a front person, and we were the guilty ones. I honestly can't tell you if he sang well or not, because I never heard a peep out of him, not talking nor singing, and I already told you, he didn't seem like a bad guy to me, but I'm so in love with my boyfriend and I only have eyes for him. I was sorry he died, but not for long, because for no reason I was guilty, a suspect among other suspects, but still guilty, so my sympathy faded off pretty fast.

Apart from
being guilty
, we were forbidden from going to the can, even though it was in the back of the bus, but the strange thing is that no one from the back or the front said anything, absolutely nothing, everything seemed quite normal that we would be banned from going to the can, men and women, until I said that it was not possible, we had the right to go to the can, it was a necessity. And then the super smart group gave in, yes gave in, that's the word, as if it was a huge favor, giving us the chance to go to the bathroom between three and four in the afternoon and at night, two hours a day, and they had the other twenty-two hours, one of the front people claimed that they were more than us, they were the majority he said, and nobody, absolutely no one asked or wondered what that had to do with majorities. Yes, of course I fought with my boyfriend, he did nothing to defend me, the front people possessed us, we were their things, we became things, and they could touch us, especially the women, just like that, and he did nothing about it. "What can I do." It wasn't even a question, he simply said it, resigned, like a dead person, his strength was gone, all his masculine strength, he became a broken man, a man with a past, all he could say was that it will end soon, but it never did, it was one day after another and one night after another, and the front people became more and more violent with the women, they raped us, you see, I can't even say it, we were raped, yes, I remember their faces, and it was all of them, without exception, not one, and the back men despised us because the front men raped us even Severio told me that I was a whore, that I turned them on that's why they raped me, I want to kill them all, that's what I want. Everyone, and if you're a man, all men, all of them, well, I'm not saying women are much better, they started competing, who had been raped more times that day, because that meant, as you can imagine, that they were prettier. I wanted to be the ugliest, but they raped me more than the others, almost every day, and those bitches were like jealous, yeah, they were jealous.

“But that's not love and it has nothing to do with beauty, it is pure violence.”

“Yes, but that's the way it is and it's easy for you to say that because you're the most attractive one.”

“How is that easy?”

“Yes, they rape you more and that's why you're the prettiest.”

“But I want to be the ugliest.”

“Sure, that's easy to say when you're the prettiest.”

“Beauty does not matter.”

“Sure, that's easy to say when you have a body like yours and you are used to having everyone look at you.”

“What are you talking about,
easy
?”

But nobody listened to me, and no one listened to no one.

From where I was sitting I couldn't see much, but I realized that we were lost. Sometimes the bus would come to a sudden halt, and then start backing. And the faces of the passengers became blurry, instead of eyes they had spots, and the same for the nose and mouth. They all looked alike. Someone said that the front people were poor men, that's how he said it, and they all started talking at once.

“And it seems they're escaping from a genocide. We must feel compassion for them.”

“Compassion? “

“Yes, some have lost their entire family, all of it, cousins and siblings, uncles and grandparents, everyone, they're the sole survivors of an ancient village or a tribe, I don't know.”

“But they're oppressing us.”

“It depends on how you see things, because they are the ones who have to decide what to do and they say that we cannot really understand the world because we haven't had our grandparents killed, so we don't have to worry about making decisions.”

“But maybe they're making bad decisions.”

“Maybe, but they are in charge, it's better not to be in charge because all the decisions are bad.”

“This is an ambush, an impasse, a maze, let them manage it.”

“They are raping us.”

“It's worse when they rape you and then kill you.”

“And much worse when they rape you and then kill your entire family.”

“So we need to have compassion even though they are raping us.”

“And even though they kill us.”

“Even though they abuse us.”

“Even though they kidnap us.”

“But we're all in the same bus, and if we have an accident we're all going to suffer equally.”

“No, it's not true, we are behind, the front people will suffer more, and anyway there is nothing we can do, they make the laws.”

“They are the laws.”

“We can say what we think, we can talk, and we can try to convince them.”

“They are very convinced.”

“Yes, they know what has to be done, they are front people, they are very developed and they understand buses better than we do. Say the truth.”

“What truth? How do they know about buses more than us if they come from an Eastern tribe and from a country without buses?”

“They have learned.”

“Where?”

“On the bus.”

Then the front people started throwing stones at us, and one of them left a back guy in a coma. When we took the broken stones and threw them back at them they called us terrorists, and most back people were opposed to throwing stones because it didn't seem humane to them. The front people accused us of racism and of not wanting to accept the natural course of the world. And the back people of not wanting to be part of the society of the bus and of being segregative. By that I mean they practically accused us of everything, separatists, terrorists, anti-whatever, undemocratic, anti-development, anti-ballons, anti-bus-people, anti-life, and everything else.