as Saadi called it, but once again, chance, Fate, or the Devil smiled on me and, two weeks later, in mid-February, I was walking for the first time on European soil, and not just between containers; I remember going by foot, without any luggage, to the center of Algeciras, and I spent my first euros there, in a bar, on a beer and a tuna sandwich. No one paid any attention to me, no one looked at me, I was a poor Moor like any other; I tried to read the paper, but I was too feverish to concentrate. The beer tasted like happiness, may God forgive me. On my passport I had a one-month visa granted “for humanitarian reasons,” that is, to go make my life miserable somewhere else—I neither had the right to work nor to go to another European country; I could only crawl to Tarifa to board a ferry for Tangier. But before that I wanted to go to Barcelona to see Judit. As I left the bar I asked the owner where there was an Internet café, he pointed me toward a kind of telecommunications office with free computers.
