Looking at Ceuta on a map, the frescos of the Sistine Chapel come to mind, where the hand of Michelangelo Buonarroti painted, among a thousand marvels, the energy between God and Adam, who extend their arms toward each other to touch hands. Spain and Europe hurl themselves thus, as if under the weight of the West, toward the peninsula that extends itself from the coasts of Africa.

 

Ceuta, Spain in Africa. It is here that myth has placed the so called Columns of Hercules, a physical and philosophical time limit for mankind. Yet still today, when the myth has been discredited, that strait continues to represent an inviolable border for thousands of Africans who attempt to reach Europe in the hope of a better life. So far, yet so near. At the narrowest point the coasts of the continents mark a distance of scarcely fifteen nautical miles, and the distance becomes infinitesimal when one arrives at Ceuta, where only a net divides Europe and Africa. Ceuta is, next to Melilla, a piece of Spain set in Africa, an enclave left over from the Spanish crown, notwithstanding decolonization. Everything in Ceuta speaks of Spain, with a sense of ostentatious belonging and a fiscal regime made easy, where it is impossible to realize that everything around is Africa. One time perhaps veiled figures that walk hurriedly would have indicated an element of specificity, but now they represent a feature common to all of Europe and one doesn’t note any difference anymore. The king of Morocco, Mohammed VI, seemed to be planning to reopen the old polemic on the sovereignty of the city, but that, too, finished in the cauldron of concluded initiatives that in the last three years travel on the Madrid – Rabat diplomatic axis and that all revolve around a great pivot: illegal immigration.

 

The closed door.  “To make you understand how things have changed I will give you an example: from the beginning of 2007 only two Moroccans have succeeded in passing from the other side. In the last years the average was 20-25 people a day.” Speaking is Mohammed Bouissef Rekab, Spanish mother and Moroccan father, writer and university teacher of Spanish literature at Ceuta and at Tetuan. Son of two cultures: Moroccan by birth and upbringing, he chose to tell his stories using the Spanish language. A bridge, a bond between the European culture and the Moroccan, that perceives the problems of the migrants, but also succeeds in making his the point of view of the Spanish. The places and faces of  the migration often occur in his stories and novels, the dreams and fears of those who leave their life to throw themselves towards a better future. How can one tell the story of the migration? “By not inventing anything, speaking only of what there is, what exists, and what no one can deny. Almost all the literature on this topic, above all in Europe, is limited to the narration of the ‘voyage,’ often only in a physical sense,” says Rekab, seated at a small table in one of the thousand bars that prop up the touristic Ceuta. “I try to express the state of mind, the sensations that end in the great business that immigration represents. No one leaves if he is not forced to, and no one would succeed in passing if it was not allowed to him.”

 

The great business. Rekab’s glance is hard behind the glasses with which he looks distractedly at the coming and going on the paseo de Revellin, the great pedestrian street in the center of Ceuta. “How can a desperate person get to Spain if he has not found along the way a network of complicity, of people who for their own personal profit put themselves out?” asks the Moroccan writer. “Officially everyone speaks of a great problem, either in Morocco or in Spain, a plague to cure. In reality everyone profits. The Moroccan police and the ferry operators, the Spanish police and the entrepreneurs. Those with papers are comfortable because they are allowed to have laborers at a low cost. See, at Ceuta the Spanish community and the Moroccan live in peace; 30% of the population is composed of Spaniards of Moroccan origin. But here the Mafia prospers and the connections with the racket of illegal immigration are very strong. I know stories of people who have paid thousands of euros in order to get to Barcelona or somewhere else, but how would they have been able to without complicity?” Now it’s no longer this way, however; things are changing. “Spanish society, like all of those in the West, is characterized by water-tight compartments: every class ignores what happens until when it feels menaced,” explains Rekab. “Illegal immigration was all right with everyone when it represented only an element of economic exploitation; therefore it was convenient. Next, however, in Spanish cities, the problem of integration and living together became thorny and then the attitude of Spain and the European Union changed. At this point it was necessary to do something. And so, at least for Ceuta, the problem has been resolved…when it was decided to truly do so.”

 

The protected enclave. Migrants have not stopped leaving, obviously, but the routes have changed. Boats are launched in the Atlantic Ocean, setting out from Mauritania or from the Moroccan Sahara, but no longer from Ceuta, aiming for the Canary Islands. But how has the “problem” been resolved? What has made the attitude of the Moroccan government change, to the point of putting into action a true and literal war on migrants? The most serious episode of this new course, made of brutality and abuses on the part of the Moroccan police, was verified at the end of 2005 when a group of migrants who tried to jump over the net that divides Ceuta from Africa was fired upon. Dozens of migrants were killed; it still isn’t known whether from Moroccan or Spanish fire. From that moment, Ceuta became even more fortified. The metallic nets constructed across the border were doubled, reinforced with barbed wire.  And the zone has been militarized, with a discreet but massive presence of police and soldiers, who patrol armed to the teeth even in the alleys of Ceuta, among the tourtists in sandals and busy businessmen. This, however, is only the most evident aspect in respect to a deeper level to see what is necessary to pass the frontier.

 

So far, so close. To do it, it’s enough to go to the Plaza de Africa that bears in its name the unique concession that the city makes to its geographic proximity, and take a taxi that in ten minutes of riding along the Mediterranean Sea, arrives at the frontier with Morocco. Passing through the controls one crosses a no man’s land, where thousands of lives seem suspended,  piled up one against the other in an everlasting market where goods of all sorts are exchanged. Hundreds of Moroccan women, in traditional clothing, carry on their shoulders piles of colored goods, while the men are busy with the loading and unloading of trucks or smoking kif. On the edge of the little hills that encircle the frontier run women, men, and children, who move frenetically in the space between the two frontiers, as if in that compressed space rhythms were made frenetic by necessity. Scarcely arrived at the Moroccan frontier one finds a clearing with taxis for Tetuan, Tangeri or Chefchaoun waiting for passengers. A trip to Tetuan costs little more than ten euros, well spent to grasp the sense of Spanish politics towards Morocco.

 

Waiting for the future. “You’ll like Tetouan, it’s a marvel,” cries a contented Ahmed at the steering wheel, trying to be heard over the sound of the music that comes from the car radio of his 1980s Mercedes. “The people of northern Morocco are equal to Europeans: open and sociable. Not at all like those of the south, closed and provincial,” says the taxi driver. It’s literally true that someone more south of you always exists. “We don’t emigrate, who would make me do it? I have my little house, my work. Here everything grows in a hurry; there is full employment. Those who emigrate are those of the south, who don’t have work.” A few hundred meters from the border everything changes; Spain progressively gives way to Morocco, beginning with the generous use of the national flag. A kilometer and two hours of wasted schedule are ticked off, a bureaucratic price for a difference of noticing all the costs. The entire coast that runs between Ceuta and Tetouan is an enormous dock: thousands of workers, troubled by the sun directly overhead, construct hotels, tourist villages, restaurants, and plant trees. “Look, here a big hotel will rise, here a marvelous hotel,” says Ahmed, with a gleam in his eyes that not even his sunglasses succeed in hiding--all while he drives with one hand on the steering wheel and one on the passenger’s headrest. He proudly points out dockyards that seem to belong to him, considering the pride with which he speaks of them. “All stuff of the first quality, you know,” he notes, “all European stuff. The funds are Spanish. Great hotel chains and construction firms, great businesses, Western quality. It will be very fine!”

Ahmed’s enthusiasm is contagious; it involves his faith in the future that rushes by quickly outside the car. The distance that separates his enthusiasm for the development of his country from the fact that all will seem still more European is imperceptible. And it is in these dockyards, in these investments, that stands the answer to the questions in Ceuta and in those newly erected Columns of Hercules.  Money in exchange for control, simply one business in place of another. Those same entrepreneurs who for years have earned on the backs of migrants still do it, only in a different way--with the blessing of the Spanish and Moroccan governments, who both have something to gain. And the frantic tour of Africa made by the Spanish minister of foreign affairs, Moratinos in recent years, imitated, moreover, by the ministers of Italy and other European countries, acquired a meaning in the palm trees planted by the workers to give shade to the phantom tourists who will arrive in flocks, as Ahmed assures, putting on a cassette of Adrian Celentano, convinced that this will make his European passengers happy.