it a point to sit with newcomers in the shelter’s
common rooms, just keeping them company.
The guy today was a Malian named Lassara.
He had a melancholy face and sat at a table in
the makeshift kitchen, alternately staring at a
cell phone and slumping over to rest his head
on his arms. “The next harvests haven’t started
here yet,” Youssouf said. “So he has no work.”
Lassara had been in Spain for eight months.
Youssouf, who’s been in Spain for 14 years, calls
Lepe a carrefour, a crossroads. He means both
a stopping place and a confusion of alternate
pathways. The pull and push of modern global
migration makes carrefours of places no one
could have imagined a few decades ago, and here
in this plain little agricultural town, Youssouf
wondered how many times he had listened to
young men like Lassara tell stories exactly like
his own: the first resolution to leave home, as
neighbors kept passing on reports of their admi-
rable distant relatives enjoying fine lives while
sending support money from afar. The convic-
tion that despite breaking immigration laws—
paying a thousand euros or more to be smuggled
northward country by country and by the grace
of God or Allah surviving the illicit open-boat
crossing from Morocco to Spain, the European
landmass closest to Africa—a migrant laboring
hard in Spanish fields will somehow obtain a
work permit and land a steady job and make
home visits properly, on an airplane, to embrace
those relatives who were supposed to have been
the whole point of their leaving.
Lassara raised his head, said something in
Bambara, and Youssouf translated into Span-
ish: “Nobody talks about what it’s really like.”
Youssouf watched him bury his face again
and nodded. Nearly 60,000 people hazarded
the Mediterranean crossing last year, follow-
ing northward routes mapped by rumor and
smugglers. But in carrefours all over the world,
migrants talk to each other in this way, tradingGAMBLE OF A LIFETIME 79