CHAPTER 9You leave Paris and enter North Africa when you go into the Barbes-Rochechouart district. It stretches between Pigalle and the city’s main canal system, and most guidebooks don’t mention it. The crowds in its streets are Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan, a lot of them wearing the hooded cloaks of the Sahara and their native casbahs. Women’s faces tend to be veiled or tattooed. But there aren’t many women. The men outnumber them forty to one. Most of these men come to France alone to earn money for the families they left behind. They live six to a small room, sleeping in shifts, and save most of what their menial jobs pay so they can take it with them when they return home.
There are few non-Arabs in sight there except for the cops. Uniformed flics from the Police Nationale patrol the
