Adua

by Igiaba Scego

  Mauro da Pisa, Alessandro da Bologna, Antonio da Sassari, Lucio da Roma, Giulio da Pistoia, Simone da Rimini, have all passed through here. The oldest date was 1923. The best inscription was dated 1932. Zoppe recognized it immediately, the supreme poet was one of his favorites:

  Through me is the way to the city of woe.

  Through me is the way to sorrow eternal.

  Through me is the way to the lost below.

  “They’ve never cleaned up, that’s clear,” he said, addressing an imaginary audience. Actually, he didn’t mind the quiet of that isolation. It was a reprieve from the torture, from the senseless beatings that had defiled him down to his soul.

  His tormenters would soon appear with their stinking farts and vulgar taunts. But in the meantime there was that strange, rat-scented calm to cradle him.

  The pain didn’t subside. It was his groin that hurt to death, especially his testicles. Beppe had really beaten him badly. Zoppe asked himself if after all those hits his seed would still be fertile. His testicles throbbed and a yellowish liquid dripped from the tip of his penis. He felt heavy. And he could barely open his puffy eyes.

  At the age of twenty he was an old man.

  A premature oday, with a drooling mouth and achy bones.

  He had his visions to comfort him. His mind catapulted him back into the home of Davide the Jew and his little girl, Emanuela.

  He had recently been their guests, and the details were still so effervescent and fresh in his mind that he could almost remember without trying.

  He could see the sour cherry preserves that Rebecca, Davide’s wife, had prepared for dessert. He’d filled up on that delicious tart and had also relished what had come before.

  “What is this dish called?” he’d asked, astonished at his overflowing plate.

  “It’s rigatoni con la pajata,” Rebecca replied.

  Just then Zoppe noted how much mother and daughter resembled each other. The same wide forehead, the same big ears, and those sparkling emerald eyes. But whereas Emanuela was exuberant like all children, Rebecca had something mysterious and seductive about her.

  Zoppe envied Davide.

  And he said: “It smells good. I envy you this rich dish.” Davide accepted that sweet envy.

  Looking around, there was really little to be envious of. It was all so small. Even the furniture was tiny. The house was composed of two rooms united by the reddish light that filtered in through a small window. The kitchen with an iron stove was in plain view. In the middle, a table, some tattered chairs and a flesh-toned armchair. The space was packed with furnishings. In every detail there was a certain affinity for symmetry that made such a chaotic space endearing. Zoppe was drawn to a blond walnut cabinet with drawers covered in faux vellum. It was an exquisite object that did not fit well with the overall simplicity. It was a little bit like Rebecca, that cabinet, too refined to be the centerpiece of that set.

  Rebecca ... Davide ... Emanuela ...

  It was incredible for him to see white Jews. Zoppe had known only Falasha Jews, the Beta Israel, from Lake Tana, even though his father had told him that in the West there were Jews “with skin as pale as the moon.” These were pink Jews, so cordial, and their Roman house so cozy and inviting.

  Zoppe was blinded by the ochre walls that matched harmoniously with the violet flooring. He was impressed by the hoard of books; they formed a cathedral. And the knickknacks scattered all over the place: ceramic dolls with real hair, decorative wall plates, tasseled colorful boxes and lots of photographs of old people in shiny, faux, silver frames.

  Zoppe liked this middle ground where sour cherries intermingled with knowledge.

  If he had his basin with him he’d have read the fate of those three people. He would have seen their beginning and their end. All their happiness and their atrocious suffering. Their passionate kisses and betrayals. If only he had his basin he would have warned them about all the dangers and joys of the world.

  .

  “Water,” he requested to the guard. “I’m thirsty.”

  “Not so fast, Negro,” was his answer. “You’re not at the Grand Hotel. Learn some manners. You say ‘Water, please.’”

  “What difference does it make? You people don’t have good manners anyway,” Zoppe retorted.

  “Ah, we’ve got a rebel here,” the guard said. “If times were different,” he added, “we would have shown you, you piece of shit. In Regina Coeli we don’t like rebels. You’re ticks, useless lice of humanity. In Regina Coeli it’s easy to die of hunger or thirst, learn that. It’s easy to bring down that cocky crest you’ve got. In Regina Coeli it’s a short path to the graveyard. But you’re a damned lucky louse. They told me not to let you die. So I’ll bring you your water. But mind you, I might not be able to kill you, but put you through hell, that I can do.”

  Zoppe said nothing. He wanted to smash that fatso’s face. But he was in chains. And weak all through his insides. Eventually he ate the slop of potatoes and prickly worms. From the very first bite he could tell that his stomach would refuse to digest it. Vomiting was the logical consequence of an unwanted meal.

  Zoppe was a cesspool. The worms dropped from his mouth whole. Restless worms, still alive and a little stunned. He could see them creeping slowly over his wasted body.

  “Where’s my water?”

  He needed to try to sleep. But could one sleep in such a state?

  He wondered whether his father, Haji Safar, knew that he was in prison now.

  “I’m sure he had a vision.” And Zoppe prayed that it hadn’t made his father suffer too much.

  Happy images from his former life stopped the pain. The lively eyes of his sister, Ayan, his father’s gentle hand, the discipline of the Jesuits who had taught him Italian, and the intense letters from his Ethiopian friend Dagmawi Mengiste. They surrounded him and urged him not to give up. He saw their prayers spiral around him in an embrace of courage. “They love me,” Zoppe thought, “and they’re thinking about me right now.” Even the Limentani family was thinking of him.

  He could hear the little girl asking her mother, Rebecca, “How do you draw a wildebeest, Mama? Do you think it has the same hump as a camel? Why don’t we invite the brown man over for lunch again and ask him to draw one for us?”

  Zoppe saw Rebecca’s face tensed in a mask of fear. Maybe she knew about him.

  Maybe news of his arrest had spread.

  He’d ended up in trouble over Francesco Bondi, that Romagnolo with the flat nose and yellow teeth.

  Zoppe appreciated nothing about that man. He was too tall, too invasive, too chatty.

  He detested the droopy mustache and red hair that the Romagnolo showed off like a trophy. Bondi was always there asking question after question, waiting for amazing answers that Zoppe was never able to give.

  And also, he only ever talked about women—bottoms, bosoms, lips, sex. Zoppe found him vulgar. Obviously.

  “Do you have a girl?” the Romagnolo often asked. But Zoppe didn’t open up.

  Of course he had a girl, but he had no intention of telling that guy about it. Asha the Rash was his woman. Every night in his dreams he savored the moment when he would make her his. But he didn’t want to share such private thoughts with anyone, let alone that lout Francesco Bondi. He didn’t want to sully her beautiful name with a filthy person like him. The Romagnolo ruined women, for sure. Every day he went bragging about his conquests. Mirella, Graziella, Elvira, Carlotta. All of them with big busts and big bottoms. All snatched up under the nose of distracted husbands. These provincial Don Juan routines bored him. He didn’t have all that time to waste. He had to work, not dawdle around. Zoppe’s greatest desire was to impress his superiors. He wanted honors. He wanted cash. So he had to look active. Lots of work didn’t scare him. Especially when he thought of the nice gifts that he would be able to give his Asha the Rash one day.

  But then that strange morning came.

  Francesco Bondi pounced on him with breath that still smelle
d of sleep.

  Zoppe wasn’t alone. In that miserable and miniscule room he was ashamed to call an office, there was a man with yellow hair.

  “Hey, Negro,” Bondi yelled euphorically. “I saw another Negro like you on the street yesterday. I thought you were the only one in Rome.”

  Then the Romagnolo noticed the man with the yellow hair. “You’re not military,” Bondi said, a little irritated. “What are you doing here?”

  “Don’t judge by appearances. I’m even more, in a sense. The name’s Calamaro.” The two men shook hands hesitantly.

  “And this Negro you saw on the street, what was he like, if I may ask?”

  “He was a Negro, what do you think he was like ...”

  “They’re not all the same, did you know that?” said the man with the yellow hair. “There are different types, in every region. Their hair and noses diverge wildly. It depends on the climate.”

  “Hair? That stuff this guy has on his head, you expect me to call that hair?”

  “Yes,” said Calamaro, calmly.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  Zoppe buried his nose in his papers and mentally wandered through the city of Rome in search of the other African Bondi was talking about.

  There was definitely Menghistu Isahac Tewolde Medhin. The Eritrean hothead. He ran into him one day around the Pensione Tedeschi on Via Flavia. The Eritrean walked slowly, he didn’t worry about being seen too much like Zoppe did. Medhin didn’t want to hide, let alone disappear. His movements were filled with pride. He walked with his head high. He had just finished at the Monte Mario international college run by the Methodist Episcopal Church and was trying to figure out what the future held for him. Zoppe didn’t like the man. His words were too learned, complicated. And his avid anti-Italian ferocity terrified him. That man would soon get himself into trouble. “I shouldn’t have anything to do with him, otherwise he’ll ruin me.”

  As he was lost in these thoughts he saw Francesco Bondi’s hand sink into his curly hair.

  “You call this hair? This is wool, not even good quality wool!”

  “It’s hair,” Calamaro replied calmly. “It’s not pretty, but it’s hair. The gentleman is a Negro, but his features are less Negroid than the anthropological specimens I examined in the Congo.”

  And then he too, no different than Bondi, sank his hand into the hair on Zoppe’s exhausted head.

  The Somali exhaled with all the strength he had in his lungs and sat there despairingly listening to the two Italians.

  He couldn’t say exactly when the discussion turned into something more serious. Had it been Bondi who offended Calamaro, or maybe the reverse? Zoppe was confused. He saw only, through his hair, that the two had moved on to hands—their hands. Fists, in short.

  “Please, gentlemen,” said Zoppe, disconsolate. “Please,” he repeated. Then he got the inauspicious idea of trying to break it up.

  The police arrested only him for that strange morning brawl.

  7

  ADUA

  A big storm was beating down on our camp when the man with the red beard entered our tukul.

  That’s how things began with my father. That’s how I met him, little elephant. That was the last happy day of my life. I was seven or eight years old at most.

  I remember that our straw roof was soaked with water and it dripped from every corner of our temporary dwelling.

  It was the ’60s, but I didn’t know that yet. I was just a flea and I struggled with the shaky, provisional nature of our daily life. I was a nomad, a little nomad with a pointy nose and I thought that life was contained in the gleeful bleat of a baby goat. The rain that day was violent. If we held out just a few minutes then it would be paradise.

  In the bush, the golden rule during torrential rain is curbing damage at all costs. We all knew that after that brief initial difficulty the sun would come out, even in our hearts. Hope, which had woven the threads of our survival, would never abandon us. A greenish mold, meanwhile, was expanding under our feet. It would bring the worst microbes, the most insidious dangers. But we were used to it. The important thing, as the camp’s old madwoman, Howa the Crooked, always said, was to dry the bottoms of your feet well once it had all stopped. Si fiican u tirtir was the motto. And already the cloth scraps on our wood ganbar were ready. Howa would have appreciated, and maybe even smiled happily about our feverish readiness. Because we truly were happy about the cruel rain that was pounding over our heads. Wallahi! So happy. That rain was a true manna from the heavens. Not by chance did everyone’s mind go to our rust-colored basins filling up with good rainwater that would quench our thirst in the coming days. Dreams soon gave way to worries of drought.

  I was used to rain.

  But that man with the red beard jarred with everything. He was so different from the shepherds in our camp. He was as clean and smooth as a young girl.

  And his turban had an almost blinding otherworldly glow. Between white and light blue, it was almost frightening.

  Then came a sudden thunderbolt.

  But instead of coming from the sky, it came from the mouth of the man who until that moment had been the center of my existence.

  “Girls, this man is your father,” Papa said.

  My sister, Malika, and I stood there staring at the man with the red beard. I noticed that he was bowlegged and had a devilish goatee.

  And his back was curved like a pregnant woman’s. And also, why did Papa introduce him to us as our father?

  I wanted to get rid of all of that angst.

  “You have to shake his hand. He’s your father. Aren’t you happy?”

  Malika and I were dying to ask, “Aren’t you our father?” But neither of us had the nerve. Maybe it was Papa’s look, the look of the man who up until that moment we’d considered our father, that dissuaded us. Maybe it was also the eagerness with which he pushed us toward that unfamiliar, lopsided man who inspired no confidence whatsoever. So we kept our mouths shut. As if a crocodile had caught our tongues.

  We couldn’t even breathe. Or think.

  Around us, the bush howled fiercely like it did every night.

  I could hear the hyenas cackling and the fierce hunger of their obscene feasts. The crows cawed. The gorgor snored.

  The lions made love to lionesses worn out with exhaustion. A woman gave birth in pain.

  Malika and I stood there, barefoot, between two fathers.

  I didn’t like the new one at all. He was too old. Too hunched. He had twisted feet, rotten teeth, and the receding chin of a false virgin.

  I looked at Papa with a silent plea for help. He broke eye contact and at that moment I realized he was rejecting me.

  “Tomorrow you will leave with him for the big city, for Magalo,” he said. Leave? For Magalo? Us?

  I had heard talk of the big city. Someone had told me that Malika and I were even born there.

  I didn’t want to go. I sensed that the big city would swallow all my purity, all my dreams.

  I was fine there with my goats, with my camels, and with that golden land that had become part of my bones. The land and I lived for each other. In harmony with the song of the elephants.

  I was a nomad. I didn’t want to be rooted.

  I was a nomad. I wanted to be free to run in the wind.

  Malika was different from me. She didn’t have many wants, no. All she wanted was for people to love her. She was a person who only had to be given an order and she would follow it. Even the most atrocious order was for her the best possible solution. She refused to think, to decide. She didn’t want to be vulnerable. Let other people do that. Her attitude was, My life isn’t mine anyway.

  So she bowed to this new father. She shook his hand. She signed the pact. She became his slave.

  And so with that submissive gesture, she gained his eternal love. I was foaming with rage.

  “I don’t want to,” I shouted. “I want Mama. I want to stay with my people.”

  Papa told me: “Asha the Ras
h was your real mother and we aren’t your people. Your father, Zoppe, has asked for you. The woman who nursed you is one of my wives. Call her ‘godaunt.’ You have different blood in your veins. You must learn this, you must learn it fast. We have been your caretakers.”

  I didn’t want to learn it. I wanted to see the woman who to me would always be my mother. Mama was pretty. She smelled like jasmine.

  “I want my mama.”

  And that was when the bowlegged man broke into that absurd conversation. “Your mother died when she brought you into the world.”

  “Yes,” my ex-father said. “She’s dead.”

  But I’d seen her just a few hours ago.

  “But I saw her ...” I murmured.

  “That’s not your mother,” the new father yelled.

  “But ...”

  “No ‘buts,’ you brat. Learn to trust my words. I am the one who brought you into the world.”

  I looked at my sister with contempt. She had already surrendered to the new order. I couldn’t bear such horror.

  I saw the old man, the one I would never call father, pick up a thorny branch.

  Then he pulled me toward him and gave me two lashes. Two hard lashes. This was my baptism.

  The thorns stuck in my skin.

  I was like the Christian Jesus, a martyr for sins I hadn’t committed. I felt a deep sorrow well up from my unhappy gut.

  “Mama, where are you?” I lamented. No one answered.

  My papa, the one who had been my papa, left the tukul.

  I heard his steps rapidly move into the distance. I thought I heard the echo of a sob. “Mama,” I called out. Then I fainted.

  When I came to, I had become an actress. No one would ever see my real face again.

  8

  TALKING-TO

  Adua, why did you tell your teacher that your name is Habiba? How many times have I told you, your name is Adua? Habiba is the name you had as a nomad, the one that silly romantic of a mother gave you when she was pregnant with you. Habiba is a dirty, filthy name. It’s a common name, for a prostitute. Surely my daughter wouldn’t have such a common name, would she? Habiba means love in Arabic ... bah, I spit on love! There is no such thing as love. It’s a useless name, get it into your head. Adua’s much better. You should thank me, I named you after the first African victory against imperialism. I, your father, was on the right side. And you must never believe the opposite. I did only the right things in life, only the right things. Not like that good-for-nothing Asha the Rash. The only truly rash thing your mother did was die. She did nothing else, just die. Whereas I, on the other hand, fought alongside the just. Inside your name there’s a battle, my battle ...