by Igiaba Scego
Massawa was a city he knew well. They shot through the dark. That shadowy race foresaw no stops.
“Will it be much longer, Count?”
No answer. Just a grunt. And Zoppe realized he was in trouble.
.
Damp and darkness. Zoppe was greeted by the familiar scent of rats. He felt trapped without understanding why. His eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness. He sensed that the room was small and very crowded. Shadows popped out from everywhere, and little by little took shape.
“Zoppe, listen well, translate every word, don’t leave out even a sigh.” The count was clear. Not even a sigh.
In the middle of that darkness were two men surrounded by servants. A wrinkled old man with eyes like an octopus and a curly-haired young man with fine lips. The old man was sitting on a cart. He was wearing a white tunic embroidered with gold. A servant, Zoppe noted with dismay, shaded his master under a little white parasol. Zoppe wondered from what. The servant was breathing hard and Zoppe was worried.
They were Ethiopian dignitaries, he could tell by their expensive and ornate dress.
What were they doing in Massawa, in enemy territory?
His attention shifted to the young man with delicate lips, the old man’s grandson or late-born son. His hair was a messy pile of curls and mist that he struggled to keep under control. He smelled like coconut and jasmine. His chin was receding and his dark eyes deep set. His aquiline nose towered imperiously over a gaunt face that had little royalty in it. Nothing about that young man seemed solid. That was clear from the demeanor of his servants, who paid him little attention. He was wearing a suit, a souvenir from the West, fit to bursting, the sleeves too short for his long arms. And the tails dangled flaccidly over his chicken legs. Zoppe found the situation very odd. But he didn’t say a word about it.
He didn’t ask questions. He just got ready to translate. He had to do his job well, it was the only way he could earn his freedom. And perhaps—why not—a little cash. He had to be prompt and precise. Translate word by word. He couldn’t judge. Open and close his mouth, that was his task. Nothing more. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t interfere. He couldn’t improve. He had to just open and close his mouth.
He looked at the old man sitting on the cart. There was something disturbing about his posture. His spine was curved in on itself and it made him into a pile of rags. But it was his hands, which the old man kept in plain sight, that worried him. They were nervous hands, shaking, with pale nails. Hands that looked a little like the claws of a bird of prey. Demanding, ferocious hands. Hands that were perhaps stained with innocent blood. Where did those hands come from? From what part of Ethiopia? Zoppe asked himself if he would be able to translate all the cruelty contained in those hands.
Especially in those fat fingers. They seemed on the verge of exploding. “What if I can’t do it? What if I don’t understand? Who knows what dialect of Amharic this guy speaks.” He started to tremble. Beads of sweat gathered on his forehead. He who knew all the languages of East Africa now was afraid of being left speechless. A rank terror seized him by the gut. It was as if a vortex had suddenly appeared in his head. And everything he knew had been swallowed by it. For a moment Zoppe couldn’t even remember his own name.
.
Zoppe’s head started spinning. There was something different about that day, that smell, those faces, that room. He looked at the old man and his son. And then his eyes moved to the servants. They all had the same expression, same nose, same absent air. They were tired, fed up, mad or maybe just resigned. They all had curly hair and amber skin, a jangling belt and big ears. Together they formed a flat expanse of black skin and stifled sentiments. There was something familiar and perverse in that picture. But Zoppe couldn’t seem to figure out what. Then almost unexpectedly came the old man’s first words, jolting him from his venomous thoughts.
“Tena yistilign,” he began.
Zoppe had to focus on that opaque, translucent voice. It was beautiful. A rugged singsong that could awaken a sleep-soothed soul to new life. But his words were harsh, sharp, horrible. Zoppe couldn’t stop to think about their meaning, because then he wouldn’t have translated anything. He would have been lost. A carcass that even a vulture would have left alone. The old man’s eyes dominated the dark. They stood out imperiously in that room that smelled of rats. But it was Count Anselmi’s cannibal gaze that confused Zoppe. His aristocratic grace was gone. The count’s Italian, once pleasant, had become a primordial scream. Even his once-elegant hands were the hoofs of a warthog in heat. In the middle of these people Zoppe felt alone. Traversed by the poisoned arrows of betrayal. Every word wounded him. Every gesture outraged him. The old man was offering Italy his support for the upcoming war. He would supply arms, men, refreshment, provisions. He promised to kill Emperor Haile Selassie himself, if necessary. The old man was signing a blood pact with Italy, from which there was no return. And he, Zoppe, was translating it. No, he couldn’t think about it. He had to open and close his mouth. That’s all. Open and close his mouth. Leave nothing out. Not even the sighs.
The count gladly accepted and promised the pathetic old man a grand career for his son. “You won’t have anything to fear with us.” And with that, he tossed a wad of Ethiopian talleros in the air, which the old man awkwardly tried to grab. “Naturally, you’ll be compensated for your loyalty to Italy.” Another rainfall of talleros went through the room. The count laughed with satisfaction. It had been so easy to buy off those Negroes. Child’s play leading them to betray their own people. At that moment the old man yelled over to his son: “Thank the gentle count who has been so good to us.” The young man, who hadn’t moved a muscle throughout that entire discussion, began to awaken like a big golem dulled by time. In an instant he had thrown himself at the count’s feet and was kissing the muddy toes of his boots.
EPILOGUE:
PIAZZA DEI CINQUECENTO
Je demande qu’on me considère à partir de mon Désir.
As soon as I desire I am asking to be considered.
—Frantz Fanon
He left. Two hours ago now.
I put him on a high-speed train for Milan. He’ll figure it out from there. He has the other tickets. The fat man helping us said he would take care of everything. That he has ferried hundreds of people all over Europe. And that with him there was no risk of being caught by the border police. “It’s a cinch,” he said. And he added: “But you need nice clothes, recognizable brands, maybe a nice jacket— he has to look respectable.” So a couple of hours beforehand, we went to a store downtown and bought two pairs of pants, the kind businessmen wear to pick up girls on the weekends, two dress shirts, the usual white one and blue one, and some decent shoes. Dressed up like that my little Titanic looked like a man about town. He was handsome in those clothes that were so removed from his life experience.
“Have an intelligent look on your face during the trip,” the smuggler told him. “They can’t see a starving refugee, a dirty Somali, a nervous wreck. You have to radiate confidence from every pore. Make the world believe you’re in control and don’t have a care in the world.” The fat smuggler, who was named Omar like all the rest of them, advised my little Titanic to get into character. “You should seem like a student or a guy on a weekend getaway. Be cool, basically.” All the way through Ventimiglia the trip would be smooth, and after that it would be in the hands of God and the smugglers. I paid dearly for that trip. It cost me a lot. I couldn’t have imagined how much those trips cost.
Bastards!
“You shouldn’t complain,” Omar told me with a smirk. “My prices are competitive and with me you can be sure that your little friend will reach his destination safe and sound.”
“But, lady,” he warned, “you have to forget about Sweden. At most, he can shoot for Germany. At least if they take his fingerprints there, there’s a good chance they’ll keep him and won’t return him to sender. Just say you were mistreated in Italy and they’ll let you stay in German
y. The Germans care about human rights; after the Holocaust they have to be nice.”
Omar made me sick.
“Let’s go for Germany,” my husband said. “As long as you get me away from here.” I wanted him to get away too.
“I won’t come with you to the train,” I said as we crossed Piazza dei Cinquecento. “From here on you’ll have to manage alone. And I’ve never liked good-byes.”
I looked around. The piazza was pandemonium, enveloped in the exhaust of the buses occupying every space in the terminus like beached whales. People zigzagged frenetically and even the most elderly were possessed by a delirious hunger for speed. They ran obliquely toward an uncertain, often completely chance future. Piazza dei Cinquecento seemed more like a freeway than a piazza. It wasn’t a place to stop and chat. The words would get lost in an incoherent, sometimes disturbing rumble. Piazza dei Cinquecento was wrapped up with my history like nowhere else. Piazza of migrants, first arrivals, departures, my many regrets. In that piazza, so disconnected from itself, I had found and lost myself a thousand times. I remember when, in those early, crazy years, posing as an actress, I crossed it half-naked in skimpy clothes, because Sissi, always Sissi, had ordered me to show off my beauty to Rome. And I obeyed. This is where I came to know infamy. But it is also here that, thanks to my friend Lul, years later, I made myself a new life. More serious, modest, sensible clothes. Here, in the darkest years, I rediscovered the smile of my people. Behind the station, they sold the xalwo I was crazy about. I had to cross Piazza dei Cinquecento to get to that strange Somalia that had developed in the back streets of the station neighborhood. I even met my Titanic in Piazza dei Cinquecento. Drunk, he’d hang around different areas of Rome: Corso Italia, Piazza Vittorio, Ponte Lungo. But it was in Piazza dei Cinquecento that I saw him bellowing profanities with malicious gin flowing through his veins. It is there, in that piazza that Italy had dedicated to its fallen soldiers in East Africa, that I’d manufactured a papier-mâché love.
Suddenly I saw something loom over my head. Something white and shiny. “Get down, duck,” my husband yelled.
But I was blinded by the whiteness, I couldn’t move. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.
Then I noticed something yellow. All wrinkled. I don’t know when I realized that it was the yellow of a bird’s feet. It flew over me. And without my catching a good look, it took my turban. Tore it off violently.
“Cover your face or it’ll scratch you, Adua.”
I couldn’t understand why that seagull had targeted me.
“They’re going to eat us,” a man said, “like in that Hitchcock movie.” A woman asked if I needed help.
I yelled to my husband: “See that bird, just sitting there looking at us, do you see how it’s looking at us?”
And it was true. It was staring at me.
“Take the cloth, save the cloth,” I said to my Titanic. But my husband didn’t move.
The seagull stared at me again. It was as if it wanted to tell me something. Apologize.
Then it started pecking at the fabric. “Stop it,” I yelled to my Titanic. But my husband didn’t move.
The seagull made a disaster of the fabric with its pointy beak. “Stop it, please,” I begged.
“No, Adua,” he replied. “I won’t, that seagull did us a favor. If only I’d had the guts.”
“How dare you!”
“You looked terrible with that dull rag on your head. Right over there, at Habshiro, they sell scarves from the Emirates, the latest fashion. Now my wife will be beautiful and chic too. A veil in red, in green, one for all the days of the week.”
It was my father’s, that turban.
I had snatched it one afternoon in Somalia, ages ago.
The very day I had gone to Magalo for the premiere of my movie. A premiere that never happened. My father paid the manager of Cinema Munar the equivalent of three full houses for them not to show it.
Three showings ... Was that my price tag?
Three showings was what I was worth to my father, three showings.
Three showings for him not to look bad, not to disgrace the family name, so he could keep on pretending to have a daughter.
My price.
Three showings not to see me, to erase me, not to be ashamed. My father had broken my heart once again.
That day, step by step, my feet took me to what had once been my house.
I wanted to be Marilyn, I wanted to be Audrey, I wanted to be Katharine or at least Kim Novak.
I wanted to tap dance like Ginger Rogers and do the splits like Cyd Charisse.
I wanted flowers from Gene Kelly and looks full of respect from a passing Jimmy Stewart.
I wanted the white clothes, the crinolines, the puffy sleeves.
I wanted Billy Wilder to make me an icon and Errol Flynn to come and save me.
But most of all I’d have liked to be Ruby Dee. Ruby was black like me. And she didn’t have to sell herself. Ruby fought for civil rights. I never fought for anything.
I was swathed in leopard skins and I ran as naked as Eve the sinner. I was always chased by a serpent.
Always hounded by shame. I was tired, so tired.
That was when, almost by accident, my eye fell on the clothes hung out to dry. A listless look, devoid of nerve.
But it was enough to fill my field of vision with sheets, tops, wraps, garees and guntiino. The blue stuck out in all that white.
I would have recognized that blue out of a thousand blues. I knew that cloth well. My father wrapped it around his head and never took it off.
“So he does take it off every once in a while,” I said to myself. In a flash I went and stole the cloth.
I didn’t see my father that day.
I didn’t see my father any other day.
I never saw him again, to tell the truth.
All I had left of him was that blue strip of cloth, that strange turban, which up until a few hours ago I wouldn’t have taken off for anything in the world.
And then that seagull, with one swoop, in the middle of Piazza dei Cinquecento, ripped it away from me.
Do you realize, my little elephant, what it had done?
It was the sign of my slavery and my old shame, that turban. It was the yoke I had chosen to redeem myself.
What would I do now without my slavery on my head? How would I atone for everything I’d done now?
“Ahmed,” I finally asked, calling my husband by name, “why didn’t you help me?”
“I did help you,” Ahmed said, with an amused look. “That bird was sent by heaven.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Ahmed ... ah, Ahmed, I’m going to miss you.
I had never realized up until that moment how much that boy I picked up at the station loved me. I’ve been horrible for calling him Titanic all this time.
Oh, little elephant, how many mistakes I make. I miss my father and my husband.
Ahmed even gave me a gift, just imagine.
“I got this for you,” he said. “I didn’t want to leave without giving you a gift.” It was a big package.
I tore off the yellow wrapping paper.
It was incredible to see that my husband—he still was my husband—had bought me a video camera.
“Where did you find this kind of money?”
“I borrowed some, nothing big, and some friends helped me out.”
“Really?”
“I never gave you gifts. And I was sorry to leave without a little something for you.
You’ve been kind. You saved me. You loved me. I’m grateful to you for that.”
“Thanks,” I whispered.
Ahmed took me in his arms, in the middle of that Capitoline chaos.
And then he said, “Now you can film whatever you want, now you can tell your story however you think and you feel.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously. And finally you’ll be able to discover what there is ac
ross the sea.” Around us, Piazza dei Cinquecento was smiling.
HISTORICAL NOTE
This novel weaves together three historical moments: Italian colonialism, 1970s Somalia, and our present day, which has seen the Mediterranean transformed into an open grave of migrants.
The characters in Adua balance on the architecture of this multivoiced story and in a certain sense make it their own. Over the course of the narrative I have not analyzed these periods in detail because I wanted to transform historical events into emotions, visions, experiences.
But now I’d like to provide a little more information about the context and background of my characters.
Italian colonialism has been one of the great repressions of the country’s historiography. Only thanks to Angelo Del Boca’s monumental work Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale (The Italians in East Africa, Laterza 1976, now reprinted by Mondadori) was a topic long swept under a rug of silence finally addressed. Fortunately, today we have a vast choice of historical and other texts. In particular, I recommend: Nicola Labanca, Oltremare. Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Overseas: A History of Italian Colonial Expansion, Il Mulino, 2002); Giulietta Stefani, Colonia per maschi (A Colony for Men, Ombre Corte Editore, 2007); David Forgacs, Italy’s Margins: Social Exclusion and Nation Formation since 1861 (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (Indiana University Press, 2015) and Ennio Flaiano’s novel Tempo di Uccidere (A Time to Kill, Quartet Books, 1992).
