Don't Tell Me You're Afraid

by Giuseppe Catozzella

  I think I must have stayed there soaking for at least two hours.

  Then I got out and turned on the TV. Chinese channels, American channels. I could barely understand the English, even though I had studied it for years at school. I stretched out on the bed with the remote in my hand. I turned to the coverage of the Olympic Games on BBC and CNN. In exactly six days I too would be on that screen. The whole world would watch me run, would read my face, as I was now doing with the athletes who were competing.

  “You can’t lie,” I said to myself. Everything you are will be seen. The whole world will see it. One billion people.

  I got up from the bed and stood in front of the mirror that went from floor to ceiling alongside the TV table. I was extremely thin. I was truly a string bean. My legs were still spindly like those of a fawn; Aabe had been right when I was a little girl and he used to call me that. They hadn’t filled out much since then.

  I tried out two or three expressions up close to the mirror. Prostration at the end of the race. Poker-faced in front of the TV cameras before the start. A tense face during the race. Then I burst out laughing, all by myself, and lay down again.

  I was on cloud nine.

  That afternoon was wonderful. I had my whole life ahead of me, and my entire life would be full and glorious. I was a champion, and I had all the time in the world to prove it. I was a comet in a fabric studded with bright stars.

  Six hours later we joined up again in the lobby to go out to dinner. I felt relaxed, and Abdi and Duran seemed so too.

  We went out and ducked into the first restaurant we came to.

  Abdi was hungry as a lion; he could have even eaten the table. He had to settle for the usual rice, though. He thought Chinese food was awful.

  The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games was held two days later, on August 8. Being catapulted into a fantasy world inhabited by ten thousand other athletes from 204 nations, all parading in traditional dress, was the most thrilling event I had ever experienced. The delegations entered the Olympic stadium in alphabetical order by country. When it was our turn we were euphoric. The stadium had been going wild, still excited by the glittering ceremony: an endless succession of dazzling fireworks, light shows, music, dancing, and choreography that had involved thousands of performers including ballerinas, drummers, and opera singers. It was a celebration, a feast for the eye, ear, and soul. An incredible immersion in the warm, multihued heart that is universal love, whose different colors are nothing more than distinctive patches that strengthen it and allow the world to breathe.

  Abdi, in front of us, carried the flag with pride. High, soaring, blue as the sky and sea. With the white star in the center pointing toward the firmament.

  I, behind him, was in our traditional dress, with long braids attached to my hair for the occasion, and I felt as beautiful as I’d been only at Hodan’s wedding.

  We went around the arena waving to tens of thousands of people. They all loved us, and we loved all of them. Most of all, we loved our country.

  That night, in bed, I told myself that life had already given me more than I deserved.

  But I was mistaken.

  Four days later, on August 12, Mannaar was born. I got the call from Hodan at the hotel that morning. She was bursting with joy. She said that Mannaar was healthy and beautiful, the same as me, that she looked exactly as I did when I was born. I couldn’t wait to meet her. In my heart that morning I sensed that that child would be the joy of my life.

  The day of my race, August 19, was extremely hot. The news that morning said that it would be one of the hottest days of the year. The heat didn’t worry me; I was used to it. It was the high humidity: The heavy air left me breathless.

  I woke up calm, with the urge to run. During those thirteen days Abdi and I had trained well, in a sports facility available to teams that required it. I was charged, full of energy.

  Outside the stadium we could already begin to hear the roar of the spectators in the stands. It sounded like the buzzing drone of a giant fly, which rose as we entered the belly of the immense Olympic stadium.

  I would be in the heat with one of my all-time legends, the Jamaican Veronica Campbell-Brown, one of the fastest athletes in the world. To be able to see her—instead of just hearing her name on Taageere’s beat-up transistor radio—and to know that we’d be running in the same race was a feeling that made me dizzy.

  We stayed out on the edge of the track for two whole hours to relish the sight of the other athletes who were competing. The more I watched the others, the more my adrenaline mounted. I couldn’t wait to get on the track. The stands were huge, the crowd enormous. An infinity of colors, of different sounds, of voices and confusion, of banners in all the languages of the world. There seemed to be even more people than on the day of the opening ceremony.

  Having the privilege of watching the performance as participants was a joy. Around us there were runners, javelin throwers, high jumpers, and pole-vaulters, some wearing the uniforms of their own countries, others ready to compete as independents. Every fifteen minutes a different national anthem rose, and meanwhile it all blended together like a giant rainbow. Abdi and I were sitting side by side on the ground at the edge of the track. Passing before us were blond German giants in black tracksuits, Italians in their blue uniforms, British in their white and blue T-shirts, Americans in red and blue, Canadians in red, Portuguese in green. It was an intoxicating mix of sounds and colors. Standing out above it all, whatever their garb, were the black athletes. Flawless, extremely tall, their sculpted muscles gleaming with ointments and adrenaline. All around, wherever you looked, there were TV cameras, photographers with lenses as long as the militants’ rifles, journalists who swept down like hawks, microphones in hand, sporting badges from various newspapers.

  When they came across me and Abdi, they looked at us to see who we were, then moved on. Not a word, not one question. Every now and then a smile of compassion or encouragement, when they realized by the colors of our outfits that we were Somalis.

  We weren’t stars.

  Then we went back inside; the two-hundred-meter heats had been called.

  Walking toward the tunnel leading into the stadium, I thought I spotted a black British athlete out of the corner of my eye: red, white, and blue tracksuit, a familiar face. I turned around to get a better look and my heart skipped a beat.

  Fifty meters away, in the middle of the green field, was Mo Farah. He was standing beside a sprinter who would shortly run the 4×100-meter relay. The latter was sitting on the ground stretching his muscles, and Mo was saying something to him. That delicate profile of his, like an antelope. Then they laughed together. I felt my knees suddenly grow weak, and at the same time I was tempted to run over to him, to tell him who I was, tell him about the worn-out photo I’d kept next to my mattress for nearly ten years. But I hesitated too long, because Duran took me by the elbow and led me inside. They were calling for us to enter the locker room.

  “Come on. It’s your turn, Samia,” was all he said, rousing me from my daydream.

  I had thirty minutes to myself: It was the period set aside to focus before the heat. I had to get Mo Farah out of my head and think only of the race.

  I was alone. There was a massage table in the middle of the locker room. I lay down, closed my eyes, and pretended it was the grass at the stadium in Mogadishu. I tried to let go of any tension.

  Suddenly, as if no more than a second had passed, I heard someone knocking gently at the door.

  It was Duran. It was time.

  Outside the locker room, as we began gathering in the hallway, I saw myself for what I was: different from the others. The wall of the tunnel leading out to the track was lined with mirrors: With all of us together like that, our images were too conspicuous for me not to notice.

  My legs, compared with those of the other women, looked like two dry sticks. They wer
e straight, with no muscles. There were none of the bulges that I saw on the others’ legs: I had no quadriceps, no calves. Also no deltoids, no trapezii, no biceps. The others looked like bodybuilders compared with me. Exaggerated legs and shoulders, calves extremely taut. I not only didn’t have the machines to develop those muscles, but I didn’t even have a coach. And I didn’t have enough food, except for what Hooyo managed to get hold of. Angero and water. Or rice and boiled cabbage.

  I was the shortest, the thinnest, and the youngest. It exposed me: That merciless mirror exposed me before the race.

  In addition, the others wore beautiful, brightly colored outfits that matched the colors of their countries’ flags. T-shirts and shorts in high-tech fabrics that clung to their powerful bodies. I had on my usual good-luck garb. A white T-shirt that Hooyo had washed the week before and that I had protectively left at the bottom of my bag. It still smelled of ash soap. My black tights that came below the knee. On my head, the white headband that Aabe had given me nearly ten years ago and that I had always brought with me to every race leading up to that day.

  None of the other women looked at me. They were perfectly focused.

  I should have been too, but it was all so different from what I was used to. I felt like I was in an unreal situation, in a dream. The TV cameras, the reporters, the stands overflowing with people, that continuous low roar that forced you to shout in someone’s ear to make yourself heard, the athletes from all over the world, the scents of their deodorants, right there in front of me, under my nose. Veronica Campbell-Brown. Everything was simply incredible.

  At that moment I remembered Mo Farah, my fellow countryman, perfectly at ease in the middle of the track, joking in English as he spurred on a white athlete. The opposite of me. By the time he was nine, he had already moved to England, so naturally it all seemed normal to him. He’d gone with his family. I was seventeen, and it was only the second time I had set foot outside my country. And the first time I’d traveled outside my continent. The first time I was among so many whites, so many Europeans, Americans, Chinese. I was indeed fortunate.

  For a moment I saw Mo’s face again, relaxed, calm, confident. I thought maybe he’d achieved an advantage that I could never hope to reach. Then I told myself that was silly; I too would get to where he was.

  After five very long minutes we were called and went out, hit by deafening applause, all for Campbell-Brown. The humidity was very high; it made the tartan surface of the track shimmer in the distance.

  It was the same track as always, the same length, but to me it seemed much longer. Twice as long, never ending.

  I walked past Veronica Campbell-Brown: beautiful, flawless, imperious as a statue, fragrant as a diva. What perfume did she wear? All the power of those legs seemed to reside in their trim shape.

  I was in the second lane, the innermost. To my left, the first lane was empty. On the right was Sheniqua Ferguson, the one everyone considered promising, originally from the Bahamas. In the fourth lane was the Canadian Adrienne Power, she too a strong runner.

  In those interminable seconds I tried to do the one and only thing I had to do: focus my thoughts, which threatened to carry me away.

  I crouched.

  I placed my feet on the starting block, the right one and the left, pretending I was alone, that I was at the CONS stadium for a training session with Abdi. Or in the courtyard as a little girl, with Alì checking my feet on the block that Aabe had built from fruit crates.

  It was just me and two hundred meters of tartan track in front of me.

  Leaning on my knees, I placed my hands on the white starting line, fingers splayed, as Alì had taught me. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. A number for each finger, to concentrate on the wait.

  A thought of Aabe, as a good-luck charm.

  Then, as if inside an infinite bubble, I waited only for the firing of the starting gun.

  Boom. The pistol shot. A loud roar from the crowd.

  The other runners took off like gazelles.

  Incredibly swift, like dragonflies or hummingbirds.

  They left their blocks before I even knew it.

  I knew I would lose the race from the very first moment. With each stride the distance between me and the pack grew. An unbridgeable gap. My opponents sliced through the air; from behind they seemed like fillies flying in the wind.

  I continued running. I held my head up and I pushed hard.

  I was still at the curve when others were already across the finish line, catching their breath.

  I ran the second half of the lap alone. But in those last fifty meters an unexpected thing happened.

  Some of the spectators stood up and began clapping. In sync. They were urging me on, shouting my name, encouraging me. Like the day of my first win at the CONS stadium. Only this time the noise was deafening.

  I would have preferred that they hadn’t cheered. That they hadn’t noticed I was so inferior.

  I cut through the tape almost ten seconds later than the first runner, Veronica Campbell-Brown.

  Ten seconds. An infinity.

  I didn’t feel shame, in any case. Only a strong sense of pride for my country. Instantaneous, as soon as I passed the finish line. People continued cheering as Campbell-Brown waved to the spectators and gave one interview after another, surrounded by a swarm of reporters.

  In silence I completed a victory lap with Somalia’s flag around my neck. Without fanfare, without anyone, perhaps, noticing. As I ran, my eyes searched for Mo Farah in the middle of the field. He wasn’t there. I took a closer look all around. He was nowhere to be seen. He must have gone back inside, lost in the endless meanders of the Olympic stadium.

  It was all over. It was really all over now.

  Just as it had come, everything was already behind me.

  I had finished last and yet, incredible as it was, after no more than ten minutes I too was engulfed by journalists from around the world. A seventeen-year-old girl, skinny as a rail, who comes from a war-torn country, without a track and without a coach, who fights as hard as she can and comes in last. A perfect story for Western sensibilities, I realized that day. I’d never had such a thought.

  I didn’t like it. I told the reporters that I would rather have had people applaud me because I came in first, not last.

  But all I got in response was a smile of compassionate tenderness.

  I’d show them.

  In the locker room, under an ice-cold shower, I swore to myself that I would make it to the London Olympics of 2012, as prepared as Campbell-Brown.

  With muscles where they should be and a heart as big and powerful as that of a bull.

  In 2012 I would be the winner.

  For my country and for me.

  CHAPTER 20

  WHEN I RETURNED HOME, life became even more difficult.

  I received numerous letters, at home and at the Olympic Committee’s headquarters, from Muslim women who had chosen me as a heroine, their ideal. Dozens, hundreds of letters. Each week more arrived. Some written in ink, some typed. Inadvertently I had become a legend for thousands of women who had seen me run without the veils on TVs throughout the world. Those letters from the United Arab Emirates, from Saudi Arabia, from Afghanistan and Iran contained a boundless passion. Hope. Dreams. Faith. In the eyes of the world I had been transformed into a symbol. And it had all happened without my seeking it in the least, without my even having thought of it.

  For this same reason, however, going around on the streets had become even more difficult. Rumor had it that the Al-Shabaab fundamentalists hated me. They hated both me and Abdi, but I was a woman and therefore a double threat.

  I was forced to wear a burka and cover my face in the country that I had represented, without veils, in front of cameras from around the world.

  Luckily there was Hodan, who, from a distance
, gave me joy.

  We were now able to talk almost every night, and often I even brought Hooyo to Taageere’s bar, where Hodan, who had meanwhile gotten a little webcam, would let us see Mannaar and hear her cooing via Skype. It was true what Hodan and Hooyo said: Mannaar and I were like two peas in a pod. She looked just like me when I was a baby. Hodan laughingly said that Mannaar wanted to become an athlete, just like her aunt.

  Meanwhile, I continued training every day with Abdi. As the weeks went by, however, we realized that our performances would never improve. We needed support, a coach, a nutritious diet, a real track that wasn’t riddled by bullets, proper equipment. Nothing like that existed in Mogadishu, and everything became more and more complicated with each passing day, each passing hour.

  For a year I never stopped training with Abdi, every day of the week. A year. A whole year spent sweating to improve our times during every free minute we had. Yet they did not improve as they should have, with the speed that we would have expected, especially considering our age. We competed in races in Somalia or in Djibouti, and we even won, but it wasn’t enough.

  Something had to change.

  At night in bed I prayed to the photo of Mo Farah to let me find a way. I wondered where he was now and what he was doing. We had tried to find a coach in Mogadishu, but no one seemed to be interested. In a country where there’s shooting, no one cares about athletics. The warlords had no reason to sponsor us, and Al-Shabaab’s men wanted us dead, just as they’d killed my father and Abdi’s mother. Even the Olympic Committee lacked the clout and influence to attend to us.

  We were lunatics nurturing an absurd folly. That’s what we were. Lunatics whose dream was that of peace, the hope of living together as brothers.

  In the end, however, my foolish nightly prayers to Mo Farah were answered, though in a way that was quite different from what I would have expected.