It was around that time that I made my only friend in Trapani, Michelangelo. After school, we would gather pine nuts in the forests of Erice. We would shake the trees, prise open the cones, and shell the nuts for drying. Then we would share out our considerable harvest. I gave mine to u zu Nanà, who sold them from his cart. Because collecting them was such a fiddly business, they fetched a high price. That way I had a pastime that helped to support my host family.
During my time in Trapani, I even learned to weld. A blacksmith named Titta lived near us, and I often spent my afternoons with him. But I was young and impetuous, and never thought to protect my face with a mask. I would go home at night with eyes so red and swollen that I could not asleep. I spent whole nights with potato slices on my eyelids to relieve the pain.
I was keen to learn and curious about everything. Above all, I did not want to leave myself any time to think about where I was.
An irrevocable choice
As a child, I always enjoyed hunting. My friends and I used to stalk skylarks, fashioning slingshots out of branches stripped from trees. Choosing the right branch was crucial, since the wood had to be strong and supple but not snap. The older children would pass down the secret art of slingshot making to the younger ones, and the tradition lives on to this day. We children had to entertain ourselves with games of our own invention, and this one was a firm favorite.
One of the biggest industries in Lampedusa was that of the dried fish delicacy known as piscisicchi. The fish would first be submerged in large vats of a particular kind of brine. Then they were stacked head to tail on gigantic wooden frames and left out to dry in the field where the airport now stands. We called it the “airfield,” even though back then it was only the military aircraft that ever landed there. Each morning, the workers would line up thousands of drying frames until they filled the entire dirt field. They looked magnificent then – like a mighty river, silver and glistening in the sun. In the evenings, the workers would put away the frames again to protect them from the dew overnight.
It took five or six months to produce a batch of piscisicchi, which would then be sold in Sicily. It sounds straightforward, but it was a grueling job. Seagulls would swoop in, attracted by the scent of the fish, and the workers would spend all day chasing the birds away.
Another threat to the piscisicchi workers was us children, especially when we were on the hunt for skylark nests. The skylarks were elusive, but we had worked out a way to locate them: we would study the sky to spot the females, who circle above their nests to defend their young. That way we knew exactly where to look. The nests were often in the piscisicchi field itself, so when the workers were distracted, we would sneak in and wreak havoc, hoisting up the frames in search of our prey. In retrospect, I fear we were a far greater nuisance to them than the dreaded gulls.
On returning to the island as a doctor, I graduated to shooting. I would regularly go out and target migrating birds as they stopped to rest from their long flight across the sky. But one day, when my friends and I were out with our guns, I decided to give it up. In a single instant, for what might seem inconsequential reasons, I lost my taste for it. As I took aim and looked up at the multitude fluttering in a wave-shaped formation overhead, I thought about the long way these birds had come, and the long way they had ahead of them. In that moment, it was as if I could see in the flock the faces of the other migrants: people who are willing to brave all kinds of dangers on their path to safety, and who are losing spouses, children, and siblings for the sake of their homing flight.
From that point on, I never shot at a bird again. Instead, every time I was asked to give out a hunting licence, which was one of my responsibilities at the clinic, I ended up attempting to talk the applicant out of wanting one.
There is hardly anyone on Lampedusa who does not remember the shipwreck of October 3, 2013, in which 368 victims died. Their coffins were all lined up in the hangar at the airport. They had perished only yards away from the beach, safety, and the chance to start a new life. But fewer of us remember the shipwreck that happened only a few days later, on October 11. Although just as many people drowned, that disaster was less memorable to most because it occurred further away, off the coast of Malta.
That day, a Maltese helicopter dropped off nine survivors on Lampedusa. The clinic looked like a field hospital in wartime. Some of the patients were lying in bed, while others sat in wheelchairs, draped in blankets with drips attached to them. One man was the only person in a family of twenty-two to have survived. He was howling that he wanted to kill himself. We persuaded him to sit, and calmed him down.
A young Syrian man was hooked up to a drip. His face was blank. I tried to talk to him, but he would not respond. The woman who sat next to him was cradling a nine-month-old child in her arms. She, too, was staring straight ahead with glazed eyes. She was cradling her baby in a strange way, alternately clasping him to her and holding him away.
After an hour or so, the man decided to speak to me. He explained that the woman was his wife. When the boat was wrecked, they had been thrown into the water along with eight hundred other passengers. He was an excellent swimmer and was carrying the nine-month-old at his breast. He held his wife’s hand with one hand, and clasped his three-year-old’s in the other. They started swimming side by side, treading water continuously and trying desperately to stay afloat. They waited for help, but none came. They were exhausted.
At a certain point, the man realized that he was running out of breath, while the waves were getting higher and the current stronger. He had an irrevocable choice to make. Right then, suspended between life and death, he had to weigh his options and make a decision. If he just kept treading water, all four of them would drown. In the end, he opened his right hand, and let go of his son. He watched him disappear forever under the waves.
As he told me this, he could not stop weeping, and nor could I. I did not have it in me to hold myself together. I felt guilty, since a doctor is not supposed to let his patients see that he is overwhelmed, but I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t just remain impassive in the face of such grief. The man was tormented by the fact that, only a few moments later, the helicopters arrived. “If I had held out just a little bit longer, my son would be here with us. I will never forgive myself.”
Another woman had a two-year-old in her arms. The little girl was making a gurgling sound: “Drun drun.” The mother explained that her daughter was thirsty but that she vomited each time she was given water. We had difficulty inserting a drip, but at last we succeeded. The woman told us that her husband had stayed behind in Libya. They could not afford to pay the fare for all three of them at once, so they decided that she and the child would go on ahead. They had not heard from him since.
Among the survivors was a university student who told us that a woman had gone into labor during the journey. They had asked whether there was a doctor on board. As it happened, there were seven, and they all assisted with the birth. Immediately afterward, the boat capsized. Perhaps, he said, it was because so many people jostled to see the newborn that the vessel keeled over.
The following morning, a guardia di finanza boat came to port in Lampedusa. Instead of survivors, this time it brought us twenty-one dead bodies, lined up as usual in green body bags along Favaloro Pier. Before making the first dissection, I spent some time looking at the victims and summoning up the courage to begin. Among them were four children, who looked as if they were asleep. Performing any postmortem is hard, but examining the corpse of a child is devastating. I went home even more despondent than I had been the day before.
For a long time, that shipwreck went on delivering up bodies. They were not just numbers. These bodies represented the stories of families who had lost their children, even though those children left home precisely to escape the war at home and avoid that fate. It was as if unscrupulous huntsmen were shooting in the dark at random, straight into the thrashing multitude of the migrants.
The following week, I r
eceived a telephone call from a Syrian man who spoke excellent Italian. He had tracked me down after first calling all the other Bartolos on Lampedusa. He asked whether I had found his brother among either the victims or the survivors of the wreck. His brother had been on board with his wife and their four children. He was a doctor who ran his own clinic together with six colleagues. They had all escaped together from Syria to Libya, before boarding the same boat. Seven doctors, I thought – they must have been the ones the student had told me about.
Several days later, the man sent me photographs of his brother, the sister-in-law, and the children. I recognized his niece. She was one of the four little ones in those body bags. I called Porto Empedocle and Malta to see if any of the others had survived. The answer was always the same.
The girl in the front row
After my first three years of liceo were up, I left Trapani. My sister Enza had married an officer in Lampedusa’s coast guard, and her husband had been transferred to Syracuse. I joined a school there, and went to live with them. Finally, to my relief, I was no longer alone.
When I got home from school, Enza would already have the lunch ready. I loved being able to sit at her family table. But in Syracuse, too, I continued to pine for the sea. After lunch, I would find myself taking the long walk down to the harbor.
I would spend hours on the docks, watching the seagulls, looking at the boats, and thinking of Lampedusa. It became something of a ritual. Even when it was raining or cold, or if I was running a temperature, I simply had to be there.
“Pietro, you’ll catch your death, and what will I say to Mamma?” my sister said every now and then. But she understood my compulsion to spend time by the water. Deep down, she too missed Lampedusa. She knew that I needed salty air in my lungs; it was a visceral attraction we had both inherited.
I loved going down to the harbor even when there was a storm. The sound of waves battering the harbor walls was invigorating to me. When I’d had my fill of the sea breeze, I would go home and study until late at night, counting the days until the summer holidays.
Since I was a good student, my teachers let me go home a month before the end of each school year, and return a few weeks late for the next. At fourteen, like all my friends, I took the necessary swimming and rowing tests to obtain a seaman’s book that would allow me to board fishing vessels. I passed at the first attempt as most Lampedusan boys do, and from that point on, I spent my summers out at sea with my father. No sooner had I got off the ferry in Lampedusa than I boarded his fishing boat. We fished for four months straight, and often through the night. I was an assistant to the engineer and was in charge of looking after the dinghy. I received the same pay as a grown man: the profits were divided into parts, and each member of the crew received one or more depending on the nature of their job. As a matter of course, I gave my father every lira I earned. Sending me to school was expensive, and I had to give him something back.
For the first few years I was terribly seasick, and was forever looking for a quiet corner of the fishing boat so that no one would see me heaving over the edge. I was ashamed, and didn’t want my father to think I was too weak and faint-hearted for the job. But one day I confessed to my mother. She boiled thirty rusty nails in red wine, a concoction that was thought to give one a strong stomach, though all it did in truth was make me very drunk. Then I was taken to an old woman of the island, a witch of sorts. She prayed over me and looked me up and down, measuring my head, shoulders, and pelvis. Some time later, I finally started doing better. I was never embarrassed by seasickness again.
In Syracuse, I was placed in a coeducational class for the first time. Since I was fairly short, I was assigned to sit in the front row, next to a very pretty girl named Rita. I asked her out straight away. She rejected my advances, and found my persistence irritating. Eventually, though, she gave in. She said it was because I made her laugh.
Rita came from a tiny castle town in the mountains called Ferla, or A Fèrra in dialect. One cold and snowy winter Sunday afternoon, I borrowed a motorcycle and made my way along what seemed an endless string of improbably winding roads, until finally I reached Ferla.
My friends had given me directions to Rita’s house. I glimpsed her through the window. She was practicing her embroidery, looking prettier than ever, but the moment she saw me, she vanished. I took a deep breath and knocked. Rita’s mother opened the door. I did not know what to say, but I was already standing there and it was too late to turn around and leave. Nor could I miss this chance. So I introduced myself, explained that I loved her daughter, and asked for her permission to propose to her. Rita’s mother invited me inside, whereupon I encountered one of Rita’s aunts. The aunt threw me a fantastically suspicious squint, took Rita’s mother aside, and said: “Chistu è chiddu di Lampedusa? Viri ca su tutti sarbaggi. Is this the boy from Lampedusa? Be careful, they’re all savages out there.”
To Rita’s family, I might as well have been from another planet. Lampedusa was not Italy and it certainly wasn’t Sicily – in effect, it was Africa. But they did not remain wary of me for long. Soon they began treating me like their own son, and Rita became my life partner, the mother of my three children, Grazia, Rosanna, and Giacomo. She is the woman who shares my joy when I come home after helping a woman give birth or successfully treating a child; the woman who eases my pain whenever I have to face the deaths of innocent people, which these days occurs more and more often.
After finishing school, Rita and I moved to Catania to study medicine. We both wanted to do well, especially since our parents were paying our tuition fees. We worked away together in a little flat we rented from the university, passed all our exams, and graduated on the same day. I shall never forget the look in my mother and father’s eyes when my name was announced. Their son was a doctor. They could hold their heads high. With the little they earned by fishing day and night, they had raised seven children and put one of them through university. Their one bet had paid off.
Risky investments
When refugees arrive on Lampedusa, the rescue team and the medical staff are the first people they meet. As such, we are also the first people to whom journalists come for stories about the crisis. Anxious as I am to raise awareness of the issue, I have over time become something of a spokesperson to the media, giving interviews for newspapers, magazines, and radio and television programs in as many countries as I can.
During one interview for an Italian newspaper, a journalist and I were speaking about the children and teenagers who arrive on the island without their parents, after fleeing their countries alone. Every time I meet young people like this at the pier, I think about how their families have staked everything on them. The journalist told me that before the crisis exploded in the Mediterranean, she spent time in a remote village on another shore, collecting stories from some such families. They were living in shanties and waiting days, weeks, even months at a time for news of their kin. Many had nothing to remember their children by but photographs neatly pinned on mud walls. Smiling faces of children who may have crossed the sea, only to be laid in coffins on the other side. Young women who had been left alone with newborn babies shed tears on these photographs. Mothers who had watched their little ones steal away to Europe were grieving over them.
There are phantom villages in which only the elderly, the women, and the youngest boys remain, as if after a war. But in this case, the culprit is not war but a grinding poverty that makes it impossible for parents to feed their families. Hearing people pontificate on television talk shows about the difference between economic migrants and refugees infuriates me, and makes me wonder if all my work has been in vain.
In those villages, there are also people who can tell you proudly of children who left and managed to make a brighter future for themselves. Some of them return to repay the “investment” their families made, sharing the gains from that winning bet.
We see many young people like that in Lampedusa. I examine them at the pier, visit them
at the reception center, and stumble upon them when I am out and about. When they leave the center to go for a walk, they are always considerate and careful not to cause a nuisance. Especially at the beach, they keep a distance from tourists as if they are afraid of bothering them.
One day in June, I saw a group of them at Guitgia, a pristine beach just out of town that is a favorite of families with children. The young refugees had clustered on a rock, away from the holidaymakers.
I was amazed that they did not hate the sea for what it had done to them: holding them at its mercy for so many ghastly days and nights, swallowing up their friends, separating them from their countries. Then, of course, I remembered that this was also the sea that had given them hope, saving them from certain death by war or famine.
A skinny boy who looked older than the others was standing a little further off. He was watching mothers play with their children on the beach, and he was weeping. I went to him and asked if he was all right. He said that he was nineteen and had come from Ghana.
“I miss my mother!” he sobbed. “I was happy to leave Ghana. I planned the route with my friends. Everyone told us how amazing Europe was. They said we would find jobs here and make lots of money, then one day we could go home and give our families a better life. But now we have been through hell. The journey was horrible, and I have no idea what to do, or where to go. What’s going to happen when they take us away and send us somewhere else? Where will we end up? I’m so scared.” He sounded miserable. “You’re the doctor who was on the pier, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, though I did not remember examining him. I have seen so many people that I cannot remember all their faces.
“So you must be an important person?”
Tears of Salt Page 3
