Twenty-four Syrians, men, women, and children from the same extended family, had boarded a boat in Libya. When they reached the open sea, where they were to be split up and transferred to smaller boats, the smugglers realized that there was not enough room for them all. Some of the passengers were taken back to Libya, among them a child who had been forcibly separated from her parents. Luckily, her uncle was sent with her.
The parents’ boat was then intercepted by a navy ship and taken to Pozzallo, in the Sicilian province of Ragusa. They were taken to a reception center in Geraci Siculo where, several days later, they were finally able to tell the mayor about their daughter. To make matters worse, they had also been robbed of the little they owned on the naval vessel. The crime was brought to court, earning the indignation of the many military officers who work hard to save lives out at sea.
Fortunately, the child’s uncle had been able to call the parents from a mobile telephone and tell them that they had reached Lampedusa. Hearing this, Bartolo Vienna set about finding someone on the island who would be willing to help, and he was given my number. I went to the reception center directly and began the search, which was no easy task, since the center was housing hundreds of people at the time. The Syrians were being lodged in large tents beneath the trees, because there was no space left indoors. With the help of an interpreter, I explained why I was there and described the little girl to the migrants. We found her, and managed to link up Lampedusa and Geraci Siculo so that she could be reunited with her family.
Bartolo Vienna told me months later that the family had settled in Holland, though their greatest wish was for the conflict in Syria to end quickly so they could return home. Thousands of families, doctors, architects, engineers, teachers, workers, and students – all refugees – are hoping for the same thing.
Bartolo Vienna, the mayor of a tiny village like Geraci Siculo, gets it. He understands the seriousness of this crisis, and did his best to help that family in its hour of need. Not only was he able to do so, but he still keeps in touch with them and asks how they are doing. Our so-called political leaders, on the other hand, appear not to understand the difficulties these people are facing.
Whenever I see images of migrants being callously deported in their thousands, forced to return to the hell they have escaped, I am outraged. What kind of person has the nerve to seal the destiny of all these people with a mere signature on a piece of paper, then smile about it to the cameraman and pose for photographs? What has happened to us? How can we have so completely lost the memory of who we used to be?
L’erba tinta un mori mai
I have a headache. A bad headache. I am in my office at the clinic, speaking on the telephone. I am agitated. I start shouting and banging my fist on the desk, which is covered with piles of papers that I have not had time to file away. My co-worker Alessandra hears me, and rushes into the room. “Pietro, what are you talking about? Whoever you are speaking to, hang up.” She looks dumbfounded, but I cannot tell why. She takes the receiver from my hands and puts it down, disconnecting the call. I am shaken. “You can’t do that!” I want to say, but I can only make incomprehensible sounds.
Alessandra is one of my most trusted colleagues. I cannot imagine why she would interrupt me that way. I keep trying to talk to her but everything I say comes out in broken Italian, and my face has contorted into a strange grimace. Alessandra looks even more worried. She dashes away to get a nurse, and before I know it, I am in the emergency room. I do not understand what is happening. They insert a drip. What on earth is going on? What are they doing to me? It is as if I am dreaming, as if this is one of my many nightmares.
But this is not a dream. I know that it is serious when a colleague with whom I have often squabbled appears at my side. “Don’t worry, Pietro,” he says. “After all, l’erba tinta un mori mai. Nasty weeds never die.” He is quoting a saying, and what he means is: “if I can’t get rid of you, nothing can.”
They put me on a stretcher, and wheel me into an ambulance. I would like to shout at them: “What is all this about? Where are we going?” My brain is thinking thoughts but I cannot put them into words. My body is not obeying me.
I am afraid, again. I am drowning, again, though this time not in water. I am gasping, but I do not know why. For the second time in my life, I think: this is it. I’m dying.
I can see the helicopter preparing to take off from the landing pad. The nurses take the stretcher off the ambulance. There is no time to lose. We get on board, and the helicopter takes off.
I shall never forget that journey and the worried faces of those around me. The sky was clear, and the few clouds looked like gigantic white meringues. My mind was filled with jumbled images that seemed to intertwine and take on a coherence of their own. Up until that point, I felt, I had lived a full, intense life without regrets.
The voyage took little more than an hour, but to me it seemed never-ending. I could feel myself progressively losing control of half of my body. One side of my face was stiffening. One leg and one arm were going numb.
I thought of Rita, and the sacrifices I had forced her to make over the years. I thought of our children. But most of all, though at the time I could not think why, I thought of my patients: of all the men, women, and children who have risked and will go on risking their lives to reach our shores and ask for our help. I thought of the hours I had spent on the pier, of the time when a colleague and I were there for three days straight, taking turns to nap on the ambulance stretchers, snatching an hour of half sleep here and there, then jumping to our feet again. I knew without a doubt that if I had to go back, I would do it all again. Though it took the worst of circumstances to make me see it, this was my reason to live.
When I was brought into the hospital in Palermo, my colleague and friend Mario was there to greet me. We had fought many battles together. He, too, had an anxious look in his eye. They wheeled me into the CT scanning room, then gave me a magnetic resonance imaging test.
In what seemed no time at all, the results arrived. I’d had a stroke, but luckily it was not serious. It had been a mild transient ischemic attack – a TIA, in medical parlance.
I was given a bed, and everybody took good care of me. After ten days, I asked to be discharged. All those around me protested, but it was my decision to make. “Pietro, it is too soon for you to go home,” Mario said. He had scarcely left my side. “Get a few more days’ rest. Your body has been under a lot of stress, and if you have another stroke, you could be paralyzed. Please think about it.”
I discharged myself anyway. I could not, and would not, stay away. I went back to Lampedusa and to the pier, that old saying ringing in my ears: nasty weeds never die.
Mario was right about one thing. It was stress that had caused the attack. In fact, it had been provoked by one particularly unexpected and absurd incident, that had nothing whatsoever to do with my patients.
It was September 2, 2013. I was in my office when the telephone rang. “Dottore Bartolo, you have to come to the Comune right now.” It was the maresciallo from the carabinieri. There, I found Mayor Giusy Nicolini’s team in a panic. A white envelope lay open on the table. It had been sent from Germany. Inside it was a quantity of white powder, and a piece of paper that read: “DANGER: ANTHRAX.”
Municipal employees had opened the envelope, and had touched and even sniffed at the powder. We immediately called the fire brigade, since they were best qualified to deal with this sort of emergency. They arrived in special suits and I told them what to do with the envelope.
Anthrax. None of us had ever seen it before, and even if we knew the protocol, no code of conduct could be truly adequate for dealing with something we had never come across.
We needed a mobile decontamination unit right there, on the spot – on Lampedusa. The situation was surreal.
The fire fighters sealed the envelope and gave it to me, even though I had nothing to do with the incident. I wrapped it in several layers and notified the regional autho
rities and the veterinary institute. They had no idea what to do either.
We spent a day negotiating and arguing, and then one of the guardia di finanza’s helicopters came to take the envelope to Palermo. Only minutes later, the chief fire officer at Agrigento called to ask me to arrange for the suits that had been used to transport the envelope to be decontaminated. I was livid. That was not the clinic’s job and I told him so, in no uncertain terms. It was that telephone call that Alessandra interrupted on the day of my ischemic attack.
The news that I had suddenly been taken ill frightened everyone, because they thought it might have been the anthrax. But the respective test results arrived speedily: I showed no traces of the disease, and neither, in actual fact, did the white substance in the envelope.
The clinic had been my home since 1991. Back then, I was hired along with five other doctors. Two of them were stationed in Linosa, but nobody wanted to work there. Especially in winter, the boats were sometimes unable to dock, and then you could be stuck on the island for days on end. I often made the trip to Linosa in my colleagues’ stead, so that they could go home to Sicily. They were not from Lampedusa, and this meant they could only see their wives and children on two days of the week.
One by one, our doctors asked to be transferred elsewhere, until only two of us were left. A few years later I was appointed as head of the clinic, and then the only other doctor asked for permission to move too. I could not refuse. I knew that living so far from his family was not a sacrifice that he could be asked to make indefinitely. So I agreed to let him go. But every time I asked for more support thereafter, that decision was held against me.
Alessandra became my biggest help. She was trained as a paramedic, but instead became my aide-de-camp, my righthand adviser, and unfortunately, the person on whom I sometimes take out my stress when tiredness gets the better of me.
Each of these people has made their mark here. They are gifted professionals who, as is only natural, decided sooner or later to go back to their home towns. Alessandra and I, on the other hand, chose to stay on this narrow strip of earth, where routine and emergency situations are never far apart.
When the number of casualties on Lampedusa went up exponentially with the eruption of the refugee crisis, we began to acquire reinforcements. We established the emergency room, which has proved more crucial than we could ever have anticipated. We also hired more practitioners, both to cater for the residents of Lampedusa and to support us in our refugee work. These include a gynecologist, who has joined us on a fixed-term contract and always comes with me to the pier. We also took on a dedicated paediatrician for the migrant children, but she soon found it was impossible to cope with that workload singlehandedly, and so this role is now shared between several practitioners. We now have one more doctor in the emergency room and two more paramedics, one of whom comes to the pier with me as well. A cardiologist and an anesthetist are also on call. In short, we have managed over time to establish a clinic with twenty-two specialist departments, which serves locals and new arrivals alike.
Of all the surprises I have encountered in my work, I look back on one of them with especial fondness. Because I am long-sighted, I wear reading glasses with a specially designed frame that clicks into place. At a time when the demand for television coverage of the crisis was particularly high, I had given several interviews that were aired on television in quick succession. Soon afterward, I received a letter from the company that manufactured my glasses. They wanted to thank me for the publicity I had unwittingly generated, and asked if they could in any way repay me. I leaped at the opportunity.
Refugees often arrive on Lampedusa with eyesight problems, and we have to prescribe them corrective lenses, knowing full well they are never going to buy them. With this in mind, I asked the manufacturers to send me some glasses with lenses of varying prescriptions.
Later that week, I arrived at work to find that an enormous box had been delivered, chock-full of pairs upon pairs of glasses. My unintentional advertisement had reaped a truly precious reward for the clinic.
Our workload is growing all the time, and it is not even limited to treating the refugees who make it to shore. When the European border and coast guard agency Frontex picks up migrants in critical condition, they generally send them here by helicopter or motorboat. There simply isn’t time to transfer them elsewhere or to wait for the boats to be docked at a port on the mainland.
We work as hard as we can to run the clinic well, because even though the migrants take up a lot of our time and energy, we also strive daily to give Lampedusans the best possible healthcare. Our handful of general practitioners simply cannot do it all on their own.
The nurses and support workers are an indispensable help. Regardless of the time of day or night, they never hesitate to run to the emergency room, and they stay for as long as it takes, even if that means working non-stop for days on end.
That is the clinic of Lampedusa. It is the men and women who share with me everything that is happening on our island, putting both their heads and their hearts into the job.
We are not the sorts to give up easily, and challenges do not faze us. Together with the local health authorities in Palermo, we are now starting an ambitious project to create a center for humanitarian medicine and immigration. It will not be easy, but I have no doubt that we will succeed.
The off-season tourist
One day, a distinguished gentleman in thick black-rimmed glasses appeared at the clinic. An off-season tourist, I thought. He asked to see me about a respiratory problem he was having. I told him that I was busy with some administrative work, and that he should register with the emergency room. But he insisted. I was mildly irritated, but agreed to examine him, and prescribed him some medicine.
Then the man started asking questions, and I grew suspicious. At that point, he must have realized he was pushing his luck. “I’m Gianfranco Rosi,” he said. “I’m a director.” I was mortified. Of course I knew who Rosi was. I had seen his 2013 documentary Sacro G.R.A., which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. He explained that he was on the island looking for inspiration for a possible film, but that he had found nothing – perhaps in part because the refugee reception center happened to be closed for renovations.
Rosi would be leaving Lampedusa the following day. I knew I could not simply let him go. For years I had been searching for someone who would tell the world what was happening here. The shipwrecks had been covered by television stations from all over the world, but we needed something more permanent, something that would make a real impact. After an interview has been broadcast it vanishes into the ether: it makes no lasting impression on viewers’ minds and hearts. In other words, it is quickly forgotten. Today everything is consumed with incredible speed. One tragedy soon gives way to another. For better or for worse, a news story only lives a few days. Perhaps with cinema, I thought, we’ll be able to make something unforgettable. Rosi said, however, that he could not make a film about Lampedusa if he could not even imagine how it might begin.
I begged him to reconsider, and handed him the USB drive I use to document my patients’ stories. I had never given it to anyone else before, though I keep it with me at all times. “There are twenty-five years of my life on this flash drive,” I said. “A chronicle of suffering.” I made him promise that he would return it to me, as I could not bear to lose it. He took it, thanked me, and left.
When two days had passed, I was convinced that I would see neither Rosi nor my USB stick ever again. But on the third day, to my surprise, he reappeared. He had not left the island. “I’ve looked at what you have on the drive,” he said. “I’ll make the film.” I was delighted. “But I’ll keep this stick, if you don’t mind. I assure you I shall take good care of it and give it back to you later.”
That was the beginning of an adventure. No one on the island knew that Rosi was making a film. He had no gear, no camera trucks, no clapperboard. He went around with a tiny video-camera that
looked almost amateurish. Even I thought he was just testing his ideas out, not shooting actual scenes. Every now and again he came by the clinic to say hello, and we became friends. Once he asked to shoot some footage of an ultrasound, which I was giving to a young woman who had disembarked only a few hours beforehand. Next, he filmed an appointment I had with young Samuele, one of the most spirited local boys on Lampedusa. “Gianfranco, when are you finally going to start making this film?” was the question on everybody’s lips. He never said a word in response.
Then one day, Rosi told me he had finished the film. I could not believe he had managed to do it with so little fuss, without disrupting life on the island at all. He returned the flash drive to me, and I plugged it in to check that it was working and had not been modified. As soon as I opened it, a photograph of a trawler full of migrants appeared on the screen. “Tell me about this,” Rosi said. So I began to talk, explaining that those who could afford it bought “first class” tickets that permitted them to travel above deck, while the airless, cramped hold was reserved for the “third class” travelers who could not. Little did I know that this was in fact our final take in Fire at Sea. The film was named after the exclamation of “Fuocoammare! Fire at sea!” that spread through Lampedusa in 1943, when the Italian ship the Maddalena was bombarded and caught fire in the port. The cry had also become a popular song.
A few months later, I received a telephone call from the producers of the film. “Dottore Bartolo, you have to come to Rome – we are going to Berlin. Rosi’s film is one of twenty in competition for the Golden and Silver Bears.” I had not yet seen the film and did not even know what was in it. I was told to bring Rita with me because it was an important occasion. I remember us getting out of the limousine in Berlin and finding ourselves on the red carpet, walking among the stars. What on earth were we doing there?
Tears of Salt Page 8
