by Joanna Scott
“What happened?” Adriana asked. After spending hours in her room, she had finally emerged. She could have come out much earlier—Giulia had invited her to come practice her music, but she’d said angrily that she wanted to be alone. Now she looked as though she’d just woken, or else she’d been crying. Her forehead was still knotted with lingering displeasure, and the many strands floating loose from her braid made a dark haze around her face. “Why is Signor Ambrogi here?” she asked.
“He’s driving Paolo to Marina di Campo.”
“Stupido Paolo.”
“Adriana . . .”
“Mi dispiace, Mamma.” She was sorry for speaking about Paolo like that in front of her mamma. But more than she was sorry, she was very hungry. Her mother was pleased to hear it. They would sit and eat their soup as soon as Signor Ambrogi and Paolo had left, and then Giulia would wash her daughter’s hair. One hundred strokes with the comb, Giulia reminded her—that’s the way to tame unruly hair and make it shine. And afterward, perhaps a game of chess? Her daughter was becoming a formidable opponent. Her poor, darling daughter. She looked as if she’d just tumbled out after spending the night inside the kitchen cabinet. But the war was over, and Elbans would soon have their island back to themselves. Remember what your mother promised, Adriana: mai più. Never again.
“Why is Signor Ambrogi driving to Marina di Campo?” Adriana asked her mother.
“I think . . . I do not know.”
Adriana looked at her mother skeptically, finally drawing from her a better answer. “There is a celebration. The Africans are preparing to move on.”
The girl’s frown seemed to tighten, almost as though she were resisting a smile, but her eyes were shining with tears. She didn’t say anything more—she just watched Paolo and Lorenzo load the bicycle into the car, and Giulia watched her, thinking about how she wished she could guide her daughter carefully through the years ahead, step by step. But the girl was too easily drawn to adventure, too reckless in her attachments to follow her mother’s lead. She’d find her own way somehow, wouldn’t she? Her strong, impetuous girl. Giulia once overheard Luisa telling Ulisse that Adriana must have Gypsy blood in her. Any girl who defied her mother’s prohibition and kept returning to Viticcio to leap into the sea—to leap backward!—must have Gypsy blood in her. No doubt she’d give her mother plenty to worry about as she grew older.
But wasn’t this worry a mother’s necessary burden? It was one thing to allow yourself to feel a carefree optimism about the predicament of a foreign soldier who had been your guest for several days; it was something else entirely when your own child was involved. If Amdu had been Giulia’s son, she wouldn’t have cared that he was too good a boy to get into trouble—she would have been out scouring the island for him right then instead of leaving him to his fate.
She reminded herself: peace had returned to Elba, and her daughter was safely at her side. It was time to resume the life that had been interrupted by the bombs, to go backward and find the best route averting the reality of war, heading from the familiar past to the future—a future in which her daughter would grow up and soldiers would go home and letters would arrive explaining everything.
A fisherman told Ulisse, who told Luisa, who delivered the news to Signora Nardi and her daughter at supper: the African soldier had cut across the beach at Magazzini and later was seen on a road heading south.
“He was walking?” Adriana asked.
“He was flapping his wings,” Luisa said over her shoulder as she returned to the kitchen.
“I don’t know why he went away,” Adriana said sullenly. “He just went away.”
He was not some stray animal Adriana could claim as her own, Giulia reminded her daughter. He was a member of the military and had duties to resume.
“Duties,” Adriana scoffed. “He carries a baton in parades!”
“That is something.”
“He didn’t even say good-bye.” She turned her spoon over the bowl and dropped the beans back into the soup. Giulia thought she understood the reason for her daughter’s anger. She had known a real Senegalese soldier and had been fearless in his company, but she’d lost him before she could show him off to her friends.
Adriana pointed out that it was easy enough to say Au revoir, mademoiselle, though he could have tried Arrivederci, signorina, or even Ciao. She had taught him many Italian words, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care that she’d brought him bread and pine nuts and springwater. He was selfish and ungrateful. He’d taken advantage of the family’s generosity. Really, the week had been no more than a pleasant vacation for him. Uncle Mario had been right—he wasn’t worthy of her trust. Though he’d pretended otherwise, she meant nothing to him. Nothing, she repeated, spitting out the word: Niente.
Giulia was taken aback by the force of her daughter’s bitterness. Children shouldn’t understand what it means to feel worthless, yet here was Adriana acting like a much older girl—like a girl spinning loose from a romance, a girl who had fancied herself in love. A ten-year-old girl acting heartsick.
“My birthday is on Wednesday,” Adriana said, as if she’d read her mother’s thoughts. “He won’t be here for my birthday.”
A ten-year-old girl, almost eleven. What did she know of love? She knew everything she needed to know. She knew what it meant to be loved—and to return love with love.
“Adriana —”
“Are you sure Pippa is not hurt?”
She loved strays and wanderers.
“I am sure. The boys were telling . . .”
“A lie.”
She loved adventure.
“A story. Now eat.”
“Paolo is stupid.”
“Adriana, hush!”
“It isn’t fair. Already I am losing the picture of him in my mind. I close my eyes and I try to see Amdu, but I can’t see him the way I want to remember him. Mamma, you must find him and bring him back. Tell him he can’t just leave us like this.”
She loved anyone who loved her. Of course she did. She didn’t have to be an adult to feel the ache of missing someone who belonged in her life forever. A girl can be infatuated at any age. Once the spell is cast, conviction is unshakable. Nothing can be done to prevent it. Lives will remain tangled together even at a distance, even through time. Wonderful, horrible love. You open up the cabinet door, and your daughter tumbles out. You’ve done all you can to protect her. And look what happens.
THIS TIME HE LET HIMSELF OUT through the iron gate instead of scaling the wall. He followed the coastline east, back in the roundabout direction he had come, across the shallow estuaries, along the rocky beach, over mounds of kelp, and into the hamlet of Magazzini, where a white-haired fisherman was dragging a fleet of beached caïques one by one across the sand. The fisherman stopped his work and stared at Amdu. The unlit cigar stub he’d been chewing fell from his lips into the sand. When Amdu said, “Bonjour, monsieur,” the fisherman turned and hurried in awkward, limping strides up the beach, disappearing behind a deserted hotel.
After he was gone, Amdu took hold of the prow of a caïque and dragged it to the water’s edge. He did the same with the five other caïques. When he was done he looked up and saw the fisherman standing on the hotel’s back porch, leaning against the rail. Amdu waved to him. The fisherman shrugged and turned an empty pocket inside out, and Amdu did the same. The fisherman shouted something in Italian that ended in “Africa.” Amdu could tell from his tone that “Africa” was being used as an insult. He wanted to communicate to him what the fisherman had missed, never having traveled to Africa, presumably. He’d missed the feeling of walking barefoot along a trail of burlap bags stuffed with peanuts or riding on a spotted horse across the sun-baked land in Kaolack. He’d missed the experience of being a young boy writing stories about himself with his fingertip in the dust of the street outside his home. He would never hear what Amdu Diop could have told him, including information that might have been useful, such as advice about the shirt he’d chosen to we
ar, which was blue. Amdu could have warned him that blue is the mosquito’s favorite color!
“Buona giornata, signore.” Amdu made a motion with his hand as if to tip his cap. The fisherman grunted and waved Amdu away, clearly indicating what he wanted to say: Go on, go back to Africa, black man. And that’s where Amdu was heading, though he was taking his time about it, for he had a need to absorb the experience that was about to end, to saturate himself with the island that he was obligated to leave behind.
Instead of sticking to the coast, he turned inland to cross the wooded Punta Pina, following a dirt road in a general southeastern direction and then bending more directly south. He walked through a herd of goats being driven forward by a boy who was no older than seven or eight. When the boy spotted Amdu, he dashed behind a juniper hedge. Amdu could see him creeping behind the bushes and he pretended not to notice when the boy whistled for his goats to catch up with him farther down the road.
Amdu felt as massive and obvious as an elephant among all those bleating, jangling goats. As he moved among them he thought about how the girl named Adriana would have laughed at him. He wondered what she was doing right then back in her stone palace by the sea—probably playing a tired old song on the piano, he imagined. He started to hum a marching tune in her honor.
Across a field, smoke rose in a thin column from a small bonfire. Amdu kept walking, though more slowly, respectfully increasing the distance between himself and the timid goatherd up ahead. He passed an old cart abandoned along the side of the road. He passed a concrete, windowless shed with a collapsed roof. He passed a one-wheeled motorcycle lying on its side in a ditch. In the story he would have liked to tell about himself, he would find the missing wheel in the field and attach it to the motorcycle, and then he’d ride around the island before he returned to his ship, taking advantage of his last hours of freedom to see all the sights. That story, however, would have depended upon a miracle, and he was done with miracles.
The goatherd steered his goats down the drive leading to a farm in the valley. Amdu stuck to the road, believing from its direction that he could follow it all the way to the marina where his division had come ashore. But the road abruptly ended at a low, crumbling stone wall bordering an uncultivated field. Rather than backtrack and find another road, Amdu set out across the field.
The sun was fiercer on the open land, and when he saw a barrel cactus roasting on top of a hillock, he felt a sudden urge to break open the fleshy tip and suck out the juice. He started to cross over to the cactus but stopped when he felt the sting of nettles on his ankles. He continued along the edge of the field, drawn instead toward the tempting shade of a grove of fruit trees in the distance.
As he climbed over another stone wall he realized that the landscape was familiar. He had passed through the same fields before, on the night he ran away from the war. The grass had been silver in the hazy moonlight, and the windfall fruit had had a bitter smell. He recognized the pattern of the uneven furrows beneath his boots and the gnarled, broken trees. Now, in daylight, neglect made the orchard look peaceful and inviting. It was the same orchard, with the same decrepit trees and the tall weeds and the shed that should have been nearby. But he didn’t see the shed where he thought it should be. Perhaps it was on the opposite slope, hidden by the crest. He climbed to the highest point and scanned the land around him. To his surprise, farmhouses dotted the south and west, almost within calling distance. He concluded that he had been mistaken about his whereabouts, that this must have been a different orchard on a different hill.
Continuing across the crest, he found himself standing at the edge of a singed, blackened ring of earth, the ashen crust over the dirt flat and cracked, the trees nearby charred on the side that would have faced the fire. He knew at once that he’d been right about the orchard and this was where the shed had been, where the soldiers had raped the girl and stabbed her in the throat to silence her, where Amdu would have lost his tongue if he’d been caught, the place he’d run from, where he’d been unable to help. He didn’t know whether the villagers or the soldiers themselves had burned down the shed. He didn’t need to know in order to imagine the walls splitting from the heat and crumbling, the flames stretching in tall, swaggering figures, swelling, wavering, the wood popping, sparks flying, melting into the darkness. He didn’t have to witness the fire to feel the throbbing heat on his face. And he didn’t have to know whether the woman standing about twenty meters away, in an open space that once must have been the central path cutting through the orchard, was the mother or the aunt or just a neighbor of the girl who had been killed. She wore a bulky dress the color of the ashes at Amdu’s feet, with a brown kerchief tied over her head, and she was bent under a bundle of wood she carried on her back. She stood motionless, propped over her walking stick, staring at Amdu. For a long while he stared back. Between them was the invisible, implacable truth of what had been done at this spot, though the actual role that he had played receded behind the current perception. He could guess what she was seeing. He, Amdu Diop, who knew himself to be a good man, was thought to be a murderer of children. His crime was unforgivable, even to a woman who might have been generous with forgiveness. The motionlessness of her stance conveyed both the accusation and bafflement of the only question she had to ask: how could he have let it happen? By staring at him, absorbing him with her gaze, she thought she’d find her answer. Staring back at her, he wished he could convey an adequate response and offer consolation to the woman. But she would spend the rest of her days refusing to be consoled. Whatever her relationship had been to the murdered girl, she was destined to remember and to keep remembering as long as she was alive.
The leaves of the fruit trees crackled when a gust of hot, dry wind blew through the orchard. It was a desert wind—silky with particles of sand too small to see—and it stirred in Amdu a craving to go home. At home he wouldn’t be held responsible for what had happened on this island. He would be measured solely by the expectations of heredity, resuming his place as the firstborn son of his grandfather’s firstborn son, using his advantages to reinforce the family’s distinguished reputation. Even if he had given up hope of proving himself exceptional, at home in Dakar he could still be known as a respectable man.
There he could be what he wanted to be, as long as this did not keep him from becoming what he was expected to be. Here he was what he was. There he would study to be a doctor. Here he was a murderer. There his parents would find him a suitable bride. Here he was alone. There he could enjoy the feeling of belonging and from his privileged position embrace a variety of influences. Here he couldn’t make himself understood. There he believed in dhikr, the remembrance of God; he believed in authentic holiness; he believed that anyone could be a saint. Here he was a stranger, a foreigner, an invader, a barbarian, un negro, a soldier of the Thirteenth Senegalese Regiment in the Ninth French Colonial Division who, by running away from the place where a girl had been murdered, had forfeited the one meaningful gift he could have offered the people of this island—the gift of testimony. Here he had kept his mouth shut. Here he had persuaded himself that with enough faith and the proper magical incantation conceived as prayer, he could revive everything that had been lost. And here he had come to his senses and understood that some forms of suffering cannot be rectified with a miracle.
Here he stood convicted—rightly so. If instead of running away from the scene on the first night of the invasion he had gone to the French field commander Lieutenant General Henri Martin and told him what he’d witnessed, there would at least have been an investigation. But he had lost any credibility he might have had and denied those who were involved either by their actions or their relationship to the dead girl the chance to experience the effects of justice. Even a halfhearted investigation overseen by a military tribunal would have been better than this: a woman’s staring eyes and a memory as unalterable as the hard-baked crust of ash in a neglected orchard. Here, this circle of ash before him, was what he couldn’t c
hange.
And here, paradoxically, was where he wanted to return. Here—not just this place where he was responsible for crimes committed during a night of chaos, but this entire island he and his comrades had come to liberate. Although he knew clearly enough that he had to leave, although in his heart he really wanted to leave, he also wanted to come back. To spend the remainder of his humble life here rather than there. To plant himself in the middle of these ashes, to live as though he belonged for long enough so that he finally did come to belong.
Did this make sense? Probably not. Amdu wouldn’t have tried to explain himself. But locked in the gaze of a woman who would never forgive him, he could imagine what it would feel like to experience himself completely as himself, without potential. To the peasant woman he was beyond redemption. But he remained alive, and life filled him with a powerful desire to earn the right to be who he was.
Amdu began to feel as if he and the old woman were the only two inhabitants of the island. For a long while they stood as still as the trees around them. But eventually the woman decided that she’d seen enough, or that watching was a futile effort resulting in nothing more than tired eyes. She turned away and carried her bundle down the east side of the hill, leaving Amdu alone.
He would have liked to remain there until nightfall and longer, to be there—here—marking the place. But his feet carried him into the hot, gusting wind. His feet remembered the course they’d already traveled and carried him toward the blue water glittering in the distance, through a meadow buzzing with a thousand bees, and toward the marina where he had jumped with his comrades from a rubber boat. He couldn’t help it—his feet continued to take him in the direction he’d set out, toward the ship that would bring him home and the life he had been born to live, a life he would resume, though only temporarily, for already he was planning his return.
It cheered him to think about how after the war, after he’d taken his exams and had been certified as a doctor, he would come back to this island by his own means, under no one’s command. Ten years from now he would find the girl named Adriana, who by then would be a woman.
