Beyond Babylon

by Igiaba Scego

  Since that day, I always leave padded with documents. We black Muslims have to defend ourselves at all costs. Mom says I exaggerate. “You’re so light, sweetie.” And then she adds, to my great embarrassment, “You’re not a negro, you’re like Beyoncé, like milk.” Mom always uses this word. She always says negro. Sometimes I hear nigger and my blood freezes. For Mom, a negro is anyone darker than her, someone who has kinky hair, a big nose, prominent buttocks. Beyoncé has the right color, she says. The right mixture of melanin. She likes her color. But she likes mine even more. “You took after your grandmother, who was beautiful and fair.” I look at myself in the mirror and ask God (or his deputy, for me it’s the same either way) why the hell he didn’t give me a big nose. He could’ve made me a real black woman, a bad bitch. I could’ve had those beautiful traces of Rasta and taken a joint to my own private sanctum to puff myself up with pride. Instead I have strange soft curls, a tiny Somali nose, and ghostly light skin for a black person. Maybe my father was white. The notion is appalling. Mom never speaks of Papa.

  My buttocks are African, though. It’s the only thing I didn’t want, an African butt. I have a disproportionate ass. Lucy says men always look at me. But men are simpletons. They would look at anything that vaguely resembles an ass.

  Oh, Lucy…maybe it’s her knocking on the door.

  It is.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Ice skating.”

  She doesn’t laugh at the joke. She doesn’t acknowledge it. She walks resolutely toward my suitcase. She screams. Abdel Aziz flinches, and I falter out of fear.

  “Why the fuck are you screaming?” I say, shouting myself. I feign amazement, but I’m afraid. She doesn’t speak. She takes a pair of shoes out of my bag. Oh God, I already know what she’s about to say. I stop her.

  “Hey, they’re comfortable, you know? Easy to walk in. I know they’re hideous, but they fit like…”

  Lucy hurls my shoes. She flings them at an imaginary point, maybe a garbage can, like a Yankee pitcher would throw the strike of a lifetime. Then she kneels over my bag. She sticks her hands inside and attacks with the vehemence of a Bulgarian purge.

  “And what is this? It looks like a nun’s habit! I can’t walk around with you dressed like this. Oh, Mother of God, saints of paradise, what made you want to bring this stuff? What is this, a maternity dress? You’re kidding me, right?”

  Few things were spared in the end. “We’ll buy everything there.”

  I’m afraid. It sounds like a threat. But at least the suitcase is ready. Have a nice trip, safar salama ya Zuhra.

  THE REAPARECIDA

  Long hair, broad shoulders, huge strides, and the number 10 on the winners’ white-and-blue shirts. World Cup ’78. Argentina on the podium.

  The country went insane. Maybe it was, with everyone singing praises to the hippie running brazenly on the field. The newspapers showed people howling with pleasure. Each goal, an orgasm.

  The papers only showed the ones howling with pleasure. The other howlers interested no one. In fact, they did not even exist. The others were desaparecidos brutally slaughtered offstage. The spotlight was solely for the golden boys and the military junta that had made the horror possible.

  Since 1976, or perhaps even earlier, people had been kidnapped, tortured, assassinated. Everything was done in absolute silence. Our ears—and the world’s ears—were plugged, our lips sewn, our hands bound. The entirety of Argentina had been lobotomized.

  Argentina campeón mundial

  Argentina, rey del mundo

  Campeones gran triunfo argentina

  Hosannas and fanaticism. The headlines all the same.

  The hippie, for the record, was Mario Kempes. His friends and enemies called him El Matador. Goals and orgasms. Officially, that’s how it was. For the soldiers, the press, foreigners. The other howlers didn’t count. They weren’t official. Foreigners wanted the folklore. The press, heart-pounding excitement. The soldiers, laurel wreaths. Self-congratulation and champagne. A shimmering cup and sharp teeth. Orgasms in technicolor. That World Cup was the first one not shown in black and white.

  Legend has it that in the first half Kempes was making an effort, but he didn’t score. He sweated, panted, swore, but didn’t score. He was dynamic like few others. On the field, he was king. But he didn’t score. The whims of destiny denied him glory among strikers. The soldiers didn’t like his restraint. Restraint could negate their glory, that same glory with which they wanted to deaden the conscience of us Argentinians. It was an act, a miserable conceit. They pretended to be good and we, on the other hand, pretended to believe in an Argentina that was by then a falsehood. But without Kempes’s goals, the scaffolding threatened to collapse. It was up to soccer to do something. It was soccer’s task. With crosses, shots on goal, extraordinary saves, it had to hide the heinous crimes the junta was committing against the sensible part of the country. The white-and-blue team was under pressure. There were veiled threats. Menotti—the coach of Argentina ’78—had what sports journalists called a stroke of genius. “We’ve got to be more superstitious. You can’t win without a pinch of magic.” He ordered the future Matador to shave his famous handlebar moustache. Smooth as a maiden, Kempes took to the field against Poland. It was at the Gigante de Arroyito, a stadium that felt like home. He scored a brace. And for the rest of that World Cup he didn’t stop until the end.

  When Kempes scarred Poland with that double goal, I’d been out of Buenos Aires for months. I was able to get away.

  Many Argentinians rejoiced with the team. Their dutiful orgasms had the trademark of a military government and the blessing of Kempes and Menotti. The state needed imbeciles, and for that they’d put on that sideshow of a championship. Money flowed and blemishes were concealed, like the people who disappeared. Like my brother Ernesto.

  Ernesto is now a number. He had a face, hair, beautiful hands. He laughed, sucking up air like a century-old combustion engine. He was a good boy. Better than me. And now he is a number on a list of thirty-thousand desaparecidos who never came home. We didn’t recover his body. To this day they’ve unearthed only twenty-thousand human scraps, but none belonged to Ernesto. I wonder how many decayed without the comfort of a grave.

  So many disappeared, so many dead, so many in exile. The country’s finest, most principled citizens were hard-hit. Along with those boys, girls, friends, new mothers, union workers, priests, and intellectuals, the whole country had disappeared. We were all desaparecidos. We couldn’t speak, we couldn’t discuss, we couldn’t breathe. We could risk the same fate as our husbands and wives, our brothers and sisters and parents and neighbors. Everything was controlled and, out of fear, little by little, everyone began erasing themselves.

  In those years the newspapers declared:

  Guerilla Efforts Truncated

  Eight More Extremists Mowed Down in La Plata

  Insurgency Suffers Blows

  The violent language of the press chilled my blood. I missed the word “kill.” I thought it warmer and more considerate than the words journalists used more frequently. I hated the words “mowed down,” for example. It seemed to suggest the human being’s desecration. It didn’t only imply the taking of life, but dehumanization. It was too much, superfluous. There wasn’t a headline that didn’t abuse words. Everything was a mowing down of subversives all across the country, 13 in Buenos Aires, 18 in Tucumán, 22 in Córdoba. We accepted the news bulletins of death as though it were banal bureaucracy. We had a high dosage of fatalism, some impassivity even, which was ultimately the other face of fear. We were so terrorized that indolence seemed to be the only form of resistance against barbarism. It isn’t so bad, the quiet life. A lot happens to others that doesn’t happen to me. And it followed that, without a shot fired, thousands of people were disappeared.

  The people rejoiced for Kempes, the hippie Matador, and perhaps in that same moment, they were attaching electrodes to your uncle’s ass to make him speak. What then?

/>   They rejoiced for Kempes, El Matador. A nickname in poor taste.

  Why am I writing all of this for you, my dear? We are in Tunis and you seem content. Why tell you this old story now? Is there a point, Mar? I don’t even know why I’m here, on this beach, writing to you. Because I can’t handle the lying anymore? I want some trace of a decent life. I’ve had a trying one. Lying is exhausting.

  I met your father in Rome. Is it that I want to tell you about him? Or is it only a way to unburden my conscience? I’m not sure.

  I met your father in Rome.

  I was sitting on a green bench, anonymous and alone. Rome was great for running wild. Crowds at every gate. Rome to me was like Patagonia, where your grandfather Alfio lived. He was a solitary man with great heart. He was from Genoa. He’d chosen Patagonia to build himself another life. It was a grueling place. They say your grandmother died of boredom.

  I was very beautiful in 1978. A real looker, if you can believe it. I had perky breasts, not this blubber you see now. At the time I would’ve preferred not having them. Now I’d give my life to go back to the way I was. I didn’t want them because they drew attention. I only wanted to be invisible. That’s why I went to the villa. I wanted a bench and the greenery around me.

  One Sunday in Rome, the children rollicked happily, mindlessly. It was 1978.

  Outside, Rome thrived delightedly beneath the light of a cat-shaped moon. The city center was nearby. I could have stretched my hand out and touched the Colosseum, if only I’d longed to do so. That nearness caused me inexplicable anguish. The monument reminded me of the corpse of one of our father’s friends, the first dead person I’d laid eyes on. The body reeked of gangrene. So did the Colosseum.

  Children were always popping up in the villa like poisonous mushrooms. Then he appeared. He looked like a tall child, but he was just very thin. He was like the Buenos Aires sky. Undefinable. I recognized something in him.

  It was your father.

  A green windbreaker, black hair, and slit eyes. He seemed to be waiting for me. Not a word came out of him. A gesture of greeting. We were mute. He lit a Marlboro for me. I smoked often back then.

  Then I left, I remember. One Marlboro and I was gone.

  It was before the hippie, before the number 10 or the goals. My brother was already a desaparecido. My mother already hated me. I’d already done a lot of damage all around. This was before the hippie. Before your father, I mean. It was a villa in Rome. The greenery. An uncertain neighborhood. His thin form standing in front of me.

  It was like in that Gardel tango, Tu sombra fue mi compañera. In effect, we became friends that year. It was 1978. The World Cup in Argentina. They drove electrodes into your Uncle Ernesto’s anus. They put the infamous capucha on him. A bag over the head and, beyond that, nothing else planned. A person wouldn’t know what they were going to do—you couldn’t see and you descended into utter panic. It was sadistic: obstructing the view of your own torture.

  Destabilizing.

  But sitting in that villa, I wasn’t thinking of my brother. My thoughts were all for Carlos. A soldier. A torturer. The man I’d been fucking for three years. Who, I believe, I’d enjoyed myself with for three years.

  Así aprendí que hay que fingir

  para vivir decentemente.

  Que amor y fe mentiras son,

  y del dolor se ríe la gente

  Gardel was always a source of comfort because in his songs I could see myself again. In his songs was the part of me obscured by failure. I obscenely traced the incisions of memory. Children appeared in the villa. I hated them all. I just wanted a Marlboro.

  I’d like one even now, here in Tunis. Instead, I’m writing. I stopped smoking years ago. Ah, that’s right. When you were born.

  THE PESSOPTIMIST

  “You can only clean shit here,” the woman told me.

  She said it with a strange, nasty voice. She was a mean woman. I remember the first one as the meanest.

  “You can only clean shit here.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Does the shit smell very bad, ma’am?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what, ma’am?”

  “On how hard you pinch your nose.”

  I pinched my nose hard, my Zuhra. But that stench had already latched onto me. It’s why I drowned myself in gin. It was there. I didn’t resist. The gin made it so that I couldn’t smell the stench anymore. No stench, wallahi! Not even the shit.

  STOP

  STOP

  STOP

  The woman paused the recording. She wasn’t satisfied. She thought her voice sounded stupid.

  Her finger angrily mashed the black stop button. She pressed it as though her life depended on it. A creak made the whole recorder shudder. A 7.0 tremor on the Mercalli scale. For a moment, the woman was worried about the pressure she put on her small, dainty finger. She didn’t want to break the recorder (again) which, evidently, was proving useful. She felt obsolete next to that old contraption. Modern life, as they called it, was surging rapidly toward digital networks. People no longer recorded their voices. They broadcast directly to YouTube. They retouched the bad recordings a little and enhanced them with effects to make them extraordinary. No one in the third millennium used cassettes and record players anymore. Maryam Laamane could use nothing else. She was like that record player, a piece of the past, a stratum of memory. She felt so mellow that way: curled up in front of the recording box. Doing things the old way didn’t upset her at all. It didn’t depress her one bit.

  The idea of recording her voice came to her fortuitously one afternoon. She was by herself. The same drivel on TV. She’d finished reading a book that upset her stomach. Two days earlier, she’d buried her best friend Howa Rosario. She and the entire Somali community buried Howa. She rose early in the morning to go to Termini Station. From there they had to take the shuttle that would carry everyone to Prima Porta, the cemetery, to bury her. That was a time when Maryam wouldn’t set foot inside the station, that gangrenous, pus-infested dump.

  All roads lead to Rome. For her, and for all Somalis, all roads led to Termini Station. At least that’s how it used to be. Rome’s roads, all its alleys, all its arteries, its passages, routes, paths, all of its crossroads, even its stops were oriented toward Termini. Somewhat like prayer toward Mecca.

  Then one day, Maryam changed streets and didn’t end up there anymore. She met with people at Ottaviano station or, as she called it, Ottopiano. She was never able to pronounce that cursed v. Finally she met up in a real place, as one should.

  “Why do you make me come all the way up here? Couldn’t we have met at Amici Bar or Lul’s, or at Termini?”

  Maryam shook her head. “It hurts my feet,” is all she would say.

  “Ours too.”

  “Mine more.”

  She had a decisive, authoritative tone that called to mind the great orators of the past. A Cicero, a Mao, a Fidel. The others trembled in deference.

  They gave in and met her at Ottopiano (not even they knew how to pronounce the v). A coffee at Castroni’s, a walk on Via Candia, the stalls on Viale Giulio Cesare. A short stroll in the dome’s shadow. It was in the heart of Catholic Rome, the Rome that spends and spreads. There were shirtmakers on Cola di Rienzo, American tourists with old Canons strung over their shoulders, children with fantastical ice cream cones. It was different from the Rome she’d known before. A quiet and presentable city. A walkable, respectable place that came out nicely in pictures and drawings. Even the pigeons were more well-mannered. With the point of their beaks they plucked breadcrumbs tossed covertly by the tourists. Their pecking was not violent, no anxiety or rush. With grace and savoir faire.

  At Termini, by contrast, the pigeons were obese, inelegant, vermin-eyed. They were something to fear. Their feathered uniforms were worn and their steps uncertain. Everything about them pointed to negligence. Tattered, slovenly, wasting time being nothing. When they found someth
ing to devour, the expression in their eyes betrayed their unrest. Inconceivable shrieks suddenly erupted. Yearning, voracity, bulimia. They pecked the earth to exhaustion, ferociously and with a certain rapacious haste. They gorged on everything. The station pigeons made no distinction between breadcrumbs and chicken leftovers. Maryam became sick the first time she saw a pigeon eat one of its own kind. Fried chicken morsels had fallen next to a Peruvian child. Two pigeons advanced. War sounded on their beaks and, in the end, the fatter one struck the wing of the thinner, half-limping contender. It seized the meager spoil of chicken, tossed it into the air, and guzzled it down. It was a cannibal.