by Igiaba Scego
“Eres española?” The guy wouldn’t give up. “Russian?”
He was blabbering like she did at Patricia’s funeral. Pure delirium. None of the attendees liked her pink dress. They didn’t like her. She’d bought the awful dress a week after the abortion. Then she’d never worn it. The saleswoman told her, “So cute! You’re a doll.” Sometimes salespeople lie out of mercy. She wanted that dress, and nothing and no one would make her change her mind. Salespeople know when they’ve got a sucker.
Once she was home she’d made her plate of special cornmeal. Pati loved it. They ate. “Me ha gustado mucho, nena. Como siempre.” Mar tidied up, washed, scrubbed. They sat down together to watch a black-and-white film on TV. It was a strange movie with a twenty-two-year-old woman pretending to be an adolescent. It was Ginger Rogers. Mar searched in vain for Fred Astaire in the black and white. She hoped the two would tap dance together. She wanted to be rescued from what she was about to say. Only Fred Astaire could do it, but he wasn’t in the movie. Midway through, both of them were fed up. A bit of channel surfing, one woman beside the other, distant. On the screen, a bloated, black-veiled Loredana Bertè appeared. Mar felt vaguely sad. Bertè had always reminded her of Toulouse-Lautrec’s pitiable whores. She was singing one of her old hits.
With no bread and butter, you can eat me
Oh oh, oh oh oh
Mar began clapping her hands and dancing like a spinning top.
“Estás loca? La gente duerme.”
“Qué se joda. Everyone can go fuck themselves. And fuck you too, Patricia Delgrado Ruiz. Tomorrow, leave this house forever.”
That she did.
No more Patricia day to day. No more poppy perfume first thing in the morning, no more Fassbinder films, no more Hernandez books, no more stupid cow statuettes spread around the house. No more hair in the spotless sink, no more frizzled toothbrush. Even that four-dollar shampoo and the egg balm were gone. What about those coconut cookies they went crazy for? Nothing. With her gone, they’d lost their taste.
Mar couldn’t be with Patricia anymore. Every time she looked at her, she thought of that disgusting spelt soup. She thought about the gray machinery above her black body. She thought of the suction. The disgust she’d felt when that man penetrated her for the first time. No, she couldn’t stay with the poppy-scented woman anymore.
The priest exhorted those who were able to take the Eucharist. Someone wept. Everything was arranged in perfect funerary fashion. The tears, the hardened faces, the flowers, the stench of incense, the sunglasses, the black shawls. Mar rose in her pink dress. Her mother grabbed her by the arm.
“What are you doing? No puedes, hija…you’re not baptized.”
“Fuck you, Mama,” and then she moved toward the casket, breaking away from her mother’s aggravating grip. Quick, casual, rash.
Mar looked at the others. Their backs, their hairstyles, the rapid movements of their perplexed eyes. They were analyzing her, scrutinizing. They were trying to understand what the hell was happening and what the hell would happen. No one dared break her stride. The deceased’s parents were paralyzed, waiting. Mar stroked the casket, el ataúd. Then, she leaped on top of it. Her butt struck the rough wood of the coffin and a thump sounded throughout the church, astounding everyone.
Her mother, the poet Miranda Ribero Martino Gonçalves, was also paralyzed. She was neither pained nor frightened. She was merely becoming inured to her horror. How many more times did Mar wish to be born? Miranda knew in her heart that Mar didn’t belong to her. Her womb refused to acknowledge her. Miranda knew she was an errant mother. She knew she would always have to brace for the worst.
Mar familiarized herself with the coffin’s coarse wood. Beguiled, she caressed it before speaking.
“Peter Sellers wasn’t actually named Peter, but Richard Henry Sellers,” she began.
Buffoons, the dumb stares of buffoons were trained on her. She continued.
“His brother called him Peter. He died a few days after the boy was born. His parents never accepted it. Peter—well, Richard Henry—would later say they called him Peter from the start, even if he couldn’t say why exactly. He was born on September 8, 1925, in Southsea, Hampshire, and died in London at only fifty-four years old, done in by a diseased and overworn heart. He acted in more than fifty films. My favorite is still The Party, where he plays an Indian bit actor, Hrundi V. Bakshi, a man of many shades. Before landing a film role, Peter had cut his teeth on preshow theater performances. Now I’ll tell you, in chronological order, every film Sellers shot from 1950 until his death. Write it down. Henry Hathaway’s The Black Rose, 1950, Great Britain; Tony Young’s Penny Points to Paradise, 1951, Great Britain; Alan Cullimore’s Let’s Go Crazy, 1951, Great Britain; Maclean Roger’s…”
Two men cut her short, one in a dark suit and the other in jeans. She knew them but not very well. They were also Spanish, and journalists. And perhaps also unhappy. Mar realized she had great strength. She resisted the men’s attack. The one in jeans tried thwarting her from behind, while the dandy in the dark suit wanted to subdue her from the front. Mar wriggled away. She fought hard, never ceasing her poetic declamation of that queer, sad hero’s tragicomic filmography.
She got to Clive Donner’s What’s New, Pussycat, 1965, Great Britain, before they threw her unceremoniously out of the church. She shook off the dust. The pink dress was filthy and her hat had flown away. She’d scraped a knee. Her wrists ached.
But she was finally able to tell Patricia something that mattered to her. She never talked about herself. Peter Sellers was the focus of her research. She was finishing a dissertation on him. Patricia never asked her anything about it. Nothing interested her, nothing beyond herself. Patricia was very self-centered. In her heart, Mar had always known that. She didn’t ask her about the spelt soup or the gray machine. She didn’t ask Mar how she was doing. She hadn’t confided about her suicide plans. “Damn, Pati, I could’ve come with you. You’re so selfish, a damned egotist.”
“OK, now I understand, lovely lady…you’re British,” the young Tunisian blurted.
Mar didn’t look at him. Was he a handsome boy? She couldn’t see beauty anymore. She stood, left some money on the table, possibly too much, and headed reluctantly toward her first Arabic lesson: the alphabet. Alif, ba, ta…
THE NEGROPOLITAN
“What have you decided, my love? What will you do when you’re an adult?”
My mother’s usual line. She asks me this every now and then. One day she asks and the next day, nothing. Each time she ends a phone call or conversation with me, she asks the same maddening question. At this point it’s a tic, it’s stronger than her. Mom sometimes forgets that I’m an adult and that I’m closer to menopause than infancy.
I just got off the phone with her. I’ve been in Palermo for four days. Today I take the boat to Tunis. I miss my mom’s caustic voice, and a text message seems like a bland way to communicate. I only felt fondness and jubilation. I felt like Judy Garland singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Swallows fluttered in the sky above. Kids ran happily into the perfect blue sea. I forgot that I was in dusty, summer-scorched Palermo. Despite the sweltering heat, I was strangely tranquil. Then, what a shame, I got the unfortunate idea to call my parent. I went to a rundown call center near my bed-and-breakfast. I dialed her number and waited for the tuu-tuuu that gave me the green light.
When I call Mom I’m always somewhat agitated. She’s my mother—we’ve known each other for thirty years. There aren’t any huge secrets between us (besides my father’s identity) or any significant ongoing crises. It’s just that every time I call or talk to her or propose something to her, I feel that I’m not perfect like she wants me to be. It gives me insane performance anxiety. On the phone, my anxiety reaches its apex. I change, I start to act. I play it safe. I list my accomplishments for her. I tell her I’m happy. I tell her my friends adore me. And, yes, I’ll find a fantastic man when I really want to. Right now it’s more important th
at I figure out what I want in life, and then, once he notices my self-confidence, he’ll love me even more. I don’t want to waste my life with slackers. No, thank you. Yes, the man will come. Yes, everyone is enamored of me. What a beautiful girl, they tell me. What a great body. You’re so refined. We’re Somali, everyone knows we’re beautiful. I praise my neck. My bottom. My skinny waist. “No, Mom, I’m not emaciated. No, I eat enough. Yes, I stopped doing that thing…you know I did.” Mom always reminds me of my bulimic past. She doesn’t forget anything. I read the pain in her face constantly. She hides the Coca-Cola from me. I used to weigh 175 pounds. Now I weigh 128, I’m fine. Ugh, enough with this, Mom. I’ve changed. I’m trying at least.
She and I don’t talk much. We can’t. I thought I was a blabbermouth, but not with her. I read the pain in her face, the guilt for having left me in that school when I was little. That’s the way it went, Mom, and it could’ve been worse. A horrendous thing happened to me at school, but that’s enough now, please. I’d like to turn the page. She said, “Okay love, let’s turn the page.” She always calls me “love,” it freaks me out. I’d prefer that she called me by my name more often. Zuhra. She said it so rarely.
Mom demands that I be happy. She doesn’t ask for it, she insists. That’s why her questions irritate me, I know I won’t meet her standards. I know I’ll never be as happy as she wants me to be, which enrages me. I feel like a nobody.
Then the offhand remark, the pinnacle of anxiety, the question I never knew how to answer. Why doesn’t she lay off me? She tells me exactly why. She doesn’t approve of what I’m doing. She wants me to be a doctor, a gynecologist. “My sister Fardosa is a midwife,” she tells me. I don’t push back. I don’t want to start an argument. Sometimes, though, I bite. “Your sister Fardosa—I can’t bring myself to call her Aunt, when do I ever see her?—is a butcher. She cuts the clits of young girls, stitches them up, and stops them from having a good fuck.” Anything but a doctor! I spit on gynecology. I mean, I spit on butcher gynecology. No blood on my unblemished gown, ya ummi. I want to stay clean. As honest as can be.
Then ummi, my mom, bites her lip. She knows her sister is a butcher. And she knows it’s all owing to the grace of God that I’m not like her. I earned a degree in Brazilian literature. I like Brazil. One day, once I’ve earned a pretty sum, I’ll live there. I’ve even chosen the site where I’ll build my little house, near a hipster beach on the magical island of Florianopolis. I went three years ago. Never, in any place, have I found such an absence of antagonism. People live their lives and don’t think about anything else. They don’t think about busting your balls or, worse, disintegrating them. And everyone smiles. I’d be stringing beads for tourists from sunrise to sunset. Then I would dance in honor of my orixá. Mine is Iemanjá, queen of the sea. Yes, I’m very close to the sea.
The problem is that Mom can’t stand the work I do. I think she’s convinced that I distance myself from any baseline of happiness. I sell CDs in an entertainment megastore (you could call it that). It’s a dreadful job, I know. Not so much because I’m a sales-clerk, that’s all well and good. It’s because I’m exploited. At this point, we’re all butcher’s meat—not only the clits Auntie Fardosa cuts off.
Everyone I know, when I tell them what I do, says to me: “Oh, working in a record store, that’s cool! You must be living it up!” Absolutely not. I can’t stand it. First of all, I don’t work in a cute tiny record shop, but a megastore. Secondly, I’m not living the life. People think it’s High Fidelity. Three nerds spending their time ranking indie records, pointlessly fantasizing and cooking up disastrous plans. If only. I’d spend all day listening to the songs of Caetano Veloso or the sacred sister Maria Bethânia. Instead, I have to put up with stupid compilations and Britney Spears. Music is blaring in the megastore all day long. Usually it’s garbage, not music. No one I know gets it. Megastores are huge. They’re enormous, usually two floors. Where I work, there are three. Libla is German, but it’s spreading through all of Europe. They have stores throughout Germany, from the Upper Saxony to Bavaria, and it’s well established in France, in Benelux, and in Portugal. They’re struggling in Great Britain and Spain. Now they’re trying to catch on in Italy.
“Libla,” our manager Augh says, “was made to kick the asses of those bastards at Fnac, Mondadori, and Feltrinelli.” Competition is quite the bogeyman, to the point that manager Augh—Ottavio Cantoni—spent months photographing people who went in and out of those other megastores. Months stationed in front of the Feltrinelli across from the Largo di Torre Argentina, even longer in front of the Mondadori near the Trevi Fountain. There’s always a carrot-haired woman avidly smoking a cigarette in the pictures. I wondered if someone was photographing the boss while he photographed them. The redhead is in all his pictures. Who knows? Let’s drop the conspiracy theories. I still don’t know whether Cantoni is gay or not. I mean at times it seems like he is, with his lurching sashay, and other times he seems riveted by the clientele’s tits. It’s unusual. If he fucked around some, Boss Cantoni would be better off, that’s for sure. He strikes me as someone who’s been chaste for millennia. Kind of like me. I’ve been chaste my whole life. At least I don’t take it out on other people. Maybe Cantoni would treat us better if he got laid.
He definitely wouldn’t be so obsessed with orifices. Orifices, empty spaces, gaps. An important rule when you work in a megastore is to never let anyone see the gaps. Everything has to be covered with books, DVDs, CDs, cassette tapes, calendars, planners, photos. The megastore is huge, you get the idea? No, huge is reductive. It’s an enormous piazza. But—and here’s the rub—there are only a few of us to do everything. Sometimes an orifice eludes us. The display wall remains just that, a wall, a hole, a void. If Boss Cantoni doesn’t realize it, maybe one of my coworkers comes to save the day. My colleagues are usually dog-tired, though, and might also pass by the gap thousands of times without seeing anything. Boss Cantoni sees it the one thousand and first time. And that’s it.
In my first month of work I didn’t think a human being could have such a reaction. If they’d have told me, “Zuhra, get ready,” well, I’d have laughed. Instead I began changing colors, appearance, essence. I shuddered. My fear was incapacitating. Boss Cantoni doesn’t shout, he just makes you feel like a piece of dried-up shit. He takes you to the orifice. You see the yellow wall. He identifies the orifice, menacingly pointing his finger. You keep looking at the yellow wall. He says the word: “hole.” Not like we common mortals would, no. His voice becomes metallic. It ricochets. The letters disperse instantly. The H seems light years away from the O and the same goes for the L from the E. The sound comes directly from the great beyond. It siphons off your life and energy. You try a remedy, flinging an old Mina record or the Six Feet Under box set up on that damn wall. You do something, anything. It doesn’t matter if the hole isn’t your department’s responsibility. It’s your fault all the same. You passed by and it was your job to see it, cover it, fix it.
Here’s how Libla’s three floors are divided. The music department is by the entrance. You’ll find everything there, from Celia Cruz’s salsa to ABBA ballads. The books are on the lower level: fiction, nonfiction, cookbooks. Films are on the top floor. Everyone in the megastore has a department. When I interviewed they asked me, “What kinds of things do you like, miss?” I remember the question because I was asked by a potato-nosed, tortoiseshell glasses–wearing girl who seemed to be in urgent need of a line of coke. I’m always empathizing with people, this is my biggest problem. “Books,” I responded. The tortoiseshell girl said, “What else?” I said, “Film?” The interrogative tone came out of nowhere. The tortoise woman made me doubt myself. Naturally, they placed me in the music department.
Okay, the records are beautiful, they shine like the sun, you can use them to comb your eyebrows, but beyond this what point do they serve? I don’t understand anything about them. I tried explaining this to the coke addict. But, sniff, and she went into drug-induced shock
. Music, what is it? For example, what difference is there between jazz and nu jazz? The fuck do I know? And British pop, how is it any different from Swedish pop? Again, I don’t fucking know! The distinction between Brazilian chorinho and bossa nova? Huh? Mozart and Salieri? This I do know. Salieri was a scumbag. You have to know music well to sell it. That’s how it used to be. Books, though, are something I know well. A lesson on Decadentism? Sure. Aestheticism? Why not? The Generation of ’27? Claro que sí. How about an annotated reading of Kourouma’s Allah Is Not Obliged? Goddamn, I can’t wait! Even with movies I don’t play around. Hell, I was watching Griffith before he became fashionable in Italy and I know all of Fassbinder by heart. I’m not kidding. But music…shit, I’m an amateur.
I’m not always in the music department, so my colleagues don’t pay me much mind. They think of me as a kind of prostitute who goes around with anyone. One who isn’t faithful to the department or her products. Rita, a big girl who looks like a WWI German tank, told me one day: “You don’t deserve to be called a record-seller, you’re only a stocker.” I’d been working there for two months, and to be stripped of the honorific of record-seller really broke my heart. Rita’s face, usually polished and smooth like marble, became grotesque when she said the word “stocker.” Her lips suddenly became pendulous, the skin around her nose dried, and her usually curly hair wilted like spaghetti napolitan. Stocker. At Libla it was a repulsive word. Stockers were treated like the untouchables of India. Some tolerated us, others openly displayed their hostility.
The manager never gave us the official title of stockers. He never gave a formal address telling us, “As of today, you are appointed by Libla S.p.A. in the official role of.…” No, Cantoni doesn’t make speeches. Cantoni acts, and he does it like a bulldozer. He couldn’t give two fucks about your feelings. I go back and forth between the records I consider part of my department, then sometimes I go up to the films and other times I cover the kids’ section. It’s a real mess. I never know how to move things in the kids’ section, and when I go there I make a fool of myself. The customers lose their patience and swear at me, which is frustrating. I’m a good worker. I don’t deserve offensive words.
