by Igiaba Scego
We threw many parties. Ernesto was like mother. He sang, but with a modern twist. He liked Dylan, as well as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He never believed in the rivalry between the two bands. He was right. He loved fado most of all. Sometimes he would grab his guitar and accompany Mother in one of her ballads of betrayal, jealousy, and death. He mixed Portuguese with the Lunfardo of tango. Mother and Ernesto’s styles blended. They were fantastic. They would drag your intestines out from the sarcophagus of your bones. I shivered for weeks whenever I listened to those Portuguese words I barely understood. They hit me straight on like a fist.
“I’m Maria Severa’s heir,” Mother told everyone. No one in Buenos Aires knew about Maria Severa. My father, the son of Italians, at best knew of Caruso. No one had ever heard anyone speak of Maria. I took a survey once among my peers. “Loca,” was the response I got. Mother stood, statuesque with her immense chest, and repeated that name infinitely, Maria. Then, solemnly, she said her last name too: Severa. On those occasions, my father became as small as a Dachshund puppy. Only his moustache stayed upright on a face otherwise made invisible. It was obvious that he would die soon. When Ernesto was kidnapped, he’d been dead for more than three years. It was a blessing. At least he believed we were happy.
Then I learned who Maria Severa was—a prostitute. She sang in the slums of an alcoholic Lisbon. Mother was also from the slums. She put fish under salt in the mornings and might have let herself have some in the evenings. She never told us anything about her, about her past life, about Portugal. She sang, but never reminisced. I don’t know how she came to Argentina. It’s almost as though her life began with her love for my father, that dark Italian who reeked of misery and humor. They were a stunning couple.
I couldn’t say the same of Carlos and I. I was very Italian. I’d inherited that skittishness and ruggedness from my father. I don’t believe I inherited anything from the Portuguese. Another kind of ruggedness, perhaps. Carlos, though, he was perfection. His colors never clashed. He was pastel-hued. I think of the soldier’s water hazing rituals when he, with his pastel colors, had entered naval school. I imagine water sliding delicately over his soldierly body. It doesn’t drench him, it doesn’t disturb the perfection of his military colors. Carlos had studied at Esma. It was a school. A school with desks and pencils. On one side, there were those who studied, the professors who gave lessons. On the other, there was an area designated for torture. Carlos was there before, at Esma. He’d gotten in by working like a mule. Then he returned later. He put the picana on people’s testicles. He didn’t tell me these things when we went to bed together, at first. He often fucked me from behind. I rarely looked him in the eyes. If I did, I might have seen the capuchas of the people who went through his hands. He applied the picana to people’s testicles. I learned it after we were together for some time.
My mother also knew. One evening, she slapped me and said: “No mereces que te llame puta.” It was a slap without fury. Something like an observation. She had been a puta. She knew that all whores retained a shred of dignity. I’d gambled that away. I let myself get fucked from behind by someone who may have tortured my brother.
I should tell you about Ernesto, though I don’t know what to say. He was a brother like any other, perhaps better than others. He ran himself into the ground at the villas miserias. He wasn’t a politician. He only believed that humanity had to help itself out. They took him along with his betrothed. They called her Flaca because she was skeletal, a stalk. Her real name was Rosa Benassi. She also had an Italian father. She, however, was not unrefined. She had a face from the Renaissance, like one of Leonardo’s Madonnas. With none of the ruddiness, though. She was too thin.
I met her in Rome five days after meeting your father.
I’d like to tell you about her. That’s why I’m writing.
THE PESSOPTIMIST
The bundle was ready. The year was 1975. The mother began telling her daughter about her first departure from Mogadishu, when she left everything to follow her man, her daughter’s father. “Everybody came to see me off and you were so small, Zuhra.” A sob caught in her throat. Maryam Laamane found herself crying again. She had always been quick to cry. She didn’t know how to refuse the past. She restarted the recorder many times. She pressed stop and then record and then stop once more and then went back to hear herself again, forward to get past herself, then she pressed record again. She was having a good time. The two-colored buttons were like a toy piano to her. They rekindled her childish spirit, which was never completely dormant. She had fun. The buttons were a distraction but her voice didn’t entertain her at all. It was serious and solemn. No, Maryam, what are you doing? That won’t do. You’re too composed. Do you want that poor girl to die of boredom? Of course, Zuhra wasn’t a little girl anymore, but an exquisite, thirty-year-old big girl. She was a woman. Yet she saw her as a child. She had wanted more than anything to overwhelm her with cuddles and hugs. But people didn’t do that in Somalia, people didn’t touch one another that much. Eeb, a shame. Because of that, people tried loving each other without touching excessively. And those who were touched hid behind some wall.
Maryam rewound the tape and began relating the time when she’d prepared her luggage and took a plane to join her husband, Elias, in his Italian exile. “I don’t know why I’m starting from the middle,” the woman said, “I’ve never been good at respecting the order of time and words. Howa Rosario complained about it all the time. She said that my stories had no rhyme or reason, you couldn’t understand anything, it was hard keeping up. But you do, Zuzu, you keep up with Mama. I’m trying to piece together all the fragments of us.”
In the middle of Maryam Laamane’s story was the journey. Before that, an image of her nostalgia: her neighborhood, her tribe come to say farewell on that day in 1975. Maryam, a young woman at the time, had a heavy heart. She knew she wasn’t leaving for vacation. They knew it too. The whole neighborhood, the entire tribe. Everyone had a thousand requests.
“If you see Nur, can you bring him this handmade otka? Nur loves meat. He stirs it with rice. Don’t forget, Maryam. Nur loves it so much.” And if it wasn’t otka for Nur, it was some other devilry to take to the land of the whites. In the end Maryam was weighed down with bags. Farewells and bags from those who had loved ones overseas.
“I can’t take anything else, I’m sorry. Maximum is twenty kilos of luggage, they told me. Otherwise they’ll throw everything away,” she explained to her neighbors. “Friends, please, I can’t…” They were not offended. Some, however, kept insisting, because you never know. Maybe at customs the police would turn a blind eye, and besides, Maryam was so beautiful, certainly she would be able to add a little something. Everyone knew that customs officers let attractive girls add a tiny bit more. She only needed to try, to take a chance. “But here, my dear. It doesn’t weigh anything. My package is light, see? It won’t cost you a thing to take it. That way you can make Nur happy. Poor boy, he’s so homesick. When he calls me he always speaks of our fat, fragrant grapefruits. Who knows what he would give for a good taste of sweet grapefruit. Where he is, and where you’re going, my dear, the grapefruits are sour. They burn your stomach. They make you cry. May God curse Barre and his progeny. Ah, all our children go away. They want to light a fire under my Nur’s ass, you know? Because he thinks, Nur’s someone who thinks a lot. Day and night. Would you bring my Nur some grapefruits? They don’t weigh much, I swear! Squeeze them in there, right there…on the side. They don’t take up space, you see? It’s so easy. My Nur thinks. He needs some sweet grapefruits to be able to keep doing it.”
The people insisted. Maryam felt guilty for not being able to help everyone. Those were deplorable years. Barre came to power on October 21, 1969. He lit fires under everyone’s asses. With communism as an excuse, he said that everyone was equal, but that he was more equal than others and was entitled to more because the country couldn’t do without him. Maryam committed his speeches to memory. She stud
ied his words so that she could use them one day in the chamber of an international tribunal. Those words were written with the blood of Somalis, those who stood in opposition, those who dreamed of a true democracy, those who wanted to live a dignified life.
Even the common people couldn’t stomach Siad’s lies. They knew he would never defend them, the story he told on every radio show and in every official speech about the Ethiopian enemy at the borders was a scam, and the nation’s only enemy was the man himself. Many decided to leave Somalia, “for a little while, at least until he kicks the bucket. Until democracy returns.”
It was the seventies and people still believed in the future. No one at the time thought, however, that their escape would become an eternal destiny for Somalis, an ineluctable karma. No one imagined that twenty years later a war would break out between brothers, between Somalis, to divide the blood-soaked power that tyrant Barre left behind. A hemorrhage of people, ceaseless, shameless, everlasting. Somalis began leaving in the seventies because of politics and continued in the eighties because of famine, in the nineties because of civil war, and so forth, without interruption, in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and today, at this exact moment, all the time. There is always fleeing, a notorious and nearly unavoidable fate for Somalis. First there was Barre the communist, who requested a glass of blood every morning, and meanwhile people left arm-in-arm with the Americans and the thieves of the Italian Socialist Party. The war was left to others, those with strange names and startling hunger.
“Would you bring some grapefruits to my Nur? Allah will repay you. Allah is sure to repay the generous.”
Maryam was about to join her husband. She felt good because soon she would kiss Elias on the mouth. She dreamed of his breathing every night. She took the sack of grapefruits and tucked them in the side of her bundle, squashing them a bit. “Nur lives in Milan,” they explained. What is Milan? Maryam Laamane wondered. She was only familiar with Termini Station. They’d told her to go there and make no detours because that was where people reimagined their dreams. That was where people found all the Somalis again. She knew that because Elias was at the station and he’d written her a letter. What was Milan? Was it far, this Milan? Could you walk there from Termini Station? Would the grapefruits last until then?
A kiss on the right cheek. One on the left. The third on the forehead. From everyone. A hug. Another hug. For everyone. A tear. For her. Busy as she was with packages and grapefruits, Maryam almost didn’t notice her auntie’s shadow. The shadow was quite menacing, partly because her auntie never hugged anyone. Usually, as everyone knew, she opened her mouth only to reprove. Sometimes she gave advice, but only in front of her burjiko, her coal-fired oven. She was a mature auntie, aging with few pleasures. Maryam shuddered. She was leaving. All she wanted was hugs, not nerves.
The woman came to give her a hug. Maryam felt suffocated, like she was dying. Her auntie didn’t want others to see that she was hurting from this departure, and so she hid her face in her niece’s wide bosom. Maryam was astounded. Despite wanting the old woman’s affection, she hadn’t expected it. The shaash barely covered her auntie’s head. She looked like a spinster who didn’t know how to behave in front of people. Her scarf slid indecently down her neck. Maryam tried readjusting it some, indiscriminately. She thought about how things never stayed put on her beloved auntie’s head. A pointless task, the hand slow, the fall swift. Hair to the wind, her auntie was like a virgin. No one noticed the hair. No one was scandalized. Her niece noticed, though. She saw that her auntie had an intricate white forest on her head. The smell of ginger mixed slightly with that of mildew. It was the odor of experience, a good smell, of someone who sees the world for what it is.
Her auntie knew the ways of the world very well. Maryam had always known this. She knew it even though she’d never left Somalia. “Take this money,” she said to her niece, “it will help you over there in Italy.” Italy—that was where the girl was going. Italy. Termini Station. It was big money. Ancient. Maryam looked it over. It was like nothing she’d seen before. She didn’t say a word. She accepted the gift, folded the enormous banknotes and stuck them in her bra, as though they were rarities, as though someone would actually want to steal them. The bundle was ready. “Niece, go and write me. Tell me whether there are women with three breasts in Italy like they told me.”
Yes, Auntie, I’ll tell you, the niece thought. I’ll tell you about the three breasts and the five mouths and, yes, I’ll tell you about the holes in the Colosseum, but let me go now, let me go because I have a long journey ahead. Her aunt held her tightly by the arm.
“You will miss this land, girl. You will miss it, you know that?”
After that she gave her, in addition to the money, a small sack filled with sand. “I took it at Seguunda Lido early this morning. Smell it when you feel bad.”
Maryam placed the sack in her handbag. Too bad her bra was already occupied by those oversized bills. The sack contained something genuinely precious. She would make Elias smell it, too, as soon as she arrived at her destination, by her lover’s side.
Auntie Salado, as the staid woman was called, had said she’d slept with an Italian during the years when the fascists were Somalia’s masters.
She grabbed Maryam by the arm. “Remember to get a good look at the three-breasted women!”
“Yes, Auntie Salado, I’ll tell you about the women with three breasts and five mouths, I’ll tell you about the holes in the Colosseum. I’ll tell you everything. Let me go now. Otherwise I’ll miss the flight. Let me go.” The aunt reluctantly let go of her arm. It was the last time they saw one another. Auntie Salado, tell me, were you in love with the Italian who made you his?
“It’s a shame you never met Auntie Salado, my Zuhra. She made the best sanbusi.” Maryam’s recording meandered aimlessly. That’s how it was when she began telling a story from the middle, everything seemed permissible. Going forward, doubling back, stopping, losing oneself. Maryam was reminded of two days earlier. She was at Termini, about to board the train that would take her to Prima Porta to bury Howa Rosario, and she ran into that idiot Gor Gor. Oh, how she hated that man. The Vulture, everyone called him. An old Somali drunk who begged for spare change to buy shots. And if you didn’t give it to him there was hell to pay. He called you sharmuta in all the languages of the world. If you didn’t give it to him you were a whore, sharmuta, puttana, putain, puta. Maryam Laamane didn’t like that imbecile at all. She didn’t like drunks in general. They reminded her too much of herself when she was one of them, when she was seduced by the translucence of gin in the early morning. She’d been like Gor Gor. She begged for change for a few drops of gin and people, not just Somalis, laughed behind her back, repulsed. Gor Gor was also obsessed with Mussolini. He thought himself a fascist. Ridiculous, a black fascist!
The morning she went to bury Howa Rosario, Gor Gor was declaiming the Duce’s words. The year 1936, the imperial year. Maryam told her daughter this in the recording. She emphasized the word “imperial” with a quiver of indignation in her voice. There was nothing imperial about puny little Italy; it was merely a clump of voracious people who didn’t know how to ask for forgiveness. Gor Gor’s words bounced brazenly off the walls. Those words still hurt Maryam, who was curled up in front of the recorder in the middle of her living room. She tried not making a big deal of it. The words were sharpened like a porcupine’s quills. It was difficult not to feel them, they stung. She wouldn’t die, but they opened wounds nonetheless. Maryam didn’t like remembering that year. 1936. Her wrath was depleted by the violence inflicted upon her family. It was the year her father died.
He died, they’d told her, on Graziani’s southern front. She didn’t remember much about that man who died at the Battle of the Ogaden. She didn’t know anything about him except that he had very large hands and had gone to conquer the empire for the Italians. He was ruddy, this she remembered well, and his skin was almost diaphanous. Not white, but something close to it. There was a photogra
ph of her father that circulated in the family. He was wrapped in white fabric and a turban. Her papa was a du-bat and he’d gone to fight the Ethiopians in Abyssinia, to invade them, in a sense. It wasn’t a pretty thing. He was coerced, like many others, and forced to kill people. He wasn’t particularly upset with his Ethiopian neighbors. They were gaalo, but who cared. They would have to answer to Allah about their infidelity, it wasn’t his job to convert them. In fact, he didn’t really think about them at all. But he happened to be summoned. They took him from the street, forced him to leave his job, made him wear two strips of white fabric, and sent him to bring ruin to other blacks like himself. To his brethren, the people of the Horn.
Her father was involved in many battles but didn’t die in one. It was an Italian, theoretically on the same side, who killed him. He was cleaning his weapon when a shot inadvertently fired. Even today many argue over “inadvertently.” Some of his companions-in-arms maintain that the Italian was a complete swine and that Maryam Laamane’s father said something the swine didn’t like. Shot fired, father gone, truth uncertain. Her mother died shortly after of a broken heart. Maryam had always lived with her aunts and grandmother.
It was nice living with her aunts, including Auntie Salado, the strictest of them all. They were good to her. Of course, she gave them a lot to deal with when she was small, but the same wasn’t true of her brothers. In exchange, they didn’t control her too much. Maryam had quite a bit of space for herself in the city. She mostly used it to run. She liked following the flights of falcons from the ground. Maryam yearned to fly all day and find herself a bed on top of a star. Maryam Laamane ran. She ran happily. Her father died on Graziani’s southern front, her mother died of a broken heart, but her aunties filled her with sweet words so that she wouldn’t think, so that she wouldn’t cry. One day as she was running she saw a group of boys. She knew one of them, he was always fighting with her brothers. She passed them as she ran.
