by Salim Bachi
In line with UN standards, the food was good. Although completely tasteless, it provided the necessary calories to keep an organism going. The living conditions were acceptable.
You had free board and lodging for months before being sent home, if you didn’t die of despair first.
“But it’s a concentration camp!” said Robinson, the same Robinson who had wanted to eat a child.
I had to spend what little money I had left to pay a refugee-smuggler to help me escape from this earthly paradise. After that, a Calabrian charitable organization transported us to Cetraro, where we were thrown into the tomato fields to work from morning till night in the hope of getting a residence permit. Carlo Moro was our generous benefactor, a man who boasted that he had sent fifteen ships filled with radioactive waste to the bottom of the sea. He was the owner, on paper at least, of an industrial-waste treatment plant. They had to make a living somehow, these Calabrians who had joined forces within a strange corporation, the ’Ndrangheta, the kind of consortium that is so widespread in Italy and has made the peninsula famous.
IWOULD HAVE LEFT my field of tomatoes and peppers and run as fast as my legs could carry me to the bus stop for Rome, if I had not, unfortunately, fallen in love with Vitalia, Carlo Moro’s youngest daughter.
Vitalia was a voluptuous maiden with a quick tongue. When she saw me for the first time, she seemed a little shy. She lowered her eyelids and her long black lashes fluttered like little butterflies. That was all it took to entrance me and ensure that I willingly accepted the lousy conditions of my captivity. It begged the question whether Carlo Moro wasn’t serving his innocent young daughter up to the men he’d enslaved.
I loved Vitalia and Vitalia loved life. She was like a plant or a wild animal. She danced in the wind and sea spray like a whirlwind of joy, trailing in her wake everything that brought life to Cetraro, a seaside resort frequented by European tourists who came to savour the delights of a radioactive sea.
I’d made friends with some of the other captives, foreigners working for nothing for men like Carlo Moro. The entire peninsula was living off the labour of thousands of illegal immigrants forced to pick tomatoes and peppers, press olives and harvest grapes; and be humiliated by men who treated them like animals.
Carlo Moro wasn’t like that. He was a rogue with a heart of gold. His grandfather had come from Sicily and had instilled in him that sense of honour so famous on the island where Odysseus had narrowly avoided shipwreck. Those macho feelings had their drawbacks, which obviously caused me some concern, but it would be too boring to list them here.
It took a great deal of cunning to contrive a meeting with Vitalia once she had ordered me to do so with her long black lashes. The young woman was sweetly lascivious. Vitalia liked to undress in front of me and I was always torn between my burning desire and the chilling prospect of being caught in the act by Carlo Moro.
In the evening, quiet as a cat, she’d slip into my hut where I was relaxing with a book. When she undressed, revealing her full breasts, and I gazed at that spectacular body with its silken skin as she lightly caressed her hardened nipples with a slender hand, I couldn’t help thinking of Caravaggio, sick with fever and all alone on a Tuscan beach. Then I would feel a terrible sadness that associated the marvels and raptures of the flesh with the black death celebrated by Homer. Vitalia drew closer and pressed her flat stomach against my face, arching her back so that I had to press my lips against her velvety skin. I followed the contours of her navel as my young mistress gave a low moan, quiet as the evening breeze over the beach, and I slipped my eager tongue inside her while, with my fingers, I spread the firm, round globes that completed the slope of her back. Then, in her deep, husky voice she sang a sort of song as my throat filled with the salty flood of the deep, and love, death, life and negated time spilled over my face, pinned between the thighs of a woman consumed by desire.
ALONE ON THE BEACH, I’d sketch Vitalia’s body in the sand; it was often a long curve, like a child’s drawing, or the simple lines executed by artists at the peak of their powers. Her long black hair followed the line of the waves caressing the shore; as the sea withdrew, it left behind mounds suggesting her stomach and breasts, the small of her back and her hips, rounded and full as the moon.
When she joined me in my hut, she would undress quickly and press her firm, lithe body against mine. These rapturous embraces would last all night. She would sometimes come and find me during the day and we’d hide behind a dune or a beach-house fence. Then she would remove my trousers or shorts and take me in her mouth, her wavy hair cascading over my thighs. She would devour me for long minutes while I enjoyed her, the sun, the silvery patches of light on her tanned skin, the surf, the breeze in the dry grass, and then I’d spill into her mouth and my semen flowed like lava over my stomach.
At other times, I’d pull her close and undress her like a delicate, silent doll. She’d let me lift up her flimsy dress and kiss her breasts. I’d spread her legs, she’d wriggle away like an eel, turn over laughing and arching her back, and I’d recapture her, cover her with my body, pushing myself between her buttocks without entering her, my face working its way up the nape of her neck to her fragrant mane of hair. An eternity passed as we remained locked together, entwined like mythical androgynes or those dyads created by the philosopher who remembered and reproduced his youthful passions as abstract images.
How old was Vitalia? She seemed very young sometimes during the day but, at night, she reached maturity, as if the moon in its fullness had endowed her with all the attributes of womanhood. Her age remained a mystery, though. She was no longer Carlo Moro’s daughter, but Vitalia, princess by day, queen of the night, a goddess invented for me. She was siren and saint, virgin and whore, or even more nebulous, like a sacred image from the mind of a sailor in solitary confinement or trapped in the belly of the whale, who, to avoid dying of despair, fills his prison with paradisaical visions in which a woman fresh as a flower keeps him company.
The dream was shattered when Carlo Moro caught us making love. He attacked me, and a fierce fight ensued from which it was a miracle I escaped. I climbed out of the window to elude the jealous father, the way they do in films, and ran off into the night.
How many immigrants had met with a terrible fate for fondling a local man’s daughter? They were accused of rape and strung up or stoned to death by the crowd—and with good reason, since the local press would always stand up for their homeland after it had been defiled by a foreigner. Even in Carthago, punitive actions were often taken against some boy caught with his hand up the skirt of a girl whose father, fiercely in favour of the death penalty, turned his neighbourhood against the enemy camp to such an extent that the descendants of the rival families would still be at war centuries later, even though they no longer knew the real reason for their enmity. Everyone has their Montagues and their Capulets. Or their Horatius and their Curiatii. When Horatia, Horatius’s younger sister, came to meet her brother at the Porta Capena, she recognized the cloak of her betrothed, a Curiatius killed by Horatius, draped over her brother’s shoulders. She loosed her hair and wept. His sister’s laments aroused Horatius’s wrath. He drew his sword and, stabbing the young woman in the heart, he upbraided her, crying, “Begone to your betrothed with your ill-timed love, since you have forgotten your brothers, both the dead and the living, and forgotten your country.”
And he added, “So perish every Roman woman who mourns a foe!”
After killing three Curiatii, the valiant Horatius murdered his own sister, Horatia.
Terrible Horatius should have been executed for this crime. He appealed to the people who pardoned him, still exhilarated by his victories over the Curiatii. From that time on, it was the right of any Roman citizen, faced with the threat of death or exile, to be judged by the populace, if he so desired. This custom came in very handy and allowed many murderers to escape punishment for their heinous crimes.
I was on the beach, hidden behind some lentisk t
rees, when I heard the sound of cascading water. The noise speeded up as though someone had turned on a tap in the dry grass. I dropped Livy and his Roman histories, stood up and, burning with curiosity, headed for the musical waters. Behind a small shrub squatted a woman with her skirt hiked up over her shapely legs, and white lace panties around her ankles. When she saw me, Sinbad, looking like a noble savage from some storybook or an Odysseus washed up on the shores of Phaeacia, she gave a cry of surprise and attempted to stand up. Naturally she fell over backwards and the wet earth soiled her white panties. I apologized and held out my hand to the young woman, pretending to look away to spare her blushes. She scrambled to her feet, pulled her skirt down over her thighs, and threw the flimsy panties into the bushes.
“I couldn’t hold it in any longer,” she said guilelessly.
She spoke in French with a slight southern accent and a hint of Italian musicality. It was delightful. My first thought was that I, Sinbad, who had been living on this beach to escape the clutches of Carlo Moro, certainly hadn’t expected to meet a woman who cared so little about her modesty in such compromising circumstances. Giovanna had the bold soul of a Man Friday. I was her Man Saturday. She grabbed my hand and led me away, as Nausicaa had once done with her Odysseus.
GIOVANNA LIVED IN ROME and worked at the famous Villa Medici, where she assisted its no less famous director, Corneille Paduzzi di Balto, a writer, producer and painter in his spare time; a painter of little girls. He’d sketched Giovanna at the age of twelve, lying languidly on a sofa, her short blue skirt pulled up over her thighs and her short-sleeved blouse open over her barely developed breasts. The picture was now in the collection of the famous Henri-François Donadieu and could be seen in a well-known gallery in Venice. Giovanna told everyone that Paduzzi di Balto’s pencil had barely touched her and that he hadn’t defiled her youthful beauty. If he had, she would never have continued to work for the direttore.
In private, when she pressed her firm, lithe body against mine, it was another story: it wasn’t just his pencil that the famoso direttore had used on the young Giovanna.
She was proud of sacrificing her innocence to her Pygmalion’s masterful artistry. Paduzzi di Balto was now very old, so he hardly ever left his ground-floor apartment in the Villa Medici; he no longer had enough strength to paint his small-scale models. He could no longer pin butterflies to his canvases, like the famous writer whose name he’d now forgotten; he languished and waited for death by his window overlooking the gardens of the Renaissance residence, where tall umbrella pines stood silhouetted against the Roman sky. If he happened to walk past one of those water nymphs, he would give chase, but he never caught one.
When I arrived at the Villa, the maestro was already a mere shadow of his former self. He had to be kept away from these Lolitas—not because they were in any particular danger from the poor direttore, but because he might embark on a headlong chase through thickets and over lawns, clambering over old stones and through murderous brambles, in hot pursuit of the young objects of his fantasies without any care for his own safety. If he were to fall, this ninety-year-old Solomon ran the risk of ending up with limbs dislocated like a puppet’s and dying in the very place he had sinned, or almost. So the staff, who were all members of the same Abruzzi family who, generation after generation, had been appointed to imaginary posts in the noble academy, donned kid gloves to handle the old fool, as they called him.
Giovanna had been his last victim and the experience had left her with the type of nervous complications suffered by those who have come into contact too early with the harsh realities of art. She had eaten of the fruit while it was still unripe and was having to strain to pass the stone. Her behaviour could be very strange. She was cheerful and captivating one minute, and so melancholy and depressed the next that you had to hide sharp or pointed objects from her, keep her away from windows and bind her wrists to stop her trying to cut them. Weeks would also go by when she was perfectly stable, healthy in body and mind. Then suddenly she would have a complete emotional and physical meltdown. I couldn’t get over her inventiveness and her remarkable flexibility in bed. At those times, she was a whispering, screaming ball of passion. Fortunately, we lived in one of the pavilions at the far end of the garden, beside the Orange Tree Garden, where the ghosts of former residents gathered and chatted about Villa affairs.
These ghosts were the damned souls of earlier lodgers, second-rate artists who’d been exiled from France to the sinister city of Rome. The poor souls had departed this life in the Villa in the nineteenth century and were still roaming their Golgotha. The only ones to escape were Berlioz, who went on to compose and orchestrate the huge Witches’ Sabbath of his Symphonie Fantastique, a danse macabre inspired by the Villa and Rome, and Debussy, who’d survived academic failure to be the famous composer of endangered, moonlit music. I also wondered if the man who composed Carmen wouldn’t come to haunt the Orange Tree Garden, since he never recovered from his stay in this hellhole and died on his return to Paris, although not before he’d had time to present the world with his terrifying opera created from lies, borrowings from Spanish music and lecherous practices taught him by the whores of Rome.
IV
FROM MY WINDOW, I could see the umbrella pines. The sky over the greys of Rome. The countless towns overlapping each other along the Tiber, between the seven hills. And Carthago, in the distance, swallowed up by memory and terrible massacres, while death did the rounds like a popular rumour. I heard the noise of boots, the clatter of weapons, the yells. I thought about my father. My mother died when I was seven, my magic number, so I’d been raised by that old woman, Lalla Fatima, who told me stories about horrible legends, awful tales about a Sleeper and his dog, about seven avengers who would wake at the end of time. I lived in fear of witnessing the arrival of that day. Of course, it never came or, rather, almost never, since you’re here now with your dog.
My father had disappeared like Romulus, abducted by the gods of the time: the henchmen employed by the reign of terror that started in Carthago after the Romans left. Or the French. I was losing track of invasions and mixing up periods. The sanctuary-town of Carthago was no help in sorting out my memories. The town embodied the history of a sunken civilization. Even its name should have disappeared without trace after the havoc wreaked by the Romans, its soil blighted by fire and salt to prevent rebirth.
And yet it had risen again from its ashes, gathering up its bloody rags and soaring towards a glorious sky, before tumbling back into enslavement. That was another story totally irrelevant to the life of a modern man born with the invention of the moon and colour TV. I didn’t care a jot about History with a capital “H”, that bloodthirsty goddess who had slyly got her hooks into me in the form of a civil war—the terrible plague that had befallen this new Thebes, where every son had become a mighty Oedipus, murdering his father and sleeping with his mother between sticky sheets. Yes, Carthago had hatched new fires that were even more destructive than the ones lit by the ragtag Roman soldiers.
So I was a fearful, unambitious child, who understood nothing of the world around him. I was ill-prepared for the life I was going to lead as an adult once I’d completely frittered away the fortune I’d inherited from my father, once I’d left to travel the paths of the world, driven by need. I found myself in Rome, thrown into the She-Wolf’s den by one of those tricks played by history. Rome had burnt Carthago to the ground, holding it up to public ridicule and forbidding the construction of new ramparts to replace the old ones. Rome, the enemy of Africa, and yet no less African, noisy, dusty and drowsy under a sun that encouraged flies and ancient acts of violence.
PEOPLE DON’T LIKE travelling and that’s a fact. Or else they’re tourists. Rome was overflowing with them. You should have seen them in the Piazza di Spagna, forming a dense mass around Bernini’s boat fountain, like flies on fresh dung or a decaying carcass, the gamy meat of an outdated concept: art. Art was finished now; people kissed relics en masse but threw shit at
artists, who were allowed to die like fish out of water, suffocating with their gills gaping open. No witnesses, no pilgrims wandering into the void to sniff at the artists’ arses, just a few curious onlookers, watching the beached creatures’ convulsions and applauding as if they were at the circus. In fact, if you went out into the desolate square early in the morning, you could see that Bernini’s fountain wasn’t half bad—it was even rather beautiful, set against the backdrop of the staircase leading up to the church of Trinità dei Monti. It had style, that gallant, lonely boat sailing towards a cascade of steps, en route to glory, preparing to climb its Calvary, hailed by Keats. But, sadly, the church was sheathed, Roman-style, in a giant advertisement, like some promotional condom. What an eyesore! And those Hominids in shorts, with their fat, slovenly, rowdy, sanctimonious females who were certainly not a pretty sight with all that flabby flesh, that composition of stretch marks, varicose veins and a hundredweight of faecal matter. Since the death of the Immobile Pope, the city was always packed, overrun by the barbarian hordes who were in danger of blocking up the sewers and causing a shitty acqua alta. The world was going to the dogs, particularly if no one put a stop to this influx. Adventures were out of the question now: there were no more empty spaces, no more wildernesses.
I thought back to ancient times when the first navigators, like my distant ancestor, the Sinbad of legend, sailed the Indian Ocean, but they never encountered these freaks in shorts, their photographic muzzles crowned by baseball caps. In those blessed, long-forgotten times, you could still die alone on a deserted beach like Caravaggio.
Finding a desolate shore now was unlikely. Lost in memories, I watched the ghosts of those who had inhabited my childhood. My father would take me fishing on the beaches of Carthago at a time when those beaches allowed such magical escapades. It was before the war that cast a dark glow over my youth. There were such depths to the night under the Milky Way: that long spermatic tail fertilizing thousands of stars, which squirmed in the dark like maggots.