“Bakhita! Bakhita, come here!”
That is how it happened, as simply as that. Just as it takes only one step to cross a frontier, and it takes only a signature to end a war, the thing you have hoped for over many years happens in a minute. Bakhita goes over. She is bought for the fifth time, bought by a man called Callisto Legnani, the Italian consul in Khartoum. And this man will change the course of her life.
When she comes before this master, Signore Legnani, on the first day, Bakhita prostrates herself, forehead to floor, arms outstretched, hands forward, and hears an order she does not understand. She kisses her master’s feet, one after the other, three times, but the master repeats his order. In Arabic this time: Taali! Stand up. She stands up, eyes lowered, heart beating wildly, already unnerved by this new world in which, once again, she is doing the wrong thing. Guardami. She does not understand. She feels the master’s hand on her, recoils instinctively when he takes her chin and forces her to look up, she knows she must not pull back, must obey everything, but she does not understand what he is saying. He speaks in Arabic again: Shufi ilia! Look at me! But she does not know how to do this. Look a man in the face. Least of all a master. She is filled with panic, looks into his eyes, cannot read what is in them, bites the inside of her lips to stop herself crying, avoid being sent away already, she looks at him but knows it is wrong to do this, he releases her chin and walks away. Nods several times, as if alone and terribly sad. Then he waves over a serving woman, utters more incomprehensible words, Bakhita apologizes several times, Asfa, asfa, but it is too late, the servant, a light-skinned woman, takes her away. Bakhita follows with her head lowered, she does not know where the slaves live in this house, in which courtyard they are beaten, she walks along corridors and comes to a dark, moist room filled with steam. The servant points to a large copper basin, a very long, empty tub, and explains that Bakhita must get into it. She is not familiar with this torture. She obeys.
* * *
—
Bakhita was washed that day. The servant, Aïcha, gave her a bath. When she felt the soft water on her skin, Bakhita rediscovered the purity of river water, childhood games, and her own mother. And yet she sat there frozen, astonished, and on guard. When the water sluiced over her tangled hair, the servant combed and arranged it, Bakhita thought she was being prepared for celebrations held by the men, but deep down sensed this might be something else. The servant looked at her scarified skin, her gouged thigh, the scars on her back, her deformed feet, she gave a brief sad smile and poured the water so gently over Bakhita’s shoulders that once again the little slave girl thought that perhaps she was not being prepared for men.
Then Aïcha helped her out of the tub, handed her a sheet to dry herself, indicated that she should wait, and came back with a long white tunic embroidered with red threads and pearls. She stood squarely in front of Bakhita without a word, and as Bakhita did not move, they stayed like that for a moment, looking at each other, with the white tunic between them. Bakhita’s hair dripped onto the sheet, she thought she had exhausted all her tears, she had never wept with gratitude, and even in this moment, this moment of silence between Aïcha and herself, she did not believe it possible. A moment of exchanged looks. With no threat. And so she reached out her hand to take the tunic, and Aïcha helped her. She put her head through, the sleeves covered her arms, and the fabric slipped over her shoulders, stomach, legs, her whole body. All that emerged from the white tunic was the black of her face, as if sculpted by light, and miraculously not scarified. All the marks of infamy were hidden, the tunic was like a veil, modestly hiding her, and for the first time since she had been captured she felt there was a part of herself that belonged to her alone. Her body, the object of profit and so much violence, had been returned to her, now hidden from others, it became a secret. Her secret. It was the first.
* * *
—
And it is with this body rendered back to her, this body that will not be beaten or lusted after again, that she is gradually reacquainted with the human world. She has something to herself, and it is herself. She belongs to the master, but a small part of her life is protected. She knows it might end any day, for a reason she will not understand, a decision that will not be explained to her, a goodbye to which she will have no right. She is dressed, her hair is arranged, with pearls in it, she wears bracelets. It is pleasant, and under threat.
* * *
—
She asks for news of Kishmet from the consul’s slaves and servants, and the day that one of them asks by what distinguishing feature they might recognize Kishmet, she can think of no reply. Her preferences? Her voice? Her laugh? Her scars? Bakhita does not know. Her new name? Her children? Her former masters? Bakhita has no idea. She tries to count, to calculate the passage of time, tells herself Kishmet could be married to a soldier, living in one of Khartoum’s countless garrisons, or in the house of a wealthy merchant, in a vast harem, as there are said to be here, dancing to divert her mistresses, or worse…She does not want to think about it. She tries to rekindle the intuition she had in El Obeid, when she knew Kishmet was there, in the same town, close by. But the intuition has gone, and she could not say whether her sister is alive in her heart or in the city around her.
* * *
—
One morning the consul summons her to his office. He is an affable man who talks in a soft voice that is not always easy to hear, his presence is almost an absence, his kindness, a form of self-effacement. He asks Bakhita for the name of her village. He asks in Arabic, so that she understands. It is a surprising question, out of nowhere, bound to be disguising a trap. Or bad news. Has she spoken of Kishmet too much? Has something terrible happened to her village? She looks outside, it is early but the sky is already white, the heat hazing the horizon. She asks very quietly if there was fire.
“Fire? What fire?”
Fire. After abductions, there is always fire, but she dares not say this to the consul and simply stands there, head lowered, her heart trapped, battling a grim sense of foreboding.
“What is the name of your tribe?” he insists. “Your family?”
“La arif…” she murmurs. “I don’t know…”
“You don’t know? Try to think…I want to help you. Do you understand? To help you.”
She has heard that the master is a good man. That he has freed slaves. That he buys them in order to do that, set them free, and she wonders what they do, once they are free, in Khartoum.
“Tell me the name of your people. Your village. Your tribe.”
She looks up at him in astonishment. Realizes that he wants to help her but, more important, realizes she does not know the name of her tribe. She has this realization here, in this office that smells of leather and tobacco, the air swirled around by the huge ceiling fan, the sound it makes of stagnant wind. She does not know the name of her tribe! She thought she knew it, had never considered it, simply looked for her family, they exist because she loves them, they are waiting for her somewhere because she misses them and will join them…the name of her village. Her family’s name. Her head is full of Arab names, elusive questions…
“I don’t know,” she says again.
He does not seem surprised. He opens a drawer and spreads before her a piece of paper so large it covers the entire desk. He waves her closer. Tells her it is her country, Sudan. She grasps the enormity of this world she is seeing for the first time.
“You walked a long way. Where did you walk?”
She nods, yes, she walked a long way, for months, years, she walked a long way. Yes.
“But where did it start? Where were you before El Obeid? Where are you from? Which area?”
“Yes,” she murmurs.
He starts again, faster now, firmer.
“Was it more in the yellow areas, the green, or the gray? Were there mountains? Hills? The Blue Nile? The White Nile? It was in the west, wasn’t it?�
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He prods the map with his finger as if about to produce sand or water from it, she does not understand how the great river can be so thin, or where the stars and moon are, does not understand what the map shows. Remembers the last image of her village, two men near the banana palm.
She looks at the map. “I don’t know,” she says again.
The consul does not lose heart.
“What animals did you have in your village?” he asks in his subdued, almost inaudible voice. “Oxen or buffalo? Asses or horses? Did you change villages often? Did you travel? On the move? Did you eat the animals? What gods did you pray to? What were your ancestors called?”
She bursts into tears. She wants to fall at her master’s feet and for this to stop, she is walking on the edge of a precipice and he is nudging her over it with his questions, she is lost and has lost her loved ones. The consul gives her a handkerchief and some water. He folds away the map of Sudan with all the places and words she could not read. He folds away this land with no sky and puts it back in a drawer.
“I want to help you, there’s no need to cry.”
Bakhita looks at the drawer where the map is shut away with her family and all her dead hopes. Where are they? Where on earth are they all? She sobs, with her hands over her face, suffering more than when she was beaten and insulted, suffering at her own hands. The consul comes closer, smoothing his mustache thoughtfully.
“It’s very simple. You’re going to tell me just one thing, and then I’ll know who to go to. A friend who knows your dialects…many of your dialects.”
Bakhita has never spent so long in a master’s office, has never been asked so many questions, she is exhausted, has lost all hope, is full of shame.
“Your name.”
“Excuse me?”
“Tuo nome? Ma smouki? Name? Your name?”
Bakhita looks at the white handkerchief in her dark hands. She folds it in two. Folds it again. And again. Slowly. She has stopped crying. Can hear her breathing like an exhausted little donkey. The master is irritated now, a little disappointed too, of course.
“What’s your name?”
She leans slowly toward him, and to show how willing she is to help, to show she is not completely ignorant, she says in her deep voice, enunciating each syllable clearly: “Non lo so.”
And backs out of the room.
This conversation marks the beginning of a long period of sorrow. She realizes she has forgotten her mother tongue. Her childhood is slipping away from her, as if it never existed. She cannot name it. Cannot describe it. And yet she can feel it within her, burning full of life, more than ever. She learned Arabic with a child’s aptitude, but for seven years she has not heard a single word of her dialect. She remembers “Kishmet,” this one talisman, one obsession, the name her sister most likely no longer has. She tells it to the consul, like a last hope, and from the weariness in his eyes, grasps that it means nothing, that it too might be a distortion, an illusion. She is back again with the long nights of despair, hoping for a dream, an intuition. But nothing and no one visits her. She is no longer beaten, is clothed like the masters, but has this sense of endlessly falling. She tries to sing her funny song, the one Binah loved so much, “When children were born to the lioness,” she translated it into Arabic, in spite of herself, long ago. She knows she says ami for mama, and baba for daddy, but also asfa, asfa, asfa, forgive me for this abandonment. She thinks of the map of Sudan, would like to see it again, to learn to read the words on it, or at least to ask about them, she remembers so clearly the landscapes through which she traveled, and the sheepfold, the baby smashed against the stones, and Binah in the sorting centers, she carries so many lives within her, why are the images of her childhood lost? She tries desperately to claw them back. Remembers the things she loved, the fires around which they sat and talked for hours, her father’s lap, her twin, her grandmother. She sees her village in her mind’s eye, snatches of ceremonies, like far-off signs, the snake trails, her brother. “My little girl is gentle and good,” her mother with so many children, her mother like a red flame, she repeats this exercise every night, memorizing her loved ones in the hope that their names will come back, but they stay locked away in this boundless anonymous love, and she reaches her arms toward people she can never hold.
* * *
—
Her day-to-day job is to help Anna, the housekeeper, and she discovers a whole new world to which, once again, she must adapt. First, there is Italian, this incomprehensible language with its words that dance, unlike those she knows, words that do not come from the back of the throat like Arabic but are plucked from elsewhere, somewhere in the chest, it will be a long time before she works out where. Outside the consul’s house flies a flag she does not recognize, with no Islamic crescent, and inside it the men and women are all together. Italian women do not cover their faces and they walk openly among men, they all come together to eat in a room intended specifically for this, they call this a dining room, they wash their hands in a separate room and to eat use not their hands but forks and spoons, and they each have a glass to themselves, placed in front of their own plate. The kitchen is inspected every day, it is cleaned and cleaned again. They never pray to Allah, and the master has only one wife whom no one has ever seen, and he sleeps alone every night in an enormous bed, and his bedroom is locked shut, no slaves sleep in the master’s bedroom or on his doorstep, no slaves sleep in the corridors. It is strange, at first, this absence of bodies that usually populate houses. Bakhita has so often heard masters cursing these slaves everywhere, spying on them, spreading rumors all over the house, masters loathe these subjugated bodies without which they cannot cope, despise them for being there, sharing in their daily existence, a sharing they actively seek out but also abhor.
The country is not unduly alarmed when the newspapers report on battles won by Mahdi’s army, on the slave-soldiers joining him and the uprisings of Arab tribes, the country behaves as if this jihad were a minor revolt, while they remain complacently strong. Since the end of slave trading was announced by Gordon Pasha, the British army occasionally captures major traders and tries them in Khartoum, and then everything carries on as before. Corruption sets in. Egypt’s infrastructures are abandoned to Western powers, and the debt it owes them grows so deep that the British take over its fiscal administration. European bankers and unscrupulous entrepreneurs hold the country at their mercy. All of Europe is here in Khartoum, men having discussions and taking maps from drawers, ambassadors of France, England, Germany, Austria, all of whom meet Bakhita’s master, Callisto Legnani. All of Europe has its armies in Khartoum, and Egypt’s army is mobilized. Mahdi continues his advances.
* * *
—
Bakhita adapts, to the new ways, the new language, lulled by Anna’s accounts, telling her that Signore Legnani’s wife writes to him begging him to come home, to this country where they speak Italian, a place called “Italy.” She describes this country to Bakhita, it is so beautiful, so far away, so free, filled with sunshine, with no rainy season, and Bakhita wonders what the map of a country looks like if there are no slaves, no deserts, no zarebas, and no violence, where all the men are like the consul, and his wife, his only wife, is she as kind as he is? Anna says she is, she is very kind, and happy, because in Italy women are not repudiated, even if they have no children, and they can go out alone, with no veil, and even after nightfall. This Bakhita cannot believe. But she forgives Anna because the woman loves her country and is good at describing it. She meanwhile carries within her only the ashes of a nameless tribe.
* * *
—
One evening, Bakhita sits on a bench in the garden at the end of her day’s work. The last of the birds can be heard, it is always a surprise, this birdsong in the encroaching night. She listens to them and closes her eyes. The birds flit through the darkness, she senses the swallows’ swift flight, the bats on their rounds, t
he wind in the palm trees, the occasional call of a toad. She opens her eyes again, the sky is closing in, dark and dense. The first stars are appearing, so small at first, like forgotten traces. She watches as they make the darkening sky grow bigger, and in that attentive evening, something in her wakes. This place is beautiful. This land of her ancestors, this Sudanese sky, is beautiful. And she wonders why the world is so beautiful. To whom we owe this. All the ugliness of mankind, she is familiar with that. The violence born of man’s terrible anger. But the beauty, where does that derive from? This night hangs over the people of this world, free and immortal. And it speaks to her. As the earth did, remembering the suffering of slaves who came before her. Bakhita realizes that you can lose everything, your language, your village, your freedom. But not what you have given yourself. You do not lose your mother. Ever. It is a love as powerful as the beauty of the world, it is the beauty of the world. She brings her hand to her heart and weeps, weeps tears of consolation. She was so afraid she would lose her.
She is fourteen and is in her second year in service to the consul. She has seen freed slaves leave to go to a village, a Catholic mission, seen some leave and then return, thin and exhausted, she has recognized some sitting on street corners, crushed, she looked away to spare their shame, and she wonders whether another life may sometimes be possible. She listens to Anna describing this Italy with no slave-soldiers or child soldiers, no raided villages or fighting in the streets.
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