“Why did you want to come to Italy, Bakhita?”
“To see it.”
“Ah, that’s good…That’s good.”
“Padrone…”
“Yes?”
“Is this it? Italy?”
“Of course this is Italy! What did you think? This was just a stop-off?”
“I don’t understand when people talk. Your friends. Are they Italian?”
“Well, naturally they’re Italian. They’re talking their dialect. Everyone in Italy speaks a dialect.”
“Including you?”
“Well, I know both languages.”
“Yes, of course, padrone…”
She understands that Italy is very large, as big as or perhaps even bigger than Sudan, there must be many tribes and many dialects, many warlords too. And is the padrone’s town far from here? Will they travel there on foot? She dare not ask any more questions. Afraid the master will laugh. But he is the one to probe further.
“So, tell me honestly, do you like Italy?”
“Yes, thank you, padrone.”
“You shall like it here. No more slavery. Are you happy?”
“Yes, padrone.”
He watches her, hesitates, smiles as if apologizing, and goes to join Augusto and Maria. All three of them look at her, and it is as if she were back in the slave market. As if she were not wearing her tunic. No protection. It should not feel like this, but her heart begins its tom-tom rhythm again, sensing danger. Maria looks at her, and there is something happy and victorious in her eyes. A glorious revenge. And then she turns away and laughs. Augusto laughs a little too, with relief. Bakhita does not understand what it is about her that these Italians find so amusing. She looks down and presses her hands together behind her back. Callisto comes up to her.
“You will go with my friends,” he tells her. “To their house, in Zianigo. You belong to them now. Do you understand? You are to serve Signora Maria Michieli.”
* * *
—
She does not prostrate herself at his feet. Does not implore him. Is dumbstruck. Would never have guessed he could lie to her. Because lie he did: The slavery is not over. Simply slower and not so noisy. Eyes lowered, she follows her new masters. Without even saying goodbye to the consul. Caught in all the commotion of their departure, the luggage, the things they say to one another, their gestures, and Bakhita, alone in her silence, follows them, not rebelling, follows them in her dumbstruck submission, a long slow sadness.
* * *
—
She does not understand a word Signora Michieli says. Augusto translates his wife’s Venetian accent into the Italian that Bakhita understands a little. She learns that they did not buy her, but the consul gave her to the signora. She will be one of their servants, she will be happy. She is angry with herself, she has learned nothing: A master never loves his slaves. Why should the consul have kept her?
* * *
—
They climb into a black beast that spits the same coal smoke as the boat but cuts across fields, dives into tunnels, and whistles as loudly as it breathes. Bakhita does not show her fear. Does not ask what this thing is called. How long it will go on. The train stops frequently. Her masters do not move. Neither does she. At one point, they alight and change trains. She follows them. It goes on like this all day, watching Italy through windows. Fields as far as the eye can see, with stooped peasants, men, women, and tiny children. Are they free? Not one is black. And here again, they are all clothed. But they have no shoes. There must be plenty to eat here, as Anna said. Because there are so many fields.
* * *
—
At the end of the afternoon they arrive in Mirano. A horse-drawn carriage is waiting for them. The masters climb inside. She does not know whether she should walk alongside the horse or sit next to the coachman, but her masters gesture for her to sit with them. They leave the town behind and head deep into the country. She sees little donkeys ridden by old men, goats and sheep watched over by children, women sitting by the side of the road, groups of men in uniform, surely soldiers. So is there an army here too? She watches and feels as if she has been set down on the edge of the world, and the world is gliding slowly by. She catches her mistress’s eye. The woman has a smile carved out of her face, like a cut made with a knife.
* * *
—
They go through Zianigo, a tiny village dominated by a massive church that is too big for the central square, and soon the horse sets off down an alley lined with cypress trees, with a huge house at the far end. There is a pink tree, a magnolia in bloom, almost hiding the front door to this comfortable home. Her new masters’ house. Bakhita alights from the carriage and clasps the handkerchief in her pocket, the red Sudanese earth has dried, is not so soft now. There is a large garden and a courtyard, but she cannot see the slave quarters, so perhaps it is true and people are free here. The master says he is happy to be home, he looks at his wife, looks at his house, and then roars with laughter. He spoke in Arabic! He says the same thing again, differently, his wife inclines her head indulgently, and his smile instantly fades.
* * *
—
An old woman sits eating on the doorstep. Scraping her bowl to a slow rhythm. She looks up and shrieks. Her bowl falls to the ground, and she runs off making frantic signs on her forehead and chest, screeching something incomprehensible but surely dreadful. From the garden and the house itself women appear, and a few men, approaching gingerly to take the masters’ luggage and eye Bakhita in mute terror. One woman spits, another brandishes crossed fingers in front of her, her arms outstretched toward Bakhita, muttering a hushed prayer. Bakhita is not familiar with this ceremony. True, the master is returning home after a very long voyage. So she smiles, if she could join in she would, but she does not know the ritual. Maria Michieli claps her hands and shouts three times. But they all stay where they are. Motionless and afraid, waiting for something. Augusto ushers Bakhita quickly into the house, and the servants no longer dare to join them but press their ashen faces up to the windows.
“They’re more frightened than you are!”
“Si, padrone…”
“They’ll get used to you, and they’ll eventually realize you’re not the devil.”
She knows about the devil, he is feared by all Islamists.
“The devil, padrone?”
“Well, yes! The black devil! And please call me paron. Make an effort, learn their dialect.”
There are finger marks and traces of breathy condensation on the windows from the frightened servants. She looks at these marks and thinks to herself that she will clean the windows. That is what she is here for. That is why she was given to the padrona…the parona…to make everything clean. And she wonders what is worse. Being djamila or sheitan.
* * *
—
For the first time in her life she has a room of her own. It has a bed. A nightstand. A gas lamp. A small dresser. And a window in a wall smothered with wisteria. The room is high up, over the stables. She does not light the lamp the first evening and hardly ever will. She understands better with outside light. When it is dark, it is time to sleep. Or watch the sky. When it is light, she gets up. Even if the whole house is still asleep. She gets used to sleeping in a bed, afraid of falling, sorry to lose contact with the ground and its reverberations. As the paron told her to, she makes an effort. Sleeping like the others. Talking like the others. Looking like the others. And in this permanent struggle, this life of adapting and terrible shame, this life devoid of love and tenderness, she will meet a man, the first man since her father who will truly love her. This man crosses her path like a star fallen at her feet.
His name is Signore Illuminato Checchini, but everyone calls him by his pseudonym as a local journalist, Paron Stefano Massarioto. He administers the Michielis’ assets during the master’s long absences, as he does for
other estates. He is self-taught, a lover of the people, the peasants, whom he is quick to defend against landowners. He frequents every market in Veneto, knows the exact price of everything, the going rate for fruits, cereals, tobacco, and vegetables, he knows the day laborers and the sharecroppers, and they all trust him. He is also Zianigo’s organist, he is an unclassifiable man, passionate, religious, warm, and amusing. What would be called a “somebody” if he were not first and foremost a humanist.
* * *
—
He comes to see the Michielis the day after the master’s return. A professional meeting and yet not. Of course he will give an appraisal of agricultural progress on the estate, but like the others, he is also here out of curiosity. The previous day his two eldest sons, Giuseppe and Leone, told him there was a “black devil” in the Michielis’ house. They saw her from the street! He questioned them, and then gently set them straight: It must be an African woman. The village can talk of nothing else. The woman is as black as burned wood, perhaps she is burned, will be reduced to ash any minute, she looks ill, as if she has been steeped in coal dust, has been swallowed up by the night. It’s beyond comprehension. And terrifying. Stefano has seen African masks in the Michielis’ house, and other exotic objects brought back from Sudan, but is this possible? A woman who looks like these masks? And when, as he talks to Augusto Michieli in the drawing room, he sees her walk past, he is shocked in spite of himself. He would like to hide his surprise but is deeply shaken. Michieli laughs at his discomfort.
“That’s Bakhita. She’s my wife’s. She’s sixteen, a slave from Sudan, she was caught when she was very young and has scars all over her body, if you only knew! She’s a very good sort, a little slow but hardworking.”
“Did you bring her back? Did you save her?”
Michieli stammers that…yes…she was serving a Paduan friend of his in Khartoum and he saved her, yes…Stefano says he is a blessed man for this, for what he has done, saved a human being, and Michieli launches immediately into cereals and tobacco. He does not like his manager’s religious sentimentality and regrets all the fuss surrounding the arrival of this moretta, as everyone is already calling her, the “blackie,” the “darkie.” He is surprised when Stefano asks permission to invite her to lunch that very day.
* * *
—
She goes with him. Paron Michieli explained that she is to eat at his friend’s house, she asked whether she would come back afterward. He explained that she was going only for a few hours, she thinks she is to serve in their house but has no idea what “a few hours” is. And does not understand a single word this man says to her. Eyes lowered, she follows him and asks no questions, simply going where she is told to go as usual. In the street, children come up to her, catch hold of her, and squeal, or follow her clicking their tongues, as if taunting an animal. One little boy licks his fingers and turns around and spits. Drawn by the children’s cries, women appear, their hands in front of their mouths, some fall to their knees, others cross themselves, one dares to come close, tugs at Bakhita’s tunic, apparently wanting to pull it off. Bakhita gives a hoarse cry. Everyone freezes, silent, and more people gather in this silence, a muttering of excitement and shameless terror, and then Stefano raises his voice, speaking deeply and firmly, chiding these adults as if they were little children, his authority calms them briefly. He comes up to Bakhita, bends an arm, and offers it to her. She recognizes the gesture that the consul’s friends made, when they left the inn in Genoa. Wonders what she should do. She is a servant, and he a gentleman. Stifled laughter bubbles up again all around them, a few pebbles are thrown. Stefano is still waiting, his bent arm held out to her. And as she does not move, he brings his hand very gently to hers, she recoils a little, gives a shudder of fear. The man’s hand is warm and rough. He puts her hand onto his arm and says something she does not understand. She is ashamed to be touching a man out in the street, but no one laughs at them, quite the opposite, she can feel the violence subsiding. On they walk, and others follow with careful footsteps and amazed whispers. They walk through the village like this, Stefano’s face proud, while she keeps her eyes lowered. “Looks like he’s taking her to the altar!” one woman murmurs as they pass.
In a way he is.
* * *
—
She comes and sits at the family table, in among Stefano and Clementina’s five children. Three sons and two daughters, ranging from five to eleven. With Bakhita still holding his arm, their father announces in his powerful voice, “Here is the Moretta! I’ve invited her to lunch!” He can read fear and respect in his wife’s eyes. “She has no one in the world. And has suffered a great deal.” The children are silent, they want to please their father but cannot understand what they are seeing. She can see the fear in their expressions and reaches out her hand to lay it gently on the head of the youngest child, Melia, who starts to cry. She turns to Clementina, “Asfa, padrona…Parona…” Even Stefano is startled. Her voice is like a man’s. “Well,” he says, “let me introduce your little sister, sorellina Moretta!,” and he laughs, and they all join him. Bakhita does not yet realize that she has been accepted into a family, and that they will now call her “little sister.”
* * *
—
She is in service to Maria Michieli, but it is through Stefano that she will come to know the world in which she now lives. She is often invited to his house, and not one meal, one evening goes by without someone knocking at their door. Peasants come to beg him to intervene on their behalf with their masters. He invites them in, sits them down, and always offers them a drink, a little milk, and some bread for the children. He listens to them. Their pavano dialect is coarser, more abrupt than Venetian, and impenetrable to Bakhita. But she watches them and recognizes the exhaustion in them, the ugly, carved-out gauntness of the hungry. Their staring, almost stupid gaze. Their red skin that tears and eventually flakes off. She is amazed that this happens only on their hands, neck, arms, and legs. Pellagra bears its stigmata on the areas exposed to sunlight, and these slaves do not live naked. She recognizes the way they shake, too, the swollen bellies of their young children, the progressive paralysis, and just like in Sudan, the insanity of people who have no food and will die of it. They beg Paron Stefano, they weep, and sometimes even fall to their knees. She desperately wants to reach out to them. Tell them she knows them, yes, she is the Moretta, she has known them a long time. They are submissive and desperate. They work and they die, and their children are condemned. Having fled Khartoum, she knows that human beings can bear the unbearable until one day someone calls them and they follow. And then nothing can stop them again. But she says nothing and steps no closer. Zianigo’s peasants are afraid of her, and she does not speak their language. She represses her impulses, and at night she tells the darkness what torments her. She finds it impossible to sleep until she has laid down her suffering, her inability to help these poor people. She talks to the sky, the sky that is the same the world over, and it makes her feel that the world is not all that vast. Not one morning dawns when she does not think of her mother, sitting on her baobab throne. Sometimes it feels imaginary, like someone else’s life, but more often than not her presence is so palpable that Bakhita is sure her mother is thinking of her at the exact same moment and knows she is safe.
* * *
—
Parona Michieli behaves toward her with an irked sort of kindness, a forced indulgence, and this too Bakhita has seen before and recognizes: A woman who silences her unhappiness is a woman who carries a formidable enemy within her. This woman should dance and scream, on and on, exorcise the spirit that possesses her. But instead this woman talks softly, in her curt, gently questioning tone, she is always disappointed with herself over something, and others know she is around from her sighing. She is not jealous of the affection Stefano shows for the Moretta, he is a valuable ally on the estate, even when her husband is at home. Because even when he is there, her husban
d seems absent. Thinking of other things, planning his next departure, always. Running away from her. Running away from this house where no one is happy. Maria Michieli is herself a stranger to Zianigo and to Italy. She is from Petersburg where Augusto had dealings with fur traders and fell in love with her. She is not Italian and definitely not Roman Catholic. Naturally, she converted in order to marry, in a church in Paris, but she is Orthodox by tradition, although without conviction. She has one thing in common with her husband: irritation at Stefano’s religious knickknacks. No, they do not have a crucifix in the house! And no, they do not go to mass! And who cares if people scorn her for this. Stefano, meanwhile, is great friends with the parish priest, he runs the choir, organizes pilgrimages, and helps with charity work. Yes, she would happily go to listen to the organ, she likes music, but set foot inside a church…In fact, she forbids him to talk of religion to Bakhita, he must not succumb to this Italian fashion for missionaries, must keep his notions of good and evil to himself, she can look after her servants perfectly well herself.
* * *
—
But Bakhita does not need to be told about good and evil. She knows this battle by heart and quickly comes to see that the world is a single world. The sea between Sudan and Italy is not a separation. It is a hyphen. Everything is the same. And men suffer. One morning when she accompanies Parona Michieli to the market she sees a handcuffed peasant walking between two carabinieri. She is horrified. Chains! Chains here too! Parona Michieli urges her on and explains, enunciating her words clearly, “He-stole-a-piece-of-fruit.”
Bakhita Page 16