Bakhita

by Veronique Olmi

  * * *

  —

  The nuns will forgive her. The bread is difficult to tear, but she goes about it carefully, her hands can do anything, always have been able to. She breaks off several hunks of bread and gives them to the children playing in the mud. They are untalkative, focused. And all at once she remembers. Can picture herself, she is sure of it, picture her sister and the children in her village stamping the churned-up dirt to make a smooth, soupy mud, exactly like, yes, exactly like the mud of their homes. That was what the rainy season meant too. New houses made with mud trampled by the children. This memory blows over her like a wind. Images like this surface more and more frequently. She remembers herself, so far back in her life and yet it feels so close, a wind buffeting her, reviving the embers of the child she once was. Her life. Her childhood somewhere. When she was no different from anyone else. When being black was just being.

  * * *

  —

  After her confession the priest reassured Giuseppina that “Jesus pays no attention to your race or the color of your skin.” And then he ran to tell the news to Mother Superior and Madre Fabretti: Not only has the Moretta converted but what’s more, she’s asking to enter holy orders! In their order! You could say their institute is working miracles. Or at least wonders. They put the request before the Mother Superior in Verona, Primaria Anna Previta, and she studies it with Cardinal Luigi dei Marchesi di Canossa, the nephew of the order’s founder. Can they admit a former slave as a novice? Right back to the twelfth century, Italy has a tradition for the redemption of slaves. Its Franciscan missionaries would return from Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia with former slaves whom they educated and converted. Now, in the nineteenth century, it is still very popular for Italian missionaries to go to Sudan. Which is how the priest Daniele Comboni came to set up the project called the Plan for the Rebirth of Africa and opened the Comboni Missionaries and Missionary Sisters in Cairo, where he trained former slaves who, once educated, would help him evangelize Sudan. This was the notion of “Save Africa with Africa,” it being the continent considered “the part of the world most resistant to civilization.” The primaria and the cardinal deem that this former slave’s wish to take holy orders follows in this tradition, and Bakhita is accepted as a novice. She is neither a conquest nor a trophy but an affirmation: Catholic Italy saves slaves. And on December 7, 1893, the church opens its doors to this young woman whose spirit had no home.

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  —

  Bakhita experiences this period as a novice, which lasts almost two years, as the opposite of what it is intended to be: a trial. For her it is, at last, a period of deliverance. Madre Fabretti is appointed mistress of the novitiate and helps her “girls” identify and broaden their vocation. But testing the spiritual and physical resilience of someone who has survived everything is superfluous. Bakhita asks only one thing: permission to love. She now has a right to this emotion that was for so long forbidden, dangerous, a bearer of much greater suffering than her mistreatment. She gives herself body and soul to el Paron, the master whose love redeems sins.

  * * *

  —

  She is twenty-four and even though she follows the same teachings, says the same prayers, communicates, confesses, and wears the same uniform as the others, she is not like the others. She is set apart. And for all time. Exceptions will always be made for her. Dispensations requested. People hesitate to accept her or, conversely, they are vociferously self-congratulatory about accepting her. She is the one who chooses a seat but does not sit on it. The one who wants to say something but cannot manage it. She amazes, surprises, and often unnerves. Most of the novices admire her, her kindness, her tireless energy for work, up before anyone else and the last to go to bed, willing and talented, but others feel uncomfortable. Dare not look her in the eye. Do not understand a word she says. Are frightened of coming across her at night in a corridor. Do not like sleeping in the same dormitory. Washing in the same water or eating opposite her. The way she holds her fork, her guttural voice when she says the Benedicite, and the scars that peep out from her sleeve. They are embarrassed by their own disgust, mention it in confession, but there is nothing for it, they are afraid and would prefer that this particular trial, living alongside this black girl, had not been visited on them. Bakhita stays black under her uniform, like an unforgivable flaw, a sin with no remission.

  * * *

  —

  Madre Fabretti sees all this, the fear in some of her “girls,” and Bakhita’s humiliation. One day she takes her to the church of Santa Maria della Salute. They climb the marble steps that seem to emerge straight from the water, and it feels like walking into a vast, cold white womb. This famous, proud, and honored church. The columns and domes and multiple chapels, the countless statues and paintings by great masters, Bakhita bows, crosses herself with water from the font, awed by the secular riches, the immemorial devotion. Madre Fabretti goes up to the high altar, and the two of them kneel before it in silence. Bakhita closes her eyes. She is aware, all around her, of the voices of visitors and the whispered prayers of people lighting tall, leaning candles. The air carries a damp chill, tiny drafts blow through the basilica. She ignores them, concentrates on her praying. But Madre Fabretti taps her arm.

  “Look, Giuseppina, she’s like you.”

  Bakhita does not understand. What should she be looking at? She thinks “like you” means a “novice” or “praying,” “kneeling.” “Like you.” Words no one ever says to her.

  “Look there, the icon.”

  Above the high altar is a Madonna covered in gold, she wears a crown set with precious stones, and the baby Jesus in her arms is equally richly adorned. Their faces are flat, their expressions impassive, their eyes distant. Bakhita did not know this Madonna existed. Would not have thought it possible. She has never seen her before. Not in any catechism book, any pious image, or even any dream. But Madre Fabretti is right, this Virgin and child are like her. They have black skin. She looks at them and does not understand. Where are they from? Are they really the Virgin and her son Jesus Christ?

  “They have been loved by Venetians for centuries, Giuseppina. Do you see? Can you see now that you are like the others?”

  “Is that the Madre?”

  “Well, of course, it’s the Madre. The black Madonna.”

  “And the angels too.”

  Madre Fabretti had never noticed them, but true enough, two little angels in the background have black faces.

  “You see, Giuseppina, there are five of you black people: one, two, three, four, five. And meanwhile…I’m on my own. The only white person.”

  Bakhita smiles at her. “Well, I can protect you!”

  And they try not to laugh too loudly in the imposing basilica that affords this unexpected relief.

  They have come, eager and inquisitive, to Saint Joseph’s convent in Verona to see her. She closes her eyes and it resounds next to her ears, swift and precise, and while the scissors snip and her hair falls, she feels profound relief, as well as great pain. She is losing something of herself, something of her mother’s dexterity and great patience, when she braided her hair with those beads that made her so proud. Bakhita felt beautiful like that, and she was. And when she moved her head, the little beads knocked against her face, she liked it. She remembers this, the memory is clear, accurate, and hers alone.

  * * *

  —

  She sits motionless, upright, with her eyes closed, cannot see what the others are watching: her tightly curled hair hovering momentarily before falling, indecisive, featherlight. They watch and know nothing. The dark cell, the hole high up in the earth wall that she tried to widen by rubbing it with her hair, she was seven and it was the start of her captivity, that great enduring nightmare. She remembers wild hope, remembers also what was only just beginning. They watch her, would like to touch the drifts of hair, take some and put it in a locket that they could show to t
heir friends with blustering superstition, laughing as they said, “Touch the lucky charm!”

  * * *

  —

  She thinks of Mimmina who could not get to sleep without fingering her hair, and she would say nothing when the child tugged too hard as she rolled over, because it felt good to be loved that much. So much that you stayed with the loved one all through the night. She can now feel the scissors against her scalp. Remembers her head being smacked against the floor, remembers Samir’s violence, her own impurity. But today she is a bride. Today, June 21, 1895, is the first day of summer and the Feast of the Sacred Heart. She is to be the bride of someone who will never leave her and will love her so much that a single life will not be enough, there will be another afterward, a flawless eternal life. Today she will take on the habit of the Canossian sisters, similar to the clothes worn by ordinary women in the street, a brown robe and black headdress and shawl, because these nuns live alongside ordinary people to “console, teach, and heal” the poorest of them. She runs her hand over her hairless head, has no mirror and cannot see herself. But everyone else looks at her and recognizes her. With her shaven head, she looks like the slaves photographed in newspapers, illustrated in books by explorers, botanists, missionaries, and doctors. They picture her with a slave yoke around her neck, a chain on her ankle, and they weep with pity, coupled, in some cases, with a hint of inexplicable guilt. And they are all equally relieved not to be of “that race.”

  * * *

  —

  Next, dressed in clothes and a headdress like the other nuns, she will make her first vows, her habit will be the habit of penitence. This will take place in the house of the Madre, the big gold-and-marble church. She would have preferred the small chapel in Dorsoduro but obeys with the fervor of someone prepared to make any number of sacrifices, even secretly longs for them, proof of her unfailing commitment. After the vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity, she is called Sister Giuseppina Bakhita and is given the locket of the order of Canossian Daughters of Charity, marked with the initials MD, mater dolorosa. She is accepted into the community of sisters who take in lost and abandoned children.

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  —

  When she returns to Venice, the locals swarm to the institute, prostrate themselves at her feet, kiss her locket, and ask her to pray for them. They have stopped calling her the Moretta. The black girl. But do not call her Sister Giuseppina either. To ordinary people she is Madre Moretta, and will be till the day she dies. Mother and black. Similar and different. Accepted and isolated.

  * * *

  —

  Three years after taking her vows, when she is more than thirty, she still cannot write. Struggles to read. Talks Venetian a little better. She embroiders. Prays. Obeys instructions, and likes this reassuring framework, where the days are all alike, punctuated by prayer, vigils, lauds, sext, vespers, compline. She likes lauds best of all, the prayers at dawn. Never passes the black velvet drape without remembering that first morning when, standing barefoot in the doorway of her bedroom, she watched the nuns go through and was terrified. But was happy. Mimmina was asleep in bed. She will never know that happiness again, sharing every moment with a child who is discovering life and nudging you into discovering it too. That is over. Holding Mimmina in her arms, singing so the child puts her little hand on her reverberating chest, looking out for the first star and the moon making its appearance, sharing a unique language, affinity, and intimacy. It is over. The warm smell of her skin, her hand in hers, and the look in her eye that says, “I expect everything of you.” It is over. She is where she wanted to be and has fought to become the nun she now is. No one will ever be her child again, and no one will replace Mimmina.

  * * *

  —

  In fact, over the years, it is she who becomes Madre Fabretti’s daughter. Madre Fabretti is an aging nun who grows happier and happier, as if amused by the endless movement of this vain, disoriented world. They have kept up their regular passeggiata, their evening walks along the quay, walking more slowly now, with Madre Fabretti leaning on Bakhita’s arm, and Bakhita thinks that perhaps her twin walks like this with their by now elderly mother. They speak little, look at the light of the sunset, the small marooned islands, the movement of the tides, squeeze each other’s hand with swift tenderness. Sometimes Madre Fabretti asks Bakhita to remember. Now that she has more vocabulary, and her life is more peaceful. And it comes back to her. Such violent memories they do not seem to belong to her, and others she recognizes but dare not relate. For the sake of decency, and also for fear of shocking her Madre, this old lady from a well-to-do Italian family. Here, with this nun who has given her life to other people, Bakhita hesitates to describe what people did to slaves back there, but despite the suffering caused by retrieving images of her torment, it feels right to explain her experiences to the person she loves. Madre Fabretti waits for the silences and the tears, lets them come, unravels the incoherent sentences, listens with horrified love. And when she says, “My darling,” Bakhita knows it is over. It is time to walk back. She will return to the convent, pray, and go to bed, will get up to pray again, will not wake in the night to howl out her memories of inhumanity.

  * * *

  —

  It is a filial connection. And this is a happy time. But the ecclesiastical authorities deem these conditions too easy. Giuseppina’s faith is clear for all to see, she is given everything, the time has come to see what is truly in her heart. The time has come to test her. One evening, after vespers, she is told that it is over. This house where she has lived for thirteen years, seven of them as a nun, is no longer her home. She must say a final goodbye to Madre Fabretti in the morning, does not even have time for a passeggiata. It will be in the morning, in the visiting room, in the presence of the whole community, no favoritism, no sentimentality. They are both astounded, almost reeling, and go their separate ways with no demonstration of weakness or affection. This wrench marked by no tears or rebellion is something they offer to God, the master who expects undivided love.

  It is almost noon when Giuseppina climbs into the gondola that will take her to the station, heading for a town whose name she does not know.

  She goes back to her former life, rejoins her ancestors and every pariah of her kind, slaves forever, their skin black for all time. Carrying within her the curse and fascination of everything people imagine of her but that she is not. She frightens children, disgusts the elderly, appeals to men, like an animal they want to master to test their own power and display their supremacy. She sits and holds her tongue, has been told in all circumstances to keep quiet, her voice is something they can discover later, they will be frightened by it, will mimic it among themselves, now and for centuries to come. She has been sitting for hours, pain tugs at her injured thigh, her leg with the phantom chain, she herself is merely a ghost, her image has been stolen. She does not look at them, keeps her eyes lowered and listens to them, speaking Venetian with a new accent, heavier, clipped, and hard, which gives every word the weight of condemnation. She is seated, they are standing, even children tower over her. Stooped old women’s faces are on a level with hers, and they sign themselves with a grimace, once home they will perform the rituals that drive out evil spirits, will make sacrifices on the sly, when the younger generation is not there to scoff at or interfere with these supplications. She is seated and wears their fear and ignorance like a cloak, affording them the pleasure of gathering and sharing their aversion. And just this once, they are all the same, all of them, the oppressed, laborers since childhood, the sick, people with rickets, people exploited by masters they will never meet, bearing children who will die in infancy or will run away to the Americas, most of them illiterate, sniveling illegitimates due to be sent off to the seminary, rebels soon to be quashed by military service, timorous little people, shopkeepers deep in debt, shepherds wilder than their flocks, peasants hungrier than their dogs, all of them look at her and pity her. This is be
tter than the harvest festival, the Feast of Saint John, or religious processions, better than the theater, better than fife-playing and dancing, better than the Virgin carried through the streets amid noisy weeping and wailing, this is a panacea for all, a wordless prayer and a unifying joke. They stifle the laughter that bubbles up in their throats, this Negress is a nun, they know it would be blasphemous to laugh at her and, who knows, she might curse them later, cast the devil’s anger over them. But what on earth is she made of? Did she come from a woman’s belly, and what did that woman look like, was she wholly human from head to foot, or perhaps…? Some thoughts are best cast out, some visions best not seen, and a few of these people kneel and fall into prayer in response to the turmoil, to everything dangerous and violent, provoked by this black woman sitting in the convent’s courtyard.