She likes being with children and teenage girls, because she likes those who are just beginning. Making their entrance into life, alert, credulous, and flamboyant. They understand her mongrel language, seek out her strength and protection, and laugh with her because to them she is nothing more or less than herself. She needs this. This recognition without hierarchy, this spontaneous tenderness and happy intimacy. But there are no pupils in the institute’s classrooms today, and the orphans have left for Bergamo. On May 23, 1915, Italy went to war alongside France, England, and Russia. Its armies took up positions in the Julian March and the Alps. Schio took in northern Italians. Women, children, the elderly. The men, meanwhile, seemed to have multiplied, a plethora of busy, inventive strategists, nothing could resist them as they built wooden bridges across mountain precipices, tanks that swallowed up trees and houses, boats that lived underwater, insatiable airplanes, the war was a permanent fire, and confronted with its hallucinatory power, civilians fled, suddenly became wandering rootless creatures at the mercy of others.
* * *
—
In June 1916 Austrian troops marched on Veneto, as if to reclaim an asset unjustly lost, and the inhabitants of Schio fled. Having been hosts, they in turn became refugees. Bakhita watched them leave on foot and on bicycles, with livestock and heavy-laden little donkeys, with dogs following carts drawn by bone-thin oxen, carts topped with a mattress, covering a sewing machine or a mirror, a bucket, a hen, or the portrait of a dead loved one, the bric-a-brac that does not encapsulate a life but admits how impossible it is to know what makes up a life. The children seemed only mildly surprised, they were hungry anyway, and their eyes were bigger than their faces, they asked no questions, simply followed the course life was taking, left with their mothers, their grandparents, and all the other trusting, surprised creatures like themselves, a ragtag of babies, brothers and sisters, cousins. They headed away from the border with Austria, this empire to which—as inhabitants of Veneto—they had belonged for so long, and took refuge in Milan, Turin, Ferrara, and Cuneo, accommodated in hospices and schools, the sick sent to the civilian hospital in Vicenza, and on the bishop’s orders all sacred objects, from the most sacred to the most punctilious, relics of saints right down to parish registers, were stowed safely in Venice. As if life were evaporating, becoming transparent, withdrawing.
A few months later shells fell on Schio’s abandoned houses, and the streets turned into dusty ruins littered with broken crucifixes, copper cooking pots, and a few heartbreaking misspelled love letters. Bakhita walked through this transformed version of Schio, what was advancing on the town was death, borne in triumph by all those who survived, the slave traders whom the Italians called “kings,” “emperors,” “ministers,” or “presidents,” leaders who sent whole caravans of men into combat. She watched the sky grow light over those torn walls, over bedrooms in ripped-open houses, disemboweled shops, polluted streams, and then the streets of Schio were emptied even of these ruins, opened up to reveal truckloads of soldiers, Red Cross vehicles and officers’ cars, mules carrying munitions cases, tractors towing canons, and, carried in on stretchers, the wounded were found space to rest in the convent’s dormitories and the institute’s classrooms. And to the fury of those who had stayed on here, the army requisitioned a house on the Via Rovereto to “serve” the soldiers, a place the locals would not look at, whose name they did not dare pronounce, a name as coarse as pleasure itself. A house in which to forget about death. Schio was transformed into a barracks.
* * *
—
She is no longer among children. No longer among youngsters starting out in life. Tends to men who have become ageless and, although amputated, mutilated, and disfigured, want to live. In their dogged determination she recognizes the terrible menacing strength of people who, like her, in a life so far away but also so close, have decided not to surrender one inch to the darkness.
* * *
—
When you are in pain. When you are hungry. You stop loving. No longer have the strength for it, she knows this. So she feeds the injured, hoping that as they rediscover their appetite for bread, they also find their lust for life. She brings them what she has managed to cook, replacing flour with potatoes, sugarless jellies with pear preserves, she keeps the eggs in limewater, the meat wrapped in ice and straw in the bottom of the well, she invents, improvises, and no one thinks to contradict her, she works in silence and when she comes up from the basement, she helps the sisters feed the soldiers. And she knows. What will happen when they see her for the first time. They will be frightened. A violent reaction, real terror, because anything people see for the first time frightens them, anything new is a threat. She is prepared for the looks of horror, the faces turned away, the rejection, the silent, paralyzing amazement. The dormitories are full of it, fear and neediness. She watches the experienced sisters tend to the men tirelessly, and others, younger ones, curbing the urge to vomit, to run away, a longing to be somewhere else, take refuge in the church to pray, close their eyes and pray, far removed from the inhumanity life has to offer, everything that should never happen but does happen simply presents itself, makes itself comfortable, is here to stay. She approaches soldiers with her face lowered, slowly, so they have time to get used to her.
* * *
—
Soon she is spending as much time in the infirmary as in the kitchen, hardly sleeping, just snoozing in an armchair in the dormitory, watching over them, and one night, in the lightning-flash brevity of a dream, she remembers a baby she cared for, born to a slave woman who died in childbirth in the “snake house,” her first master’s house. And then the child was sold or given away, she cannot remember, but she suddenly misses that child with ferocious intensity, she let him go, just as she did with Binah, did not hold on to him, the oppressive weight of it crushes her chest, Kishmet is an old woman trudging the streets of Khartoum, Mimmina has left Africa, her own mother has left the baobab trunk on the ground, where are you, where have you all gone? She wakes as if drowning, suffocating, gasping for breath, gripping the armrests of her chair, and the heavy putrid smell of the dormitory ricochets her back into her dream, it is the smell of nights spent in slave quarters, she gets up and kneels, right there, among the wounded. Speaks to her father, the African, the man who never managed to find her, and she asks el Paron to forgive him. Has only just grasped the guilt and terror felt by the man who fathered her and then lost her. She entrusts all of him, whether he is alive or dead, to the supreme infallible Father, entrusts his devastated soul, his love, and his defeat. And feels soothed. Gets back to her feet, walks slowly, her footsteps ponderous, uneven, swaying among the sleeping soldiers. Realizes that everything she learned as an abda is serving her now. She walks in the half-light between the rows of beds, and knows that in each of these men there is a part that is greatness and a part that wanders aimlessly. Some will die before dawn, without understanding, others will survive wounds that were thought fatal, there they lie, unequal in the face of pain and of death, and she hears their breathing, like frightened children.
It creeps up on her, almost in spite of herself, the tune of a song she did not even think she knew, and she sings it to the sleeping soldiers, who smell bad, are in pain. Sings and forgets some of the words, tripping up sometimes: “A little breeze blew by…the roses…the fragrance, while I, I dreamed and my soul dreamed too. But the threads…the threads,” and one of the soldiers picks up the song for her, she can hear him at the far end of the dormitory, a hoarse halting voice: “My soul dreamed too. But while the threads ran through the loom, I heard the bell ring, like a gunshot to the heart. I felt a burning in my soul, I clenched my fists and shouted: curses on the factory with its smoking chimney, curses on the looms with their weaving and their shuttles, those machines are cursed monsters, they’ve been eating away at my life for twenty years.”
She is at this man’s bedside, amazed by the vehemence of the song. All she knew was the op
ening, the soul and the smell of roses.
“Are you a Lanerossi?”
“No, little sister, I’m from the other mill, Cazzola.”
“And now you’re here…”
“Yes. Back home. Life is strange…”
“Yes.”
“I’ll never go back there, to the factory…I’m only half a man now.”
He gestures toward his one leg. She thinks that in Italy worthless men are not abandoned, and this man will draw his strength from another source, some part of himself he does not yet suspect.
“There’s nothing to do for this bitter world. And nothing to do with what’s left of me, either. Nothing…”
She looks at him, his anger and, more particularly, his disgust at what is happening to him. His contempt for himself.
“Look after your life.”
“My life? What life? A half life, yes.”
“Please, always look after it.”
She smiles at him and dares to put a hand on his forehead, it is a long, chapped, very warm hand, a hand that soothes, she knows it does, and the soldier closes his eyes, his tears so sparse that they look old, ancient, like the very end of an exhausted sob.
“Why?” he asks.
“What?”
“Why are you so kind, little black sister?”
The soldier’s breath comes in deep sighs, she still has her hand on his forehead, which is now sweating, burning under her palm, the fever is coming out, her arm aches, her shoulder is stiff, but she has not finished, this needs to go on longer, goes on and on, until the soldier turns his head, his lips parted, his face serene, succumbing to sleep. She returns to the armchair with her clumsy footsteps, would like to make no noise but does make some, hobbling and breathless, and she falls asleep for an hour or two in the chair, and when a soldier wakes from time to time, this woman sitting there sleeping reminds him that before this war started, he was just a child, just a little child.
A small black sun turns around and around, and the man’s voice is right here beside her. She cannot see him, neither him nor the piano, does not understand what he is singing, but his song is so beautiful that she sits listening, attentive, wanting to join her gnarled hands in prayer. Dares not because this is not a sacred song, but still. It is the purest prayer she has ever heard. She does not know what this piece means, The Pearl Fishers, they are all fishers, and pearls too, but no one tells them, no one tells the men that they are divine. And they have come home from war bitter and tight-lipped, come home aged and full of resentment, Bakhita has seen their distrustful eyes watch everything as if to say, “So, it’s like that now, is it? That’s how you want things to be?” And she knows this is only the beginning. She listens to Caruso sing, his voice coming from the horn above the small box, and this is the most beautiful thing progress has produced. Caruso sings for all of Italy and for each individual Italian, his voice expresses all the devastation and pain offered up, his singing has the rhythm of life, willful and fragile but sustained like a victory of the human heart. If Bakhita dared, she would ask Elvira to put the phonograph in the church, so the crucified slave and the Madonna could take on the suffering of men contained within the tenor’s singing. But she would never make such a decision, is here to obey, and obey she does, in humility and poverty. And yet how can she help these men? How can she heal them of so much pain? She anticipates what is still to come. The humiliation suffered is like a graft on a tree, one day there will be a new fruit, a fruit it will be impossible to ignore, because once rebellion has taken root it does not evaporate. The returning soldiers say nothing, but she recognizes the faces of animals ready to commit themselves passionately, knows it will not be long before they rally to the first cry and, with their heads lowered in determination, plow toward the powerful leaders, look them in the eye, and allow the leaders themselves to have a good look at them, see these returning armies.
* * *
—
During the war, thousands of Italian soldiers died of cold and hunger as prisoners of the Germans and Austrians. Bakhita knows this death, hunger that leaves you a husk, ruined on the inside, the cramps, the hiccuping, the dizziness, cold that freezes the heart, silting it up, choking it, till the eyes are blind, the mouth bleeding, the convulsions and the delirium, she remembers, saw so much of it in caravans, zarebas, and slave markets, hunger destroyed the mind long before the body gave way. Sometimes, in the still of the night, she finds herself wondering what point there is in prayer, and her doubts are still more violent than her suffering. She feels that everything hovers between uncertainty and belief, between beauty and the profanity of beauty. Today while she listens to Caruso sing her emotions are as raw as when she meets injured soldiers or soldiers’ families. She learns new things, things that deep down are not new at all, immutable inhumanities, and an armistice does not mean amnesia. This war can be related without words, can be told with refusals and strikes, an accumulation of poverty and so much injustice. Madre Battiseli’s nephew returned from Caporetto, where the Italian army was trapped in the mountains and defeated. He described how the soldiers retreated toward the river Piave, abandoning thousands of men to the enemy…along with the best part of Veneto. It was the fall of 1917, the disastrous fall. Everyone in Schio knew that Austro-German forces were twenty-five miles from Venice, and reverberating across the sky, around the mountains, and beside rivers was the sound of the cavalcade of death marching onward, a more powerful raiding party than the most vigorous slave dealers. When he returned from the camps, Luigi, the nun’s nephew, explained in hushed secretive tones how the Italian prisoners’ deaths had been planned by their commanding officers: orders for them to be kept starving, forced to work, sent neither private parcels nor Red Cross assistance while held in Austro-Hungarian camps. So they walked barefoot in the snow and died of pneumonia. Ate grass in the camp and died of dysentery. Rifled through garbage and died of hunger. But why speak so quietly? Why say all this as if it were confidential? Why did Luigi bear the burden of shame on behalf of the Italian general staff who had never hidden the truth, had actively campaigned to make it known, so that the “full horror of captivity” be brought home to the prisoners? Brought home to these insubordinate traitors. Luigi describes his purgatory, but it is news to no one. Italy went to war. War pulled the country apart, impoverished its people, and divided its population. Caruso may be singing of this too, a single language for a country that wanted to be unified but tore itself apart. Elvira had fled France, a country that was an ally in wartime but a traitor at the armistice, the country that stole peace from the Italians, who gained none of the territories, none of the expansion that had fueled their dreams. France is the new enemy. Everything changes camps so quickly.
* * *
—
Elvira did not draw in Paris, she survived by modeling, the naked girl on the dais, but she will not tell Bakhita this, Bakhita would not understand, could not understand that being the naked girl on the dais was not what she feared, she was not only djamila, not merely coveted. Being looked at by artists is in itself art. This is what she tells herself to keep intact her longing for something other than the factory floor or domestic service, but she now knows it will not be enough, painting, singing, and beauty will not be enough to rebuild a world. She has gone into service for the Caresinis in the big house on the edge of town. A hidden, protected residence, where she is simply passing through. She is not the sort to resign herself and serve, she came back here only to set off again and did not even recognize her hometown. Not just the gutted houses and fallow fields, destruction like that is the same everywhere. Rather than the ransacked houses, it was those left standing, those watched, guarded, that spoke to her of the newfound violence in her town. The carabinieri posted around the clock outside the family homes of soldiers accused of desertion and shot, a sentinel stopping anyone from coming to gape at the pariah’s parents, but stopping no one from seizing their possessions, and
the families are now nothing more than designated prey, caged in their homes and their shame.
* * *
—
In this mild afternoon, filled with the smell of figs, Elvira looks at her Madre Moretta, barely touched by the invention of the phonograph but devastated by this song she does not understand. If she were to draw her hands today, they would look like vine shoots, like twisted kindling wood.
“I’m going to interrupt Caruso, it makes you too sad. And you’ve stopped talking to me, too.”
She lifts the tonearm, the singing stops, and the sudden silence feels like an affront.
“It’s beautiful,” Bakhita says.
“It makes you too sad. Look at me, Madre, even your hands are sad.”
“My hands?”
“Yes. You could be a model for sad hands.”
Bakhita laughs. Looks at her hands and waves them about like puppets.
“I’m happy, the children are coming back, the school’s opening again.”
“Wonderful! The school’s opening again, the land has been promised to the peasants, and the bosses are going to give us an eight-hour day.”
“The children are coming back, Elvira.”
“The peasants are occupying the land, Madre.”
“Occupying?”
“They’re on the land but not working it. Things have changed. Nothing will be like before. Oh, no! Don’t wring your hands! Come on, let’s dance, let’s dance!”
Elvira turns the handle on the phonograph, puts the stylus onto the second piece of music on the record.
“Tarantella Napolitana! Will you do me the honor of this dance, Moretta Bella!”
Bakhita Page 30