Bakhita glances around briefly. There is no one else in this shady courtyard next to the orchard. She takes the hand that Elvira offers and there on the dry earth they perform a few jubilant, ungainly dance steps. Bakhita closes her eyes and Elvira can see in her smile how much she loves life, a love that runs as deep as hope. A resistance.
Land. Factories. Mills. Workshops. They are all occupied. Strikes. Demonstrations. Riots. The proletariat is working up to a revolution, as it is in Russia. Socialist workers clash with the police. Throw officers—those lackeys of capitalism—out of windows on trains and trams. Clash with their bosses. With landowners. The idle rich and financiers. Enough of submission, destitution, unemployment, and exile. The order of things is turned on its head. After this war, which they never wanted, their country will be reborn, proud, indignant, and powerful. In the opposing camp are war veterans, now out of work, with no role in civilian life, taking issue with the socialists’ pacifism and challenging their contempt. They are nationalists, futurists, unionists, republicans, Catholics, anarchists, elite soldiers, and they are forming a movement, the Italian Fasci of Combat. They take in anyone who believed in the war and is now choked with bitterness. Disappointment. Despair. Anger. Hate. Peace has been cut short. It has nothing to offer them. The Allies laughed at their country, carved up the world and left them only crumbs. These veterans did not go to hell and back to bow and scrape once again. Their leader is a journalist, the son of a lowly blacksmith and a nursery-school teacher, Benito Mussolini. He will restore the veterans’ lost honor. Reinstate Italy’s greatness. He has given his word.
* * *
—
That is how it started. With men who needed to band together. To fight. Be Italian. Proud, too. Virile. And, in many cases, violent. With a taste for war under their skin. And for revenge. To reign, in fact. In their own group, their camp, their village, their region. And to set themselves free. With fighting. Pillaging. Murder. Alcohol. Cocaine and sex. Their time had come. Time for a new Italy. Time for their youth. They sang “Giovinezza,” and this song became an anthem. They dressed in black, and this color became a flag. They marched through the streets and sowed terror. They called themselves “Despair,” “Fearless,” “Lightning,” “Satan.” They had clubs, brass knuckles, daggers, revolvers, and grenades. Their blood was up, they moved quickly, like frenzied dogs, and their urge to live became confused with their urge to kill. They wanted to do away with all the others, anyone who was not with them. Anyone bogging down the country. Hampering their reign. The Reds. Peasant organizations. Catholic cooperatives. Unions. All those little people, the pathetic and the undesirable. They meanwhile were a fire consuming the country. A movement spreading its wings, casting its shadow, and forcibly instituting its laws. And then one day their movement was no longer a movement. It was a party. The National Fascist Party, set up by Mussolini. With deputies. Votes in parliament. Legitimacy and strength. The Bolshevik revolution was dead. The fascist revolution was up and running. Mussolini entered Rome. Was appointed prime minister. Established a militia. Restored order. Discipline and respect. War had created martyrdom and sacrifice, but it was now time to dominate the Mediterranean, find their own place in the sun at last. Reunification was the making of Italy. Now it was time to make the Italians.
* * *
—
The orphans return to the institute. More of them and younger than ever. Tiny little girls so thin that illnesses carried them off before the nuns even had time to tend to them. The white wooden coffins are light, adorned with a flower picked in the garden, followed by nuns dazed by their own impotence. The pupils arrive late, struggle to concentrate, and they too are hungry, as are the teachers, as is everyone. What to eat, where to find food, how to pay for it, with what? Inflation is at 450 percent, the weapons factories are emptying, unemployment breaks men’s spirits, reduces families to despair, brings the country to its knees. But Il Duce points toward the sun.
Mother Superior asks to see Bakhita in her office. Bakhita feels an emotional response as she obeys what she always experiences as an order. She forces herself to calm down as she climbs the stairs to the office, clinging to the banisters without which she could not go any farther, and when she arrives, Mother Superior will be holding the handkerchief that she will inevitably need to wipe her brow. Mother Superior gestures to an armchair facing her and, with a wave of her hand, tells Bakhita to catch her breath. Bakhita smiles, one hand on her heart, embarrassed that it takes a while for her breathing to settle.
“I always make so much noise. I’m sorry.”
“Madre Giuseppina, you know that many things have changed since the war—”
“Am I not staying?”
“Excuse me?”
“Am I being sent somewhere else, Madre?”
“Of course not.”
“I’m staying?”
“Madre Giuseppina, you mustn’t always talk as if you’re going to be driven out. I’m here to tell you the exact opposite.”
“The opposite?”
“You have worked in the kitchens, in the sacristy, and even in the infirmary. I would now like you to be at the institute’s front door. Do you understand?”
Bakhita’s heartbeat accelerates, as if any piece of news were a brutal shock, any change painful.
“Madre, do you mean that I am…sorry, that I will be the portinaia?”
“The doorkeeper, yes, that’s right.”
“Here? On the Via Fusinato?”
“Well, naturally, here, at the institute! Where else would it be?”
“But…Forgive me. Thank you, Madre. But…one question, if I may?”
“You may.”
“I’m—”
“Very black, yes. They’ll get used to it. You’re patient. Kind. You can explain. You’ve already helped out a little at reception, you know what to do.”
“A little…”
“It always went very well, I know it did.”
Bakhita bites her lip, Mother Superior laughs out loud. “What I mean is, it always ended up all right. People see you, they’re frightened, but after a few days, everything’s fine.”
“Well, yes…”
“You will greet the pupils, the orphans, the teachers, the nuns’ families, church clerics, school inspectors, and even plumbers, decorators, delivery men, and the gardener! It’s a big responsibility.”
Bakhita bows her head as a sign of acquiescence. She should thank and obey. But being the institute’s portinaia means being constantly exposed to the door, the first port of call for anyone from the outside world. Convent doors should be open to all people at all times. She knows this. And is frustrated with herself for feeling more fear than gratitude.
“Thank you, Madre,” she says, and, because it is the only thought she finds reassuring, she adds, “It is el Paron’s will…”
“Of course it’s what the Lord wants, He’s your ‘boss,’ Madre Moretta!”
It is strange how people always remind her she is the Moretta the moment she mentions el Paron. Even though the church uses the terms “master” and “servant” without intending any reference to slavery or skin color.
“When will I start?”
“Next week. In seven days.”
“Thank you.”
She leans on the arms of the chair to stand up, but Mother Superior has more to say.
“Do you remember when Madre Fabris started writing your story?”
“My story?”
“Your memories of Africa.”
“Oh…of course.”
“And when Madre Maria Turco pursued this with you, it helped you recover your memories, didn’t it?”
“Yes…”
“We’d like to pick that up again.”
“Oh, thank you, Madre, but…I have memories. Thank you.”
“Well, that’s good, but Madre
Maria Cipolla is very interested in your…journey. In who you are. She asked for the notes Madre Fabris made to be sent to Venice, to Ida Zanolini, who writes for our periodical, Vita canossiana. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Signora Zanolini found your memories very…really very touching, but she thinks you could go further. Much further.”
“Further?”
“With your recollections. Particularly of slavery.”
The word is like a slap. This word that still defines her. But she cannot see what more she could say, what it is they need to hear. Perhaps her story is too wretched for this woman who writes in a periodical.
“Why, Madre? Why say more?”
“Because Signora Zanolini, who is a very cultured woman, a highly regarded teacher, and a good Christian, is going to write your story as a serial. Do you know what a serial is?”
“A story. A story several times.”
“Exactly. It’s an honor, Madre Giuseppina. But you must derive no pride from it. You will leave for Venice tomorrow morning. When you return you will take up your position as doorkeeper.”
“Venice?”
“With the Canossians at the Sant’Alvise Institute. That’s where Signora Zanolini will meet you. Madre Giuseppina…the Dorsoduro Institute now belongs to the Salesian sisters. There isn’t a single Canossian sister left at the catechumen institute, did you know that? Don’t expect to see anyone you know in Venice.”
“But where are they? The sisters, where are they now?”
“Don’t you worry about that. You go now.”
* * *
—
Who else would be asked to tell their life story straight out like that? Who would be forced to have their confidences transcribed and made public? Who else but a former slave saved by Italy? A Negress converted to Catholicism? The year is 1930. Military operations have intensified in Libya. Women, children, and the elderly have been corralled in camps around Benghazi. Where they die of disease and malnutrition. Mussolini’s army released mustard gas over the country. This is the “place in the sun,” the “conquest of the Mediterranean.” It is Africa that fuels Mussolini’s dreams and the dreams of a nation brought to their knees, the Africa of barbarity and abject poverty, and conquering this Africa would restore the Italians’ honor, and the power they have lost. The Africa featured in postcards, films, novels, songs, and even commercials for coffee, insurance, and beer. So why not have a serialization of the terrible life story of Madre Giuseppina, formerly Bakhita? Why hide what is a living testimony to the best that Italy can do?
She is back in Venice. And it is Mimmina she misses. Instantly. The baby clasped to her on those windy sun-sliced streets, captivated by the sudden beauty of a palace, a flower-decked terrace, a centenarian tree on a small square. Returning to Venice is like visiting it for the first time. She is more than sixty years old, but it is as if she were twenty with that child huddled against her, filling her with joy and a lust for life. One next to the other. This was where the two of them belonged. It was solid and happy. Since then, not a day has passed when she has not prayed for Mimmina, for el Paron to protect her, and, most important, for Him to tell her that she, Bakhita, loved her and still does with an indestructible love, bound to her life itself. She comes to the little square outside the convent in the heart of the Cannaregio district, and the red-brick church looks as imposing and weighty as a windowless palace. The sound of her lopsided footsteps rings on flagstones and bounces off houses caught in the sunlight. She is back in the city’s salty, fishy smell, and the feeling of being protected, being on this island as if nestled in the crook of a hand, trusting, because the light is so beautiful, and men travel about in their gondolas like tribesmen in canoes, solitary and proud. Looking out over the nearby lagoon, she is back in a life lived openly under the sky, its uninterrupted horizon, and she smiles, because here in Venice she has found something of Africa’s unconstrained spaces. She prayed a great deal the day before, has not slept, and knows that el Paron is asking her to talk of all the people she did not help, who she left to die in a ransacked land.
* * *
—
She meets Ida Zanolini in the cloisters of the Sant’Alvise convent. The young woman’s surprise…Bakhita is the first black person she has met, and she is so taken aback she does not know how to greet her, bows, kisses the mater dolorosa of Bakhita’s Canossian medallion, and smiles at her, emotional and embarrassed. She is a committed, exuberant woman, a lay teacher devoted to her profession and to Catholic action. She and Bakhita go to the convent’s small visiting room to sit down, and Bakhita knows almost immediately that with Ida Zanolini she will be able to speak at her own pace, speak as she chooses, and she senses that she will tell her how it feels. How it feels to have come through it all. Without the others. She thinks she has said enough about the burned village, the abducted sister, and the captors’ dagger against her neck. But Ida does not write anything down as she listens, does not ask her to repeat or explain any words, does not ask her to go back or rationalize the sequence of her account. Because she is listening not to Madre Giuseppina but to the woman who cannot remember her name and is now describing her past as she never has before. The pain. The defeats and the shame. And the loss that no fervor has succeeded in assuaging.
* * *
—
In her bedroom that evening, Ida writes down everything she has heard, at such speed that she struggles to read her own writing, which comes in a great tide, and it is the modest guttural words wrested from the little Daju girl that guide her hand. She has never experienced this. Never met anyone like Bakhita. Faltering, and yet filled with superhuman strength. Incandescent. Unclassifiable. Intelligent and restrained. She does not yet know where this narrative will take them both, and perhaps if she had known, she would never have dared. Had she been aware of the repercussions, the passions, the near madness this serialization in the Canossian periodical would provoke, perhaps she would have apologized to the woman who confided in her over the course of three full days, sometimes choked by sobs, and who pulled herself together like someone clinging to the last rock on the last mountain in order to describe the torture, the children, particularly the children, “you understand: the children, child slaves, child soldiers, do you understand, I did nothing and neither did you, and who could, who will, tell me who will do something someday?” This is what she said, in her jumble, in which there were flashes Ida understood so clearly.
* * *
—
On the last day Ida takes Bakhita to 108 Dorsoduro, the former catechumen institute. Twenty-eight years after leaving, she is back in this familiar place. The Salesian sisters have been warned, and, doing their best to disguise their surprise when they see the Moretta who is blacker than all the photographs and pictures they have seen of Africans, they open their door wide to her. The small cloister, the compact garden, a corner of silence under a calm sky, and a violent sensation of being at home. Here in this institute, the first place where she said no. She goes into the visiting room, vast and empty but still echoing to the sound of Mimmina’s sobs and her mother’s curse, “You ingrate!” This oppressively dark place is inhabited only by the shadows and echoes it still holds, and in this brutal concertinaing of time, she is struck by how achingly close the past is. Remembers Stefano, his impatience and commitment, she realized only much later how doggedly he had fought for her, all of this has been written down now. Justice has been done to him. Perhaps his children will read the serialization. And Mimmina? There is no news of her at all. She could so easily find out where her former nanny lives, she may even know but does not come.
Bakhita goes into the chapel, it is humble, almost bare. She walks over to the baptismal fonts, points them out to Ida.
“I became God’s daughter. Here.”
And Ida feels guilty that she will be writing down these words, these very intimate words, along with all the
others. Bakhita sits facing the crucified slave, the man she knew without even knowing who he was. She can hear Madre Fabretti saying, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted,” and she feels as if she is returning to her very source, as if this place also kept watch over her childhood with her family, kept watch over the confusion and love she feels for it. She understands that Venice saved her because Venice belongs to the sea, it is a place of ebb and flow, of refugees and tradesmen, of intermixed people and dreamers, a city where she felt at home, drawn to and intrigued by the sisters singing at dawn, their hushed intoning behind a velvet drape.
* * *
—
Ida hangs back slightly, cannot help looking at her: What language does she speak to herself? Is there one language for Africa and one for Italy? One language for el Paron and another for the stars, stars she says she has looked at every evening since she was a child? Has she really forgotten her name, or is that her last secret? Ida is afraid of betraying her. Afraid of hurting her by writing about this childhood lived in another century, and quite immutable in its devastation. She looks at Bakhita and has an impression of theft. She is taking everything. There is what she does not see, what she intuits, and all the questions she has not asked. The savagery of her masters. Their boundless power over little girls and women. She can imagine. Will say nothing. Because nothing has been said. The dishonor. The dying inside. The part of her burned. She looks at Bakhita, slightly stooped now by tiredness, and feels uncomfortable knowing that her back is scarred by whipping, her skin tattooed, and especially uncomfortable because readers of the serial will soon know this too. She can see her own words, her sentences lined up like ropes, solid as chains, catching and confiscating confidences.
Bakhita Page 31