She has not told her. Must tell her. Absolutely must.
“People will read this, Madre Giuseppina, do you understand? They’ll know. There aren’t very many of them, and they are our kind. But they will know everything.”
Vita canossiana does not have a vast readership. But deep down Ida knows. She will not accept it but knows it, the dishonesty of the written word, a spoken avowal written down, circulated, and replicated. “It could end up in anyone’s hands,” she thinks. Immediately brushes aside this premonition and masks it with a surprise, she has a surprise for Madre Giuseppina today, redeeming herself in advance for what might happen once the serial is published, things for which she knows she will be responsible.
* * *
—
They take the vaporetto together and the vigorous buffeting of the wind makes Bakhita laugh, she likes this short trip with the roar of the motor and the pitfalls of the swell, the Virgin’s expansive gesture on the dome of the basilica, as if she were offering them the sky on this happy day, leaving Venice and watching it grow as they move away. “It’s beautiful!” Bakhita cries, and Ida nods in agreement, holding her scarf over her wayward hair.
* * *
—
They come to the island of Giudecca, to the new institute for abandoned children. This is a surprise for Bakhita. And it will also be a surprise for the person she has come to see, Madre Fabretti. The portinaia who opens the door to them is young, seems like a child to Bakhita but says she has already been here fifteen years, as if this were an indicator of her rectitude, she blushes when Bakhita speaks to her, and her expression betrays a note of pride to be seeing with her own eyes this former slave whose conversion is described to every novice. She explains that Madre Fabretti no longer walks and calls for a sister to show them to her room. Bakhita sits down while they wait. Does a mother that old still recognize her child? Can you recognize someone after “nearly thirty years apart. Ten. Plus ten. And another ten,” Ida explained with her outspread hands. She does not know. Has never been reunited with anyone.
* * *
—
She and Ida follow the sister who leads them down long corridors with waxed floors. They can hear the shrieks of children playing, shrieks that bounce off the countless windows. Ida takes Bakhita’s arm, helping her to walk without appearing to, surprised by the weight of this body that has to peel itself away from the earth. She knows—and cannot help thinking of—the miles this body covered in deserts and on hills. Noticing the frightened expressions of those who come across Bakhita, she wonders whether anyone with a black body can ever be free.
* * *
—
Bakhita goes over to the armchair where Madre Fabretti is sitting, huddled, bowed as if in prayer, her chin on her chest, her neck fragile. Kneels to be on a level with her, and with the pain that this causes her, it is as if she is the same advanced age as the friend she has come to see. Their heads are so close, face-to-face, breath mingling with breath. They do not speak. But look at each other. For a long time. And then a slow gentle movement, Bakhita’s forehead leans in and comes to rest on Madre Fabretti’s lap. The old woman’s misshapen hand strokes her headdress. And it wells up slowly, just a breath at first, rasping, obstructed, and then a cough, something trapped in her throat, and from Bakhita’s buried face comes a powerful never-ending sob.
* * *
—
Ida tiptoes out, leaves the old nun and her protégée to renew their dependence on each other, renew a prohibited emotion, an attachment that, she understands, takes nothing away from God but gives these two women a taste of the elective, consensual, subjective love that makes us all unique.
* * *
—
“We’ll need a photograph, Madre Giuseppina, a photograph of you on the cover of the book.”
“What book?”
“After the serialization there’ll be a book, you’ve been told that. Have you been told?”
“My hideous face? On a book?”
“Come on! The Italians are more and more accustomed to black faces. Show her the postcards, Ida, there are such pretty ones now. Do you know the one of the young Italians kneeling before the little black girl? You know, the one with the hammer. The Italian boy is kneeling and breaking the young slave’s chains. My nephews showed it to me, it’s so moving!”
A nun is taking Ida and Bakhita back to Venice from Giudecca, and her high-pitched voice can barely be heard over the noise of the vaporetto. Bakhita screws up her eyes as she looks at her.
“But you’ll be on the book too, Madre,” Bakhita says.
“Me? Why me?”
“Canossians are always in twos. So I can’t be alone in the picture.”
The nun laughs playfully to mean no. She has been told about Madre Moretta’s sense of humor. She drops the two of them at the Cannaregio quay and heads straight back to the institute, happy to have met this black Madre whose story, as far as she can make out, is so exciting. As the vaporetto pulls away, she cups her hands around her mouth and calls out to Ida Zanolini, “And write us a nice serial, won’t you!”
* * *
—
Bakhita has the photographs taken. Alone. Standing. Kneeling. Holding a book or with her hands together. Praying. Smile held in check. Eyes distant. She maintains an upright bearing, because she must look up and not move, she has a dignity and natural elegance that disconcerts the people choosing between the images, and they whisper that perhaps this is because her father was the village chief’s brother, as she told Ida Zanolini. Who knows? What if she were an African princess? Oh…it’s no laughing matter, the life she’s had…the life! How to describe her? She’s…well, yes, she really is a wonder just as the name implies, this “wonderful story,” this storia meravigliosa. Every Italian child ought to know it, they’d see what children are subjected to in Africa, and they’d be twice as happy to live with Il Duce.
* * *
—
In January 1931 the first installment of Madre Giuseppina Bakhita’s Storia Meravigliosa was published in the Canossian periodical. In December the book was on the shelves. It describes the hell of slavery, her lifesaving meeting with the Italian consul, and her time in Italy until she became a novice. The book’s cover frightened no one: The illustration of Bakhita’s smooth wise face with her Canossian headdress is set against a map of Italy, her face is light, almost mixed race. Inside the book, the photograph itself reveals the deep black of her skin, as if it would take Italian readers a while to come to terms with it. In the preface, after Ida Zanolini has described how moved she was by their meeting, the editor adds a few lines about God’s wonderful ways, God who, in His goodness, wanted to “bring Bakhita from the distant desert mired in superstition and barbarity to the light of Christ and the glories of His grace, in religious perfection.” These last words were for the missionary movement.
* * *
—
The book is not a success. It is a phenomenon. People fight over it. It is reprinted. Reprinted over the course of several years, up until 1937, at the end of the war in Ethiopia. At first Bakhita does not understand at all. Does not understand why people come ringing at the institute’s door all day long and sometimes at night, but she opens up, she is the portinaia. They come from all over the place. Not just nearby villages, not just towns in Veneto, they come from Trieste, Fiume, Venice, Turin, come to see her, touch her and be touched by her, be blessed, healed, consoled. Some throw themselves at her feet sobbing. Others gaze at her in astonishment, touch her medallion, kiss the hem of her robes, ask her to pray for them. There are the homeless. The superstitious. The wounded souls. The inquisitive. The humiliated and the exalted. And beside the Madre, who is so black, so moretta, the sisters have put a collection box. After meeting Madre Giuseppina, people are encouraged to give money for the Canossian missionaries, every donation buys a slave’s freedom, so the poor among these visitors feel the
y are contributing to their country’s greatness, Italians are no longer mandolin-playing exiles, no longer illiterate alcoholic peasants, they are these generous souls who work to save other peoples that are not yet acquainted with civilization.
* * *
—
“It is el Paron’s will…” When evening comes and she is alone in her cell, with the window open to the night air, she keeps telling herself this. It is God’s wish. And she prays for Him to explain it to her. What are they all looking for? Mother Superior laughed when Bakhita asked why so many people wanted to see her, when they can look at the photo in the book. She laughed and did not answer. And ever since the serialization was published, long before the book came out, things have changed in the very heart of the convent. One day, during their leisure time, the sisters asked Bakhita to sing an African song. She could not remember a single one. They insisted, come on, couldn’t she make an effort, an African song, just one. She closed her eyes, it was an April morning with pale light, a clear morning holding nothing back, she simply could not remember, this disappointed the sisters and left her feeling miserable and ashamed, as if she had lied to them, as if she was not really from “over there,” and apart from her devil skin, she had brought nothing from Africa, she could see some of them had their doubts and suspicions: She’d told her life story but couldn’t even remember a song? This tormented her for several days, and she would go about her business, her brow furrowed, humming the beginnings of a melody that went nowhere, trying to whistle, to recall a sound from childhood, a snatch of music from her mother, who no longer visited her dreams now that she had been described in a book. Bakhita could find her nowhere now, as if she had definitively left that fallen baobab trunk (a detail Bakhita had kept to herself) and vanished into an inaccessible beyond, but perhaps her soul and Bakhita’s father’s soul resented her for telling the story of their failure. The little slave girl. That little slave girl was the daughter they failed to find. She prays for this too, for her family to forgive her. And when she hears money drop into the Canossian mission’s collection box, she cannot help thinking of Binah, Kishmet, and all the others. So she agrees to be this “rare creature,” as she puts it, but is sometimes just too tired, sometimes feels so awkward and anxious that it paralyzes her. “Two lira to buy the book, and how much to see me?” she asks. How much is she worth? How much has she ever cost? At more than sixty, she would not be much use now in Sudan, to slave masters, and she pictures herself in Khartoum’s stifling, dusty streets, sitting against a bare wall, a beggar woman like the others, like those she sees in Italy, hounded and beaten by the Fascists, and then found half dead, with their manic smiles and their embarrassment for still being alive. These are the women for whom she feels an affinity. But el Paron wants something else. And the day she remembers her song “When children were born to the lioness,” she announces the fact to the other nuns with the relief of a conscientious child. The nuns are delighted, and so curious that they ask her to sing it right here, right now, even though it isn’t leisure time, here, in the refectory, where they have pushed the tables into place before sitting down to eat. They want to watch too: “You must clap your hands, Madre Giuseppina! And dance!” They have seen the films, they know how this goes. Bakhita sings her childish song. Even though she feels so old. The song for the children who sat around her, carefree and wide-eyed. It is in a combination of dialects, Arabic and Turkish, she does her best, has long since forgotten her mother tongue. At first the nuns are embarrassed, her full-bodied voice, lumpen words, clapping hands, swaying body, they dare not look at her, are ashamed that it makes them shudder, and when Bakhita closes her eyes at the end of the song, drops her arms by her side, motionless and serious, they are afraid someone will come in and see this, this pain they cannot begin to understand.
* * *
—
Subsequently, to atone for this awkward atmosphere, they decide to laugh about it. And it becomes a regular occurrence in their leisure time to ask Madre Moretta to sing her song. But without closing her eyes. “African style” to the very end: Clapping and dancing. Joyful. Always joyful! Afterward, Bakhita’s legs and back and even her arms hurt so much she thinks she definitely wouldn’t be any use to anyone in Khartoum now, she’d just be a beggar. Would no longer serve in anyone’s house. No young mistress would ask her to sing or act like a monkey to entertain her guests.
Of course, all of these people who come to see her know what to expect, have read the book, are curious but not afraid. It is better now than in her early days as portinaia, when she frightened children. The first days of school were the worst, the children did not want her to touch them, some burst into tears at the sight of her and stood staring at her, rooted to the spot, helpless. Surely she was the wife of l’uomo nero, the babau, the bogeyman in fables, a horrifying black ghost that their parents threatened them with at the least misdemeanor. Does she have legs under her robes? Does the lower half of her body give off smoke? Does she hide under their beds at night? And the perennial fear that she would dirty them, contaminate them, steal them to eat them. The patience it took to calm them, these children who grew up with fear and whose parents replaced their clothes with Fascist Party uniforms, black dresses, skirts, and shirts, ever keen to do the right thing, be like everyone else, acceptable and identical.
She wants only one thing: to welcome them in as best she can, be the best possible doorkeeper, it matters, she knows it matters how each day starts. So she asks the children to sit down before the bell sounds for them to go in and tells them about the life of Christ. She would rather never talk of her own life again, never answer more questions about it, prefers talking about the crucified slave, how people wanted to follow him, listen to him, how he loved beggars and the sick and little children. But a lot of them prefer to have Mussolini’s book explained specially for children, or the poems they recite at breathtaking speed, clapping their hands: “Rosa was her name, a name that’s full of thorns, but he was her bloom, her little boy Benito. She kissed his brow and said, You’re mine, oh you are mine! But she knew that he belonged to Italy. And God.” It is a game. A new way of life. As a group. Gathered together. Surrounding the leader who is reviving the country after the Great War made it “worse than a lunatic asylum or an African tribe.”
* * *
—
She will do this until 1933, usher in the institute’s children, its visitors, and respond to the endless needs of those who have read her storia meravigliosa. Wherever she may be in the convent, the school, or the church, when the doorbell rings, she goes to it. Perhaps because she admitted to the terrible treatment, the blows, the torture of tattooing, perhaps because she talked of the long walks, the hunger, and the thirst, her body can take no more. It is failing. Just when she is in such demand, when she must run the moment she is needed, her body would like to stop. But she still has the same reflex response: Someone asks her to do something, she obeys. She does not always understand what is wanted of her. Why do they need to come so close to her? Why do they read her story with such passion? Can’t they see what’s going on here, in their own country? Don’t they see the little peasant girls? Do they know how many children there are at the institute who don’t know their birth dates? Why don’t they ask the orphans to tell their “wonderful stories,” these girls who come here with no underwear, dirty and silent, already abused and ashamed? She does not understand, and then accepts this lack of understanding, she is the nun who wears her story on her skin like stigmata, and does her best to disguise the pain shooting up her legs to her lower back, never asks for a doctor to examine her, and will never show the infirmary the strange little spots that appear on her scars, inflaming her skin.
* * *
—
One day she is told she must go. She is sixty-four years old, and will leave Schio. Mother Superior introduces her to Madre Leopolda Benetti who has returned from more than thirty years as a missionary in China.
“D
o you know where China is, Madre Giuseppina?”
Bakhita shakes her head, she does not know China, and she smiles as appealingly as she can to Madre Benetti who is eyeing her with such curiosity.
“China’s a very long way away. Farther than Africa,” says Mother Superior, and Madre Benetti nods as if to say, Oh, yes, that is possible, somewhere farther away than Africa!
Madre Benetti tells Bakhita that she has read the book. Bakhita nods. The book, of course, why else would anyone want to talk to her, and what else does anyone talk to her about since its publication, yes, the book, and she listens while she herself is discussed, her childhood and her conversion, and then there is talk of missions which, as she knows, are more and more widespread in Africa, in Sudan and Libya. She listens and waits for the request that is bound to come next, because there is always a request at the end of these discourses.
“All those slaves whose freedom must be bought. All those lives to save.”
“Yes.”
“And you…the Italians love you so much.”
“Me?”
“Our Madre Moretta is the personification of humility,” Mother Superior says to apologize for Bakhita’s innocence. “You could help our missionaries, Madre Giuseppina.”
“How?”
“People come from all over Italy to see you, don’t they? Well, now you shall go out to meet them.”
Bakhita Page 32