Bakhita

by Veronique Olmi

  “I’m leaving?”

  “Yes. You’re leaving.”

  “I’m not staying? I’m going?”

  She is driven out once again, it is her fault, she said too much, chokes the place by taking up so much space, knows this, sometimes feels like a huge flag planted outside the institute, masking everything else, the humble, patient work of the other nuns, and she remembers how happy she was when she worked in the kitchens, and the sacristy, the happiness of those prewar times when the little girls called out to her in the schoolyard, “Moretta Bella, come here!” She should never have gathered them around her and told them about the escaped slave girl who sleeps in trees and isn’t eaten by wild animals. That was how it all started.

  “Are you listening, Madre Moretta? Will you help us buy the freedom of slaves? Save your brothers in Africa?”

  “In Africa?”

  Madre Benetti spreads a map of Italy on the desk. Bakhita has seen images of it since the war, this long country of mountains and seawater.

  “You and I are going to set out to spread the word. You, me…and the book. We’ll travel all over Italy, every Canossian institute in the country, and we’ll collect money for our missionaries.”

  “I have to tell you, Madre. Sorry, but…I walk difficult. Really.”

  They do not understand straightaway. To Bakhita, leaving means walking. When they do understand, they are torn between laughing and hugging this Madre Moretta, protectively but also gratefully, because the idea that Madre Maria Cipolla, the overall Mother Superior, has had is very good: “increase the institute’s standing” by taking Madre Giuseppina all over Italy. And this, this simpleminded innocence of hers, so perfectly represents the African people!

  * * *

  —

  They will take trains. Dozens and dozens of trains across the entire country, for three years. Before leaving, Bakhita confides in Elvira. She is anxious at the thought of talking about a book she did not write and had trouble reading. Elvira reassures her: Madre Benetti (“the Chinawoman,” as she calls her) will translate her Venetian dialect, everything will be fine, people love her so much, love her without even knowing her. She tries to soothe Bakhita when she would prefer to tell her not to go. Bakhita has a right to rest. A right to be like the others, a tired old nun, loved by former pupils, lay teachers, orphans, everyone who has grown up and grown old alongside her.

  “I’ll come to join you, Madre, I’ll come to see you, I promise.”

  “Your mistress doesn’t want you to.”

  “Don’t you worry about my mistress.”

  “How long do you think I’m gone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Could I have a walking stick?”

  “I’ll ask them.”

  And then they sit in silence for moment. Elvira notices her sagging profile, so different from the drawings others now do of her, the image that is in general circulation, wise, so wise, her lips closed, her heart silent, and all her torments held in check. As if guessing what Elvira is thinking, Bakhita tells her this very private fact: “My mother is back, you know, Elvira. She forgives the book.”

  “Have you seen her? In a dream?”

  “Not in a dream. She kissed me.”

  Elvira loves her so much when she is like a five-year-old, when she twists her mouth and raises her eyebrows, the little twinkle of blue in her astonished eyes.

  “What do you mean she kissed you?”

  “It’s very cold, but when I sleep she kisses me, here, on my cheek. She forgives.”

  “Yes, my darling little Madre, she’s forgiven you, and now she’ll never leave you again.”

  “Do you think?”

  “Who would want to leave you?” she asks and, taking her in her arms, adds quietly, “And let the Chinawoman carry your suitcase, won’t you!”

  Feeling Bakhita’s laugh reverberate against her chest, Elvira realizes Bakhita has no idea what is expected of her. She is from a very real Africa but will be expected to talk about an invented country, her mother kisses her at night, and she will be asked to describe an Abyssinia of savages. The official speech. It is what they do best in Italy, reassurance and hope transmitted along simplistic lines that speak directly to the fears of the general population, their fear of “other people.” Of barbarians.

  In their thousands, and over several years, they come. Groups. Schools. Universities. Sick children. Pilgrims. They come to listen to her and more particularly to see her. In churches, theaters, and schools. In the convent in Castenedolo, men who have never set foot in a church before kiss her hands and come away in tears. In Florence, Bologna, and Ancona she meets the cardinal, in Lodi the bishop grants her a special audience, in Trento more official photographs are taken, in Milan she meets the children in a Canossian establishment where they teach young deaf-mutes. The children run away at the sight of her. One little girl comes closer, touches Bakhita with a finger. Her finger does not come away dirty. The child waves the other children over, and they throw themselves in Bakhita’s arms, asking for kisses. She spends the whole afternoon with them, they show her sign language, she responds with flailing gestures, with them she feels understood. In Venice she is invited to the centenary of the institute’s foundation. At the Vimercate novitiate she is asked to perform the role of portinaia for a few days. The novices’ parents refuse to enter the building until a white nun comes to the door. In one town there is such a crush to see her that the tram lines are blocked, four thousand people throng the streets. In other places people climb into the pulpit to have a better view of her and call for her to come up and preach. Crowds wait for her in stations, and when the train pulls in some start singing canticles while the more politically minded sing “Faccetta Nera”: “Little black face, little Abyssinian, we’ll take you to Rome a free woman, you will be kissed by our sun, and you will be pure in a black shirt.” She is asked whether she knows Josephine Baker, who has a Sicilian lover and whose triumphant tour included Italy. Is asked whether she has read the scandalous book Sambadù, amore negro, which Mussolini has recently ordered to be taken out of circulation because it is an offense to the nation’s dignity. (The cover features a white woman kissing a black man, but at the end of the novel the Italian heroine acknowledges her lover’s barbarity and he returns to his tribe.) Bakhita is Africa. Some even say she is “the color of Africa.” She herself, though, would admit later, much later, “I felt I was falling into the abyss.”

  * * *

  —

  What she is being asked to do is essentially fairly simple, and each appearance follows exactly the same format. The missionary sister, Madre Benetti, talks about Canossian missions, the lack of funds, conversions, freed slaves, missionaries’ lives, and—emphatically—their deaths (through sickness, violence, or poverty), then asks Bakhita to join her. This is the moment everyone is waiting for. The reason they are here, overwhelmed with emotion before it even begins. She comes to the middle of the stage, steps into the light. And she always allows them a moment to look. Because this is what they want, she knows it is. Once the shock, the exquisite shock has passed, they try to recognize in her the little girl from the book, the half-naked slave in Khartoum’s markets, they stare in silence and sometimes she remembers the white bird that sailed over El Obeid, when a buyer asked to have a closer look at the merchandise. Remembers what she then had to do, fetch a stick, run, crouch down, show her teeth, she could not do this now that she uses a stick to walk, but not here, not in public, the walking stick stays in the cloakroom, and she arrives on the stage with her cumbersome limp. Next, Madre Benetti asks her to “speak from the heart.” She will talk and knows her voice will frighten them. And that they will enjoy their fear, which is also such a good expression of “Africa.” She says hello to them and thanks them in her bad Veneto, she says, “I will remember you in my prayers,” sometimes adding, “I hope to see you all in paradise.” And then she
climbs down from the stage. She does not want to, but it is an order and she obeys. (“Three things, Madre Giuseppina: First, no walking stick during these gatherings; second, please don’t hesitate to speak in your African dialect; and last, please feel free to go down among them, and do whatever they ask.”) She signs books, grants forgiveness, sits down with those who want “more details,” and even shows the scars on her arm to those who really insist. She blesses sick children with her medallion of the Virgin, and as she blesses them she prays for all those she has seen die, in Sudan and in Italy, and she feels boundless tenderness for these children who ask for nothing. The children themselves look at their mothers, hoping that they too, they in particular, will take comfort from Madre Giuseppina, and Bakhita wishes she could take these women in her arms, but that is not the accepted thing to do.

  * * *

  —

  It is in doing this, mingling with crowds, talking to students, local journalists, the intrusive and the well-meaning, that she gleans news of events in Ethiopia.

  * * *

  —

  On October 2, 1935, she attended a gathering on the main square in Bergamo where everyone was to listen to Il Duce’s speech transmitted live on the radio. Madre Benetti showed her where the voice would come from, loudspeakers hung in trees.

  “Il Duce is in Rome, in his palace, but he will speak here, and we will hear him. And so will people in town squares all over Italy. Everyone will hear him.”

  “Yes.”

  “You mustn’t give any indication that you don’t understand or you disagree.”

  “I know.”

  “You mustn’t show anything at all. And anything you don’t understand, I’ll explain later.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s find somewhere on the sidelines.”

  She understood later why Madre Benetti protected her from the crowd’s prying eyes. With what he was to announce in this particular speech, it was better not to be black if listening to it among those jubilant masses, it was better to sit a little apart, on a bench, in the shade of a linden tree that went some way toward hiding her.

  She heard the band play before the speech, the clamoring crowd, the announcement that Il Duce had arrived before he himself spoke, and she would never forget Mussolini’s music. Listened with all the focus of someone trying to understand, and getting the gist of his words. Heard “Rivoluzione!,” “Tuta l’Italia!,” “Unità della Patria!,” “Destino!,” “Determinazione!,” “Tutti uniti!,” heard the slow, halting tempo of the beginning, as if the story to come would build to a crescendo, weighed down at first by ponderous slowness, by short sentences interrupted by the roaring crowds, the crowd on the radio and its echo from the one in Bergamo, heard also the anger in Il Duce’s voice because he carried all the anger of every Italian on every town square, and then the rhythm of the speech changed, the story built momentum, his deep voice went very low, like in an aria by Caruso, then suddenly swelled, rose to a shrill register, only to drop back down, hoarsely, laden with rebellion, his powerful rolled r’s like drumrolls, his sentences expansive and full of fury, at times it seemed Il Duce might cry, but he puffed himself up once more with the implacable anger that gave him such terrifying energy. And then Bakhita heard dates and numbers shouted, feeding the mood of rebellion in the exhausted exultant crowd, figures that inflamed them, seeming to rally them to head off to war. And this was the aim. “La guerra!!!” “Italia proletaria e fascista!!!” Men in the square identified themselves in these utterances, as if these words were what had been missing their whole lives. At the end of the speech, the cheering mingled with the crackling from the radio, Mussolini was inside them, his blood flowed in their veins, his voice rang in their ears long after the loudspeakers were unplugged. Bakhita did not know what Il Duce did once he had finished speaking to the whole of Italy, but on that square, from where she was on the bench on the sidelines, she witnessed an explosion of joy, in singing, shouting, tears, and hugs between people of all ages and both sexes, and children in their black shirts, who had understood still less than she had, were happy, because everyone else was. Fascist Italy was advancing in unison to claim the vital position it was due and to avenge the injustices it had been dealt for too long. It would no longer settle for the crumbs of the colonial feast. That was what this announcement was. And when Il Duce roared “Oh, Ethiopia, we’ve been waiting forty years, and it’s enough now!,” the Italians were as euphoric as if they had been reunited with someone they had missed terribly, someone without whom their lives were impossible. But they had in fact missed themselves. And thought they would find themselves again by fighting “those Abyssinian dogs,” because colonization would make a wealthy respected people of them.

  * * *

  —

  It is by talking to the countless hordes who come to listen to her (and to see her more than listen to her, to touch her rather than just see her), it is through contact with Italians that Bakhita grasps that Ethiopia, a country so close to her own, is an immoral nation but also a place of untapped wealth, with oil, gold and silver, platinum, nitrates, sulfur, iron, it has everything and they will devour it all, devour, invade, excavate, and dig in this exotic but barbaric country, a country they know well, they hear terrifying reports of infibulation and child sacrifices, and secretly exchange prohibited pornographic photographs, Africans with their devil skin tempting innocents as the devil does, Ethiopia not only has countless riches, it also fuels their fantasies and longings that have been repressed for too long, the steamboats to transport them there are groaning with soldiers, farmers, laborers, nuns, and missionaries, but also with Italian girls intended for Italian brothels, so that the white race does not become contaminated and all that virility is spent in the right place, without weakening itself.

  * * *

  —

  Andrea Fabiani writes a simple parish newspaper and, like so many others, asks for an interview with Bakhita. He asks her to repeat what has already been written in the book and reiterate what she has just told the crowd. She speaks as if reciting, could almost tell the whole story in Italian having heard Madre Benetti relate it so many times in this official language, the language of the book. Nevertheless, she makes an effort to be involved in what she is saying, to relate events as if for the first time but without the pain of the first time. Fabiani makes the most of a moment when Madre Benetti slips out of the room to ask Bakhita a question, but so quietly, so quickly, that she does not fully understand and answers only with an apologetic smile that the journalist interprets as a discreet manifestation of her anguish.

  She remembers the words. Her instincts tell her that they are dangerous. She must approach them cautiously. And so it is with caution that she asks Madre Benetti a question in the train taking them from one institute to another, asks what “arsenic” means.

  “Arsenic? It’s a poison. Why do you mention arsenic?”

  Bakhita closes her eyes. She feels terribly hot, her hands shake as they clutch her rosary, Madre Benetti assumes she has drifted into prayer. Bakhita is walking through the fields of Ethiopia. Alongside lakes full of dead fish, poisoned rivers, and dead bodies frozen in their final convulsions. Fabiani’s words encapsulate this murdered landscape: “They gassed the population. Do you understand gassed? Shells containing arsine and mustard gas. You must have heard of arsine? It’s true. I heard it on a foreign radio station.”

  She tries to hold back her pain. Channels it. Steers it. Contains it. And later, in her cell in whichever institute welcomes them that evening, she weeps. She lives in the furious chaos of this world. And does not know where to put her own rebellion.

  * * *

  —

  She heard it on the radio. Has seen photos and illustrations, newspapers, posters and postcards, seen him taming a lion, galloping on horseback, straddling canons, wielding a pickax, sowing grain, threshing corn bare-chested, and skiing, kissing children, inspecting
armies. Seen his face set against a map of Africa as her own face is on the cover of Storia Meravigliosa. Ethiopia is now Italian. And she is to meet Il Duce at his private residence, the Palazzo Veneziano, from which he addresses the whole of Italy. It is cold on this December day in 1936, Rome is full of huge public squares and drafts, ruins and dark streets, her walking stick slips on the frozen cobblestones that make walking difficult for her. A stooped figure, she makes her way supported by two nuns who are emotional about helping her, as if they were close to her, and it is true that strangers know her now. People discuss her father with her, the night she escaped, the sheepfold, but the more people talk of her life, the farther away it feels. When she confided in Ida Zanolini, she did not know that what she said would become a book and that she would be asked to give a copy of this book to a warlord. Had she known, as she whispered in Sant’Alvise’s tiny visiting room, that these words prized out of her would be sold for two lira all across the country, she would surely have kept intimate details to herself. Would have talked of children. Slaves. Numberless martyrs. But not the others. Not her brother. Her twin sister. Kishmet. Not the little kids to whom she told stories and sang songs. She would have protected the children in her village from this, from Mussolini’s palace. She makes her way, whipped by the icy whistling wind that drives her forward, hunched over, seeing only her own feet and the walking stick, she has three idiotic legs moving so inadequately and cannot keep up with the valiant strides of the missionary nuns who are bound for Addis Ababa, missionaries full of curiosity and fear at the thought of seeing Ethiopia saved by Il Duce. And suddenly Bakhita stops. Catches her breath. Looks up. There it is, facing her, so tiny. The balcony. The one where he stands to talk. To yell. He is on the verge of tears, prepared to kill them all, she can sense it, this man with the voice of terror, and she knows terror, oh, she knows it so well. She almost collapses, the nuns hold her up: “Don’t prostrate yourself now, Madre, wait until you’re before him.” Her eyes cloud. The wind snakes under her robes, stings her damaged legs, she is hiding with Binah, behind a towering acacia, they have run away and are listening to the guard’s voice carried on the wind. And then, slowly, the sound of chains. The slaves’ breathing. She looks at this ridiculously small balcony with two Italian flags flying on it.