“The first thing to do with the children…” she says, turning to one of the missionary nuns.
But the sister cannot hear her, there is too much wind and Bakhita is speaking too quietly.
“I DON’T UN-DER-STAND!” she shouts, enunciating her words. “LET’S HURRY.”
Bakhita grasps her walking stick firmly, nods, and says quietly, to herself, “The first thing to do with the children is give them something to drink.”
And, flanked by the missionaries, she steps into the vast snake house.
* * *
—
A few days later, still with the same missionaries, she will meet Pope Pius XI, it will be the pinnacle of her tour, and she thinks that after this she will return to Schio but is instead appointed portinaia at the institute of the Canossian Daughters of Charity in Vimercate, near Milan, where she has been before and where the novices are preparing to set out on a mission. She is put there like a bridge between two continents, reassuring parents who are anxious that their daughters are to travel abroad when they are so young, so exalted, and ignorant about so many things. Ethiopia may well be Italian, but the Ethiopians themselves are still African, and their revolts are subject to savage reprisals from a military power against which they are helpless. Of course, Italy must know nothing of this. But the facts cannot be kept silent for long, the murders, deportations, and concentration camps. Men change hands, like money and guns. There are cracks in the wall, for those prepared to see them, large clouds obscuring Il Duce’s sun. And those who return to Italy, whether they speak or refuse to say anything, in fact admit the offenses, perhaps in spite of themselves. The missionaries’ good intentions come face-to-face with the buying and selling of men, of children, little girls bought for fun, given as gifts and abandoned in the streets when their owners go home to Italy. On the one hand, a sincere commitment, on the other, pillage. Mussolini becomes drunk on his own power, engages his armies in supporting General Franco’s nationalists, “to defend Christian civilization,” he is hungry and the world belongs to him, he wants everything, is indestructible, intoxicated, and deranged. He soon makes an official trip to Germany, another balcony, another speech, the same furious enthusiasm for hard work and the young, the same hostility to communism, he crowingly highlights the similarities between Nazism and Fascism.
In May 1938, Hitler comes to Rome. Shortly afterward, the subject of race appears in the Italian press, alongside the Jewish question.
Bakhita stays in Vimercate for two years. From 1937 to 1939. She knows war never dies. War is everlasting. She is an old woman now and that is how she is addressed, as one who knows. In Vimercate she is no longer the object of fear and curiosity that she has previously been. She is from the country where the novices are heading. The novices themselves and their parents ask her things. To pray for them and, especially, to prepare them. She talks of the land of childhood, which is the same for everyone, tells them that over there daytime is blessed, nighttime respected, and nature thanked. “It’s the same for you, isn’t it?” With a father. A mother. The people who conceived you. And babies waiting to come into the world. “It’s the same for you, isn’t it?” And this is precisely what disturbs them. They are afraid of recognizing themselves in African lives, becoming confused with them. Losing themselves in the hopes and suffering of others, which are so similar to their own.
* * *
—
Bakhita has been given a priceless gift. Sometime earlier, in the monastery in Cremona, she came across her sister. That is what they decided to be to each other, the possibility that it could be true. Sister Maria Agostina is Kishmet’s age, has the same black skin from the same part of Sudan, the same abduction and years of slavery, the same conversion as Bakhita, having been given her freedom by the priest Don Biagio Verri, “the girl slaves’ apostle,” “the morette apostle.” It was fifty-three years since Bakhita had seen a man or woman her color. Fifty-three years in which she had been the terrifying oddity, the only one in the world. As she approached Maria, Bakhita could tell, from her skin, her hands, the way her body moved and her eyes watched, that the two of them were of the same beliefs, from the same landscapes and caravans, experienced the same slave traders and masters. Could tell that they were sisters. They had lost everything. Had had everything torn from them. Seen everything. And, inexplicably, their hearts continued to beat. They hugged each other for a long time, without a word, with a sense of recognition as if by holding each other close, they were in fact hugging themselves, an infallible, legitimate, unashamed black body. They talked in a language that came back to them, a fuddled, disparate, damaged language, they laughed and they cried with a relief that had all the violence of love and the longing for it harbored in each of them. They had so much to say to each other, and behind every word, every situation lay the same lost happiness, the same barbarity, the same beginning and end, what their lives could have been and what brought them to this, meeting here in an Italian monastery, with the cross of Jesus on their breasts and their medallions of the Madonna who protects stolen children. After two years of touring, her meeting with the Sudanese slave who became Sister Maria Agostina was a sign to Bakhita that she had worked well and el Paron was thanking her for it. And then her life was never really the same again. She felt, perhaps for the first time, worthy of Him, and knew nothing would ever frighten her now, nothing horrible or unforeseen could happen to her. She was protected from everything.
* * *
—
Three racial laws establishing the basis of Italy’s fascist regime were published in July 1938. Shortly after this, Giulia, a friend of Elvira’s, came to Vimercate to give Bakhita a letter that she was to burn once she had read it.
“Read it to me.”
“But Madre…you’ve just read it.”
“I don’t understand it.”
“Oh, you do. I’m afraid you understand it perfectly.”
It was the start of a hot dry afternoon, the shutters were closed and the cell was filled with that half-light of siesta time when the sun is all-powerful. With her misshapen fingers, Bakhita stroked Elvira’s letter again and again, as if trying to smooth creases out of fabric. Or erase the words.
“You must burn it, Madre, I promised her.”
“How does she know?”
“That she’s Jewish?”
“Yes.”
“A friend of her grandmother’s came to warn her. He told her that her maternal grandmother, you know, the one who raised her, was Jewish. That’s what he said.”
“But she grew up with us, in Schio. She grew up with Catholics.”
Giulia said she had to go but would come back with news as soon as she had any, as soon as Elvira was safe in Switzerland, where, from what she said, her mother was waiting for her.
“Pray for her, Madre.”
“Yes. And for the others.”
Giulia stood to leave, Bakhita reached for her walking stick.
“Don’t see me out, Madre.”
Bakhita opened the door and took Giulia’s arm. The convent was silent, they walked slowly along the corridor with its curtains faded by sunlight, could hear the buzz of flies and wasps trapped among their folds. Bakhita stopped to catch her breath, asked Giulia to open a window. The air was scorching, and it felt as if they had come into an overheated room rather than put their heads outside.
“Look, that’s Milan. It’s beautiful.”
“Yes, Madre.”
“But people are hiding. Can you see?”
Giulia looked for a long time but was much too far from Milan to make out anything other than the cathedral’s spire and the city’s terraces and hotchpotch of roofs.
“I’m sorry, Madre, I can’t see anything.”
“That’s because they’re well hidden.” She smiled as if she had made a joke, but this was no laughing matter. She brought one hand to rest on Giulia’s heart.
“This is where people hide. In strength. Tell Elvira that. Strength.”
And then she returned to her cell, and her breathing mingled with the buzzing of wasps and flies. She knew. The world reached her here in Vimercate. Radio, newspaper, discussions on all sides. Everything was out in the open. These were impassioned times. Il Giornale d’Italia had published an article entitled “Fascism and the Problem of Race,” in which scientists had established that the vast majority of Italians were of Aryan origin and constituted an Aryan civilization. The manifesto encouraged Italians to “declare in all honesty that they were racist,” and stated that Jews were the only population that had never been assimilated in Italy. With this, fear reared its head once more. Fear from the “superior race” for “inferior races”: Jews and Negroes. The former were depraved, the latter infantile, and both threatened the nation’s purity. Italian children were to be taught that they were superior to blacks and racially distinct from Jews, and Italy’s minister of education asserted the “eminently spiritual” nature of Fascist anti-Semitism. Newspapers and magazines relayed the message by publishing caricatures and satirical articles; the cover of the magazine La difesa della razza featured them together, Jews and Negroes in league against Italy; photographs of bare-breasted black women, of hook-nosed Jews skulking behind a white baby doing the Roman salute; a Roman statue sullied with a black handprint and affixed with the Star of David; and much more besides, Negro women and Jewish men always in cahoots. And while missionaries were sent off to Ethiopia, Jews were being excluded from universities, schools, most professions, and many public spaces.
* * *
—
Bakhita did not burn Elvira’s letter that day. She kept it close to her, between her skin and her nun’s habit, right where her heart beat with what strength she had left. And her prayer was addressed as much to el Paron as to His children, to that cruel, lost, brutally fractured family plowing forward into disaster and hatred.
She is seventy years old, the train she is on is the last one she will take, she knows this. It is taking her “home,” to Schio, and she has been told that now she can rest. She does not believe this to be true. No one rests in a time of war. Italy is fighting alongside Germany in a war that the government is saying, once again, will be quick and easy. People read the time on watches and calendars, see the world in atlases and from airplanes. She thinks they are seeing everything from far too far away. Knows this will take a long time. Longer than the war itself. It will come and it will go down in history, the massacre of the living will bequeath their sorrow to their descendants, but who will console them, who will console these peacetime children carrying their fathers’ invisible pain within them? There is a memory, a trace of it in the universe, and it cannot be erased. Nothing is invented. And nothing erased. She thinks of Elvira, has no more news of her, thinks of the young missionaries lost somewhere between the love of Christ and their fear of “barbarian” nations. She has come through many years and many countries, and has only ever seen the same landscape, a landscape of lost men, of dispossessed mothers, and of children robbed of innocence. The train brakes hard, screeches over quite some distance, and lurches to a halt. Her suitcase falls at her feet, the nun accompanying her hurries to pick it up, is concerned, is she all right?
“Yes. I’m fine.”
The train does not set off again. People open windows. It is very hot. Very humid. The weather is about to turn. It would be good to have rain, for the sky to burst. The doors have been opened and passengers have climbed down into the fields. Bakhita can hear people calling to each other, rumors spreading.
“It’s a deer…”
“Yes. It’s taking long enough to get it off the track.”
“What on earth are they waiting for?”
Everyone talks, gets involved. Bakhita stays seated. Her ears thrum, ring continuously. This happens more and more frequently, this interference between her and the world. Nothing to be done about it. And all of a sudden, it rains. Big hot raindrops that stir up smells from the soil. Children reach their arms outside. They are scolded, and the windows are closed. The air is stifling. And still the train does not start up again.
“For goodness’ sake, move the wretched animal!”
“What the hell are they doing?”
The gunshot is sharp. It obliterates Bakhita’s thrumming, and there is a sudden, astonished silence, immediately followed by a great commotion.
“What now?”
“Oh, my word, what’s going on?”
And, slowly, the train sets off. The passengers have climbed back in hastily, soaked by the rain, laughing and shaking off their clothes, removing their hats. They were frightened but it was nothing. Impossible to get the deer out of the way without destroying it. Its legs were broken. A child starts to cry in distress, his mother gives him a kiss and a hunk of bread. Sitting on his mother’s lap, the boy studies Bakhita. The old woman with the burned face. She smiles at this child who has just entered the war.
* * *
—
She herself is entering old age. Back in Schio she no longer has duties or a set schedule. Finds herself in the stark emptiness associated with sickness. Her fingers deformed by arthritis and synovitis, her wrists red, swollen with edema, her knees, hips, and shoulders seized up and tight, she is held together by pain, and under the effects of cataracts will progressively lose her sight. She wanders down corridors, clings to the walls, heads toward noises, but her ears whistle and everything becomes confused, her points of reference blurred. Her body is withdrawing, her mind looks on. In this convent she goes through the same experience as every sick elderly nun, praying and preparing herself for what is to come. By night. Or by day. She moves slowly about the institute, from one place to another. Makes a point of combing the hair and washing the hands of pupils who arrive dirty and neglected, hands out her share of bread, her piece of fruit to the hungry who take it and hide it, the tired children who hang back to watch the others play with the dreamy expression of aimless drifters. She hand-washes the altar cloth and other linen from the sacristy every day. Tidies the refectory. Knits, sews, darns, and embroiders, and no one dares tell her there is a newfound ugliness to her work, now that her sight is poor and her fingers so gnarled that they look ready to break, snap like twigs. People visit her in the hush of the visitor’s room or her own cell, and they gradually realize that, although almost blind, she is remarkably insightful, announcing the recovery of a loved one, predicting a nun’s next posting, or simply knowing where a mislaid letter can be found.
At seventy-three she falls for the first time. And then again. And yet again. When she collapses in front of a priest, he asks her never to do this again, prostrate herself before him Eastern-style. She asks him to help her up. Soon she is being pushed in a wheelchair, a hefty wooden chair rather like her, dark and stiff. Sometimes she is taken to mass but no one thinks to take her back, and she stays, hunched in her chair, forgotten in the church. In time her breath fails her. She has asthmatic bronchitis, and people know she is around from the sounds she makes, the creaking of her wheelchair, the whistle of her breathing, her cough, her spitting into a handkerchief that quivers in her hand. Her spells in the infirmary become increasingly frequent. She no longer knows how to get comfortable. Lying down is impossible. Sitting compresses her chest, her torso slips slowly, collapsing, the nurses support her legs on a chair outside the bed because she has elephantiasis. Nuns come to keep her company, she sends them away, too afraid the nurse will be upset, thinking she is not taking good enough care of her.
* * *
—
On December 8, 1943, her golden anniversary is celebrated, fifty years as a nun, and the convent grants itself an hour of peace amid the turmoil of war. After mass she stays sitting in silence, in a corner of the refectory, watching the gathered company. A great many people have come to mark her jubilee, and not only the institute but the whole
town is celebrating. She has spent fifty years among sisters, and most of them now seem so young to her, what was it that made each of them turn around one day and say, “I’m not leaving. I’m staying”? They will never have children. Must form no close ties. Own nothing. Obey everything. “I’m not leaving. I’m staying.” The prison is outside. Being in the convent means being free. There are rules, and they are sometimes difficult, stringent, and unfair. But they are reassuring, and the nuns’ lives are underpinned by them, Bakhita realizes this: The convent is on the inside. Internal. Not immediately understood. It takes years to find one’s place. She sees them, these novices and young nuns, those who have a few regrets and those who are already tired, those who are so radiant that their skin seems impregnated with light, they live together day and night, and sporadically struggle to tolerate one another, there are irritations, rivalries, and friendships that are not meant to blossom. Affection is expressed in the smallest considerations, the occasional confidence, like those Bakhita receives. The sisters talk to her, there are things that are more easily admitted to a woman than to a confessor, and the Moretta who has seen everything is equipped to hear everything. Bakhita looks at all these people who have come for her, she is both among them and withdrawn, imposing and unassuming. She would have liked Elvira to share in this occasion. She has no news but knows the Jews have already slipped away to the ends of the earth, and she can foresee what will happen. She is not clairvoyant, as people believe. But simply knows a little about the world. Knows that what will happen to us is engraved in us. And what will happen to the world is inscribed. She will never see Mimmina again, nor Elvira. They will be a part of that portion of herself ripped asunder like painful, inflamed skin lost forever.
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