Bakhita
Page 35
The roundups start, and it is not the blacks who are being taken but the Jews. Before joining the Allies in Sicily, the Italian king had Mussolini arrested. Hitler released him and under the Führer’s control he now rules over the Fascist-Nazi Republic of Salò in northern Italy. The first convoy left for Auschwitz in September.
Bombs fell on the world, fell on Italy and Schio. Bakhita never agreed to be taken to the shelters. Said no bomb would go falling on the institute, but the children must be protected. She meanwhile stayed in the house, like a caretaker, a broken old woman listening to the thunderous din of bombing raids. There were fatalities, injuries, and terrible destruction near Alta Fabbrica. Children were terrorized by the sky. How could she now demonstrate the beauty of the world through an open window? Darkness had invaded daytime. She prayed that the little ones would not be too frightened down in the cellars, would not become oversensitive or embittered at the thought of the lives that lay ahead of them. “Give them strength, Lord,” she implored. And wondered who made the decision that children could be allowed to die. Who decided on those massacred motherhoods. And when the girls wailed at the sound of airplanes, she said, “That’s just the sound of a cart, my darling, can you hear it?” And it was true, you could pick out the sound of horseshoes on cobblestones in the drone of the airplanes. “You mustn’t be frightened of carts, because they always go away, you know that, my darling, don’t you?” And the children did not answer, merely gazed at this wrinkled, twisted, black old lady who seemed so poor and so powerful. They believed her and went down to the shelters “until the cart has passed.” After bombing raids, Bakhita would ask, “How did the girls take it? Did someone tell them stories? Did someone sing them songs?”
* * *
—
And then peace returned. To a world that had been erased. Fifty million dead. And as many missing. Bakhita sometimes dreamed of Elvira, confused her with other people, her twin, or slave girls she thought she had forgotten but who cropped up in her dreams with accurate names and faces she recognized. She knew they were coming for her. It was over. The end of her life had come this time. She was already living more intensely in her dreams than in that room in the infirmary where she was watched over day and night. Her tongue was swollen, her breathing dwindled, her water-bloated limbs stretched her scars, her body looked ready to tear open. An apotheosis of suffering after an entire life of fighting pain. Could she hear the murmured prayers and words of compassion? Did she know she was not alone?
* * *
—
One evening as she lay in bed, she felt her feet in sand, it was hot, shifting, soft. She had her thin legs back again, the legs of a child walking a long distance. Had the terror back again and the weight of that terror.
“The chains!” she screamed. “The chains!”
And her cry was so weak that the sister watching over her leaned closer.
“What did you say, Madre? What chains? Madre?”
“They’re too heavy…”
The sister took her hand, a little frightened by these words. What could she do? What could she say? “She’s feverish…” “She’s leaving us…” “My God!”
* * *
—
The prayers started, two days and two nights, at Bakhita’s bedside. The nuns moistened her lips with a dab of water, held her hand, as if giving to this old lady what the little girl had so desperately needed. Bakhita had been given extreme unction, the convent was in a state of vigil, lessons were suspended, people fasted, workers at Lanerossi took a break for a moment’s private reflection, and the inhabitants of Schio went to the church in shifts to pray day and night. The whole town surrounded her, gathered to wait for what would inevitably happen. Word had been sent to the nuns in Venice, to Ida Zanolini, and to Stefano’s children. Every institute she had visited. Orphanages, missions, and convents. Her imminent death made everyone feel like falling silent, like adopting her very particular rhythm for the first time, an internal rhythm connected to the world, and they realized that she had brought more with her than simply a life.
* * *
—
“Mama! Oh! Mama…”
The nuns came closer, Madre Giuseppina had cried out, but what did she say? Her rasping voice seemed to come from someone else, and no one could tell whether it was expressing joy or terror. Her death throes were her final struggle.
“I think she called the Madonna.”
“What?”
“I said I think Madre called the Holy Virgin!”
* * *
—
Word spread through the convent, the institute, the town, and other towns: In her death throes, Madre Giuseppina had seen Santa Madonna. She was happy, already. And everyone bowed before this news. Candles were lit at the Virgin’s feet. And the organ played “Ave Maria.”
* * *
—
She could not hear it. Could no longer hear or see anything. Except her mother. Who was standing behind her. With her agile hands in Bakhita’s braided hair, she added tiny colored beads given to her by her own mother, and from farther back still, every woman in this Daju family that had lived beside the river for so long. She felt her mother’s mouth on the nape of her neck, cool moist lips, and before kissing her, they nibbled her brand-new skin and whispered in her ear, and what they whispered in their unique, joyful, and unerring way, was her birth name.
On Saturday, February 8, 1947, at the age of seventy-eight, Madre Gioseffa Margherita Fortunata Maria Bakhita died in Schio. The next day her body was taken to a chapel of rest. For two days a never-ending procession of people came to see her.
On Tuesday, February 11, after a mass in the institute’s chapel, she was buried in Schio’s cemetery, in the tomb of the wealthy Gasparella family, in recognition of who she had been.
* * *
—
In 1955 the church began proceedings toward having her beatified.
* * *
—
In 1969 her remains were exhumed and transferred to the chapel at the institute for the Canossian Daughters of Charity in Schio.
* * *
—
On December 1, 1978, Pope John Paul II signed the decree of her heroic virtues. After investigation, Bakhita was deemed venerable for her dauntless efforts to conform with the Gospel and be faithful to the church.
* * *
—
On July 6, 1991, Pope John Paul II signed the decree for her beatification.
* * *
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On May 17, 1992, Pope John Paul II announced that Bakhita was blessed for leaving “a message of reconciliation and evangelical unity in a world so divided and wounded by hatred and violence.”
* * *
—
In 1995, Pope John Paul II declared her the patron of Sudan.
* * *
—
On October 1, 2000, Pope John Paul II declared her a saint. This made Bakhita the first Sudanese saint and the first African woman to be raised to such religious glory without being martyred. In his address John Paul II said, “Only God can give hope to victims of ancient and modern forms of slavery.”
* * *
—
In order to proclaim someone blessed or a saint, the church requires non-martyrs to perform one miracle for beatification and another for canonization. The first miracle attributed to Bakhita relates to Angela Silla, a Paduan Canossian sister who, the day before she was due to have her leg amputated, prayed to the late Madre Giuseppina Bakhita and was cured of her tuberculosis of the knee. The second relates to Eva da Costa, a diabetic Brazilian whose condition was deteriorating and who in 1992 was due to have her right leg amputated. She was healed by her prayers to the blessed Madre Giuseppina Bakhita.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Odile Blandino who followed and encouraged my work with her vigilant, joyful, and unfailing friendship.
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br /> Thank you to Elena Vezzadini who so patiently answered my questions about slavery in Sudan in the late nineteenth century.
Thank you to the Canossian sisters in Schio and Venice for welcoming me and listening to me.
Thank you to the Salesian sisters in Venice for opening the doors of the Dorsoduro convent to me.
Thank you to Claire Delannoy, Richard Ducousset, and Francis Esménard for their faith in me and for being there.
Véronique Olmi is an actor, playwright, and stage director who has written several novels, including the critically acclaimed Beside the Sea anbd Cet été-là, for which she received the Prix Maison de la Presse in 2011. She has also published two plays, Une séparation and Un autre que moi.
Adriana Hunter studied French and Drama at the University of London. She has translated more than fifty books including Camille Laurens’s Who You Think I Am and Hervé Le Tellier’s Eléctrico W, winner of the French-American Foundation’s 2013 Translation Prize in fiction. She lives in Kent, England.
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