by Igiaba Scego
“Sirens, mister,” Zoppe said disdainfully, “are dangerous creatures, especially here in Port Said.”
“But I’m as strong as Odysseus, Zoppe my friend, there’s no siren who could resist me; Maria should watch out. And I want to immortalize her in my notebook. Up to now I’ve only drawn birds and a few wayward fish. A pretty lady would be a nice addition, don’t you think?”
Civa had a nice smile and eyes that recalled the forests of Europe’s far north. A handsome fellow, dark hair, refined bearing, medium height, and biceps that not even the Laocoön at the Vatican Museums could match.
Civa’s looks were something that emerged gradually, with time and a certain dose of perseverance. He wasn’t a heartthrob out of a romantic melodrama, listless and vain. He didn’t have the sparkle of someone like Rudolph Valentino. He was more like Amedeo Nazzari, a man to be discovered frame by frame. But women are impatient. And a good-looking man like that found himself all alone sighing over a mirage that was about to appear over an Egyptian cliffside.
Maria Uva.
Frenzy over Maria Uva, the patriot Maria, the mature, plump Italian woman the legionnaires pined for. The one with the high-pitched voice who saluted the future soldiers in the war that fascism was preparing for.
“She’ll come out soon, I want to be ready, my heart is already racing for her.” Zoppe studied the young man and found him a mix of contradictions.
His sentimentality didn’t fit well with his blind and total loyalty to the National Fascist Party that he loved showing off at society events.
Civa said that Benito Mussolini was a beacon, the light of all knowledge. He also claimed that he would swallow even the bitterest pill for his Duce.
But then there was that dissonant note in his crystalline voice. The one that made you doubt his loyalty to fascism.
You would stare at his light eyes to figure out the truth, but they knew exactly how to evade scrutiny.
But Zoppe didn’t care whether the boy was a fascist or not. To him, he was a tool, the weapon that destiny had provided him to free him from his jailers. In the end he was grateful to Civa. Without his help he would have probably been left to rot in that hovel, Regina Coeli.
It had all happened so fast that day, the day he was freed, months ago.
One of his guards, the bigger one, had come over and said to him, “Negro, we have to wash you today.” And his colleague added as a little joke, “Maybe rubbing you with soap will turn you white.”
That morning, besides the promise of being clean there was also a timid ray of sunlight penetrating the cell to cheer him.
Rome was covered in pink dust.
Maybe the tramontane is coming, the old people said.
.
“Cat got your tongue?” asked a sergeant whom Zoppe had never seen before.
The room was full of light and Zoppe had been dumped there unceremoniously by the guards.
Finally clean, shaven, groomed, he felt like he could meet the soldier’s gaze. That irked the sergeant.
“There’s someone outside who has come to collect you. You will finish your sentence in the service of the distinguished Count Anselmi, a father of the nation, a more illustrious fascist would be hard to find. The count wants you. He insisted on having you, you know. In no time at all he moved heaven and earth, you know how these counts are, and in a certain sense he bought you. Your fate was decided at the highest levels. Thank your saints. Be glad. You were lucky, louse, keep that in mind. You earned yourself an entirely different destiny and you know it. But the count wants you and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
The sergeant gritted his teeth at that last sentence.
Zoppe remembered Haji Safar’s words. “Qofkii aammuso waa dhintay.” He who chooses silence is already dead.
And he decided that even if the battle was lost, he could at least try to fight the future ahead of him.
He didn’t want to die a count’s slave.
“But ...” He had trouble getting the words out. “But, sir, I can’t go into the service of a count. I have a job to finish at the base, in Rome.”
A thunderous laugh filled the room, burying his minute words.
In that same room were also the three goons who had beaten him days ago. “Are they going to start up again?” he wondered.
He felt a pang in his chest and a pitiful creak between his balls. That’s where Beppe had hit him the hardest.
“Here are your friends. Aren’t you happy to see them again?” To distract himself from that miserable sight his eyes began to wander. A lone portrait of Benito Mussolini stood out on the wall. No trace of the king.
“Maybe,” Zoppe wondered, “they forgot about the king?”
It was a sad room. The gray walls gave it a touch of claustrophobia, which rendered every sensation stagnant. No flowers, no family photos, not even scratch paper with doodles or stubby pencils for company. A layer of pink dust remained the single sign of life.
“For a while, boy, you’re done with the base.”
“But ... if ... that is, that’s the only reason I’m here, to translate, they sent me specially. Has anyone notified the priests?”
“Forget about your Jesuits. Erase them from your memory. Only they could dump a Negro like you in Rome. And to translate what? There’s no war yet. You would have been useful later. Right now you’re only in the way. We tolerate Father Evaristo’s little priests because the Vatican gave us strict orders to do so, and it’s trouble if you ruffle a single hair on their heads. But we’ve got their number, oh yes, we do.”
Zoppe sank to the floor like a rag.
“Come on, don’t be like that. We don’t want to hurt you. Consider this a little chat among friends.”
Zoppe’s hand instinctively went to shield his groin. He would defend his manhood even if it cost his life. They wouldn’t leave him sterile. Death would be better. And he had promised Asha the Rash, beautiful Asha, that he would come back to Magalo and marry her.
Zoppe bit his tongue.
And he began mentally reciting a prayer, one he had known since childhood, that had the ancestral power of driving away the evil spirits that whispered horrors in the heart of creation.
“We found an interesting photo among your personal effects.” Photo? They’d searched his room.
“Pretty girl, this one. How old is she? Nine? Ten? Her chest isn’t too developed yet, I see ... hmm ...”
Ayan, his sister.
What chest was this guy talking about? She was still a child. He felt a wave of disgust.
The photo was from a year ago. Ayan had an innocent, expectant look. Braids close-knit like ants framed a perfectly oval head. And her big lips were bursting with stories and laughter.
She was pretty and sweet, his sister.
One day, like a good brother, he would give her away to the best of men. But now, Zoppe wondered, would he live long enough to keep that promise? What would Ayan do without her brother?
If those three fascists went back to work on him, he wouldn’t live through it. “Your sister, right? We know.”
Zoppe shivered. Please, not Ayan, Lord, save her from his madness.
Not a single muscle on his face betrayed his concern. Zoppe opened his big dark eyes wide to show them he wasn’t afraid and that their threats had no effect on him.
But his temples throbbed and his stomach juices jetted into his esophagus. Back straight, chin out, eyes fixed, shoulders wide.
“It would be a shame if something happened to this little girl, don’t you agree?” and then he snapped his fingers with a sound that to Zoppe was louder than the bells of St. Peter’s.
Snap. Snap. Snap.
Beppe stepped forward.
The scene went by so fast that Zoppe had almost no time to figure out what was happening.
Beppe unzipped his fly, pulled out his penis, rubbed it for a minute and then released his warm spunk all over little Ayan’s photo.
“Ugh, what a careless soldier,” the sergeant said. “I
t would be a shame if something like this happened to your sister, wouldn’t it?”
Zoppe was shaken, but his face remained impassive.
“She’s at Via Cardinal Massaia, in the Littorio Quarter ... the one you Somalis have the nerve to call Warta Nabbada.”
Via Cardinal Massaia ... no one called it that. Everyone knew that was Haji Safar’s street, the street of the soothsayers and storytellers. That was where the stars were studied and worlds were glimpsed in the eyes of newborns.
The Italians had stuck some unknown cardinal’s name on it. There was a Via Cardinal Massaia in Mogadishu too, in Xamar Weyne, right in the middle of the marketplace.
The name was an abuse in Mogadishu too.
13
ADUA
There was a small movie theater in Magalo, the fascists built it in the ’30s—an ideal vehicle, they thought, for colonial propaganda. There were several in Somalia. Ours was a movie theater intended for the local population. It was so run down, with busted seats and a sheet metal roof, nothing compared to the Cinema Xamar in Mogadishu, with its austere Mussolinian structure. Magalo’s little cinema had no pretensions—it was plain, subdued, almost hidden. The people loved it, it felt like it belonged to them, like the well in the center of the city, the city hall, the livestock market, the goldsmith square. When the Italians left in 1960, a magnate born in the old quarter of Xafad, a man named Idris Shangani, decided to restore it. Idris Shangani was one of those Somalis who had made money during colonialism by sending bodies to the front during Italy’s war against Ethiopia. Then after the end of World War II, when the United Nations decreed that Italy and the newly-formed Trust Territory of Somaliland would ferry us to independence, Mr. Shangani got even richer.
“He was a crook, that one!” my father repeated daily at lunch.
“He was a collaborator, they’re the worst.” He trembled as he said that word, his voice broken, fragmented. A tremor went through his whole body, turning him to jelly. My father grew agitated and spit on the ground, his mouth filled with curses and insults for the figure who in his eyes incarnated the greatest sin.
But these outbursts were rare for him, because Father didn’t like to talk about the past.
Yes, he preferred to keep quiet.
Sure, Mr. Shangani was a crook, but how lucky we’d been to have him as a fellow citizen of Magalo! Without his money we would have never known about the existence of Ava Gardner or Norma Jean. The movies they showed were dated, but in Magalo, where there’d never been anything of the sort, those old films dubbed with literal translations from Italian were manna from the heavens. In Magalo, thanks to the big screen, the women had an hour every day to dream. They lined up after the Dhuhr prayer, only after stuffing their fat husbands with food. They never managed to see a whole film, they didn’t have time. At home there was the mending, ironing, cleaning, cooking, nursing the children, bathing the grandparents. They went to the little cinema just to catch a few frames, a few fleeting details. In fifteen minutes they’d decided whom they loved and hated. Lots of them needed just five minutes, the minimum to get lost in the blue eyes of a fleeting Paul Newman. The virgins of Magalo, however, preferred Gregory Peck. And they were all crushed when, almost without a fight, he let go of that sweet flower Audrey Hepburn ... And then there were cowboys and Indians, every little boy’s favorite. It took only a moment to turn a movie into a shared game played on Magalo’s blistering sands. Most cheered for the Indians, of course, which makes sense—they were more impressive. They had trouble relating to John Wayne. “He waddles like a pig,” the kids yelled. And on the blistering beaches they made a show of imitating the heavy walk that made Wayne look like a freshly infibulated girl, the stitches still enflaming her tender vagina. No, no, the Indians were better. They had boundless bravery and those fantastic feathers.
Yea for the redskins, down with the John Waynes!
Magalo’s little cinema was called Il Faro, The Lighthouse, or Munar as we say in Somali.
In fact everything was a munar, in Magalo. Everything was a reminder of the great labor of our forefather Torobow, who had erected the tower that later became our city’s beacon by his strength alone. In Magalo, wherever you went, you saw a lighthouse. There was the Munar nightclub, the Munar grocery, the Munar Italian bakery, Munar Square.
Our lighthouse was considered, like the one on Cape Guardafui, one of Somalia’s historic monuments.
My father no longer liked the lighthouse after it was modified in the thirties. “They defaced us,” he would say.
But if you asked him to elaborate he shied away like a virgin at her first kiss. The additional element Papa hated so much was the blade of an axe. With that, Torobow’s Moorish tower was transformed into a grandiose fasces lictoriae, the bundle of rods symbolizing fascist power.
“For the perpetual glory of Rome,” was inscribed on the base. For me, reading that inscription made me long for that faraway Rome, full of la dolce vita and cabaret.
I didn’t understand fascism then.
The memory of it was already gone. And you would always find people like Idris Shangani who would happily tell you how life wasn’t so bad under the Italians. Usually it was a former askari or a madama who hadn’t minded being a kept woman. But how could a little thing like me understand those details? One master is as good as another, that was the gist. And Magalo wasn’t Mogadishu; in Magalo, history went by at an angle. There was no Abdullahi Issa, the spirit of Somali independence, to educate us. To explain to the little people of Magalo that the value of our land lay in us, African citizens, architects of our own destiny. No one had ever told us that colonialism was the problem. Even those who knew the truth said nothing. My father, for example, said nothing.
He muttered a few things, comments so vague they didn’t express, they didn’t explain. I was a little girl, I didn’t think about political matters.
I wanted to be like Norma Jean. I didn’t care about the rest. I wanted the lights, the makeup, the awards, the red carpets, the passionate kisses.
I wanted to dream, dance, fly. I wanted to escape. Italy was everywhere in my life.
Italy was kisses, holding hands, passionate embraces. Italy was freedom. And I so hoped that it would become my future. In Magalo, before the socialist nationalist Siad Barre came to power, lots of Italians lived in the city. You would see them strolling down the main boulevard in their elegant clothes at sundown. Perfect ties and cufflinked sleeves. Women often sported pretty little hats that transformed their petite frames into proud and beautiful Grace Kellys. The Italians opened restaurants and gelato shops. The wealthiest had banana plantations just outside the city. At school, among us girls, we would talk about their beautiful houses and the legions of servants they had looking after them. We were jealous, I admit it. And more than one dreamed of marrying an Italian when she grew up.
It was Papa who dragged me and Malika to the Munar cinema for the first time. We had been in Magalo for a month when it happened. The trauma of separation was still fresh. The wound still raw. The bush was still there, frozen in front of my dark eyes.
Papa Zoppe hated Mr. Shangani, but he loved cinema too much to deprive himself of such a joy.
That day, when we came home from school, he told us: “Tonight we’re all going to the cinematograph.” He was happy. I was not. I was alone, terribly alone.
I missed the goats and in my dreams I cried for my mama, the woman I’d thought was my mother.
“Mama, rescue me,” I called out to her. “Mama, help me,” I begged. But the nights went by and no one came.
Only the broken coo of romancing owls soothed my fitful sleep.
Especially at night, I couldn’t accept my new condition as a city girl, even if with every day my body was slowly adapting to the sweet seductions of a too-comfortable life. I was getting used to it—almost without noticing— to silence, a soft mattress, and morning breakfast, injera with melted butter and sugar. The rhythm of my life was marked by the call of the muezz
in and the school bell. I didn’t have to worry about hyenas and lions anymore. And in the bright midday sky, sweet birds chirped. The vultures, horrid flying vermin, were just a memory.
“I love it here,” my sister Malika once said to me. I spit in her face. The betrayal didn’t come as a surprise, but it hurt. It hurt badly. It was a hurt that was overwhelming and full of anger.
The night we went to the cinema, the old man had in mind celebrating Malika’s tenth birthday. It had just rained and the frogs covered the earth in a cloak of green. The silly things had emerged from their burrows to take advantage of the sudden cool. Slick and jumpy, they basked in the last drops of the rainy season.
“Remember, stay in your seats. And don’t move,” our father told us. “Especially when the lights go off. You’ll bother the others.”
“All right, Father,” my sister said. I nodded slightly.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of, but if you disobey you’ll get a taste of my karbaash.”
The karbaash—we’d heard about that. It may have been Hajiedda Fardosa herself who put us on guard. A karbaash was a whip used for donkeys.
We entered the theater. And we sat down, Malika and I, as we’d been instructed. Then I suddenly felt a tug on one of my braids. My heart jumped.
“Ow,” I said. It was Sultana Patel, my Indian classmate, sitting behind me. There were lots of Indians in Magalo.
“Don’t you know I’m with my father? If you make me yell you’ll get me in trouble. We have to be quiet, you know!”
“I’m not dumb,” she replied. “I saw him get up. And what’s the big deal if you talk to me? The movie hasn’t started yet.”
I froze. I wondered if it was a good idea to explain to my new friend that I didn’t know what was going to happen in the room. What was a movie? And how could you tell when it started?
I was embarrassed. I had so many questions I wanted to ask Sultana, so pretty and kind, my only friend. But I didn’t want her to laugh at me. Discover my ignorance. “Have you seen the Maciste movies?”
“No, you?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “They’re boring though. There’s a guy, the star, who thinks about nothing but battle, from start to finish. No love scenes, kisses, pretty clothes ... Of course, I love Nadira. She dances a lot. I learn a new step from every one of her movies.”