by Igiaba Scego
Everyone laughed and the tension melted. “I have a clumsy daughter,” my father said.
20
TALKING-TO
I can’t stand you looking at me like that, Adua, like you’re scolding me. I’m the father. You’re just the daughter. I can look at you that way, you can’t. You’re nobody. Without me you wouldn’t have even been born. These are things you would do better not to forget. And I’m sick of these questions about your mother. What do you want to know? You mention her all the time, muttering to yourself. You think I don’t see you trying to talk with the shadow of that woman? You never even met Asha the Rash. You don’t even know what her face was like. And you dare talk to her? Adua, what are you talking to her for? You’re pathetic sometimes. I’m not a fool or blind. I see everything you do. But that woman, no, that whore, don’t mention her name in my presence again. She chose to die, she left us. Don’t mention her, ever. And even if you’ve gotten big I can still beat you till your soul bleeds. Don’t take advantage of my good heart. I haven’t beaten you for years and I have no intention to start again now. But stop bringing her up. That woman is nothing. Just a mistake.
21
ZOPPE
Citrons didn’t break. They weren’t weak like the fragile papayas or soft mangos. Citrons were warriors, their cores made of metal and their pulp was as if covered in armor. It was a strange alchemy that kept citrons alive. The sweet soul was in fact a defense against a rough, thick skin. That’s what guaranteed the heavenly fruit a quiet life without any trouble. Citrons were more resistant than lemons, harder than grapefruits. Ideal for target practice.
“You’ll see, brother, they’re just what we’ve been looking for.”
Semeon was enthusiastic about his discovery. And he wouldn’t stop singing its praises. To him, those rough citruses had the advantage of being not too small, but not gigantic either. They were what Semeon called “the ideal size.”
“I saw them at the market, down at Tessa’s. They’re just right for us, my brother, they’re perfect. Shooting at them will be like shooting right at the temple of the Italian enemy,” Semeon told him the first time.
And since then, Dagmawi had taken up the habit of going outside the city to the big clearing with a big basket full of citrons.
A basket, and a weapon hidden under his arm.
That fruit had become the center of his existence. On the horizon, a future as a warrior.
Normally he went alone to the clearing. His Somali friend Zoppe had come to see him. What a treat! He really needed someone to share his troubles with. Since he’d started training, he was suffering. It was as if something were eating him from the inside out. It was nice for once to have some company, not to go down that long thorny road in solitude.
It had been five years since they’d seen each other last. In those five years they had become men. In those five years the responsibilities had piled up on their shoulders.
Zoppe sported a nice Sufi beard, though his hands remained as soft as a young girl’s. They were hands that had never seen soil or the hard labor of that daily back-and-forth. Dagmawi, on the other hand, knew all about it. He had been working at the Indian emporium Mohamedally for three years, and by now his life was organized by the packages he had to load and unload. Flour, rice, curry, chili pepper, cumin, as well as hides, meats, beans, eggs.
He worked hard at Mohamedally, and from the labor his once smooth hands were covered with little wrinkles of suffering.
But Zoppe suffered too. You could see it in his furrowed brow and his constantly quivering shoulders.
Dagmawi wanted to ask his friend the reason for all his anxiety, but decided to wait.
Once they reached the clearing they would tell each other everything.
“It’ll seem crazy to you, Zoppe, my friend,” he said, almost anticipating the confession, “but these citrons are the best thing that have happened to me in the last six months, at least ... yes, definitely the best. All I have left to keep me from going crazy are the citrons. Zoppe, will I be capable of killing?”
Zoppe didn’t breathe a word. He just took a citron and bounced it off his right hand.
“What about your marriage? Since you wrote me you’ve been married for about five months ... Is it possible that these citrons are better than your woman?”
“Yes,” Dagmawi said curtly.
He loved Tezetà, his wife, but those citrons ... ah, those citrons ... they were the corollary of something bigger, more absolute.
Those citrons were the tangible proof of a man’s love for his land.
.
Zoppe had already forgotten the citrons. His soul had taken him back to the vision he’d seen at dawn, several hours before.
He’d barely slept that night. The cries of a wounded dog in the distance kept him awake.
He had asked Count Anselmi for the day off and strangely the count put up no resistance.
“I know you’re not going to run away anyway. You can’t. So go ahead and enjoy a day of complete leisure.” And then, with a coy wink, continued: “The body’s needs must be satisfied. These little Ethiopian girls are like good wine from the hills, all it takes is a couple of glasses to tide you over for the next ten years.”
No point in explaining to the lecherous count that he wasn’t going to see a woman. Not that he didn’t miss a woman’s sweet breath ... At home, as soon as he got back, he would find Asha the Rash waiting for him. He loved Asha. He had promised himself, under the shade of a sycamore, that he would make her his. And Zoppe was a man of his word.
He missed his future bride. A woman with a big backside and a contagious laugh.
Asha the Rash, afar indhood as the neighbors called her, because of the thick tortoiseshell spectacles a Turkish doctor had advised her to wear.
But that morning, the thought of Asha was swept away by a vision. A bad vision.
The contours of the world were jagged and opaque. His eyes teared up. His mouth suddenly went dry. And his tongue became stiff, lifeless.
The vision came before he left the hotel. He saw wood huts burning. He recognized that place. He’d been there with Haji Safar on one of his trips. His father would go there to heal children from their demons. That was how he met Dagmawi and his family. His father had cured a friend of his from the evil eye. And since then the two boys had been inseparable. Haji Safar loved that town, loved those people. “Here was once the kingdom of Bilqis, the one the gaal call the Queen of Sheba. If we exist in this world, my son, it is because of her. That is why I often come to this foreign land. I reunite with the spirit of the ancient queen.” Haji Safar loved that land, and he was delighted to be able to give a little hope to those people without a future. There, among the poor, East Africa overcame its differences. There, all divisions were canceled out. Zoppe could have recognized that big district out of a thousand. How much time he had spent there as a little boy, romping in the mud with Dagmawi and little Semeon. The area was between Sidist Kilo and the old market. There, his father was respected and venerated. Seeing those huts burning was an immense horror for Zoppe, who collapsed in the doorway like a rag. In the vision, everything was being set on fire. He saw brown uniforms, taut cheekbones, onion-shaped eyes, pink skin, black corpses.
Then the vision, just as it came, vanished into air.
It dissipated with the first morning light, without leaving a trace, except in his human heart.
.
“This is the clearing, dear Zoppe. We’re here,” Dagmawi said.
Just then a treacherous wind began bellowing from the west.
In an instant Zoppe’s skin became hard and bluish. Everything was flat and empty. A few shrubs here and there. A few solitary animals.
The citrons in that lunar landscape truly looked heavenly.
Dagmawi took one in his hand. It was yellow, oval and had a slight bump at the peduncle. He touched it. He almost shivered. It was so much like a woman’s nipple.
The man began to play with the citr
on, rolling it from one hand to the other. A frozen expression on his face. He was talking to the citron, coaxing it. He wanted to understand its most recondite secrets, suck out its wisdom before destroying it. Then he gripped it decisively and threw it into the distance. “Nice curve,” Zoppe yelled. But Dagmawi didn’t hear him, Dagmawi was shooting.
A suffocating silence muffled the eardrums like silk. There were only the citrons and their unrelenting thirst for vengeance. Everything was deadened and soft. Only the flapping wings of the horrible marabous clashed with the clouds in the sky. They were shrieking over some carcass they’d scented nearby.
Dagmawi didn’t like marabous. They were a bad omen. He had seen many of them during work. Sometimes he came across a load of spoiled meat and it was his job to carry it as far away as possible from the emporium. Those beasts waited for the meat to rot, and when the first worms came out of the carcass, they would swoop down onto what had once been alive. Nothing scared them, not even his presence, not even his pitchfork.
Dagmawi looked at Zoppe. “When I have real bombs in my hand, will I be so brave?”
“Maybe,” Zoppe replied, doubtful.
“The Italians are going to crush us, aren’t they?” Dagmawi insisted.
“They have modern weapons,” Zoppe said noncommittally.
To distract himself, Zoppe picked up a citron too. It was round, shiny, inviting like few other things in this world. The citron reminded him of his Asha’s curves. He started peeling it. Slowly. Then he ate it.
22
ADUA
“You don’t dress well.”
So the boy whose mouth I feed said to me this morning.
I should say, “So my husband said to me,” but as the days go by I feel he’s less and less of a husband and more of a burden.
I can’t seem to care about him or respect him like I used to. Besides, he doesn’t love me anymore either. He didn’t love me when we got married, to tell the truth, but at least he was kind, considerate. The rascal always knew what to do with a fool like me. He played the part of the chivalrous knight perfectly and I melted at his fake declarations of love. I knew—because I’m not dumb—that he was never motivated by genuine feelings for me. It was clear what attracted him was having a place to sleep, the hot soup I offered him, more than my long-faded graces. But despite it all, I accepted that fiction, because it was the only thing in the world that still gave me a little warmth, a jolt of life. With him I realized at least in part my ridiculous childhood dreams. That’s why I pretended to believe him—I did it for that little girl from the past—and in that vulnerable state jumped into his arms like a freezing little animal. To his credit, the little bastard has always known how to handle me, he was always good at that. Not by chance did he pretend to be more in love than anyone else, the most devoted of the devoted. His eyes were so funny and false. So cheerful and deceitful. I laughed at his efforts, but deep down I was also a little flattered. Like a good master, I liked to see him kneel at my feet and ask for just a few crumbs of love in return. As a magnanimous mistress I threw him what little he needed in order to adore me. Not one ounce more or less. I was good at measuring out my power, or what, poor stupid me, I thought was power. And he was good at being falsely devoted to me. There were days, especially the ones streaked with gray lines and bad omens, when he greeted me with a brilliant smile, and if he saw I was especially tired he happily massaged my aching feet.
Sometimes he sang me songs full of love. “For my beauty, for my darling,” he said.
He would make paper flowers to frame my pretty little face.
I laughed at these sentimentalities. I found all that teenage romanticism ridiculous, those rose-colored thoughts that weren’t for me. And if I think about it, they weren’t for him either. Since when did two Somalis, especially ones with nomadic backgrounds like us, give each other treacle-colored flowers?
We who had known hunger, separation, suffering— what the hell were we supposed to do with a flower?
I told him so.
Flowers weren’t part of our culture; he should stop with these Western affectations copied from who knows where.
I was harsh, so that he would be even sweeter with me. I wanted him to soften all my asperities, cradle my wounded self, compensate for my cultural maladjustments.
Usually he did. But sometimes what I also heard out of his little viper mouth was a truth I wasn’t ready to hear.
Once, I don’t remember now if it was in the morning or afternoon, he asked me: “When you were young, you never loved anyone, did you Adua?” His face was completely serious. It scared me.
I remember looking at him a little taken aback, a little offended. How dare he judge me, this kid? How dare he hurt me with his pointed words? Had he perhaps forgotten that I had been the one to take him off the street and feed him?
What did that peach-fuzzed little boy know about my youth? What did he know about how much suffering I’d buried in my chest?
I closed myself in a dome of silence. Pissed. Furious. But it didn’t last long. I can never really stay mad at him. Usually it takes just one of his little quirks to put a bright big smile back on my face.
And that was when he, like a perfect Lancelot, would get down on one knee before me and with hands joined on his chest, start to recite the love poems that his poor paralytic mother had taught him one night to distract him from the bombs falling like hailstones over their bare heads. It was jidaal, the season that brings nothing and spares nothing, but the little boy’s heart filled up with his mother’s chimeras as fast as a wineskin.
Ah, how I loved those poems where valiant camel riders saved maidens on the pasture from the insatiable ferocity of the hyenas. I saw myself in every girl and my heart beat with every heart.
“Recite, recite some more, little one,” I commanded. And with his clear and sonorous voice from better days he transported me to a time before all time, where not even dreams yet had a home.
Now however, none of this happened any more between us. That debauched Titanic is sprawled out in front of the TV almost all day long.
I wonder when he’s going to leave me.
At this point I don’t wonder if anymore, but more realistically, when. We barely touch at all anymore.
I think he’s had enough of my barren womb.
His every cell, I can feel it, is pushing him forcefully to make an heir for himself.
Today I wondered whether the “You don’t dress well” which he shouted cruelly in my face was none other than the beginning of our end.
How ironic. Radiant me, today I’m dressed like a housemaid.
I remember when I was young I brought the sun to Italy, to this crater of illusions that swallowed me up.
It was the twentieth century and I was the most beautiful in the land.
Arturo Sposetti, the director of the film I starred in as the Femina Somala, box office smash in the year of grace 1977, always told me I was the most beautiful. Arturo had a big paunch that didn’t match his little arms, as slender as a rachitic boy’s. No hair on his face. Smooth as a young girl. He looked like a hippopotamus, with that sleepy air he had. He smoked a pipe. I remember how much I liked smelling the pungent odor of tobacco when he was nearby. He rarely laughed. He squinted like a sloth. And for every little thing he’d slap me on the rear like a sailor. But he did it listlessly. He contorted himself to fit the masculine role which destiny had affixed onto him. Everything about his gestures betrayed little conviction.
And it seemed like life didn’t interest him all that much. He’d get excited about my Somali fabrics, though. He went crazy over my tunics.
“That dress you’re wearing is magnificent. I want it on the movie poster,” he told me, with that hollow smile of his.
And sure enough I’m wearing a Somali tunic on the poster, though it’s carefully cropped, almost up to my groin, to leave my legs exposed.
And to make the whole thing look even more savage Arturo had me take the photo perched
on a big plastic baobab like Jane from Tarzan.
The idea for the tree was Sissi’s. She had all the extravagant ideas.
And in fact it was Sissi, Arturo’s wife, who had chosen me for the movie.
“She was the one who wanted you. And in general she was the one who insisted on having a Somali.”
They’d forked over quite a bit to get me a passport, a visa, an airline ticket. And Somali customs authorities didn’t look twice. Sissi wanted me at all costs. But in the end I cost the production very little. I thanked them by running away from home with my best fabrics.
I didn’t say good-bye to anyone, not even Muna Kinky-Hair, my ex-friend. I was too afraid of last minute revelations. I didn’t want to get caught by an enraged father and his sympathetic community. So in silence I let myself be swallowed up by an Alitalia Boeing with a stopover in Addis Ababa.
“She’s gonna make us rich, this Negress,” and to celebrate, they sang “Faccetta Nera” on the airplane—the 1930s fascist anthem about an Abyssinian girl being taken to Rome after the invasion of Ethiopia. They sang it to me a hundred times, shaking my long arms, asleep from the weight of my runaway’s pack.
“During the African campaign my father bought a wife from where you’re from,” Sissi told me that first night on the plane. I just nodded, waiting for the rest of a story that never came.
Sissi never mentioned her father again.
In general, the Sposettis didn’t talk much.
They didn’t tell me much about the movie, to tell the truth. I knew only that the main character was called Elo and that she was a photographer.
“So when can I read the script?” I asked.
I wasn’t illiterate and I couldn’t wait to read that script. But no, they didn’t give anything away.
And that is how for several days, weeks even, I lived in ignorance. Elo ... who are you, Elo?