by Igiaba Scego
Yaad tahay?
I wondered what sort of face I’d give her. What tone of voice. What bearing, what gestures.
No one had told me yet that Elo undressed completely and gave herself away to men like a dog in heat.
Then one night Arturo and Sissi told me everything. And they told me crudely. It was May. Yes, May.
It was a freezing night, a strangely freezing night for springtime in Italy. I was dressed too lightly for the occasion. I was wearing a tunic because Sissi had insisted so much, because she’d told me, “You have to be extra beautiful for us tonight.” A delicate scarf covered my bare shoulders lightly. I was shivering with cold, but I tried not to let it show too much. We were in a seaside town near Rome, I don’t remember which; the boardwalk was empty and the pizzeria we had come out of was closing. An insidious wind ruffled our exposed souls and a strange light flashed in a distant window.
“What a moon tonight, look,” Arturo said, turning to his wife.
She didn’t reply. She just said: “Why don’t you take us to the beach house? That way Adua can see it.”
I was tired. I wanted to jump in bed and sleep, close my eyes and sleep for a century or two. But Sissi terrified me and so I faked enthusiasm.
Sissi, I realize now that some time has passed, had a cunning beauty that could stop a too fragile heart like mine. Not because she was beautiful, but because there was this need for control in her that was difficult to get away from. That night her bobbed hair was tousled, she wore a casual blouse, a pair of jeans, a burst of beads and leather laces that wrapped around her big feet. Her face shone with an intense light and her salt-and-pepper hair accented the intense green of her almond eyes.
Her nose was straight, her build robust, her chest abundant, but despite her bulk she wasn’t a fat person. Her hands were big, though her shoulders were oddly tiny. I noted with an expert eye that she regulated this flaw with modest shoulder pads, which gave a certain consistency to all her bodily contradictions.
It was she who asked me: “Are you bored?”
“No, dear,” I said, in the meek voice I had back then.
“Good,” she said, relieved. “We have a nice surprise for you.”
Arturo, meanwhile, didn’t speak. He wasn’t a man of many words. He usually grumbled and when he wasn’t busy grumbling he was smoking his pipe.
When we got to the beach house, they offered me a scotch. “I don’t drink,” I said. It was true.
“A drop won’t do you any harm, it’s a party.” I was struck again by that fear. Sissi’s voice chilled my soul. I didn’t have the strength to tell her no. I drank.
And that sly pair gave me all sorts of things. Vodka, whisky, wine, gin. Mixing in excessive amounts.
Soon I was drunk.
And I, who didn’t know how to say no to the people I considered my benefactors, knocked back one after another, with an idiotic smile on my face.
“They took me away from that pit Magalo, they’re having me make a movie like Marilyn, they care about me.” That’s what I thought then.
And the more I wanted to say no, the more I knocked back those obscene concoctions because my head refused to let go of the idea of Elo, who was going to make me famous like Marilyn.
“If you leave, they’ll give the part to someone else,” my head told me, as I contemplated every tolerable sacrifice to be Marilyn.
I knew they were after my body. I wasn’t that naïve.
I knew sooner or later I would have to pay that tax. A friend had warned me. “They’ll ask for your body. That’s what the Italians did with my grandmother. I don’t think these ones are any different, you know? You just have to figure out if you are willing to pay the price or not.”
I would have paid anything to become Marilyn. Or at least that’s what I thought then.
I didn’t know that they would take everything from me. Even my dignity. I let myself be touched, groped, smelled.
Their hands were frenzied, their breath heavy. She gave the orders, and he followed them.
Then she kissed him and he squeezed my tits. It went on and on. I felt like one big bruise.
“We’re teaching you, Adua,” Sissi told me at one point, when I was on the verge of passing out from exhaustion and alcohol.
“Teaching me?” I said.
“You’ll have to do this in the movie.”
“In the movie?”
“You’re awkward. Hesitant. We’ve studied you. You’ve never been touched by a man, have you, Adua?”
I was plastered. I couldn’t even respond. I wanted to scream. But I was too weak. Too weak. I wonder if this had happened to Marilyn too.
Marilyn, so sweet and so jaded. Urban legend had it that once she got a star on her dressing room door she exclaimed, laughing indecorously: “Now I’ll only do it with the ones I want to.” No more fellatio to land an audition, no more quickies in the elevator to reach a certain director.
Marilyn had earned her place in the star system. And me?
Would I have the guts to go from fellatio to fellatio to reach my dream? I didn’t know what my answer was. I was too drunk.
And that was when, as I was lost in my thoughts, she ordered him: “Now undress her, Arturo!” He looked at me sidelong, hollowly embarrassed, and with a flick undid the tie on my tunic.
And for the first time I was naked in front of my director.
“Arturo, she’s yours, do whatever you want with her,” Sissi said in a hard military voice that froze my blood. And that was when Arturo noticed the stitches.
“This one is all closed up down there,” he told his wife.
“Closed?”
“Yeah, it’s like she’s run through with barbed wire.”
“What are you talking about, Arturo?” And she too, who had mostly limited herself to giving orders from the feather couch, jumped up on the bed, all disheveled, to see the strange barbed wire that their Somali girl had in that so delicate spot.
“Adua, what did they do to you down there?” I didn’t respond. I was so sleepy. “Answer, you twit. What did they do to you down here?” I didn’t respond. I didn’t have the strength.
I barely heard their words.
That’s when Sissi slapped me, one, two, three times. “Listen, I repeat, what did they do to you down there, fool?”
And that’s when I said: “They do it to all the girls in my country. They cut our siil, the part that hangs down. They cut off other stuff down there too. Of course it hurts, but then you get a bunch of gifts and it’s nice. I got a shell. Then they sew us up. That way we remain pure, we’re virgins, and we stay that way until our wedding day, when someone loves us and opens us up with his love,” I replied with a whimper.
“Love?” she rebuked. “What a useless word.”
“You don’t need love, stupid. We can open you up with a pair of scissors. And then finally Arturo will be able to taste you.”
Scissors?
Did she say scissors?
I tried to wriggle away ... to beg them. But there were two of them, they were stronger than me, and also more lucid.
And that’s how on that strange May night I was deflowered by a pair of scissors. I wonder if the same thing happened to Marilyn.
I wonder ...
23
TALKING-TO
Where did you find that picture? Do you look through my stuff, Adua? And what do you mean you want an explanation?
I won’t give you any explanation and I won’t tell you who those white people in the photo are either. I can tell what you’re trying to do.
I realize that you doubt my being a patriot and a nationalist. You think I’m acting.
Your mother thought the same thing. Always questioning me, not taking me at my word. It’s like I can still hear your silly mother. “Dear, why don’t you tell me the truth? Everyone worked with the whites during that time anyway.” She thought I was a traitor, a bad person. She didn’t love me, your mother. She thought the worst of me. And then she w
ould whine and beg for some truth and it bothered me so much when she said it was all the same to her, it didn’t matter. How could it not matter? There’s a big difference between betraying your country and fighting for it. But then your mother said “I love you” and to her those words settled everything. She was a silly goose, a dupe, a fool. And headstrong too. Always sitting there asking me about my past, the whites, the wars I went through.
She was a nosy pain in the neck. And now you’re doing the same thing? You women, you’re impossible. Creatures from hell. I can’t stand you.
24
ZOPPE
The man had kind eyes, a long beard and big ears like an elephant’s.
The man was bent over big sheets of paper all day. He spent hours sketching the world. He drew trees, butterflies, gnats, girls. His realm was the courtyard of the Hotel La Douce France; he wasn’t interested in touring like the other guests. There was no agitation in his movements. Zoppe envied him. He too would have liked to sit there doing nothing. Instead he had to run all over Addis Ababa with Count Anselmi. Lately, their days had become frenetic. And Zoppe’s tongue had dried up in his throat from translating. He translated, but he lost the sense of the words. It was as if his thoughts were floating away from him in a storm cloud. But the count had fallen ill that day. “My head is spinning,” he’d said that morning. “I hope it’s not a fever; I’m going to lie down for a while.” Zoppe was pleased. He couldn’t stand any more running around muddy Addis in his old shoes and he hoped the fever would last as long as possible. That’s how he found himself in the courtyard with the elephant-eared man that strange morning.
He looked at him as if for the first time.
There was something so familiar in the figure bent over the sketch paper. As if they’d already met. His skin was a little yellow. Covered with strange brown spots and a thick layer of pink dust that Zoppe couldn’t quite explain. He couldn’t figure out where the strange man came from either. It was like he had emerged from the depths of some crater. There was something ancient about him and at the same time familiar.
The man looked at him and then said in a language that he knew very well: “I’d like to draw a portrait of you.”
What to do?
Zoppe knew in his heart that he had to dodge the request. He had to say “No, thanks.” “No, I don’t feel like it.” “No, you frighten me.” “No, I don’t want you to.”
Instead he said yes.
He couldn’t resist the kindness of those familiar-seeming eyes.
.
After three hours, the drawing was finished. “Can I see it?” Zoppe asked.
“I would rather you not.”
“But ... but what do you mean? I sat here without moving for three hours for you.”
“The drawing will hurt you.”
“Let me be the judge of that, damn it,” Zoppe said in an arrogant tone he’d never before used in his life.
The man motioned for him to come closer. Zoppe looked. Then, he fainted.
.
That night he dreamed of the drawing. On one side, there was a man with a blue turban, his face disfigured by an egg-shaped scar that made him look strangely fierce. He was throwing a javelin. His arms were muscular. His movements coordinated. He was almost handsome in that athletic pose. On the other side was an elephant. Big ears, a big trunk. The elephant resembled him in a way too. The elephant knew the javelin was aiming his way. Zoppe noted something in the animal’s eyes. Something that he knew well. It was called terror.
.
He didn’t find anyone sitting under the baobab at La Douce France. The yellowish man had disappeared. He asked the other servants if they had seen him. No one knew anything about it. A young man named Hamid, originally from Harar, told him: “There was no man sitting under that baobab. Yesterday it was just you sitting there, nobody else. You dreamed that man up, my friend.”
.
That night Zoppe remembered the words of his Aunt Bibi, the soothsayer. “Our conscience,” she used to say, “has a face.”
.
That’s how Zoppe ended up sitting on the bed with his legs folded waiting for something to happen.
The yellowish man didn’t take long to come.
He still had elephant ears. But his skin was darker, grainier.
“I don’t understand,” Zoppe blurted out, confused. “Who in the devil are you?”
“I’m you. How can you not recognize me? How can you still be confused?”
Only then did Zoppe remember that he had ears like an elephant’s and his skin had spots. He also remembered that he drew when he was upset. Putting lines and curves on paper had always helped him calm down. Whatever he didn’t understand, he drew. That yellowish man was his conscience taking bodily form. As his Aunt Bibi had always said: “Our conscience has a face.”
25
ADUA
I’m naked ...
Sand covering me like gold ...
Up in a tree waiting to be devoured ...
Big lips slicked with gloss for extra allure ... Eyebrows furrowed, like a cat, well defined ...
Kohl highlighting my eyes, and who knows, maybe even my desire ... Bangs straightened by a flesh-eating iron ...
Brightly colored wraps in the beach scenes ... A little hairspray and I feel effervescent ... And beads all over my body ...
Lying back on calfskin I display myself obscenely to an oblivious world. Meanwhile he’s hollering, “Close your legs more baby, don’t show the hair, not yet, save it for now.” And a moment later, “Now fling them open, like the windows when you wake up in the morning.” He has a raspy, cavernous voice. He scares me. He’s the director of my movie, though. He’s my master, he bought me for peanuts at a sale down in East Africa. I can’t contradict him. So I nod, obedient, passive, as befits the defenseless like me.
My nails are sharp as the claws of a proud lioness.
The manicurist told me, “With these, no one can break you.”
Didn’t she have the experience to know that the nails of small-time starlets don’t last?
She should know that better than anyone.
My nails will break, milady. And sometimes my heart breaks too. I scratch, bite, paw.
But it all lasts an instant. Time for one take. For one regret.
“Give me languid now, baby,” the director orders.
“Move those hips, come on, be a good girl.”
And I am a good girl. Because that’s my job as an actress. I’m a professional, I think.
I wallow in that fiction.
“Now move your wrists in circles ... that’s good, like an odalisque in the pasha’s harem. Let the dance take you over, baby, and then move over to him nice and slow, you’re a panther, baby, remember that. And now kiss him, yeah, kiss him with passion.”
Armando smells like garlic, but I have to pretend to love him, pretend that he’s my only reason for living.
I move toward him and smell vodka. But I know the script says I’m supposed to claw him like a little kitten. I follow orders like a cadet. I have no other choice. It’s written in the script. He lowers my head, authoritative.
“See how good I am? Not one complaint, boss,” I say to the director. But no one answers me now.
Has the set been taken down? Where am I?
And where’s my movie?
Who are you, man who reeks of vodka? And what is this mahogany furniture around us?
Where’s the tropical beach we re-created at Capocotta with fake palm trees? Where’s the crew? And my makeup artist? That fat lady who cleans me off and wipes my sweat every other second? And those maniacal costumers checking every wrinkle on my skimpy little dress?
Where on earth has everyone gone?
I’m still wearing my costume. I’m still made up like a slut.
But then I remember, everything comes back to me in a jolt of pain.
I’m not on the set anymore. We wrapped at five. They’ve taken me to a luxury villa in the middle of
Rome, off of a famous piazza.
It was Sissi, it’s always her, always that disaster of a woman, who told me in her fake nunnish tone: “There’s a dinner at the distributor’s house, you know, that magnate who gave us all that money for the movie ... he invited us. He wants to see you.”
And I, dismissive, said: “Me?” I remember always having had that sharp tone of voice with Sissi. Essentially, I couldn’t forgive her for what she’d done to me.
“So basically you have to go and you have to play nice with him.”
“Nice?” I asked, a little disconcerted.
“Do you want to become a star or not? Well you’ve got to play nice, honey, otherwise you can forget about being a star.”
“Forget about it?”
“Yes, honey. And put on a nice little dress, it’s an elegant dinner.”
“Really elegant?”
“Just the right amount, you’ll see.”
It was almost all women at the party, all with skimpy rags barely covering our privates. And we all had plastic smiles contorting our faces.
We were brunettes, blondes, redheads, one with purple hair—“She’s eccentric,” someone whispered to me. They’d also recruited an Asian, maybe Japanese or Korean, and then of course there was me, the drop of chocolate over the double layer of whipped cream.
He came up to me and said: “So you’re Arturo’s Negress. Not bad. Long legs. I like the ones with long legs.”
I looked at Sissi. I was alarmed. I felt so dirty. So empty.
Sissi pushed me toward him and said: “He’ll give you orders like Arturo on the set, you follow them, piece of cake.”
I go down a long hallway with that man, who barely came up to my shoulder blades. He keeps his hand on my bottom, kind of like Arturo during the first days of shooting.
“How old are you?” the magnate asks.
“Twenty,” I lie.
“A round number, like all of them, of age then ... the others always are too.” And after a low laugh, he adds: “Between us, it’s smart not to say seventeen, seventeen is bad luck,” and gives me a conspiratorial wink.
I don’t know what to say. I nod just to do something.