“Why do you ask?”
“Because if you are an important person, maybe you can help me. I want to go back to my mother and my family. Please, can you help?”
He was speaking through tears. I didn’t know what to say to him. No one had ever asked me to help them get home before. I told him that I had no power to arrange for him to go back to Ghana: I was just a doctor, not an important person. I asked him what his name was, and promised to talk to someone who was actually responsible for things like that. He understood what I was saying, but he was inconsolable. He had been hoping I could help him. I felt terrible too, powerless in the face of such a request. I tried to calm him down and tell him that things would get better soon, but he did not believe me. When I left him, he was still crying.
Some young migrants allow themselves to show weakness; others refuse to surrender, even in the face of unthinkable hardship.
One day, a motorboat full of people arrived at the pier. After letting them disembark, I boarded the boat together with a few other workers because there was a boy on board who had lost the use of his legs. We wondered what had caused his disability and how he could possibly have made it this far.
We lifted him off the boat and were preparing to transfer him to a wheelchair, when we were interrupted by a yell. “Stop, stop!” It was a teenager who had broken away from other refugees. He was gesticulating at us and shouting in English: “Leave him alone!”
He came over to us, lifted his companion onto his back in a single swift motion, and returned to his place in line with the others. Astounded, I looked at the other workers, and asked the interpreter to speak to him. This was their story.
They were brothers, and they had left Somalia together. Mohammed, the older of the two, had been injured in a gunfight back home that left him paralyzed. Nevertheless, he had decided to attempt the journey to Italy together with Hassan, his younger brother.
Hassan had carried Mohammed the entire way. Together, they had crossed the desert, arrived in Libya, and, finally, boarded a boat. The smugglers had mocked them relentlessly, and could have killed Hassan for his obstinate refusal to abandon his disabled brother. But Hassan had not left Mohammed even for a moment. And he did not want to be separated from him now that they were both finally safe. The two practically lived in symbiosis. Hassan was exhausted, but he didn’t let it show. Instead, he reassured Mohammed, whose head was resting on his shoulder.
Several days later, I saw them waiting for the boat that would take them from Lampedusa to their next destin-ation. Mohammed was still on Hassan’s back. Hassan saw me and made a gesture as if to say: “See, Doctor, we can take care of ourselves. We don’t need anyone.”
I stopped and looked at them. Hassan was right. He and his brother were a single being, one body with two heads. I thought of Martin Luther King Jr.’s words which, happily, this pair were on their way to disproving: “We’ve learned to fly the air like birds, we’ve learned to swim the seas like fish, and yet we haven’t learned to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters.” By contrast, Mohammed and Hassan embodied all the love, dedication, and selflessness one could dream of between two brothers.
A Fèrra
Not long after our graduation, Rita and I were married. Our first child, Grazia, was born in May 1984. Rita and I were still training in Catania – she to become a hematologist, and I a gynecologist – and our work forced us to make some sacrifices. We left our daughter in Ferla with my parents-in-law, and were only able to see her at weekends.
Rita’s family had become my own. My father-in-law, Ciccio, owned a large plot of land some distance from the town, where he grew wheat and kept cows for milk, ricotta, and hard cheese. Every year he took the calves to the fair and sold them. That was how he provided for his wife and children.
Before getting to know Rita, I had never come into contact with farm life. I soon learned that arable and dairy farmers work just as hard as fishermen. Cows have to be milked every day, so there is no such thing as a Sunday or holiday. Every morning, when the moon was still bright, Ciccio would harness his mule, Bertoldo. He would fill his baskets with food that my mother-in-law, Rosa, had prepared, then leave for the fields. In good weather, it took him about two hours to get there. But if it rained, the journey itself would be an ordeal. The paths were uneven and the fields were three valleys away.
Ciccio did this every day, in sickness and in health. He had a gigantic umbrella, but that was not always enough to keep him dry. He also had to ford two streams that swelled well past their banks in the winter. Sometimes he was so tired that he would fall asleep on his mule. But Bertoldo knew the way, and would tramp onward until they got there.
When the penetrating winter frost hit, Ciccio would return home after dark with chapped, cracked hands, his fingers bleeding at the joints. Rosa would give him a spoonful of olive oil, which he would bring to the boil and then pour slowly over each of his open wounds. The blisters from these self-inflicted burns would allow the cuts to heal over. It was an agonizing operation, and Ciccio would grimace every time he subjected himself to it.
After dinner, Ciccio would collapse into bed, exhausted. He had no other pastimes and no holidays or breaks: he did nothing but work.
During the summers, if I was not going back to Lampedusa, I would work in the fields with my father- in-law. That was how I learned to harvest grain. We bound the wheat into sheaves and fastened them on the mules’ backs to be transported to the threshing floor. Then we would take the grain to town, sell part of it, and store the rest in Ciccio’s barn. Around once a month, we would fill a few bags and give them to the mulinaro, or miller, who would bring it back to us as flour and bran. Ciccio fed the bran to the hens and other animals, and every week Rosa used the flour to bake bread in her wood oven. I helped her bake, and she taught me how to knead the dough. When we took the loaf out of the oven, I would cut it into thick slices, pouring oil and sprinkling salt on them. I have never had such delicious bread anywhere else: it had the rich scent of the earth in it. I also learned to milk the cows and even discovered how ricotta is made, which is a long and complicated process. The farm fascinated me, and Ciccio kept me grounded by showing me how much work it all was.
When the grass thinned out in our part of the mountains, the animals had to be taken elsewhere, to a valley in the middle of nowhere. This was the transumanza, the annual cattle drive to fresh pastures, which took place at the same time each year. Ciccio would fill his baskets with enough food for a month, and he and Bertoldo would set off with the herd. Getting there took a day and a half. There was nothing in the valley, not so much as a cabin. Ciccio slept under the trees, nestling down with the cows for warmth. He would not see another soul the entire time he was there. By day, his skin was burned in the scorching sun. At night, his clothes grew damp with dew.
Every now and then, when I happened to be in Ferla during the transumanza, I would get some homemade bread and freshly churned butter from my mother-in-law and go to visit him. I could spend hours talking with him there. He was a wise man who had spent his whole life working to support his family, and now I was part of it. He never treated me as a son-in-law: after Rita and her brother Michele, I was his third child. I will always be grateful for that.
Back to the island
We had a good group of doctors in Catania. My peers were brilliant, and they all went on to have high-flying careers as senior doctors. If I had stayed and continued my studies, I too might have gone up in the world. But we needed to earn money for our family, and were running out of time. So we returned to Syracuse, where I had found a job in a private clinic. And then we made the choice that would prove especially difficult for Rita: we moved back to Lampedusa, where both of us could easily make a living.
To me, returning to the island felt right. My roots were there, and I wanted to go back. I loved the thought of being a truly Lampedusan doctor, a local. And then there was so much to plan, improve, and build on the island. But for Rita it was different. It was
hard for her to even imagine living there. If you were not born on Lampedusa, it is difficult to grasp the island’s dimensions, the way time moves there, the logic of the place. It is beautiful in the summer, but in winter it can feel like a cage you cannot wait to escape. If you are a lover of cinema, theater, or music, it constrains you to a sort of intellectual exile. But there was another, more significant problem: Rita knew all too well that our children would have to leave home to finish school, just as I had, and fly the nest before their time. That was the hardest part for her to come to terms with.
Ultimately, our decision to go “home” was triggered by a single event. It was April 15, 1986, and at that time I was still working in Catania. I was assisting one of the senior doctors, and we had just completed a cesarean section. I looked up and saw one of the administrators eyeing me anxiously through the glass of the operating theater.
She signaled to me to step outside, and I did so with the senior doctor’s permission. “Dottore, something terrible has happened in Lampedusa,” she said. “Come and see, there’s a newsflash on TG1.*” The reporter Enrico Mentana was saying: “Here in Rome, we have learned that a Libyan guard ship fired several rounds from a distance of four miles against American telecommunications equipment on the island of Lampedusa.”
I called home frantically, but the line was always busy. Finally, I got a ring tone and my mother answered the telephone.
“Mamma, what’s happening?” I said.
“We heard a rumble a while back, but can’t make out anything else,” she said.
I took the first available flight to Lampedusa. As it turned out, it had not been a guard ship at all. Several minutes before 5:00 p.m. that day, the then-leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, had ordered two missiles to be fired at the United States Coast Guard’s Loran base in retaliation for a powerful American airstrike on Tripoli. But fortunately, the missiles had landed in the sea, where they did nothing but startle the inhabitants of Lampedusa.
Grazia was two and a half years old when we moved back to the island. Rita had found a job as the director of a medical laboratory. It was a rare opportunity, and we had to seize it quickly. It was the only laboratory on the island, and the former owners were leaving for Agrigento, so there was no way they could continue to run it.
The evening Rita told her parents about our choice, her mother trembled, but said nothing. Minutes later, we heard sobs coming from her bedroom. Rosa was crying out loud. We were – or rather, I was – taking away her daughter. Not Rita, as you might think, but Grazia. She had raised Grazia, fed her, cuddled her, and taken care of her while we were studying and working. This was too much for her. What would she do without her picciridda, her little girl?
The day we left Ferla, we loaded our luggage into the car and got ready to say goodbye. But we could not find Rosa. We were running very late and risked missing the ferry. “Mamma,” Rita called out. Silence. “Mamà, è tardu. Mamma, it’s late.” Still nothing. We looked in every room of the house, in the garden, in the street. She was nowhere to be seen. She had slipped out because she could not bear to wave us off. It was as if we had snatched Grazia right out of her arms. We had to leave without bidding her farewell.
Rita was heartsick on that journey to Porto Empedocle. She wept quietly so as not to frighten Grazia. She felt she was leaving behind her home town, her origins, and her family, for ever.
Rita knew Lampedusa like the back of her hand: we had been there many times to visit my parents. Yet by the time the ferry reached the pier, she was submerged in sadness. My whole family had come to welcome us, but she was barely herself. Her eyes were vacant and her voice hoarse. My sisters were worried. “What’s wrong, Rita, was the crossing rough?” She could not even muster a response.
We moved to Lampedusa in the summer, and a couple of friends from Catania came to stay with us for their holidays. When it was nearly time for them to go home, Rita asked almost obsessively: “You are going to come back, aren’t you? Don’t just leave us here. Lampedusa isn’t far. If you take the plane, you’ll be here in no time…” She was trying to convince herself that we were not all that isolated from the rest of the world.
On winter weekends, Rita sometimes asked me to go for a drive with her. We would go to Capo Ponente, or to Cala Francese, or to Capo Grecale. That was it. There was nowhere else to go. You could drive around the island ten times, but that was all there was. It irked Rita, I could tell. At those times, I regretted persuading her to move to Lampedusa. Every time we had to go home after a visit to her parents’ place in Sicily, she looked a little more downcast. There the island was, a tiny speck of land on the horizon.
Rita’s only solace was her work. But running the laboratory immediately proved to be demanding. Things were different back then. The samples had to be analyzed one by one. Obtaining results took days on end and was an extremely complicated process. Rita felt even guiltier than she had when we were in Syracuse. It weighed on her that she was spending too little time with Grazia.
Then, one Saturday morning, fate smiled on Rita. She was hanging up the laundry when the telephone rang. It was her mother. “Rita, now that your father has retired, we’re thinking of moving to Lampedusa too, if that’s all right with you. That way I can take care of Grazia and you can feel better about having to work.” My wife leaped for joy as if she had won the lottery. She bounded about the house, laughing and crying at the same time. She would not be lonely anymore.
But her happiness did not last long, and the moment Rita had feared ever since we made our momentous decision arrived.
Grazia was such a bright little girl that she had skipped her first year of elementary school, something known as fare la primina. As a consequence, she was only twelve and a half when Rita’s nightmare came true: Grazia would have to leave home to attend a liceo in Palermo.
When we dropped her off at the convent school, both Grazia and Rita began to cry. All the students slept together in large dormitories. This would be quite the opposite of a warm home environment. Grazia would simply be “boarding” at school, in the purest sense of the term.
It was unbearable. And Grazia was only our eldest. Four years later, our middle child Rosanna had to take the same step, and four years after that, our son Giacomo. Every one of these separations was painful. “I have no tears left,” Rita told me one day. “I have used them all up.”
Yet once a year, we would all be happy. My in-laws had kept their old house in Ferla, and we would organize annual trips back with them, usually on the feast of St. Sebastian, the patron saint of Ferla. My brother-in-law Michele would also come from Syracuse to meet us, and our whole family would be reunited for a few days.
My mother-in-law would spend hours in the kitchen just as she always had. It was like being transported back to the past. We would talk, tell jokes, and have fun together for days on end – grown-ups and children alike. All our worries would be put aside, and we would simply enjoy each other’s company. Then I would reflect on how much Ferla has meant to me, and to all of us.
* TG1 is Italy’s most watched television news program.
Little pieces of home
I was so skinny as a child that you could see my ribs. This vexed my father. “Picchi un manci, figghiu miu?” he would say. “Why do you not eat?”
At dinnertime, my father would sit at the head of the table, and I would be seated next to him, under his surveillance. Everything my mother put on my plate was the result of my parents’ sacrifices, and I had to eat it all without a fuss. One false move, and my father would fly into a rage. He once bit his own tongue so hard that he drew blood. In moments of exasperation, he would bring his fist down on the table, always slamming it down at the same spot. As time went on, a slight dip formed in the table between his place and mine.
Whenever I went back to visit my parents after I had grown up, my gaze would come to rest on that hollow notch, and I could not help but smile. My father had meant well. I was frail and prone to illness, and he was only
worried about me.
At the time, people thought that drinking the blood of newly slaughtered animals was good for children because of the iron and other vitamins it contains. I remember being seven years old and watching the live animals as they were brought in from Linosa. They were bundled in a sheet of cloth on the cattle boat and then transferred to a little speedboat by a crane. When they reached dry land, the men would tie a length of rope around the animal’s head and one of its legs, to prevent it from escaping. The poor beasts would throw themselves on the ground and refuse to move, as if they knew this would be their last journey and that they were destined for the butcher’s. To get them moving again, the men would tug on the rope or hold a flame to their hindquarters.
My father made me drink the blood fresh from the animals’ throats, which meant that I always had to watch the executions. The men would tie the trussed-up victim to a pillar to make doubly sure it could not run away. Then the butcher, with a coldness that made me shiver, would cut its throat and the blood would come spurting out. Two other men would climb onto the animal’s back and squeeze its stomach so that even more blood streamed forth. They filled glasses for me and the other children who were considered fragile, and we were forced to swallow. I found it revolting, but for all my retching, there was no getting out of it. It was not until I was an adult that I discovered we had been tormented in vain, and that fresh blood does not really make one stronger anyway.
One afternoon, my father brought home a piglet. I built a little pen for him and gave him a name: Pinuzzo.* I fed him every day, and watched him grow. He would be happy to see me and could recognize me from afar, just like a puppy. I spent every spare moment collecting stale bread, vegetable peelings, and other titbits for him. Taking care of Pinuzzo was my hobby.
When my father announced that the time had come for Pinuzzo to be slaughtered, I objected strongly. I was in floods of tears when they took him away to the butcher’s. Pinuzzo, too, grunted forlornly because he knew the end was nigh.
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