That evening at dinner, I refused to eat his meat. I – not to mention the table – might have been severely punished for my defiance. But that day my sisters, and even my mother, rebelled with me. It was a full-scale mutiny. This only made me more indignant. “Why did you have him killed if you don’t even want to eat him?” I said. “He was like a dog – he was my friend.”
Decades later, it was the memory of Pinuzzo that guided me through a most unusual sequence of events.
I was on the Protector, a British navy ship that was docked at the large pier for commercial vessels. There were two hundred migrants on board, and I had been asked to help examine them before they disembarked.
A very young Sudanese girl was sitting on the boarding ladder with a carrier under her arm. I asked her what she had in it, and she showed me a black cat with a white stripe on its head. I told her that we could not let it off the ship unless she could document its vaccinations, particularly against rabies. Unsurprisingly, she did not have any such paperwork. That meant we would have to quarantine the cat before returning it to her.
Sama – that was her name – began crying so hard that she was convulsing. I managed to placate her by promising that we would treat her pet well and give it back to her as soon as possible. We then helped to gather together her family, and put them all onto a bus bound for the reception center.
I went back for the cat, only to find the carrier empty. The ship’s captain had been irritated by what seemed to him a pointless complication, so he had set the creature free.
Thinking of how Sama would react, I went about searching the ship with the help of the firemen – much to the annoyance of the captain, who wanted to weigh anchor as soon as possible. When at last we found the cat, we notified the veterinary authorities in Palermo. Though there was no state-approved quarantine facility on Lampedusa, it had to be kept indoors and away from other animals for a period of six months. A local girl named Eletta, who adores animals, volunteered to take it in herself, and she accepted all responsibility for the quarantine at her own expense.
Once the cat had been entrusted to Eletta, I went to the reception center and told Sama and her family what was happening. “You will have to be patient,” I said. “And tomorrow you are going to have to leave Lampedusa, you can’t wait here.” Sama was despondent. The cat was like a brother to her and she had fought to keep him with her throughout the journey. But there was nothing else we could do. I gave her my personal telephone number and reassured her that we would get her pet back to her, whatever it took. She dialed my number right away, and when she was satisfied that I would actually answer and was not trying to trick her into capitulating, she calmed down.
A few days later, Sama called to ask how the cat was doing. She continued to telephone me regularly throughout the six months of quarantine. She asked for news of her pet, and updated me on her whereabouts so I would know where to send him. It was clear that she was devoted to the creature.
Meanwhile, Eletta dutifully looked after Sama’s cat as if he were her own. Her generosity knew no bounds, and when at last the cat’s release was authorized, she made the extraordinary offer of returning him to Sama’s family in person.
By then they had settled in Germany, and true to her word, Eletta took the cat and flew to Berlin. She then took a train to the small village where the family now lived, and knocked on their door. They were so happy to see the cat that they all burst into tears, as if they were welcoming home a long lost son. “It was better this way,” Sama confided. “I am not sure that I would have been able to keep him safe.”
Sama and her family had traveled a long way since leaving Lampedusa. In Ventimiglia, they had slept rough for two months. Then, since the borders were not so strict as they are now, they had made their way north. Though they had no relatives in Europe, they had heard that Germany was the best place to go to – and so there they had gone. Now they were living in a house provided by a nonprofit organization, and were waiting for their status as political refugees to be recognized. The children had started school and university.
“As soon as I opened the carrier, the cat jumped into Sama’s arms,” Eletta told me on her return. “I had thought I would spend at least one night with them, but I changed my mind right then and went straight back to Berlin. I felt I was intruding. After all that time, they had finally been able to get a taste of the normal life they’d had before they were forced to give it all up.”
Slowly and steadily, that family had been putting their broken home back together. What Eletta had witnessed was the moment when they found the last missing piece.
* Pinuzzo is a dialectal equivalent of Pinuccio, an affectionate diminutive of the common Sicilian name Pino, which in itself is a diminutive of the Italian name Giuseppe.
Omar is unstoppable
The year was 2011. Even at the height of the Arab Spring, winter still reigned in Lampedusa. It was a bitterly cold March when more than seven thousand migrants arrived within days of each other.
On the pier, we were frozen stiff. The ambulance tore back and forth from the clinic. We worked day and night.
Most of the refugees had come from Tunisia. They were everywhere on the island: on the beaches, in the coves, in the fields. One day, I received the message that a group had managed to beach their boats nearby on Isola Dei Conigli. Most of them had disappeared, but one boy named Omar was found beneath one of the boats. He was in a critical condition: dehydrated, emaciated, and running such a high fever that it was giving him convulsions.
We took him into the clinic. We inserted an intravenous drip to rehydrate him, and when he remained weak, I called the emergency helicopter so that he could be sent to hospital in Palermo.
It took ten days for the doctors to get Omar back on his feet. But then, instead of making his way to Germany, France, or the Netherlands, Omar decided to come back to Lampedusa. I remember picking him up at the pier as clearly as if it were yesterday. He was transformed from the sick child we had found, into his energetic, confident, seventeen-year-old self.
A Lampedusan family who are friends of ours said they would be glad to host Omar, and they welcomed him into their home. After a few months, however, the father gave me a call: “Pietro, we can’t keep Omar any longer. Things aren’t going well and we can barely afford to support our own children.” At that point, Rita and I decided to host him ourselves. He spent a few more months with us, but he craved independence and did not want to be a burden. So we got in touch with some friends in Rome, where Omar ended up finishing school and qualifying as an interpreter.
Almost a year later, Omar returned to Lampedusa and found work at the reception center. He was good at his job and could speak several languages. But unfortunately, he had a problem with authority. He was always siding against his fellow workers with the migrants who, like him, had suffered greatly. He could not tolerate even the slightest discourtesy or the smallest error on the part of the administrators, who had a tough job managing countless moving parts and dealing with all kinds of problems. On several occasions, he had become the ringleader for refugees who begged an extra meal or blanket, or for those who simply wanted to leave Lampedusa and move on to their next destination.
The director called me time and time again. “If he keeps going like this, we’ll have to fire him,” he warned. Rita and I tried to reason with him. We said that he had to accept the hierarchy within the center, that he should be more understanding of the difficulties involved in accommodating thousands of people. “Do you know how they’re feeling?” he retorted. “Have you ever been in a situation where you are dependent on others to take care of you? Any abuse of power over them is just unacceptable. I really hope you can understand.” We did understand, but we could not say so – we would only have made things worse.
After less than two years, Omar quit his job. He decided to leave Lampedusa and find work elsewhere.
In the time we had known Omar, we had gradually learned of his background. He was an o
rphan, and had been adopted by a penniless family from a village near Sfax in Tunisia. His adoptive mother doted on him, and he would have done anything for her. When she was found to have breast cancer and the treatment proved too expensive for their family, Omar decided to attempt the crossing to Italy and find a job that would allow him to send money home. And he did just that. He kept only a few euros for himself, and posted the rest of his salary to his sister for his mother’s treatment.
One day, Omar received a letter from Sfax. He had a bad feeling about it straightaway. Refusing to even open it, he left it on the table and ran off to cry by himself. Rita opened the letter. Omar’s hunch was right: the treatment had not worked, and his mother had died.
Rita found him outside and hugged him tightly. She had him sit with her on the beach and stroked his hair as if he were still a child. Eventually, the sobs ceased. Omar had fallen asleep in Rita’s arms. At the age of nineteen, he had found a new mother. Yet even today, when he speaks of his adoptive mother, he cannot hold back the tears.
Omar lived with us for a long time, but he was always restless. We found him a job at a center for asylum seekers in Mineo, near Catania, but this suited him even less than the one in Lampedusa. He could not handle the provocations, hypocrisy, and ignorance of certain workers. I went on receiving telephone calls from administrators: “Dottore Bartolo, if Omar keeps behaving this way we really will have to ask him to leave.” I begged them to be more patient with him, though I knew I was wasting my breath. Omar could not just acquiesce, because he would never forget what he had been through. He feels compelled to stand with whomever he finds stuck in a place they badly want to escape. They need to leave and find jobs, send money home, enable their families to lead normal lives.
After leaving Mineo, Omar came back to live with us for a while. Then he tried going to Germany, but was stopped by the police and sent away. He was not exactly an illegal immigrant, but his residence permit was for Italy and not Germany. He tried Finland next, but he was jettisoned from that country too. It appears the European Union is a union not of people, but of borders and walls. Omar has since roamed to Malta and to Sweden in his continued search for a job, and more importantly, for a new identity, a life no longer marked by grief and anger. I know that Omar will come back to us time and again, but that we will never be able to keep him here.
The will of the waves
My mother was Lampedusan, but when she was a child, her impoverished family lived for some time in Susa, in Tunisia. She was seventeen when they returned to Lampedusa. There, my father first met her and fell in love. He too was from a poor family, but he was extremely driven and determined to make something of himself. Before long, he decided to risk using the little money he had earned from fishing to build a boat of his own. He named her the Kennedy, after the American president who had been assassinated earlier that year.
My father asked his brother-in-law Nicola, or Uncle Chilinu as he was known to me, to be his business partner. Uncle Chilinu was born in Susa but had not set foot there since his family’s return to the island. He was a truly extraordinary man whose face always wore a smirk of some sort. You could never quite tell if he was joking or being serious. He became an excellent fisherman, and when he was not on the Kennedy, he was out fishing with a trawl line, the type that has many hooks. He had a small boat of his own too, which was named the Pietro, like me.
One day my father and I came home to find my mother in tears. Uncle Chilinu had gone out fishing on his boat and had not come back. We immediately set out to look for him, with all the other fishermen of Lampedusa in tow.
There is an unwritten rule that you might only understand if you were born on an isolated island like ours: leaving another human being at the mercy of the waves, no matter who they are, is unacceptable – unthinkable, in fact. This is a law of the sea. It is taken so seriously that when the Italian goverment prohibited taking migrants on board a boat, fishermen often defied the law and ended up in court.
The whole island searched for Uncle Chilinu. We divided the sea into zones and went more than twenty-five miles out. The search yielded nothing. There was no sign of him. The navy got involved and sent out helicopters. Still nothing. We could not find him. Our conjectures grew increasingly absurd. Had the boat capsized? Had Chilinu been kidnapped?
The coast guard sent a message to all the port authorities of the Mediterranean. At home, our hopes of finding him, dead or alive, grew dim.
Two weeks later, the port authority telephone rang. It was the coast guard in Susa. A small boat had been found in the port, and there was a corpse inside. My father and I sped to Susa on the Kennedy, along with some of the other fishermen. As soon as we entered the port, we spotted the boat: unmistakably, it was the Pietro. Uncle Chilinu’s body had drifted to Susa in a sort of nautical morgue. When we saw him, his mouth was curled upward at the edges. He looked as sarcastic as ever.
He had been born in Susa, and there he had returned in death. We were told that he’d had a heart attack while fishing. The boat’s motor had kept running, so it must have taken him all the way to Tunisia by some caprice of fate, as if it had wanted to deposit him on Tunisian soil. The following day, we put his body on the Kennedy and took him back to Lampedusa: perhaps we were wrong to do so.
Tunisia also held a special place in my mother’s heart. From Susa, she had brought with her one prized possession that she used and looked after with the utmost care. It was a green couscoussier of glazed terracotta, the treasure chest in which all her memories of Tunisia were preserved. During the long hours she spent making that archetypal Tunisian dish, those memories would come flooding back.
I loved to watch my mother as she cooked. She would take a large pot of boiling water and place the couscoussier on top, sealing the space between the two vessels with dough to prevent the steam from escaping. Then she would put the semolina on a wooden table and begin to roll it: that was the trickiest part of the recipe. My mother was a strong, imposing woman who had incongruously beautiful hands. She would sink her long fingers into the semolina and gradually mix it with a little salt and water, blending the ingredients lovingly in a circular movement known as incocciare. She looked as though she were sculpting a work of art, and as she worked I could tell that her mind was wandering back to the sights and smells of her childhood.
At just the right moment, she would tip the semolina into the couscoussier. Then she would make a broth with the fish my father had brought home. Since fish was a staple in our household, she often dressed it up by garnishing it with vegetables from the garden, transforming it into a triumph of colors and flavors. Even I loved her couscous, though I was the fussy eater of the family. It is a dish that is at once simple and intricate, one that has always united the inhabitants of both shores of the Mediterranean.
The family that lived opposite us was even less well off than we were. In my mind’s eye, I can still see my mother in her apron, filling a huge ceramic bowl with couscous and crossing the street to take it to her neighbor and friend with a smile. Even if you were poor on our island, you shared what you had and helped each other out. There was no selfishness, and there were no barriers.
There is one restaurant on Lampedusa that cooks to perfection the couscous that my mother made. Every time I taste it, I feel like a boy again. All my childhood memories come back to me, as did my mother’s memories of Tunisia when she was cooking it. The chef is none other than my sister Caterina: she values the cultural significance of the recipe and, in it, she has also preserved a small piece of our family legacy.
My other sisters are also excellent cooks. They all learned from my mother’s inventive ways of presenting fish.
When we were children, we often tired of eating the stuff and my poor mother was running out of new ways to prepare it. One evening she served us a mouth-watering polpettone: a type of meatloaf full of eggs, mortadella, and cheese. “Finally!” we said. “No fish tonight.” We ate with gusto, as if we were savoring a rare delicacy
. When we had finished the meal, my mother looked at us all: “Vi piacìu? Did you like it?” “Sì, mamà: finalmente a carni. Yes, Mamma, meat at last,” we chorused.
She smiled. “No. . . u purpittuni fattu cu pisci era,” she said. “That was fish you just ate.” She had simply mashed it into the consistency of minced meat. Once again, she had amazed us.
The greatest gift
One day when I was at the clinic, sorting through my post for the day, I received a pleasant surprise. It was a letter from the head teacher at an elementary school in Pisa. Her pupils had come first in a national competition for schoolchildren on the theme of the “unsung hero,” which is dedicated to honoring individuals who do not appear in the history books, but whose example has much to teach us. The class had won five thousand euros for their nomination of the World War II Resistance fighter, Athos Mazzanti. Since they had heard of the many young people who are rescued in Lampedusa, they had decided to use their prize to buy toys for children less fortunate than themselves. Mazzanti had also received a prize, and had decided to donate his to the same cause. The teacher asked in her letter if we at the clinic would mind receiving the toys, and distributing them to the children when they arrived.
Soon after this, the presents flooded in: boxes and boxes of soft toys, building blocks, and all kinds of games. The best thing about those gifts was that they came from the children themselves. Instead of simply sending money to buy toys, they had bought and wrapped them individually, and attached little notes in Italian and English. “Dear children,” one said, “you left your countries to find a different and better life in Europe. We young people have got to change this world, and follow in the footsteps of men and women who gave everything they had.” Among the packages was even one gift for me. I was moved when I unwrapped it, and I still guard it jealously.
Tears of Salt Page 5