“Life among the ruined,” Kiri says to no one in particular.
“We are stronger than this,” Charles urges. “Fire up your imaginations. Think of our suffering brothers and sisters. We are their messengers in the world now.”
Living in a weary, weathered building that promises blistering summer sun and pelting winter rains, with no place to meet or rehearse, depressed under the pall of Robert’s silence, Abafumi is deserted.
Three times a day, they traipse two blocks to a tiny restaurant for their set meals This is all part of another Rome for them, a gabble of women in windows high over narrow streets.
At Trattoria Gloria they take their free meals with beer or red wine. And yet they feel like prisoners. Despite the plentiful food, they all feel morosely that each meal will be their last.
The novelty of their celebrity fades and they grow quarrelsome with each other. Dancing as fast as he can, Charles calls up every resource he knows to keep them together. And to keep himself and Beth together.
Gianni comes by every other week with cash. But the amount decreases as regularly as the meals shrink in size.
A month into their stay, Robert’s wife arrives at the same sad hotel with their two children. Everyone gathers around her, eager for new information. But she knows as little as they do. She has been in Nairobi she tells them, where her husband made sporadic, anxious visits. Then he told her that she would have to leave and join the company in Rome.
“I know nothing,” she assures them, her face shut tight, her children’s eyes glancing from one familiar portrait to another of Robert’s other family, his extended family. “Nothing.”
At meeting after meeting in the hotel’s tiny sitting room, Charles tries to develop a work strategy but the encounters quickly degenerate into complaint sessions. Finally they arrive at the same conclusion. Abafumi is dead. They are on their own.
Joseph is the first to say it. “Until our situation improves or we hear from Robert, we should find work that pays.” The idea sits in the air like heresy.
Charles, Kiri, and Joro visit Robert’s wife to discuss their predicament.
“We can barely keep ourselves going. Can you help us contact Robert?”
“I leave messages at the U.S. Embassy but I cannot contact him directly.” Wanly lit by a square of dirty window, Robert’s wife perches, for this inquisition, on the edge of frayed velour in the sitting room. She answers their questions through tears that seem, thinks Charles, to roll helplessly out of her.
Can she help them generate some extra money?
“I have none,” she tells them. “I have nothing. Not even for the children’s education. I want the children to go to school. But they are not Italian and they don’t speak the language. We are stranded here like you. I don’t know if I will ever see him again. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know what will happen to us. Truly.”
It’s a lament that makes them feel like intruders into her small space, her tiny Italian refuge. In the tense silence that follows, their eyes fall on a white lace doily that has floated onto her shoulder from the back of the sofa, as though sanctifying their collective hopelessness.
This is how they leave her.
“She is in worse shape than we are,” says Charles as they walk down a street sliced cleanly in two by late afternoon shadow. “We will have to do what’s practical.”
In the next few weeks, they sell themselves to the Italian Ministry of Tourism. And the Ministry rents them out as African drummers and singers, to shimmy and shake, as Joro puts it scornfully, through Rome’s vast parks. “We are performing chimps,” says Joseph.
“Don’t make it harder,” Charles chides him. “We are doing this to survive.”
Joseph is bitter. “This is our demise as artists.”
They array themselves over the moss-covered shell of a fountain, where Joro gyrates comically in a vain attempt to keep the ostrich feathers of his headdress dry.
At the Trevi, designed to commemorate the founding of Rome, they situate themselves beneath the allegorical statue of the She-Wolf, mother of all Rome, to render a sad little homesick song.
They chant and drum down the avenue of The Hundred Fountains, lurching and jumping jets of water that gush from stone carvings of small boats, obelisks, mouths of animals, eagles and lilies. Down the cypress-studded slope they slide and twist, lighting the faraway fires of equatorial Africa among Italian waterfalls.
Four tipsy maidens spray water at them before an elaborate chapel at the Fontana dell’Organo. “They want to wash us clean of everything African,” quips Beth.
When they finish each performance, Kiri walks among the purple rhododendrons and the bemused crowds to collect money.
Charles takes particular care of Beth. They have grown close again, comforting one another in a shared room and a shared bed, such exchanges being easier now among the company. Together they watch themselves in the shining mirror of each other. One night, during sleep, the mirror shatters.
It begins with a soft thump at the window. Beth wakes and makes out the upper rungs of a wooden ladder angling itself against the sill. Or is she dreaming? The shadows of two men slide into the far end of the room. She drifts off once again
Some hours later, she jolts awake. Screaming. Looks around. Charles leaps up to comfort her. “It was real. Charles, it was real. Look. Look.” She is nearly hysterical.
The open window gapes wide. Winding themselves in bedsheets, they survey the room then rouse the others. Call the manager. Their bags have been taken. Wallets. Clothes. Passports. Gone.
The Italian police are no help, confirming that the thieves were primarily after passports and cash. “Why would they take our bags?” asks Beth. The best police guess is that they just happened to be near the window.
“We can no longer stay at this hotel,” says Charles over coffee.
Joro suggests it is time for the group to split up. They have not received funds for two weeks. The hotel manager is getting irritable. No one at the U.S. Embassy seems to know Gianni.
It sounds so callous and cold to Charles, so logical. But he knows Joro is right. It is time to go.
Along damp cobbles they walk, careful steps merging with Joro’s quiet words. “Abafumi is over Charles. We all need a fresh start. Mara too. She has never recovered from Robert’s treatment of her in Brazil and I want to take care of her. The way you look after Beth. We’ve made up our minds. We’re going to Morocco.”
“Morocco!”
“At least it’s Africa.”
Charles looks stricken.
“You stay here, Charles, if you want. You be leader now. You can still help them. You believe in Abafumi — and Robert — more than anyone.”
Beth and Charles inform Robert’s wife of the decisions and urge her to tell Robert everything. The last of their old reality is vanishing quickly.
Applying for political refugee status, Joro and Mara prepare to leave. Charles knows they are glad to be escaping.
Should he and Beth go too? But where?
Others in the group are turning into street people, drifting away as well. And apart.
Charles and Beth stay for a time but know they need to find new lodgings. They have all been given two weeks notice. They are offered a series of temporary homes by various emissaries of good will – first, a Ugandan studying in a Vatican seminary for the priesthood, then a Zairian attaché who takes a particular liking to Beth and invites them to use a spare room at the Embassy. But the attaché soon loses interest when Beth does not satisfy his many requirements, among them entertaining groups of his male friends.
Furious at what she has been asked to do, Charles roughly hoists their very modest luggage on his head and marches them both off, like the exiles they are, to the railway station. This vast glass and iron house of arrival and departure becomes home for a week. To the sweaty ch
uffing of trains, to the wailing of porters and cries of vendors, to the bumping of luggage, to the faraway look of scurrying travellers, they huddle together in dark grimy corners. With drunks cowering under filthy overcoats.
They are propositioned by pimps to make some money with their bodies. Their only defense is staying awake. Heads resting on their one suitcase, they become sleepless fixtures in the railway station like gargoyles on a Gothic church, warning the unholy. Ugly. Hated as the devil himself.
The Ugandan Embassy is their worst enemy now. The American Embassy is totally closed to them.
Someone tells them of unused trains that can be opened quietly at night. Here, on soft dusty seats, they find refuge for a few hours, until the police come with flashlights, harsh words, and a few well-placed kicks to rout them out.
Another habitué of the train station tells them of a place to get free food from a priest called Castelli. “But be careful,” he says. “Castelli expects payment.”
They protest they have no money.
“Still,” they are told, “you may be able to give him what he wants.”
The next morning, Charles and Beth ring a corroded doorbell beside the iron gate of a closed churchyard. An old woman in black opens the door, hears their story of woe and ushers them into a study, full of angels.
Charles is soon extending his hand to a fleshy middle-aged priest with a watery smile whose voluminous black cassock rustles as he moves.
“We have come to ask you for food tokens,” says Charles. “We are actors…”
“It is all right. I do not have any need to know who you are right now. You are children of God. That is enough.”
Father Castelli opens a drawer in his wooden desk and hands them two days’ worth of tokens. They are immensely appreciative. “Go to the address on the envelope this afternoon. They will take care of you. Come again when you and your beautiful lady need more.”
The priest’s complexion is as florid as the angels in his study. Red on white. He sits spreading out on a sofa before them. Studying them silently, he drinks his tea. “You say you are actors?”
“Our company is in exile because of the political situation in Uganda.”
“Ah Uganda… What kind of plays do you do?”
Charles says they are based on myth. “No words. A lot of movement and music. The company is called Abafumi, The Storytellers.”
“Can you describe the movements you do?”
“Group movement mostly,” says Beth. “Like a Greek chorus.”
“Ah. The Greek chorus.” The priest is studying them. “Do you know,” he says finally, “that there were no women in the Greek chorus. No women at all in the Greek theatre.”
“I didn’t know that,” says Beth. “There are women in our company though.”
“So I noticed.” Suddenly, he rises. “I hope you will come and visit me again. I wish you good luck.”
The priest holds out his hands. Beth and Charles each extend theirs in response. As they say goodbye, Father Castelli draws them close and, with a little laugh, kisses each on the forehead. As he says goodbye, he presses their hands against his crotch. “Go with God. Return in love.”
Beth and Charles move briskly back from him. Race over the broken tiles of his private chapel, its rough-hewn saints smirking at them as they flee.
“I thought at first he wanted you,” says Charles in a whisper. “Then I realized that he wanted me as well. No man has ever looked at me quite that way. I didn’t like it.”
“But we have what we needed. Two days’ worth of food. Maybe we can make it last four … until we find jobs. We are finished with Father Castelli. For now.”
As late afternoon shadows lengthen, Charles and Beth scurry along shuttered side streets with high round windows and small arched doorways until they come to a small house whose walls are covered with votive offerings. Drawn to a fork and spoon flickering in neon, they enter a dingy cafeteria lit by bright bare bulbs. Uncertainly, they make their way towards a glassed-off area behind which nuns are taking the church-given tokens through a lower hinged portion of their transparent wall and handing back trays of food.
The clatter and clash of porcelain and tin is muted by thick windows. Like insects swarming over a dead cow, thinks Charles.
Speaking through a small grille in the glass they order all they can: spaghetti, lasagna, steak, beef stew, rice.
“We need to ration this out,” she reminds Charles.
They take their heaping plates over to the empty table noticing, uneasily, that they are alone in the middle of this large room. Sitting down warily to eat, they expect to hear a lecture or a sermon.
Then it comes.
“Bastardo, bastardo!” They look up and see a filthy figure in rags lurching violently towards them.
In a flash, the nuns pounce. They have rushed out from behind their cages, a female force of robed righteousness, to scold and berate. Through the door and into the street, they firmly usher out the foul-mouthed man, telling him not to return until he can behave in a civilized way. Then, demure as they were indignant, they quietly apologize to Beth and Charles and return to their silent duties.
Charles thinks about nuns. The black widows of Christ. Catholic heaven. Caught between sacrifice and salvation.
The agreement, before everyone separated, was that they would check in at the Villa Gloria once a week for messages. On their regular stop at the hotel bulletin board, Charles and Beth find word at last.
“New accommodations found. Meet Sunday with your bags at St. Paul’s Church, Vatican City.” It is signed, “Robert.”
On the appointed afternoon, bedraggled and weary but nonetheless pleased to be together again, eight members of Abafumi stand before the high holy stones of St. Paul’s, staring up. In awe, they wander through the huge Corinthian columns and lean protectively together on gleaming floors inside the wide central nave, a tight dark knot of apprehension, studying paintings on the panelled ceiling that seems to drop straight down from paradise.
Charles scrutinizes medallion portraits of the Popes on thick walls arranged around a series of small portholes. Leos, Innocents, Gregorys, Piuses, all fixed in red and ermine robes under glittering caps turned towards something only they can see from a place where only they can be.
Far into the apse, Charles strains his eyes — high above an altar dense with black marble, lacy with alabaster, topped by arches and towers of gold — a mosaic of Jesus giving blessing. In blue and red robes, enthroned in oriental carpet, his white face beams serenity, while from his raised right hand, assurance flows.
“I believe him,” says Charles quietly to Beth. “He will look after us.”
Rita and Monday arrive together with their few belongings. As the two company members who have been perhaps least faithful to the group during Robert’s prolonged absences, they are greeted with muted enthusiasm. Ultimately, though, it pleases everyone to see their numbers increasing.
“So do we get to bunk inside this palace?” Rita heaves a plastic bag filled with clothes.
Beth unloads her battered suitcase. The women hug and whisper together.
Charles explores the side chapels.
They circle the rose garden, sit between columns, like a tribe of holy nomads, share stories of where they have been. “Perhaps we could rehearse here,” says Beth.
“More likely,” says Kiri, “we will start having holy visions if we stay long enough.”
“My mother’s spirit church was like this,” Charles says to no one in particular. “But it had wasps,” he adds, unexpectedly thrown back to the past.
Talk of Robert joining them grows in the quarter hour they are there and then fades quickly as a young priest arrives to bring them in.
“I am Brother Vittorio,” he says. “You are welcome. Your new home is here under God’s protection. But I am afraid it is a
lso underground. Please follow me.”
“Pluto’s domain,” mutters Kasa as they descend a series of massive stone steps to a cavernous and cavelike cellar aglow with huge chandeliers. Rooms opening into rooms. Walls like wandering vines, extending, curving stopping, starting.
“Entering Purgatory,” Beth sighs.
“It’s more like the underground lair of Magobwi,” says Charles, steeling himself to the absence of sunlight.
“Even more like a slave house,” declares Joseph. “Everyone kept in cages and pens before the ships took them off.”
“Actually,” says Brother Vittorio, “early Christians hid here.”
“Before they were buried alive I would assume,” says Kasa. “Is there any natural light?”
“Anyone buried in the catacombs is quite dead, I can assure you,” says the good Brother without a smile.
“Why should I live with dead bodies?”
“Because you want to stay alive. That’s what we’re all trying to do.” Charles is quickly losing his sense of humour.
Water gurgles from an underground stream with a small, carved bridge that they step carefully across.
“There used to be huge cisterns down here,” explains Vittorio. “Now it is part of the city drainage system.”
“Great,” says Joseph ironically, “So we are sewer rats.”
“How could Robert do this to us?” asks Kiri bitterly.
“I think he’s just getting back at us for all the trouble we’ve caused.” Joseph is not amused.
Through a murky tunnel they wind, one after another, pressed down by an atmosphere clogged with unused light. They have descended onto another level past a small archway leading to a games room, complete with card tables, checker boards, chess sets, and a ping-pong table. From here they walk past a large kitchen and storage rooms into a great hall. High white walls and ceilings sparkle with electric light. People sit against pillars on cement floors, chatting or reading. They smile as the group passes. Some shout out, “Welcome to St. Paul’s.”
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