Hiding in Plain Sight

by Nuruddin Farah

  Presently, she spots a web in the corner of the floorboards, close to where her foot is resting, a web woven and then forsaken, and then she sees another, this one active, in which a bigger spider has recently trapped a tiny insect, which is now trying to wiggle its way out alive. Bella bends down and frees the insect, which shakes its whole body and then tenses, like a gymnast readying to somersault and hit the ground with his feet wide, balanced and firm. The spider goes in determined pursuit, and both vanish through a gaping hole in the floor of the car.

  With nothing better to do, Bella returns her attention to the driver. She volunteers that she has missed Africa, missed the smell of night fires, the mellifluously tonal languages, and the calls of neighbors across a village courtyard after a day’s hard work has left them too exhausted to bother with the formality of coming out of their homes.

  The driver asks, “So you were born in Africa?”

  “Born and brought up a Somali,” she says.

  “Both your parents are Somali, are they?”

  Again Bella seizes up, and as the traffic moves a little faster, she revisits the most salient fact about her life, which is that for most of her early years she believed Digaaleh, nicknamed “Arab” on account of his very light skin, to be her biological father and Aar her full brother. She was seven when she first made the acquaintance of Giorgio Fiori in 1988. Fiori was then on a return visit to Mogadiscio in the capacity of leader of an Italian government delegation charged with determining if Italy should continue funding university education in Somalia and for how long.

  Bella, as it happened, would meet her father again less than a year and a half later, when she and her mother and Aar fled the anarchy surrounding the collapse of Somalia to the coastal city of Mombasa, Kenya, where they were declared stateless and were made to stay in a refugee camp. Fiori came in person to take them out of the refugee camp and fly them to Nairobi, where he presented them with Italian visas so they could go with him to Rome. It was a couple of months later that Digaaleh, who had remained behind in Mogadiscio, had surgery on his prostate. Half a year later, he would be dead.

  Bella remained in Rome with Fiori, who supplied her with the obligatory papers allowing her to remain in Italy and pursue her studies. When she was older, she moved into an adjacent one-bedroom apartment that he paid for so they could be in constant touch, sharing evening meals often and spending a great deal of time together. Still, she led her private life discreetly, never speaking of her Neapolitan lover, a cameraman working in the studios of Cinecittà, the film studios established by Benito Mussolini on the outskirts of Rome in 1937. No one could be more aware of the importance of Cinecittà than Bella, as she had been brought up on Italian cinema, popular during her days in Mogadiscio. Her Neapolitan lover showed her the precise location where Ben-Hur was shot, and they gave her a private tour of Teatro 5, where Federico Fellini made his most famous films.

  Aar and Hurdo eventually relocated to Toronto, where they were first granted refugee status and later Canadian citizenship. Within a couple of years, Hurdo learned she had ovarian cancer. Aar cared for her even as he pursued his graduate studies in human migration. After Hurdo died, Aar joined the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental organization headquartered in Geneva.

  It takes the taxi a little more than three hours to get to Bella’s hotel. By the time she arrives, she is too exhausted to evaluate just how terribly the place has aged since her last stay, but she can see that the walls need more than a lick of paint and the chairs are sunken with use. She asks for the room she occupied a decade ago when she was on assignment here and met her Kenyan lover, HandsomeBoy Ngulu, who is no longer in the modeling business and now works for an NGO specializing in the eradication of illiteracy in Africa. But she still remembers him as an exemplary subject, patient, willing to do as many takes as she wanted, always smiling, forever prepared to make her happy.

  What a disaster it was, their first lovemaking! But things began to improve with each night they spent together, and Bella still thinks of him as her bell’uomo. Now that Bella is in Nairobi, however, she thinks that she must seek out HandsomeBoy Ngulu to apprise him of her new situation and suggest that they cease being lovers; life now is just too complicated.

  3.

  In her hotel room, Bella takes a shower. Drying herself, she stands on the tips of her toes, craning her neck as though to see something beyond the scope of the mirror. She is a dark-eyed beauty with a prominent nose, heavier in the chest than she likes because of the attention it draws from men, even though she is overjoyed that she boasts the slimmest of waists for a woman her age and an African’s high buttocks. Drop-dead gorgeous, she also strikes most people as charming, well read, and intelligent.

  Which of her names goes with which of her attributes? She is a woman whose disposition is rarely at variance with other people’s assumptions. She only reaches for the unattainable when it comes to photography, where her ambitions soar. And yet, not only as a woman but also as a Somali woman, she has had to defy harsh social conditioning to establish herself as a person equal in all respects to a man.

  She puts on a robe and starts to unpack, but she makes very little headway, distracted as she is by several loose photographs of Aar that fall onto the table and floor. He is in different situations and in the company of different people, including his children, the photos having been taken when they met in Istanbul during what would turn out to be his final holiday. She looks at one of the photographs and remembers that somewhere she read that the French philosopher Roland Barthes thought that an interest in photography points to a preoccupation with death because it attests to the past existence of an object, person, or image in a never-ending present, but not necessarily to its continued existence.

  Now, as Bella holds Aar’s photograph before her, her mind wanders from where she stands to engage with a distant past, where she interrogates the meaning and quality of a life that Aar had been an essential constituent in. In the photograph, Aar stands before the Hagia Sophia Museum, the sun in his eyes, facing Bella as she takes his picture, the thought of death the furthest thing from their minds. But now, looking at the photograph and studying it with death-inspired intensity, Bella senses that the two of them were in a sense preparing for death. Otherwise, why take a photograph in front of a museum representing a distant era that is no longer part of anyone’s present? That is to say, this photo, taken barely a year ago, now serves as a witness. And she listens to herself saying, as though to another, “Here we were, my brother and I, in Istanbul, marking our existence with this photograph, which now attests to his death.” A question: Can one accept the existence of anything unless one can represent it in some form or image?

  —

  Of the many apocryphal tales about Bella, this is the one Hurdo repeated most often: Unlike other babies, she was not born with the residue of birth smeared all over her. Nor did she announce her arrival with the usual primeval cry. Instead, she emerged from the womb with a shock of long jet-black hair and an even-tempered, almost professional expression that put Marcella in mind of a competitive swimmer emerging from a pool after a hard workout.

  Digaaleh suspected from the beginning that he was not the father. Indeed, very quickly the rumors circulating gained so much momentum that he couldn’t ignore them. This did not improve his marriage, but to everyone’s surprise, he continued to put on a good show despite his obvious loss of face. He neither spoke ill of Hurdo in public nor accused her in private. He treated Aar and Bella equally as his offspring, and behaved civilly to Giorgio Fiori. Only Fiori’s wife, who had remained in Bologna with their son, found his fling unpardonable. As if to prove that all cats are not gray in the dark, she filed for divorce within a year of his return to Italy.

  Hurdo, for her part, believing that a child’s happiness is built on a parent’s small gestures, devoted herself to the newborn, and in return, Bella gave her reasons for joy and a ho
peful perspective on not only her daughter’s future but also her own. Aar, now twelve, had longed for a sister, and he too reveled in Bella’s presence. He was highly protective of her, even reprimanding his parents if Bella fussed in her crib and neither of them went to comfort her. When she was awake, he could be found sitting beside her, cooing sweet nothings to her. Once, when Bella took ill, Aar refused to go to school and nothing would make him leave her bedside, where he kept feeling her pulse, taking her temperature, or touching her forehead. When asked how his absence should be explained to his headmaster, he said to write that he was too sick to attend school; he couldn’t be well if Bella wasn’t.

  When he had done anything to upset his mother, Aar learned that extra attentiveness to his sister would soften Hurdo toward him. They were a threesome, Hurdo, Aar, and Bella, flourishing together, never allowing anyone to come between them. For the first three years of Bella’s life, they lived just as they pleased, with no boundaries. And Bella appeared to benefit from their unusual closeness. She sat up at five months, had her first teeth at six, crawled at seven, and walked before her ninth month.

  Yet Hurdo was aware that life couldn’t go on like this forever, with the three of them continually in one another’s hair, and she knew she would have to put a stop to some of Aar’s boyish mischief. In self-admonishment, she repeated to herself the Somali proverb that a parent must refrain from showing her smiling teeth to her children lest her children start showing their naked bums. Gradually, she began to introduce some order into their lives.

  Bella continued to thrive. The world is at my daughter’s service and everyone in it is at her feet, Hurdo would say. Other children seemed to be infatuated with her. They threw tantrums when their parents arrived to fetch them home, crying their hearts out and insisting on staying longer and speaking of their wish to sleep in Bella’s room. Yet the moment Aar came home from school, Bella lost interest in them. Sometimes she would shoo them away disdainfully so that she could follow Aar around, going where he went and sitting where he sat, endlessly telling him things. At five or six, she threatened to kill any girls she imagined as rivals for Aar’s affection. In his absence, she often complained of feeling hunger. Asked what she craved, she would say that she longed for his return. Yet no amount of his indulgence seemed to satisfy her; Hurdo said he had the patience of a saint.

  Hurdo spoke of her daughter’s attachment as a form of infatuation, comparing it to an infatuation she remembered from her own childhood. “When I was three,” Hurdo recounted to Marcella, “I felt drawn to a boy my age. My parents and the boy’s parents were amused at first. Then came the time when my parents and the boy’s parents quipped that the boy and I would marry.”

  Marcella said, “Still, to experience love as hunger is a brilliant way of dealing with a complicated emotion. How apt! Your daughter is very smart.”

  “Among Somalis,” Hurdo explained, “love is looked upon as an affliction, a sickness for which there is no cure. We believe that love is unattainable because true desire is impossible.”

  Marcella thought that Bella’s childhood crush on her brother might make her the kind of woman men fell for and women were wary of, even hated by them. And Hurdo too worried that the intensity of Bella’s feelings for her brother were such that she might never allow herself to fall in love with anyone else.

  But what was there to do? They would just have to see what would happen. And the bond between Bella and Aar stayed unbroken until Aar fell in love with a girl in Rome, and Bella went ballistic. Hurdo’s every attempt to explain things only made matters worse. Always a bad eater, Bella became anorexic, in the terrifying grip of a hunger that to her was synonymous with pining.

  Eventually, her despair abated, when, thanks to a photograph of her that appeared in a fancy Sunday supplement published in Rome, she became a celebrity and began to earn a lot of money as a teen model. Bella had the uncanny ability to make her eyes flame a metallic green, and what with her exceptional looks and captivating smile, several agencies vied to represent her. After consulting Hurdo, Fiori negotiated a very favorable agreement with her with one of the best-known of them. Hurdo was not surprised when Digaaleh rang them from Mogadiscio, raising his objections, disconsolately comparing Bella’s work and the exploitation of her image to prostitution. Hurdo let him fume, seeing his reaction as that of a typical Somali father and knowing he could do nothing to stop Bella from pursuing her heart’s pleasure, while earning good money to boot.

  Digaaleh, however, insisted she had misunderstood his intentions. “Essentially, it depends whether one sees Bella as Somali and therefore Muslim—and Muslims don’t go into modeling or exploit their image in exchange for cash—or Italian and therefore free to do as she pleases.” But Hurdo cut him off, saying that Bella was indeed a free person, able to make her own choices in life, and that no one had the right to impose their cultural or religious dictates on her just because she hadn’t yet attained the age of majority.

  “I don’t wish Giorgio to decide her fate,” Digaaleh said.

  “Well, if it comes to that, he will,” Hurdo retorted, “because he is her father.” Then she was hung up on him—and not long after, word came from Mogadiscio that he had died. And it wasn’t until many years later, at Giorgio Fiori’s funeral, that Bella heard about this heated exchange, from Marcella.

  Bella has long been of the belief that there are no people on earth more narrow-minded or chauvinistic than Somalis, for whom appearances—the clothes one wears, the way one moves—matter enormously, especially when it comes to women. She recalls too that when she took up smoking and dressing in jeans, the Somalis she met in Rome, or Toronto whenever she visited, found both habits provocative and offensive in equal measure. (Looking at her fingers now, she can still see them in her memory as they were: stained brown with nicotine, as she held a fresh cigarette between them, lighting it with the butt of the previous one.)

  —

  It was Giorgio Fiori who sparked what would become Bella’s true vocation, for it was in his house that she saw the first piece of art that ever took her fancy—the inspiration for making art herself. It was a carving from the Dogon in Mali—a simple figure with a cylindrical body, rods for arms, broken bits of colored glass for eyes, thrown together as if in haste—that she had glimpsed in silhouette at dusk in the house he rented during one of his intermittent teaching stints in Mogadiscio during her childhood. The natural light was fading and the electric lamps had not yet come on. The carving struck her as the most beautiful thing she had ever seen or held in her hand; she was very impressionable.

  She did not know then that Fiori was her mother’s secret lover, but as she held the piece, admiring its detail, she admired its owner by extension for choosing a work of such finesse. From that moment she began to adore him and to love her mother all the more for the adoration she sensed in her.

  Fiori had other pieces too, which he would show her later. By then she knew that he was her father; speaking in Somali, he told her that he’d kept them hidden away from the prying eyes of the Somalis when he lived there, not knowing what impression the carvings might make on such an unlearned lot. As Muslims, perhaps they’d have accused him of engaging in idol worship. But none of the pieces, much as she admired them, inspired the same reaction as that first piece. She’d wanted to possess it, pure and simple. Of course she could have it, Giorgio said. Hurdo tried to persuade Bella to withdraw her demand, but Bella wouldn’t back down. Hurdo explained that the piece was one of a series and Giorgio’s favorite, and that it would upset the balance if the piece was separated from the rest. Nothing doing: Bella wanted that one and no other. In the end, she accepted a compromise: She could borrow the piece for a month and keep it in her room on her windowsill provided she took good care of it. Bella charged headlong into Giorgio, hugging him and blurting her thanks.

  Each night, Bella went to sleep with the piece in her sight, and it was the first thing she loo
ked at when she woke. It made her feel fulfilled, joyful, satisfied with life. She worked harder in school, earned better marks, and became more purposeful and organized. She volunteered to do the dishes when it was her turn without talking back to her mother. Giorgio couldn’t make sense of his daughter’s infatuation and predicted that it would be no more than a passing fad, like several others she’d gone through. But neither her devotion to the piece nor her interest in art nor her newfound sense of purpose and discipline wavered.

  It was then that Aar bought her a Polaroid camera. She began to draw too, copying the sculpture in crayon from different angles. And then she began to photograph it with the Polaroid, shooting it again and again, as though possessed. One day, Aar walked in on her when she was at work, unwashed, sweaty, her room a mess. As she worked with unbreakable concentration, she looked like someone in another world. For the first time it occurred to him that with proper support she might become a serious photographer.

  Next Aar bought her an inexpensive point-and-shoot, and she began to learn which camera to use to get the effects she was after. When the cost of developing the flood of photos she was taking became more than they could afford, Giorgio introduced her to an Italian colleague who trained her to develop her own negatives and helped her to set up her own darkroom in a closet, with Giorgio covering the outlay for materials as a gift for Bella’s twelfth birthday.

  With a view to becoming self-reliant, Bella began to photograph weddings and other occasions. At first she did so free of charge while she mastered the art of taking photos of unruly revelers in crowded circumstances. Next, she learned to take portraits outdoors because she had no studio. She noted that when people posed for portraits a different self came to the fore, a self behind the self they wished to present to others. And Bella discovered that the longer she held off before clicking the shutter, the more this hidden self emerged. She learned to wait for this hidden, this authentic self to emerge, surfacing after a display of nerves and fidgeting.