Beyond Babylon

by Igiaba Scego

  I didn’t see him at Cafra. We met on a street in Prati. The buildings in that neighborhood faced away from the Vatican. The Piedmontese built them in the years after unification. Prati was supposed to be a residential neighborhood for the capital’s new government. It was also a slap in the Pope’s face. I wonder if Pablo knew this story.

  He and Flaca sold their wooden ducks there. The duck was supposedly a symbol of the freedom struggle. Perhaps it was really a symbol of misery. I saw the duck first, then Flaca’s outfit.

  About ten years later, on July 8, 1989, I was alone at home. You were little, Mar. We still lived together. I don’t know where exactly. We might have been living at a friend’s house. We had been there for one year. I didn’t like the neighborhood. It was full of fascists, but the house was full of light. It’s the price you pay for light, I thought, the price for being flooded with it. I made a few friends in the neighborhood. I remember that unfortunate day. Menem took office as the Argentinian president. Alfonsín agreed with him—the country had to move forward. I felt an acute pain in my heart. The Radio One newscast was a dagger in my chest. The country was done for. It had reached the end of the line. It had to change, and this seemed like a step backward. Twenty-thousand steps backward. That man had una sonrisa norteamericana que no me gustaba, carajo. It was fake, the shit-faced smile planted on his face. He wouldn’t do anything good for my beloved Argentina. Nothing good for me. By then I was considered an intellectual. People would ask for my opinion. I only wanted to cry. I felt impotent. If only I’d been there in Buenos Aires, I could demonstrate with las madres y las abuelitas de Plaza de Mayo. I knew about their meeting on Thursdays at 3:30 around the Pirámide de Mayo, with white scarves on their heads, conjoined one to the other in an embrace. Yes, I would’ve been there, alive, and I wouldn’t have been crying with a half-empty bottle of double malt whiskey in front of me. My nerves turned to pulp that evening. I called Pablo. I don’t know if he understood my words, mumbled with buried pain. I do know that half an hour later, he was at my house. He rang the intercom incessantly. I came after a few minutes. I slithered on the ground, too drunk to walk. Too drunk to have dignity.

  When I opened the door, I shouted, “Shit!” It was the only time he hugged me after our encounter on Via dei Sabelli.

  Me, Pablo, the mothers of Plaza de Mayo, any Argentinian endowed with a brain and heart, we knew what a farce that man was staging for us. In the months that followed, everything became tremendously clear. Menem pardoned hundreds of officials tried for human rights violations. Among them were the infamous carapintadas who had made life difficult for Alfonsín, and those responsible for the Malvinas defeat. The worst was yet to come. It came in time for Christmas. Pardons were granted to Videla, Viola, Massera, Suárez Masón, Camps. Pablo called me that day. “They did it,” he said, “hijos de puta.”

  Those who stained their hands with the blood of our sons, our daughters, our loves, our closest ties, are now free, I thought. I didn’t celebrate Christmas. I told you nothing, Mar. I should’ve said something to you from the beginning. I should’ve summarized, cataloged all of my errors, all my incongruities. I wasn’t ready yet.

  Forgive me. I can’t retie the threads of my strange life in chronological order. I have difficulties with time. Habit makes me unwind the wool of time, unstring the cloth, weave it again, find the knots, unstring it again to undo the knots. I don’t want imperfections. In my case it’s a futile wish. I hope that one day, when I’m no longer here, you won’t learn things about me that you dislike. I don’t want you to think that your mother was a mentirosa maggot. I was a maggot, I don’t want to justify myself, I know I was a chica mala. But never a liar, not with you. I didn’t tell you, that’s true, but I did not lie to you, ever.

  The day I met Pablo and Flaca, I walked around Prati. I probably had an interview. That was my main activity at the time. I wanted to become independent, take up my studies in sociology again and leave the Martino Brezzis. I was uncomfortable in their house. They were pure. I was scared of blighting these diligent people with my traitorous disease. I’d bonded with Liliana. She had a good head on her. She had dreams. She didn’t act like a fifteen-year-old and was very mature. Every evening she read Gramsci’s Letters from Prison. She cried. One evening she said to me, “He was very loved.” Even so, I wanted to leave them. I liked Liliana and the rest of the family as well, but I wanted to create a new Miranda in that gigantic city. I wanted to be reborn, like Venus from the froth of the sea.

  Pablo and Flaca were bizarre. I saw the duck first, then Flaca’s white outfit. The duck was fat and looked like it had indigestion from dulce de leche. Yet the face was kind. Its beak was like that of el pato Donald, Donald Duck in miniature. Its maternal girth moved me. It reminded me of my mother. She was often on my mind in those years. I’d left and hadn’t said goodbye to her. I didn’t want her to spit in my face. I wouldn’t be able to endure her telling me, “No mereces que te llame puta.” It was the unbearable truth. I ignored it.

  Adversity was my chaperone and also my present. The duck, however, looked happy. There was a glint in its drawn eyes. Then I could see that the glint wasn’t coming from the duck, but from the white background. I raised my eyes slowly. Things revealed themselves to me piecemeal. The whiteness was a cloth, the cloth a dress, that dress a woman, the woman Marilyn Monroe. It was a Marilyn without breasts, the dress from The Seven Year Itch, blonde hair, perhaps a wig. Her makeup was garish, caked-on, laborious, a triumph of rainbow dust that didn’t quite make sense. She was like a Picasso painting, painful to look at. At the same time, I was entranced by this crude draft of a woman. Why would she dress like that? As soon as I’d formed the thought, I heard a man’s voice tell me in Spanish, “Hay que quitarse el sombrero delante de ella.” I touched my head. I had a beanie on. I snatched it off. The Picassan Marilyn struck a pose, performed a jazz dance step that might’ve only been a bumbling strut. Is she thanking me? I bowed my head in return. I felt stupid on that Roman stage. The voice chimed in. “Do you really not recognize her? Don’t you remember her anymore, Miranda?”

  I looked at her more closely and glanced at the duck. I think I was hoping for an epiphany. I didn’t know who that ridiculous woman was. I turned toward the voice and saw that it was Pablo Santana. He told me the ridiculous woman was Flaca, born Rosa Benassi, daughter of Italians. Rosa had deteriorated into a drooling fool. I cried. In the seventies, I didn’t know how to do anything else.

  What was I doing in those years exactly? I can’t precisely say. I was traipsing around a city called Buenos Aires, a city that still has that name, though I don’t believe it’s the same anymore. There is a before, a moment in which the irreversible has not yet happened, when the soul hasn’t been lost. I lost mine, but I’m not the only one. There were many who pretended that everything was proceeding as normal. The slogan was No te metas, don’t meddle. So we stuffed cotton in our ears. As if that weren’t enough, we drew from our dark sides. I think of that despicable statement, “There must be a good reason they disappeared.” A good reason? What would that be? Tell me. Integrity in ruins. People in ruins. Our conscience was swamp water. We were reprobates. Me, us, everyone. We didn’t lift a finger. We all ate popcorn and watched the Videla Horror Picture Show. The front row was packed with moronic smiles.

  They took Ernesto in the seventies, toward the end of the decade. At the start, however, there was excitement all around. In years past there had been banana dictatorships. Years when, little by little, people took power and wore the country down like a termite wears down wood. We young people waited for Perón. The old folks, too, waited for Perón. We were duped into thinking that the man who had aroused such excitement with his aplomb and his beautiful wife—his first wife, Evita, who Argentinians considered the only one—could solve all our problems. We believed he was God instead of a man. Perhaps a specter. We believed in him when the decade began.

  I lost hope only after his first speech at the Casa Rosada. Yes,
from the moment of his first political act after eighteen years in exile. He was elected president with sixty-two percent of the vote, his largest electoral triumph. He presented himself on the balcony with his nutty four-dollar slut, Isabel Martínez, whose real name was María Estela. The idiot was named vice president. You could see her mock Evita with every breath of her mucus-filled lungs. She didn’t deserve the prestige. Why marry such a mediocre woman after Evita? I remember the speech. I’d gone to hear it with Ernesto. It was one of the few things we did together. Perón was decked in full regalia and seemed younger, at least that’s the sense I got from afar. I remember trying to hear the viejo’s words, but I couldn’t make anything out. Someone handed me a pamphlet and I read it. I didn’t understand. Ernesto explained that the pamphlet announced Perón’s Armed Revolutionary Forces and the Montoneros had joined forces.

  I remember being alarmed by the bulletproof glass Perón had erected as a barrier between him and us. It wasn’t like before anymore, even the viejo had sold out to power. I felt a throb at the opening of my stomach. I wasn’t very well read in politics. I liked tango and soccer. I thought politics was complicated, too many acronyms and changes I didn’t understand. On that day, though, I understood the glass. It represented something no Argentinian could ignore. The idolized leader was afraid of the fucking activists. That September, Perón’s fear materialized as bulletproof glass, which would defend him from the people, his people. In ’74, they became an unwieldy furor.

  On May 1, 1974, Flaca and I found ourselves again at the Plaza de Mayo. Ernesto and my mother weren’t in the city. They’d gone to Patagonia to do something that I don’t now recall. Something to do with Grandpa Alfio’s house. One day I’ll show you Grandpa Alfio’s house, I’ll show you all of Patagonia. It seems like hell, hija, but really it is paradise, and not only because of the silence. There it seems that life finally decided to call a truce. That suspension of pain was so gratifying. It seems incomprehensible, I know, and it’s not easy to imagine if you don’t experience it. But I swear, dear, that’s what the land makes you feel.

  They were away. I was alone. I hadn’t met Carlos. I would meet him soon after. That day I was still pure and virginal.

  Flaca had snug jeans, her hair in a braid, one hand covered with gray metal rings. She might have been stylish, but the braid was outdated. She looked like my grandfather’s grandmother. She’d come to visit me at home. I was alone, as I told you, reading an important book by Jean-Paul Sartre. I’d found it in a library. It was titled, simply, Antisemitism. I want to die when I think of it now. Perhaps that book was trying to warn me about the future, but I was never good at reading signs. So I set the book down and went to open the door. It was her, Rosa, with her unfashionable plait.

  “Will you come with me to Plaza de Mayo?” she asked, tilting her head. I watched the braid twirl. I told her yes. It was hard to say no to that girl. She was so lovely and pure.

  There was mass hysteria in Plaza de Mayo. Many people were young. They all looked very fair. In those years, my hormones were running a thousand miles per hour. I wanted to sweat on top of another human being. I wanted someone else’s saliva in my interstices. I didn’t know it yet, but this was the saudade of having given birth. I felt incomplete. Alone, I was no longer enough for myself. I wanted to enter the bloodstream of the universal spirit. To give, receive, share, lavish. I was about to go crazy. Yes, crazily, madly in love. I would come to love everything. And yet, stupid as I am, I forgot to love myself. I hardly loved myself at all. I felt like a roach, or something worse.

  Flaca loved me dearly, though. She read between my lines, you understand?

  “Hey, girlie,” she said, “we came here for Perón, not cute boys. Remember?”

  I grimaced in mock horror. We cackled. My mouth wide. Hers, wider. I scoped my surroundings. The boys were striking, as were the girls. We were a beautiful generation. That was a volatile time politically, but generative. People debated everything, from films to plays. The city was a riot of movie clubs, theaters, off-Broadway shows. Unconventional years. Trailblazers and dimwits. A beautiful generation. Sensitive, healthy, altruistic. A generation of dreamers. I can’t believe it was fractured. Those who didn’t die in the concentration camps—230 of them throughout Argentina—were consumed by fear and cowardice. Many left the country and were never really seen again. Today in Argentina, everyone is either a therapist or in therapy. We were lost thanks to a bunch of sleazy brutes.

  What agony, what ancient pains I’m calling forth. I must, dear. I’ve been keeping you in the dark. I’m not proud of it. I couldn’t do it earlier, understand? You might not. Something inside me has changed. Could it be this place on the Mediterranean? I believe so. The dictatorship in Tunis boggles the mind. It’s breathtaking. It’s what brought the pain out. I don’t remember what Perón said, not even from that time I heard him. His words, which once inflamed souls, sounded false and hypocritical, and not only to me. Gardel came to mind. His slicked back hair, his droopy hat, his frank stare. I don’t know why I sang. It was absurd and irreverent.

  Así aprendí que hay que fingir

  para vivir decentemente.

  Que amor y fe mentiras son,

  y del dolor se ríe la gente.

  “You heard him too, right?” Flaca asked me.

  After a few moments, everyone was making noise. No one listened to the old man anymore. Then the ear-piercing chorus: How is it, how is it, how is it, General, that the people’s government is full of criminals? It was true. The evidence was overwhelming. I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Before Perón could make a final point in his speech, we left the piazza along with everyone else. It was a pointless speech, and quite possibly malevolent. It wasn’t worth listening to. When Perón reached the end, there wasn’t a living soul in Plaza de Mayo. The dead souls were sickened.

  Flaca and I slipped into a cinema. They were showing an old movie with Marilyn Monroe. It was Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch. Flaca knew the gags by heart. When Marilyn’s dress lifted in the subway gust, crowning the erotic dream of the Middle American male, all Flaca could say was “Poor Norma Jeane.”

  I don’t know why, but I kissed her on the mouth.

  THE PESSOPTIMIST

  Maryam enjoyed recording her voice. She felt like one of those good surround speakers whose sound one could feel in the heart. She no longer pushed the buttons anxiously. She didn’t rewind the tape anymore. Her gestures were sure, her hand firm. Her voice did not fluctuate.

  “Zuhra, sometimes I feel like Howa is sitting next to me. This thought helps me a lot. Because I have a fickle memory, I never remember minor details. She wove the thread of time for us both. She kept every genealogy in mind. But now, sitting with this recorder, everything is so clear to me, like the noontime sun. I think she’s the one whispering the past in my ears.”

  Maryam’s thoughts wandered back once again to Termini Station and Howa’s funeral. It was where everyone had gathered to leave for Prima Porta, on the fringe of the city where Howa would lounge for eternity. Needless to say, everyone was late. Typical of Somalis. The only Swiss, right on time, was Maryam. It was her turn to wait, though not for that long. Better than usual. Maryam analyzed her surroundings. Termini’s walls were covered with papers. Flyers of all kinds, some very large, others small, had been stuck everywhere. They all shouted. All were urgent. They advertised social events, restaurants, buses to Eastern Europe, black hairdressers, refugee welcome centers, Italian language schools. The walls in the capital station were so different from the walls of the small village where she once lived.

  The woman thought of Primavalle and its infinite walled paths. What was Primavalle crying out for? she wondered. She realized uneasily that Primavalle was covered almost exclusively in real estate ads. There wasn’t the same phantasmagoria of paper that inundated Termini.

  Termini’s walls permitted obscenities to the point of tastelessness. Nude women in lewd poses caught the attention of rich white me
n with fuchsia-colored numbers to call. Every announcement was written in at least two languages, Italian and English or Italian and Third World-ese. Maryam, simply to kill time, took a survey of the languages used in the little, poorly tacked flyers. There were more than fifty, she determined, with no trace of pride.

  The Somalis still hadn’t arrived, not even those who should’ve come early. Had she gotten the days mixed up? Perhaps, the woman thought happily. Maybe Howa Rosario isn’t dead and you came here by accident. Maryam clung to this silly illusion for a moment. Good sense didn’t allow for daydreams. Howa Rosario was dead, dead as a rock, finished. Howa Rosario was in the arms of angels. She was going away, didn’t Maryam understand this?

  Yes, Maryam understood.

  To distract herself from her new pain, she turned fully toward the walls. She looked at the ads like children look at Christmas gifts, with suspect curiosity. She read the notices, interpreted them, laughed at some. Then in the confusion of meaningless words and subliminal images, she saw her: Norma Jeane Baker. She was stunned. It was a photo from early in her career. A picture in which Norma Jeane’s evolution into Marilyn Monroe hadn’t completely happened yet. Her face was sweet and her sensuality was not pernicious. Norma/Marilyn was like a fearful newborn. Norma reminded Maryam of panna cotta on ice cream. Abundant, frothy, soft. It was so good you had to eat it right away in a single bite. The panna wasn’t destined to last. Pure consumption. Pure indulgence. Norma was also consumed. The first time Marilyn Monroe thought of consuming her, Norma hid. Then came the universe’s turn. Maryam wondered what would’ve come of Norma Jeane if Gladys Pearl Monroe, her mother, had hugged her as a child. Sometimes Maryam Laamane thought she might be Gladys. She wasn’t convinced that she carried out her motherly duties as well as she could have