Beyond Babylon

by Igiaba Scego

  Vittoria Pasquinelli’s fifteenth birthday arrived. She was the oldest of Antonio and Magda’s children.

  “Prepare your usual, dear,” the woman said to her trusted cook. Majid liked cooking rice. It reminded him of his Famey’s smell. Maybe it was the cardamom or the cinnamon. He felt inspired that day. He made a delicious rice dish. It smelled like a woman.

  He thought of Bushra. The roundness of her bottom, her delicate face, those immense eyes. He thought of her velvet skin and the scent of oils on her soft body. The kindling of desire lit in his groin. A lonely erection in the kitchen was normal. Every day at that hour he thought of Bushra and her perfect body. He cared for her more than himself. He desired her as no man had ever desired a woman. Was he still a man? Could he admit his shame to her? He preferred dreaming of her instead…

  No. It wasn’t enough for him to dream about her. If she hugged him in her arms that night, he would relish her scent. Yes, that’s what he would do. He was her husband after all. Was it wrong if he hugged her a little bit?

  “Mommy wants you to serve today,” a girl’s voice stirred the man from his thoughts. “Mommy says Yousef is too dirty and we have to host important guests.”

  Majid was annoyed. He didn’t like being the waiter. He put a clean white tunic on top of his apron; he wet the rebellious curls on his head and pretended to comb them with two fingers. Then he washed his hands. He waited for the call. When he heard the bell sound, he carried his masterpiece to the table.

  They were all seated. Vittoria was captivating in her lilac dress. She was kind, the only one in that house who smiled at him without giving too many orders. There were two other heads. One blonde and one almost completely white. Majid didn’t like white heads. They brought back irrational fears.

  He placed the rice on the table and got ready to serve it. Then his heart jerked. For a moment he felt like he was dying. The white head was similar to one seen too closely years ago, on that terrible afternoon with Famey and the other sad wretches from the shuttle. Could it have been Guglielmi’s head? He focused for a moment. The same mean eyes. The same unsightly moustache.

  “Majid,” Mrs. Pasquinelli lilted, “a plentiful portion for my Uncle Alberto. He’s a soldier and needs to eat.”

  The uncle smiled. Majid thought he was losing his mind.

  Then he remembered that he had a son. Elias would avenge him. He had to run home and tell him.

  SIX

  THE NUS-NUS

  The girl had a video camera in her hands. She was swinging it from side to side in the same swaying motion as her straggly hair.

  Mar observed from afar like a bloodhound watching its prey. She didn’t want to get caught. When she’d seen the girl in that serpentine coil of people that was the medina of Tunis, she decided on pure impulse to follow her. But stalking the unknown Patricia lookalike was putting her on edge. She had fun until she saw her wavy hair cleave through the air. Before, she was with friends, chatting, bargaining. Now she was alone, following a ghost she’d wanted to forget.

  When would she ever again gorge on chapati shawarma with Björk’s clone and a Chinese man who aspired to be a philologist? They weren’t people you found on every street corner. They made her laugh. It had been a long time since she’d laughed with all thirty-two of her teeth. Only Peter Sellers, with his depressed dementedness, occasionally managed to uncover a few shining teeth. For everyone else her mouth was hermetically sealed in disconsolate pain. And what to say of Miranda and the two of them together on that strange, happy afternoon? Miranda was different. That’s all Mar could say. It was hard to believe. Each time she said it aloud reinforced its reality. There was a light around her mother that wasn’t usually there.

  Miranda, Mar knew well, was used to lights, especially the limelight. She was a famous writer, translated into more than twenty languages, comprised of a thousand souls. She wrote columns all around the world, entertained important people and artists, was invited to every film premiere. On those occasions, the light passed through her, giving her slim figure the soul-soothing tones of an Irish forest. Her mother wore green to present herself to the world. Teal, light green, forest green, soup green, dark green. Mar hated green. She couldn’t stand it. For her it wasn’t the color of hope, but of oppression. She didn’t like the wall of trees her mother had placed between them. She was her daughter, and it seemed as though she were any other stranger. Mar envied her mother’s readers, even the most miserable. They understood her, and she put in a tremendous effort for them. She’d read every damned poem. She’d read them with a magnifying glass to take them in better. It couldn’t be done. She couldn’t see her mama, her Miranda, in the verses. Sometimes she felt like she was missing the substance of those blood-scrawled words. It was as if the Miranda of the poems wasn’t the Miranda from real life. Her existence was divorced from Mar’s. She didn’t like her first three poetry books. She’d never confessed this to her mother. She wouldn’t have done it under torture. She liked her mother’s later books more. She began adoring her simple, unembellished style. She always talked about politics, never about herself. Always going on about Argentina, but constantly cryptic. One could understand her better there, nearly enough to comprehend. Nearly. There was inevitably a black hole waiting on the next page. Mar still envied the readers. They cried when the poet cried. They sighed when she sighed. Everyone was perfectly symbiotic. Only she, Mar, remained on the outside of her mother’s chorus and heart. This was another thing she couldn’t tell Miranda, though she didn’t know why. Perhaps the reasons were unnameable.

  Mar wondered if her mother knew she’d written poems, particularly the early ones, far removed from her reality. The streets of Buenos Aires didn’t belong to her as she thought, nor did the pain belong to her as she believed. Mar wondered if her mother, the great Miranda Ribero Martino Gonçalves, had ever understood that more layers existed within her. Living next to her was hell, but also the sweetest of paradises.

  They’d been happy that afternoon. She, the daughter, with her mother. It wasn’t the distant, haughty Miranda. Or the genteel, reasoning Miranda. It was only her mother. Simply a woman. Her mouth full of chapati shawarma, meat and scattered bits of onion. She was a mother who had fun with her daughter and who grumbled with her mouth full. She was a more relaxed mother. More human. That was what scared Mar. Oftentimes Miranda didn’t seem human. Her face looked like that of Christ carrying his mortal cross.

  The afternoon was past perfect, but she’d left her lovely group to pursue a mirage, the strange girl with the video camera. Mar knew she was like Miranda in this regard. She was also a Christ carrying her woman’s cross.

  The girl with the video camera was moving quickly, like a camel between dunes. She was swift but graceful. Occasionally Mar saw the glint of her glasses coruscate in the distance, a green and violet flickering. Mar thought the girl dressed peculiarly. In that way, they were alike. Ripped jeans, prison-striped blouse, orange clogs with purple buckles. She carried her backpack on her stomach. Someone had evidently notified her of the preferred pastime at the medina: slyly pilfering tourists’ fat wallets. Everything had to be done speedily. Thieves had a difficult life in Tunis.

  The police were on alert and it was the overseer Ben Ali himself who wanted nothing bad happening to the tourists. Tourists were money, international prestige, and one of the reasons the great master-father of the country was tolerated by the West. Mar didn’t like his chubby face. It was redundant, obsessive, brutal. A senseless replica. Every shop, every corner in the house, every hotel, every public restroom, every hole was papered with that man’s fat face. On her first day in Tunis, Mar had mistaken him for a comic actor. That face encrusted with rouge, mascara, and foundation made her laugh. Like a good Argentinian, her mother explained that by no means did this man make others laugh. Many people in the country had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and in Tunis the story was the same: desaparecidos, torture, heartache. Her mother never spoke of desaparecidos. She
never spoke to Mar about the past. The portrait of the African dictator upset her stomach.

  The spindly girl didn’t buy anything from the bazaar. She stole images with the ravenous contraption in her hands. People in the souq didn’t like being filmed. The women put their hands over their faces. The men glowered. The spindly girl was unconcerned. Only the motions of the famished video camera mattered.

  They walked many of the medina’s byroads. They passed the great mosque of Al-Zaytuna and, still running, the spindly girl ventured onto the side streets Mar had named for the baskets that lined them. Recently, seemingly moments before, JK had explained that these baskets were used for weddings. “Women and guests perfume themselves at the weddings. The baskets are for the oils.” They looked like cradles to Mar. The lace handles, the delicate lining. She thought a newborn would fit nicely in one. Hers would. Sometimes, in her dreams, she saw her child. He grew, teethed, took his first steps, smiled, made funny faces. Pati was never in the dreams. Miranda was. She was the one who cradled him when he was tired. She sang “Alfonsina y el mar” with her windy voice. The child in her dreams was always a boy. His name was Ernesto like her desaparecido uncle. She didn’t want to name him Elias, like the man to whom she owed her life. She didn’t know him. She didn’t know if he was worthy of respect. She’d discovered Ernesto in her mom’s fifth book. He was real for her. The son in her dreams was always Ernesto, like her uncle, like Guevara. But people wake up and dreams dissipate. Mar awoke each time bathed in sweat. She remembered the gray machinery that had guzzled her child. She remembered the spelt soup she’d hated as a kid. She remembered the frightening suction that plunged her into chaos. She remembered Patricia, who made her abort.

  Each time she thought of the child—lost for nothing—she wanted to hate Patricia. Why had she humiliated her like that? Why? She had loved her too much. She’d put her on a high pedestal. Mar had forgotten herself, for her. Why had Patricia repaid her with a forced abortion and suicide? Why not take her along in death?

  The video camera girl’s hair elicited strange notions of extinction. A different death with every swing. Sliced veins, makeshift nooses, dives from nonexistent buildings, leaps onto the subway, the more standard colored pills. Tunis no longer seemed like the restorative place it was before.

  Mar’s eyes settled on a chessboard. The checkered table appeared beautiful, at once unique and manifold to her eyes. She was mesmerized. She forgot she was following the girl. The chessboard was a tacky souvenir. Something was written on the side in orientalesque Latin characters—a banal, touristy saying. The board was made of reddish faux wood. It opened like a box of assorted chocolates, and there were other games inside: checkers, dominoes. Mar’s staring turned into action. She opened the chessboard like a lunatic. This shade of red bewitched her. She needed to absorb the color, the essence of life. Two meaty men approached her. It didn’t take a Sherlock to understand that they were the bazaar owners.

  “Bonjour,” they said to her. “Do you speak English?”

  “Italian,” she said tersely.

  “Of course, miss, beautiful Italy. Parmessssan,” one of them said in false Bolognese.

  The other one nodded.

  “How much for the chessboard?” she asked somewhat brusquely. She didn’t like bargaining.

  “For you, miss, only forty-five dinars.”

  Too much. She was tired. JK had told her that everything was negotiated in the souq. One couldn’t give a merchant the satisfaction. Some struggle was necessary, for dignity if nothing else. She was about to say okay when a voice from behind her said, “Khamsat ‘ashar faqat, fifteen dinars.”

  The two merchants looked in the voice’s direction. She did as well, more out of instinct than curiosity. She started when she saw the profile of the girl with the video camera. Like the hurricane whose name she bore, Katrina, she swept away the merchants’ absurd pretenses.

  “Forty-five dinars, it’s too much, demasiado, nena,” she whispered in Mar’s ear.

  Nena? Had she heard right? Was the spindly girl speaking Spanish? Had she called her nena? Only Pati called her nena, with an inkling of resentment in her voice. This girl, however, had a blaring voice. No resentment. Maybe it was happy. Yes, she had said nena. Mar was delusional for a moment. She looked at the girl’s face more closely. It was relaxed, plain, devoid of resentment or torment.

  “Demasiado?” Mar said, the corners of her mouth partially puckered.

  “Yes, demasiado.”

  Then followed a dizzying boxing match in Arabic. The guttural sounds chased one another confusedly in D flat. The numbers were aligned on a scale along which they rose and fell depending on the whims of battle. The fatter of the two merchants didn’t intend to give away his chessboard cheaply. His companion, however, watched Mar rapturously. The girl with the video camera showed off her Arabic skills. Mar was the only one doing nothing, breathing absentmindedly.

  The younger man moved closer to the girls.

  “Are you virgin?” he asked Mar in mutilated English.

  Virgin? Mar didn’t understand. What did that mean? “Virgin?” she repeated like a malfunctioning android.

  “Yeaah. No man in you…no man…in…” his mouth became a dirty, pornographic fold.

  Mar didn’t understand. She responded. His face fell. All pornography disappeared from his expression. Mar realized that he was young, probably the bazaar owner’s son. His forehead was wide and curious. His eyes were submerged in pockets of sincerity. The sign of a good person. Would he have been that way under such a stifling regime? Or would he have raped a woman just to show that she was worth nothing in the chain of power? Ben Ali smiled triumphantly from a filthy corner. In the distance, a muezzin called to prayer from an 18-inch TV.

  Tunisia was in dress rehearsal for civil war.

  “You good girl, ya ukhti,” the young man said.

  Mar smiled stupidly. The chessboard was purchased for nine dollars.

  “Come back soon, presto, presto,” father and son said in unison.

  Mar wondered what the young man had asked her. She wasn’t sure she gave the right answer.

  Katrina, in the meantime, was planning the future.

  “Hay una fiesta… a party in my mabit…mañana por la tarde. Hay cerveza, también.”

  “Cerveza?” Mar asked. She knew the word: beer. She remembered that drinking was difficult in this country, only permissible in hotels and dive bars. She envied her mother, who wasn’t a teetotaler like her, who took pleasure in life. Her perfect, goody two-shoes mother.

  THE NEGROPOLITAN

  Benjamin, please, don’t do it. In the name of Allah, Shiva, Jesus Christ, and the souls in purgatory. In the name of my blessed ears, in the name of my stomach, Benjamin, don’t do it. Stop right now. Don’t profane these honeyed words anymore. Don’t violate. Don’t desecrate. Show some respect. Genuflect and mash your nose against the floor. That’s what you need to do. Prostration. Humility. Benjamin, in the name of Allah, stop reading!

  Just six minutes until the end of the Arabic lesson. It’s been ten minutes since Benjamin started eviscerating one of the most beautiful poems by Mahmoud Darwish, the griot of the Palestinian struggle. Benjamin is German. If his passport weren’t there to prove it, his strong Bavarian accent would. Even better, he’s Aryan. Canary blond, glassy eyes, diaphanous skin. Comrade Hitler would’ve fallen in love with his upturned chin, his large shoulders, his burly body, his chunky mouth. Comrade Adolf would’ve dragged the man to him and perhaps loved him more than Eva Braun. Screwed him more than Eva Braun.

  Luckily, Benjamin was born after that collective delirium. His mom was an anarchist hippie, his father a Syriac philologist. That’s why, twenty-five years after his first cry, Benjamin is here in my third-level Arabic class decimating Mahmoud Darwish’s greatest poem. If he’d been a conventional Aryan, Benjamin would’ve listened to Guns N’ Roses. He was an Aryan with anarchist blood in his veins, so he ended up in Tunis, in an Arabic school that was mo
re like a synagogue, though it was always empty. Since coming here, I’ve only seen two policemen keeping an eye on it.

  The poem the plump professor is making us read is “Identity Card. Ana Arabi.” I am Arab. Benjamin tries giving it pathos. His accent betrays him at every letter. Everything he does is backward. The guttural sounds slip away like silk, while he brings out a certain sheepishness in the soft sounds that all Germans have when they try to speak other languages. It turns to stone in Benjamin’s throat. Everything is dry and granitic. There seems to be no room for letters or their emotions. The poet’s exile, his struggle, his land, are lost in the canary-colored boy’s sandy cadence. Darwish dances on the architecture of himself like a dragonfly, but Benjamin destroys every emotion with his reading. He is like a caricature more than a boy. Once, I read a book in which Hitler’s head had been thrown into a freezer, waiting for a perfect Aryan body to graft itself onto. Maybe the author knew Benjamin, the perfect Aryan specimen. A perfect caricature, at least. In fact, anarchic blood runs through Benjamin. Glory to Bakunin!

  Benjamin, please, don’t do it. In the name of Allah, Shiva, Jesus Christ, and the souls in purgatory. Benjamin, in the name of my blessed ears.

  There are still three minutes left. I want to hear how this torture ends. But I have a problem, and it’s not an easy fix. Mahmoud Darwish still dances inside me. Despite Benjamin, I feel the rhythm of the poet’s misery. I feel the pulse. It is frenzied. A defective drill.

  I have to pee, damn. Why now? I want to hear the end of the poem. I’m holding it in. I’m trying. I feel the water compressing my intimate walls. It’s violently pushing against me now. It’s insistent. Can’t it wait? Damn it. I give up. I have to run to the toilet, stat.