Beyond Babylon

by Igiaba Scego

  I wave at the fat professor. Sorry to ruin the magical moment, teach. I know, I’m smashing it to smithereens. I’m not a killjoy, I actually wanted to hear how Benjamin finishes destroying the poem. But I have a pressing physiological need. No ya mu’alima, oh teacher, I can’t stay. No, I can’t hold it in. I tried, but you see, I’m bending over. In a minute I’m going to pee all over myself if you don’t let me go right now. She gives me a look that couldn’t be any more ornery.

  This hyperproduction of urine must be connected to my excessive consumption of mint tea. It’s good, especially when they add pine nuts. First you swig the liquid and then you try snatching as many nuts as possible with your tongue. Some get away from me. The pine nut is cunning, but my tongue is vigilant. In the end, it doesn’t lose a single one, on my word. I’m gifted at some sports. They should make it into an Olympic event. I should have multiple medals at this point, more than Sergey Bubka, the guy who obliterated everyone in the pole vault. I would be in the Guinness Book of World Records and people’s hearts. Records, laurels, and glory. The pine-nut snatch would be watched more than swimming. Freestyle, crawl, breaststroke, outdated stuff. They’d use me in commercials. I’d be a heartbreaker.

  But none of this will happen. I’m still single and I’m running to the restroom with a full bladder. I forgot the tissues in my purse, shit. The school’s bathroom is rundown and toilet paper doesn’t exist even in one’s dreams. Only that damn tubing. They don’t have a bidet here, they have a tube. They’re doing better than the English, though. Those people don’t use anything. Tunisia is still a Muslim country. They want to keep Arabs clean. During the Crusades, Roman apostles made fun of them because cleaning yourself was seen as a feminine concern. The English, who really are effeminate, don’t wash themselves. They don’t have bidets. They don’t have mixer taps for cold and hot water. They have two lonely faucets. One burns, the other freezes. No half-measures. Tunisians have a tube instead of the bidet, a tube as long as a serpent. It’s like something you’d use to water the garden. It’s basically attached to the trashcan. The tube’s function is simple. First, people do the usual unmentionable things in the toilet bowl, until the last drop or piece. Then they use the tube to wash away the remaining drops, and dangling residue; once the water is at the right temperature, they position the tube near their genitals and start washing. One hand holds the tube and the other massages. The tube isn’t a bad invention, it’s just that, barring death, I wouldn’t use the one at the school. My philosophy is the same one I have for all public restrooms. I don’t sit on other people’s toilets. I hover above them, like a butterfly. It’s hard to pee in this position. You have to exert your calf muscles, find the correct center of gravity, or otherwise you risk spurting urine everywhere. I envy the penis in these instances. You can pull it out and don’t have to offset your balance.

  Anyways, the school’s tube could have licit or illicit uses. I don’t want to know. I can’t put something that has seen other people’s goods so close to my own. It’s incredibly revolting.

  The pee doesn’t let up. I feel full. I feel a blow to the groin, a faint sense of nausea. Oh God, let’s hope it’s only pee. I don’t want to be on my period, not now. I have to go to the beach with my friends. Miranda is coming. And the piglet gaal halouf, the infidel. The one I like a lot, I mean. I think I like him. His name is Orlando, like Ariosto’s and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. I doubt it’s an easy name to have. The name of a king, or perhaps for madmen. I don’t know if I actually like him. I think I do. When he’s near me, I want to look at him. He seems defenseless. I want to hug and protect him. I remember the doll I had as a child, Susanna. She was all I had. Poor Susanna, she was so unlucky. She broke everything. She was always ill. I cured and looked after her. She had the same face as Mom when she came to visit me at school. Even Mom hugged her tightly. I took care of her.

  No, please, not my period. I want to meet the gaal halouf today. Not tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, today. I’d taken out my orange and white bathing suit from my bag. It’s the kind of thing you’d see at the beach in Ipanema. I checked myself out in the mirror. Not half bad. A knockout, almost. He’ll look at me. I’ll smile at him. He’ll tell me about himself. Another smile from me. He’ll approach me with a trembling hand. Then, I don’t know, the thing that happens in films. We’ll find a nice place. We’ll kiss. We’ll swear eternal love. That’s how it goes in the movies, right? Titanic, DiCaprio style. So it’s important that my period doesn’t start today. I have romantic plans.

  The restroom seems like it’s an eternity away. I run. My legs gallop at full speed. Move, get out the way, let me through. I’m about to go on myself. Really, though. Move!

  There’s a line, three girls in front of me. I have to hold it. At my venerable age, pissing myself would be unbecoming. I think about Miranda to distract myself. What a beautiful woman. Supple in her movements. She told me she’d join us later. She has errands to run. I think she’s writing a book. Every time we stake out a spot on the beach she’s bending over her pages. No one dares disturb her; she’s engrossed. She doesn’t know that I know who she is. I’ve read all her poems. I know of her immense pain. There are times when her stare goes blank. I don’t like it. It reminds me too much of my own stare, of Maryam Laamane’s.

  The girl in front of me may have tissues. I almost dare asking her for some in Arabic. I’m not embarrassed. So what if I mess up? I clear my throat. “Afwan,” excuse me, I whisper. “Afwan,” I repeat, at a loss. She looks at me. Her stare makes me regress to a nonexistent Esperanto. I mix English, French, Spanish. The only thing I say in Arabic is, “Min fadlika,” please. I don’t know what language I say “tissues” in. Aramaic? “I’m Italian like you,” she says. “Muslim as well. Have you forgotten already?”

  But of course, I hadn’t recognized her from behind. The back never corresponds to what you see in front. From behind, the girl seems like a respectable person, someone whose acquaintance or friend you’d like to be. The front dissuades you of both those things. It’s true, I know her, we were on the same boat. She gets under my skin. Her name is Souad, and she’s in my mabit. She’s Italo-Tunisian. She speaks the dialect well, but she’s not great with classical Arabic. She’s two levels below me. She’s from around Turin. I don’t really know why, but she puts on an act. She’s no one special.

  I have to pee. I need those tissues. If I don’t ask her, I’ll be obliged to go back in the classroom, interrupt another one of the teacher’s magical moments, leave again, and stand in another line. This one is stagnant as it is. It would be a nightmare. I don’t have a choice, she’s all I have. Souad, the world traveler.

  “Would you happen to have a tissue?” I ask neutral-toned. I privately commend myself. I was impersonal in asking the question. I don’t show my emotions. I don’t say to her, for example, “I dislike you,” or “I think you’re irritating,” or “You’re a pain in the ass with your fucking air of superiority.” I don’t say anything. I’d like to, but I mustn’t forget—I don’t know her. Here I cite Bersani Samuele from memory, like how others would cite Carducci Giosue. I prefer Bersani, he’s more fuckable. I don’t think Carducci ever was, even if someone has done it with him. I’m blasphemous. His poem about the ox was my bane as a child. It was impossible to learn. The nun punished me too. “You Zulus really have no creativity!” That stupid nun always called me a Zulu.

  When I think about it, Souad does look like the stupid nun. She has the same snout, like a cuckolded pig. Souad is flat-faced. I remember her strange snout also stood out when I saw her in line at check-in for the flight to Palermo. Since then, I’ve wanted to say four hundred things to cosmopolitan Souad. I said, “Finally I’m going to Africa,” and she said, “Tunisia isn’t Africa.” So what is it, then? Tunisia is on the African continent, it’s still there, so it’s Africa. Souad insisted, saying that they were Arab and not black, so being in Africa was only a short-lived accident. I wonder what cosmopolitan Souad wants to do wit
h her country. Might she want to haul it to the Middle East, towed by a rope? Where would she put it? Near Assad’s Syria? Or in the middle of Palestine? Because as everyone knows, Palestine is such an agreeable and peaceful place. I don’t like people who want to forget the color line, the equatorial line. I didn’t insist though. Geography was on my side.

  She’s the one I have to ask for tissues. The water sloshing in my bladder, the water my kidney is excreting, makes me do it. Residues of me. I reformulate the question, this time in the elegant Italian I express myself with only at university. The word “tissues” sounds like lacework, given my pompous pronunciation. The girl looks at me. Her black hair sticks to her head like Lego bricks. She has tortoiseshell glasses and fuschia-colored lipstick. She isn’t ugly, but she looks sloppy. Her hands magnify everything. She has long bones like marble. You can see them through her skin. She has anti-reflective lenses in her frames. I’m familiar. They’re the only thing I wore before permanently converting to hard contact lenses. After the hours spent in Libla, I needed to feel beautiful, alive. Hard lenses, a new coat, brand-name makeup around my eyes, and a frilly dress always helped a little. It’s bullshit, I know, but they make me who I am.

  I repeat my question. I think, Manzoni must’ve talked like this. I am perfect. A gentle Italian issues forth, cultured and unreal. The one I use in public offices or when I have to pay the sanitation bill. They look at me with their whitebread faces and yell, “Residency permit!” as though it were a magic spell to humiliate me. I wonder why being foreign has to be shameful. The whitebread faces distort when they press my Italian identity card, my Italian citizenship, to their noses. They don’t believe it.

  Souad, too, has a whitebread face. That’s why I don’t like her. Her face quivers. A fluctuation, a tremor at the edges of her mouth. She fixates on me like a toad. Menacingly pointing at me, she says, “You’re Muslim, aren’t you ashamed?” Of what, pray tell? Please, I know Arabic better than you. I’m devout, I believe, I’m interested, I read the Quran, I don’t forget alms, I adhere to Ramadan and one day, God willing, I’ll make a pilgrimage to the Sacred City, if I have the means. Otherwise, Allah al-Kareem will exonerate me. What should I be ashamed of, bread face?

  Cosmopolitan Souad’s finger expands. It’s the index, but it looks like three fat thumbs put together. Repugnant. It looks like an erection. I don’t like having a dick waved in front of my nose. Her threatening finger makes me uncomfortable.

  “You’re not ashamed?”

  “Of what?” I ask her. I lost my Manzonian verve. I sound like a Tor Bella Monaca junkie.

  “The tissues, idiot.”

  I should’ve cut her to pieces. I wish I was Ranma Saotome. Or, I wish I were married to Ranma Saotome. It’s a shame such a handsome boy is from an anime. If I had his strength, I’d give her a lump on the head that she’d remember for the rest of her meaningless earthly existence. I let the insult slide, but what about the tissues? I wonder. She laughs contemptuously.

  “You don’t get it, do you? Idiot.”

  Here we go. She said it again. I don’t like being insulted and not doing anything about it. I’m coming this close to punching her in the head and getting myself expelled. I still don’t understand what the tissues have to do with anything. Curiosity prevails over rage. I wait for an explanation. She doesn’t hesitate.

  “Muslim women don’t clean themselves with tissues, they wash themselves. You have to wash yourself with water. Do you want a squalid vagina like an infidel beast? Theirs are unwashed and stay unwashed, fool. They pee. They go around with men and they only use a tissue. We use water. We’re always pure, fresh, clean.”

  Oh god. I can’t believe it. Allah hold me back, I want to crown her head with lumps! She’s giving me a sermon on personal hygiene. I can’t believe it. And she’s bringing religion into it. I want to respond in kind.

  My stare goes through her, pierces her. I want her to feel small and useless. My hand is a masterwork. It moves as though it were the hand of Queen Victoria. Royal, glacial. A hand that knows what it wants. It oscillates and summons holy terror. Souad is scared shitless. Then the voice comes, when she’s already a bundle of nerves that doesn’t know what’s coming next. Does she know that she’s crossed every line?

  “A good Muslim has to dry herself too, right? What are you doing? Do you go around dripping? You don’t leave your underwear damp, do you? I mean, that’s not good, for health or decency. Soaked hairs, soaked fabrics, annoying smells. You’ve got to think about these things. You’re not going to tell me you don’t use tissues?”

  I see her, wan-faced. Whiter than Nosferatu. I’m winning. Triumph has a bitter aftertaste sometimes.

  I’m sick of people who want to snoop around my vagina. It’s mine, you understand? Mine alone, and I’ll do what I want with it. Why is everyone so worried about it? Why don’t they leave it in peace? What does it matter to cosmopolitan Souad, knowing whether I clean myself or not? My vagina has the right to smell bad, if it wants. That’s its own business, understand Souad? You have nothing to do with it. No one has anything to do with it without my permission.

  In elementary school there was that man, Aldo, who did have something to do with it. Without permission and without wiping off his shoes. He was too interested in my vagina. I was afraid of him partly because he was the school custodian, and partly because he had a fixed stare. He made me feel uncomfortable in whatever I was wearing. I didn’t know how to tell the teachers that Aldo wanted to steal my vagina. When the others didn’t see him, he tried caressing it, he pushed me against the wall. My heart raced. They told me that I had to listen to adults and follow their commands. I didn’t like when Aldo pressed me against the wall. I should’ve shouted or told someone. No one ever believes kids in elementary school. One afternoon, Aldo had a strange face, he was clammy and enraged. Aldo stole my vagina that day.

  The day after, Howa Rosario came and took me away. I don’t know how she did it. Perhaps she pretended to be my mom. She never told me. The people at school were incompetent. They couldn’t distinguish one black person from another. My belly hurt, I cried and bent over. The theft of my vagina was discovered because the sheets were soaked with blood. It flowed profusely. I couldn’t hide it. I tried, but my fear of Aldo was too great. He told me he’d kill me if I mentioned what had happened. I was silent. The sheets spoke for me. Howa took me to the hospital. We pressed charges against Aldo. Mom, I imagine, was too drunk to come.

  Souad stokes my rage from that time, my abiding rage. What the fuck does it matter to her how I clean myself? What do you care? Leave me in peace, Souad, you don’t know anything.

  My hand touches my stomach. It slips down, delicately, like plumage. The usual delusion. It’s the same every time. I touch my vagina and don’t feel anything. Instead of my vagina there is always that horrible emptiness.

  Leave me in peace, Souad. You know nothing.

  “Here, take this.” This voice quells my rage. It belongs to a dark girl like me. She hands me a tissue. It’s a revolutionary gesture. “Hurry up and pee, I’ve got to go too.” It’s funny. She looks like Miranda.

  THE PESSOPTIMIST

  In the month of May, the Shebelle River flowed bountifully in its natural bed. A conduit traveled for centuries, bringing sweet waters plunging to the south and into the furious Indian Ocean. The river was fattened by nurturing rains that fell on the Ethiopian mesa, causing a spillover on both embankments that was not always fruitful. Seeing muddy marshes in the heart of the Somali woods was no rare occurrence. That was the scratch mark of the flood, an alluvial wound that made the pastoralists cry in dejection. Immense fertile surfaces remained unusable, making the concerned populations howl in fear. The specter that wandered among the wretched was poverty—taking everything and leaving nothing—the kind that exhausts you before death. Poverty that starves and blinds you. The lands near the Shebelle were not easy. It was in those lands that Maryam Laamane imagined her life as an adult woman.

&n
bsp; At the beginning of the twentieth century, the first banana plantations emerged there, right on the coast of the hot-blooded river. The plantations took the name of the Lower Shebelle’s agricultural district. Many were still under Italian ownership, but by then, with independence, handovers occurred even there. Italians sold (at exorbitant prices) to enterprising Somali businessmen, the new sharks of politics and business who differed from the ex-masters only in complexion. Bananas were a safe business, more at home than abroad, and tempted many. Quite a few people grew rich thanks to the harmonious yellow fruit. They went around in Jeeps and built multistory villas, with a pair of consenting whores dressed in the latest Parisian chiffon on their arms.

  The sweet, soft Somali bananas, with their spicy aftertaste, were easy money for the sharks. Berlin housewives, like the ones from Voghera, were euphoric over the pulp’s sensuousness, the fruit’s consistency. Demand increased and the floors of the villas multiplied. Growing bananas wasn’t expensive. Shrewdly using the waters of the tormented Shebelle was enough. In its pursuit of death, racing toward the ocean that would annihilate it, the river left numerous traces of itself scattered about. One only needed to appropriate the redundant water to irrigate the fields. It was quite simple. With the right tools, calculations, and willpower, the bananas of the Lower Shebelle ripened and prospered.

  One of the district owners was Maryam’s uncle. The name on all his documents was Othman, but people preferred to call him Gurey, the left-sided, not only because he wrote with his left hand, but because, in his mind, the left was creation’s natural orientation. They whispered that he had unusual communist ideas in his head, that for an owner, he treated his dependents too well. “He reads too many books that we don’t understand,” people said. Gurey had a snow-white beard that covered his face, a prophet’s beard that instilled respect and hatred in like measure. Gurey spoke little, but that little caused the bowels of the insecure and the slothful to quake. Maryam loved her uncle. Around him, she never felt the fear that turned others into jelly. Her uncle seemed like an old, good-humored man with many stories to tell. He knew everything about hyenas and the circular flights of buzzards. He could describe the wandering of ants and recite ancient stories from the Land of Punt, the ones in which the queen of Egypt, Nefertiti, took incense baths near the seething Nile. Maryam Laamane listened, enrapt, to her prophet uncle. She felt nourished by his erudition and sweet knowledge. Her uncle spoke with her frequently. Sometimes he ran his hand along her soft cheek and whispered, “Oh, little one, you look so much like my lost brother.” The river prophet never spoke of Maryam’s father, who died on Graziani’s southern front. He never spoke of the time when they were ruled, used, and mistreated by the Italians.