Beyond Babylon

by Igiaba Scego

  Nuccia was speaking of Rome and Italy, but I always thought she was talking about me, about Argentina. It was the perfect neighborhood for veterans of pain like the three of us. Hija, maybe you’d like to know what kind of life I lived in those years on ancient streets. What I did, who I smiled at, how I walked. I was young, and you danced inside me—this is all I remember. The fact remains that my memories of that time are tied to Flaca, how she smiled and how she walked.

  Everything was going smoothly until the day I, more stubborn than a mule, dragged her to Via dei Giubbonari, to the dance school at Madame Elsa’s, in search of unattainable chimeras. I wanted the kind of normalcy that was no longer ours to have. I only wanted to see her dance. Then there was the man on the stairs. I don’t remember seeing him. I just heard his voice. It was unmistakable. A youthful, striking timber that conveyed a sense of his body, the way he smelled.

  I don’t remember noticing him. I watched Flaca, living in her vacuous gaze. By mirroring myself in her, I realized something strange was occurring. There, my love, do you see how vague I am? I don’t know how to describe the events of that time, especially that miserable day. And how can I be clear? I was the third wheel of a tragedy that I possibly could’ve avoided, a stupid dream of normalcy that no longer concerned us.

  The boy turned around and bumped into Flaca. That’s how it happened, an unremarkable, involuntary shove, like in the movies. Flaca fell down. I laughed, I remember. I laughed uncontrollably and crassly back then, in the late seventies. I should’ve been ashamed. Though, my laugh may have been the purest thing I’ve ever had in my life. Flaca was so funny on the ground with her white dress and dopey face. She was beautiful nonetheless. She seemed like the Rosa Benassi, daughter of Italians, that I knew in Buenos Aires.

  He stretched out his hand. He helped her up and apologized. He whispered Sorry in a striking, orthodox voice and introduced himself. He had an Italian name, the kind I heard two out of three times in San Lorenzo. He said to us, “Listen to me on the radio tonight, my program is on Radio 77 at 9:30. You’ll go on a journey.” That made Flaca smile. She clapped like a well-fed seal. The boy vanished.

  Pablo, Flaca, and I didn’t have a radio. Instantly, I forgot about the boy and the radio I didn’t own. I forgot about them because that’s the way things were, because we forget most of the people we encounter in our lives. But Flaca didn’t forget that boy at all, or his voice, or the fleeting promise of a radio voyage.

  We went shopping and, at the doorway to our house, I saw that my friend’s dopey face had clouded over. The rouge that she’d maintained until that moment became dirty water and her eye shadow, mixed with tacky mascara, turned into a formless soup. Flaca had a strange way of crying. She stifled herself. She shouted silently. Her deformed face was like Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Cubist and senseless. Rosa was a distressed Madonna who’d lost faith in the son she believed was God.

  I was tired that day. Carrying you in the womb wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, Mar. My body didn’t respond to external stimuli the way it had before, as almost all my exertion doubled. Plus we lived on the fourth floor in San Lorenzo and there weren’t elevators in the building. There were four flights of stairs, an infinite number of steps, breathlessness. We had groceries that day. We’d bought a lot. Memory is strange. I might not remember how the couscous I ate for lunch tasted, but I do remember how much energy it took to haul the groceries one day twenty-odd years ago. I was spent. Even though she was my Flaca, I remember her hysterical crying stressing me out. I entered the house weighed down by bags, feeling weariness and repressed rage toward my capricious friend.

  “What did you do to her,” Pablo Santana said, lunging at my neck. “What’d you do to her, carajo?”

  My fury intensified.

  “What do you think I’ve done? Who do you think you are?” I retorted.

  My fury turned into worry. I walked away from Pablo and went to my crazy woman. “¿Qué pasa, amor?”

  She gave me a hug, soiling me with putrid rouge and cheap eyeshadow. I turned pink and blue. Something of a buffoon myself. My friend cried in silence. She was mute, incapable of making noise.

  “¿Qué pasa, amor?” I asked again, and that was when I remembered the boy and his promise of a journey. I had already dismissed him. A few kilometers, a few groceries, and a flight of stairs had come between us. He was yesterday’s news, for me at least. He’d been a priority for Flaca.

  I went to Pablo. I put a hand on his shoulder as a way of patching things up after our spat and explained that we should find a radio because Flaca had a new friend. Pablo and I were in a tight spot with money. He sold ducks on the streets of Rome. And me? I was unemployed, aimlessly scraping a living together in a city of exasperating antiquities. We were poor, hopeless souls. We didn’t have money for a radio.

  We had begun going to Nuccia’s place every night at dinnertime. What beautiful evenings those were. She was lonely and our company made her feel alive. She cooked, dug up old anecdotes and, on the fairest of nights, combed Rosa’s hair. Beneath the mophead, my friend had tallowy hair more beautiful than a peacock’s plume once untangled.

  “I had hair like that when I was young,” Nuccia said. She dug in with the brush. That night, at 9:30, they turned on the radio to listen to the boy and fell silent. He had an interesting program. I don’t remember ever hearing anything like it. I was in Buenos Aires before that and wasn’t what you would call a radio fanatic. Mother was, however. She was glued to her afternoon radio dramas. Sometimes she would listen to them one after the other and lost the plot of each one. She never knew how those intriguing stories ended. She didn’t know if Gina would marry José or if Diego would make her a widow before she could. Mother liked those absurd stories, where love was a pretext for banishing boredom. At most, I listened to songs, I listened to Gardel and sometimes to the River games. I wasn’t an expert. But this boy was something else.

  Alberto, as he was called, excelled at his job. He amassed words, made a shapeless heap out of them and then used them in blocks for their intrepid sounds, their overt laboriousness. He was urban baroque, Alberto Tatti, a poet of the urban ether. His program was a genuine journey. A tour of the African continent between kora and electronic sound. Today, musical Africa is very much in style. It’s almost a given that you hear Cesária Évora’s creamy voice or Salif Keita’s regal melodies on the radio. Nowadays every cutie moves to the rhythm of griot style and delights in desert dissonances. The Tinariwens warm your heart with their nomadic guitars, or you can tear your hair out with Ali Farka Touré’s overflowing blues. These days it’s easy to make a feast of Africa with our virgin ears. We go in any record store and can fill our ears and pockets with trigonometric names. Angélique Kidjo, Khaled, Papa Wemba, Franco, Maryam Mursal, King Sunny Adé, Youssou N’Dour, and others whose rhythms I know, if not their names. You like continental music, too. It makes you happy, you told me once. That was shortly before our trip to Tunisia. I was astonished. You hadn’t told me something so intimate in a long time. You were snuggled up on the sofa, Mar, the beige one that you’ve liked since you were a little girl and that I’ve never done away with. How could I? We were happy on the couch. We cocooned ourselves. We watched Happy Days and Candy Candy. We were mother and daughter. What were you listening to that day, dear? I don’t remember. I only know that it was African. The Africa in your blood. Elias’s Africa. His colors.

  Listening to Africa wasn’t so straightforward in the seventies, although people spoke of the motherland more then than they do now. Today people discuss it rarely and insufficiently. At the time, only about ten years had passed since 1960 jumpstarted the dance of independence. The hopes of the sixties were toned down in the seventies, but the people still believed in the possibility of creating a future on the continent. Democracies were wasting away everywhere, puppet dictators had taken power here and there, but the people hoped, they never stopped, nor have they now. Your father was also hopeful. He adored
Africa. He embedded it in his fashion designs, he embedded it in his heart, and in a certain sense he embedded it in you, my love. When I see your nose, so pretty and perfect, I know the continent formed you in more ways than I could imagine.

  The program drew me in. I’d already met Elias. I’d made love to him. I felt more than prepared to listen to Alberto’s journey. Flaca was in heaven. When Alberto Tatti took the stage, she nearly stopped breathing. She didn’t want any interference coming between her and that man’s voice.

  Alberto himself, I remember, didn’t seem to breathe either. His ornate words followed one another in a maelstrom, one atop the other. You almost felt sorry for his perpetual absence of breath. Alberto never laughed. He never made jokes, he didn’t wink at his public. He was polished and hard like a dowry chest. Serious like an old, retired Latin professor. It was a pedagogical route, a journey of initiation somewhat like following Frodo Baggins in search of the cursed Ring. Alberto was Frodo, he had to lead us, perhaps make sacrifices, and then bid farewell. We still didn’t know it then. We didn’t know how bad things would get.

  We traveled and did nothing more. We traveled with our eyes closed.

  There was a series of stops. From Oran and its nightclubs to the dusty streets of Cairo; then to Massawa to brood over the remnants of Italian occupation; a train on the Addis Ababa Djibouti Railway, and a detour in a Mogadishu that wasn’t yet hellish and still smelled of mangos; then, in this order: Mombasa, Nairobi, and down to Johannesburg, which was still divided into white and black neighborhoods. We wandered in Madagascar between dumb macaques and tight-lipped Malagasy. Then we went back, always flying. We came up the coast to glimpse new ways of living on the continent. In Douala, our money was spent contemplating the ocean and then—Lord knows how, Lord knows where—indulging in a medley of other experiences. We filled our arms with Melian wax paintings and sauntered between Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and the hectic rhythms of Congolese rumba. We sat down, drank spiced tea, and waited for the griot to tell us of our deaths. Finally, we slept in Cape Verde. Or we disappeared.

  Alberto was exhausted by the end of the program. We were too, since it was difficult memorizing names in a hundred different languages. Mandingo, Somali, Arabic, Berber, Swahili, French, English, dialects of a specific city, a particular neighborhood. When the program ended, Flaca clapped like a circus animal and kept going for half an hour. Pablo and I looked at one another sadly. Nuccia kept caressing her tallowy hair.

  One Thursday evening, Alberto’s program ended. So did the journey through Africa.

  We weren’t prepared for the end. No, we weren’t ready in the slightest.

  THE FATHER

  Ultimately, it was only a heart palpitation. It could be ignored.

  Majid was like that, Zuhra, he ignored things. He chilled his emotions so much that a block of ice was hot by comparison, dozing in a bikini under the sun. He chilled his emotions and, at the same time, he simmered. Your grandfather Majid was utterly cold and utterly hot inside. In permanent opposition to himself.

  “Elias left a while ago and you didn’t even realize it.” Cutting words from Bushra, precise, not to be repeated. An absolute, inescapable fact.

  Majid’s questioning face, that of a once-great, failed inquisitor. An incoherent and distraught Torquemada.

  “He took his bag and said, ‘I’m going to Africa.’”

  Africa? They were already in Africa. My son, what have you done? Where have you gone? Why now, when I need you most? You are already in Africa. This land, this broken nose we call Somalia, is Africa. It has Africa’s acacias, Africa’s gazelles, Africa’s smells, Africa’s dreams. It is Africa, I’m telling you, I swear to you, wallahi. Why have you gone looking for Africa? Why now? I need you. I need your helping hand, your courage, your ire, which is also my own, my disguise. I need you to take revenge for me, my son. Do you understand?

  “He tried saying goodbye to you. He went to the Pasquinellis but they didn’t let him in. ‘There’s an important guest here,’ they told him, ‘your father will be busy in the kitchen all day.’ Elias said they were hysterical. The gaalo didn’t let him enter. But you’ll see your son soon, don’t you fret.”

  Bushra took a breath. I don’t know whether the woman understood how hurtful the words she threw in that poor, afflicted man’s face were. She thought it was good news. Elias was leaving, living, making a man of himself, embracing experiences, forming his own vision of the world. Bushra was pleased. She dreamed of him immersed in the urban fabric of African cities. Urbane, happy, attentive. Bathed in colors and cloths.

  “He told me to give you a hug and kiss. He’ll come back a great tailor, you’ll see. He followed Sheikh Maftuti. He’ll let us know as soon as he’s arrived in Nairobi.”

  Nairobi. He’ll let us know, Sheikh Maftuti. Nairobi. Know. Maftuti. Nairobi. Departed. Africa. Journey. Nairobi. The words replayed in Majid’s head. Now who would avenge him? Who?

  Majid pondered revenge like a dumb dodo. Revenge. What a complicated word, Zuhra, no one really knows what it means. They tell you, an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. It’s biblical. You have to believe what they tell you because it’s written in the Holy Bible, it’s the law of retaliation, something you don’t take lightly. An absolute truth to consider, to act on, to live, to do nothing but repeat. Everyone is a trained parrot, skilled at repeating, but no one can ever explain. Did you steal an apple from me? I’ll cut off your hand. Did you betray me, dirty tramp? I’ll stone you. And you must believe in retaliation like you believe in the saliva you spat this morning. This is a strange society, they say, a counter-society. You have to defend yourself, you have to respond, you have to protect your ass and the shirt on your back. You have to shield your soul, or else they’ll gobble it up with ketchup. You must. It is a moral duty to vindicate yourself, to besmirch, to wash away the endured insult. Yes, the shame, the dishonor, the ignominy, the offense, the outrage, the affront. You must carefully wash it all away. Remove the stains. Rinse off. Do it again for as long as it takes to become pure again.

  Deep down, we were never clean. You can rinse and rinse again as much as you want, but the residue stays, the pain remains. Majid didn’t know this. The pains were absorbed slowly, they didn’t go away at all. We pretend not to know it. We play dumb. The pains transform, they become another thing. Sometimes they can be resources, improved lenses for understanding the world. But we are fools if we believe a vendetta, any old vendetta, will bring peace to our souls. Peace has other paths. It knocks on other doors.

  Revenge is a baffling, vaguely useless word. Why? It doesn’t quench your thirst, that’s why, it doesn’t bring back what you had. I don’t know if Majid ever reflected on his primordial thirst for revenge. He understood there was no point in waiting. Yet wait he did. He harbored resentment because that’s what he was taught as a child. He dictated his pain internally, the one that was rending his soul, which patiently trudged along after he was raped. He hadn’t forgotten a single moment from that evil day. The separations, the stench of petrol, the searing sand underfoot, the hot cheap cologne, the heat of sperm between his buttocks, Famey’s yells, the shots, the laughs, the farts, the military songs, the obscene cawing of the raptors, the gorgor, waiting for their carrion. No, your grandfather couldn’t forget. It was the day he’d stopped becoming a man and had transformed into a shriveled cockroach. He had surely wished to tell Bushra, whom he loved most in the world, along with Elias and your grandmother Famey. He wanted to tell her—the singular, irreplaceable woman of his life—that as a man, a male, he was unserviceable. Majid didn’t see anything ahead of him that gave him comfort. His dreams had died that day.

  And yet, before that pain, Majid had been a simple man. He believed in his dreams. He wanted to have a normal life—some livestock, a piece of land, a little red cottage to view the sunset from. A few sunsets would do just fine. With his eyes toward Mecca, he would sing praises to the Lord of worlds. An uncomplicated dream. Instead, an obscene reptile ate his
insides many years ago. If it had been one of those films Bushra liked, he would’ve confiscated the film reel. He would’ve rewound everything and changed the scenes he didn’t like. One in particular. He would choose a different shuttle trip to avoid falling into fascist hands, into their thirst for domination. They would’ve taken another street. They would’ve been unscathed and content.

  He would’ve married his same Famey, but this time out of love. He would’ve courted her, cast languid stares and sweet words. He would’ve composed overindulgent sonnets for her. He would’ve made her laugh because that’s what real men do. He would’ve been gentle, sensual, special, in love. She also would’ve been in love. And on the night of their first love, he would’ve discovered her slowly. He would’ve plucked her as one does corn, ear after ear. He would’ve tasted her and let himself be tasted. Sweating bodies, remarkable, in unending joy. And yes, he would’ve married Bushra afterward. He’d have finally smelled her oils up close and the firm body he dreamed of at night. If it were a film, he would’ve cut out every terrible scene. He would’ve removed the heat of white sperm from between his buttocks and annulled the screams of his courageous woman. Famey’s screams were something he still couldn’t stomach. He wasn’t a man—he didn’t defend his woman, his pride. He was only a nigger’s violated ass. A faulty, sterile thing.

  These were the thoughts that crowded your grandfather’s mind, Zuhra. Maybe I should tell you of myself, of what I did then. I was grown, I had made my decisions. But to speak of Majid is to speak of me. Even if my friend Hagi Nur says that I’m failing in my mission as an epic poet, I can’t do anything about it. Memory does what it likes.