Beyond Babylon

by Igiaba Scego

  My father came looking for me that day. He’d just seen the man seated at his superiors’ table. He’d served him quietly and looked at his neck from behind. He was fat. Brown sweat trickled down his hair. At that distance, he looked like any other man. White, hairy, fat, but normal, the kind of person often seen in Mogadishu. A man who wanted to do business, drink some mango juice, and enjoy a massage. The mistress’s daughters laughed at his words. He was kind to women, especially to the young. His eyes—Majid looked at them closely—did not seem cruel. He had a distinct visage.

  “You’re wonderful,” he said to Majid.

  Majid noted that his voice was dry and woody, like an echo of the screams that had gnawed at his soul.

  “Absolutely wonderful. What is your name?”

  Majid did not respond. He didn’t want to hear his name in that man’s mouth.

  “He’s timid,” Mrs. Pasquinelli said.

  “Yes, he’s our cook,” the youngest daughter clarified, as though this explained the silence.

  Majid had hurriedly left the house in search of revenge, toward the son who would bring him back to life. He didn’t know how to do it himself. In his wounded paternal mind, he saw in Elias the possibility of payback.

  He bought a gun before going back. Mogadishu at the time wasn’t like it is now. Guns weren’t on every corner (those were peaceful times, strange as it seems) and people weren’t trigger-happy yet. But guns could be found even in peacetime. They were terrible then, too. It wasn’t difficult. All it took was forking over the right amount, in the right way, at the right place. And there the gun was, beautiful and ready to kill. Glimmering and dangerous.

  He placed the gun in the green trunk where Elias would stuff scraps of fabric. Elias didn’t like throwing anything away. He accumulated cloth leftovers because they might be useful later. Majid put it in his trunk and prepared to tell Bushra white lies in case she inadvertently discovered his hiding place. Majid was certain that wouldn’t happen. Bushra never peeked at her godson’s things. That evening he ate the dinner his wife cooked. Potatoes and rice. No meat. A mediocre sauce. That was fine by him, he didn’t like eating much. Feeding others gave him more pleasure. He didn’t sleep that night. What was upsetting him was the nagging thought of putting another human being to death. That night, the notion of revenge showed the first sign of cracking. But it was a small thing.

  The next day, he awoke feeling even more resentment. He wanted to destroy that man, that white man. He wanted to turn him into maggot food. He felt like humanity’s trash collector. He wondered if a single shot in the forehead would be enough to satisfy his thirst. Would seeing the gaal’s blood and brain matter dirty the floor satiate him? Surely the walls of the Pasquinelli house could use some color. After a while, all that milky white nauseated even the most rock-solid person. It made them blind and ready to vomit. The fascist’s brain matter and blood could be of use on those white walls. Maybe the Pasquinellis would even thank him for that painting of human matter.

  He was a fascist, a relic of the past. Didn’t Mr. Pasquinelli say so at the table? “The future is with the Christian Democrats. They’ll save us from the communists.” Wasn’t that what he said? “The fascists are useless people.” By then, he said, that phase of fascism had long been over. They had done well under the Duce. That is, Benito treated people well, especially those loyal to him, but it was over. Pasquinelli wouldn’t object. He was a Christian Democrat. Kill the fascist, he’d say, kill him. Stain the house with his foul red blood. Go on, Majid, go on. You’re a good cook. Cook the fascist, with potatoes perhaps. I’m a Christian Democrat. I was once a fascist, but that’s the way it goes… It’s not fashionable anymore.

  No, of course Mr. Pasquinelli would never appreciate a fresh meat stain. Pasquinelli was the kind of person who said one thing and then its opposite. In the end, the fascist was his guest. Was it perhaps just a coincidence? Majid didn’t like the idea of staining the white walls of the Pasquinelli house with that sickening man’s gore. The idea didn’t exactly fill him with joy. It wasn’t out of cowardice, and it wasn’t because of the trigger. He wasn’t afraid of pulling it, he would do so gladly. It was because of the pain. Would a pistol shot to the despicable fascist be enough? Would the bastard feel pain? Majid thought what he wanted was only to make him feel an unfamiliar pain, to take pleasure in it.

  How could one elicit pain from someone like that? he wondered.

  The thought occupied him for exactly 23 days, 16 minutes, and 2 seconds—the time it took to absentmindedly gulp down 56 bananas. How to draw pain from someone like that? Maybe he would have to strangle him, watch him slowly turn purple and perish by the second. But perhaps Majid wasn’t strong enough to throw him to the ground and twist his neck. The two things required a certain amount of physical effort. If Elias were there, it would be an altogether different thing. He was strong, lean like his father, but with more fiber, a more toned musculature. And he had large, thin hands. He handled everything resolutely and delicately owing to his regular attendance at the loom. Majid shelved the idea of throttling the fascist. What if he stabbed him? Or, hell, if he poisoned him with some deadly, atrocious drug? Cyanide, strychnine, arsenic. They were all possibilities. Torturing him after drugging him was another option. He could cut off his penis, shove it in his mouth, piss on him, and set his eyebrows alight. Yes, any of those things were feasible. He could put poison anywhere, in his morning tea, in his evening snack. He was a cook. He could find a thousand and one ways.

  He still wasn’t convinced. They were all possible, better than a shot to the chest or head. Better than one second of anguish. Majid wanted the fascist to know why he was dying. He wanted the memory to resurface so he would palpitate while awaiting an unforgiving death. Of course he wanted to see that. But he didn’t know if he could do it. The man was a soldier. He might’ve been trained to resist torture. Majid could rip out the fascist’s body hair, nails, the tuft on his head, and still he might not say a thing. He wouldn’t shout, wouldn’t cry about it. He would wait for a martyr’s death and die with a renewed conscience. Instead of vindicating himself, Majid risked helping the dirty fascist. By no means did he want this.

  The day Majid distractedly devoured the fifty-seventh banana, the package arrived.

  There were all kinds of stamps on it.

  “I was waiting for you to open it,” Bushra said.

  He wanted to ask his wife who the hell could have sent them such a large package, but he remembered that his son had gone to Africa.

  “Go ahead, I’m curious, chop-chop. Open it quickly, it’s from our son.”

  The “our” made him flinch. Ours? Yours and mine? No, Bushra, almost all yours, almost all yours. Majid thought of Elias in a new light. He thought of how little time he’d spent with him and how he’d missed his spine rising toward the sky. A living plant. Immense. Ours? No, yours Bushra, yours. They said it was she, she herself, who’d buried Famey’s umbilical cord. The first contact that had made her a mother.

  Ours? Yours, only yours…but mine as well…yes, mine, mine, mine, ours. Yes, ours.

  He flinched imperceptibly. Bushra spoke like an enthused radio host. The words tailed one another tirelessly, without pause. Majid wasn’t following. He was lost. He thought about revenge.

  “It’s from Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou,” Majid read on one of the many stamps.

  “Where is Burkina Faso?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not so far.”

  Majid didn’t want to open the package. It would’ve been a shame to unveil the secret of the scrupulously wrapped box. It was strapped with cords and twine and slightly sticky. Covered with scotch tape. Their son didn’t want a burglar opening it. He had been careful. Majid, however, had no desire to open it. If it was for him, he would keep everything as it was, with all the adhesive and twine. Your grandfather was often unreasonable like this. Stubborn, an air of dreaminess. Sometimes his head wasn’t quite there, not properly attached to his body. It
was elsewhere, near the Pasquinellis’ villa, thinking of how to make the dregs of humanity step outside.

  Majid abruptly massacred the box, ripping at it with his nails, bruising it until there was nothing but shreds.

  “Do it slowly,” his wife whispered in his ear. He continued his brutal work. Was it curiosity? Fear? Anxiety? Or was the part of him that thought about how to kill the fascist bastard becoming too much for him?

  It was easy guessing what was inside. Fabrics of startling beauty. The luminosity of the colors rivaled that of the sun. The package enclosed all of creation. The entirety of Africa and its hopes in a parcel. There was also a letter. I wrote of my travels. I can’t recall the exact wording—every trace of the letter was lost—but it said many things. I had left Sheikh Maftuti in Nairobi and joined up with roving Zairians, a group of musicians. Madmen. From there I’d gone a long way. Mozambique, South Africa, Mali, Guinea, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, Zaire, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Senegal. I’d seen many people, made friends. I’d fallen in and out of love. I swam between cotton swatches, traditional pagne fabrics, extravagant boubou, soft clays, cola nuts, and wax gowns. There was a photo that Bushra kissed again and again. In it I wore a pair of glasses, a garish shirt, and was standing in front of a loom. A textile factory. I was between three barefaced men. One was Sankara. The same Sankara who some years later would become president. Bushra thought he was one of my friends. She liked the way Sankara kept his left hand hanging. In the letter, I promised more packages. More colors.

  Bushra strutted around for hours wearing the fabrics. Even Majid felt a frantic desire to wear one of his son’s marvels. But he was a man. He could only watch. He went to bed upset and almost didn’t tell his wife goodnight. He seemed destined to live a worthless life. He immediately asked the Lord to forgive the troubling thought. He tried holding in his sobs. Men don’t cry, they hit hard, they smash chairs, throw objects, beat their fists on the table, and when they’re really upset slam young girls against iron gates. Or they get revenge on their enemies. Majid dreamed of his son’s outfits that night. He dreamed particularly about the yellow. The following day, he thought, he’d take revenge on the man who’d made him impotent. He would kill him.

  After the morning prayer, he headed to the Pasquinellis’ villa. Not to work. More than likely, he’d thought, between the sobs of the previous night, he would never cook another chickpea for those white people. He staked out a position in front of the villa because he’d decided to tail the fascist. If he wanted to kill him, he would have to know something about him. He’d need to know what he liked and didn’t like doing, his routes, his breaks, his schedules. He had to know how to kill him, in what place and at what time. He couldn’t leave anything to chance.

  He found a spot. He was partially camouflaged. He’d wrapped himself in ochre cloth like the country’s beggars, those whose begging never draws attention. Maybe people shoo them away, but no one remembers their faces, their height. No one looks at beggars.

  He saw the Pasquinellis leave together, then his colleague Mohamed. No sign of the fascist. He waited patiently. Only after the noon prayer was there a breakthrough. A man exited. It was his man. The same fatness, the same egg-shaped head, the same facial expressions. He’d just left the house and was already sweaty. Wet stains had formed under his hairy armpits. His back was sodden. His soaked white shirt had a few horizontal blue lines that made his girth even more noticeable. He wore khakis and a straw hat with a black band around it. Designer sunglasses, slippers, a pink kerchief in his breast pocket. He heedlessly dragged his feet. The vainglorious man couldn’t stop looking himself over.

  Where could a man like that go? Majid had theories. He saw him walking toward the Catholic cathedral downtown. He had to feign devotion. Like all scum, he had to act like he knew God. The cathedral would be his first stop. It was perfect for him. The structure was a colossal eyesore. Its two towers rose brazenly toward the heavens. “A giant erection,” his colleague Yousuf called it, the great fascist erection. Yousuf was spot-on. De Vecchis, one of the quadrumvirate of the March on Rome, had built the cathedral. He didn’t sit well with the Duce, so he’d been sent to Somalia. De Vecchis was insane and sabotaged the country. The cathedral was a minor injury, but still a slap in the face of the Somali people. When I think about it now, in the delirium of civil war, Somalis almost miss it. Before, in peacetime, the cathedral was regarded with frustration. No one had thought to build it in harmony with the neighboring buildings. Whatever the cost, the quadrumvirate wanted to do something magnificent, monumental, something to contend with the sky and the Duce they secretly hated. Experts say that it was a faithful copy of the Cefalu Cathedral in Sicily. An erection that could’ve perhaps been avoided at the equator.

  Majid thought the fascist would go there and search for some whore at the Indian’s place. The man stretched as though he’d just woken up. Then the second man appeared, the fascist’s twin. Identical in his behavior, his gestures, his stretching out to the last muscle. He was fat in the same places, sweaty under the same armpits, equally shaggy. He had on the same slippers, the same khaki pants, the same sunglasses, and the same pink kerchief in his shirt pocket. The second fascist’s manner was calmer. He seemed more refreshed. He may have had fewer wrinkles, even if Majid couldn’t have sworn by it. The only difference was the shirt. It wasn’t white. It didn’t have horizontal blue stripes. It was the opposite. Blue shirt, white vertical stripes. An inside out mirror. They took different paths. One went east, the other west. Who to follow? And where was the second fascist going? The whimsy of the situation didn’t interest Majid. He didn’t wonder if he was going crazy, if he was seeing double, if perhaps his rapist had a twin. He didn’t ask himself anything sensible. He didn’t make plans. He was occupied by what he would soon do. He was at a crossroads. What he decided would change his life forever. The gun pressed against his thigh. Revenge screamed like a maenad. He was undecided. Who to follow? The one with the white shirt or the one in blue? He stepped toward the east, the white shirt. He changed his mind and turned the other way. He took a few westward steps, toward the blue shirt. Then he stopped. He was tired. He stopped thinking. He was about to stop breathing. Where to go? East or west? What to do? Kill, torture, or pardon? He wasn’t a man, he hadn’t been for a long time. He wasn’t shit. East or west? West or east?

  He went home. Bushra wasn’t there. He’d already known she wouldn’t be. She would be away all day at her sisters’ house. He went in the room with the stamped package. The contents were spread on the bed, laid down every which way. A triumph of cobalt, ivory, pearls of Sahel. Violent brush strokes of blended, muted colors. Majid felt a surge of emotion. He went to the bathroom and stayed there for half an hour. He shaved everything. Underarms, legs, moustache, beard. He made himself virginally soft. He washed. He daubed himself with his wife’s oils. Then he put on the outfit he’d dreamed of all night. He wondered if his son had sewn it for him. The suit was golden, stars stitched everywhere, interwoven with the sky and universe. It was a superb gown, I still remember it, rabal cloth embroidered with strands of raffia.

  Rabal was my passion at that time. I’d found it in Guinea-Bissau. One of my friends on the street told me about the artisanal traditions of the Mandinka and I dove in, soaking up everything I could about the technique. It wasn’t easy. I had to work entirely by hand at the loom with cotton yarns, and afterward I decked them with raffia or silk. I’d made the gown in Ouagadougou, on my way back from the region of Casamance in southern Senegal. I’d slept with a woman much older than me. She told me that I had to sew my first outfit in rabal for the person I loved most in the world. I had to think about that person and sentiment would guide my hand.

  The golden gown was for your grandfather and Majid knew it. He wore it. He felt handsome in those reflections of the sun. Beautiful. Unique. The east was forgotten, as was the west. He left home wearing his son’s clothes, with the sun’s rays enshrouding him. He left home and did not come back again
.

  SEVEN

  THE NUS-NUS

  Tunisia: low-cost, high-class Africa; Arab only on the surface. Islam suppressed and isolated. Islam persecuted. No money to be made with Islam, the whites said. No euros, no nothing. This was the money men’s law. And, as always, the Arab leaders obeyed. A bribe and the nephew’s got it made, the State is set in stone, despots for life. Cheers, the champagne is great. In Tunisia, everyone pretended that Islam didn’t exist. Those with a veil or a beard pretended to be something else. They hid their beards in their shirt collars and their veils were the color of phosphorescent wigs. Islam was a mishap, an annoying setback. They celebrated Jesus instead. Not the real one, not the one who died on the cross in Palestine. That one made sales decline. He was a fucking Third Worlder with lice and lifelong famine, too thin for the market’s tastes. No, no one was interested in that Jesus. The Jesus people liked was blond. It doesn’t matter that he was born in Palestine, doesn’t matter that he was Jewish. Those were mere details. Jesus was blond, authentically blond, his eyes authentically blue. Now, in the twenty-first century, someone gave him the gift of a red Coca-Cola dress. A Moschino label. Don’t let that get around. Otherwise the other stylists may get offended. He no longer has a beard. He’s a swaggering hunk.

  Here, Tunisia, livable Africa. Africa for the right pockets, the whites, the overweight, the filthy. Africa’s surrogate. A fiction, a half-joke. Like her, Mar Ribero Martino, an ongoing simulation. A pinch of Africa, a dash of Latin America, a touch of Europe. Empty, in a word. She was foreign, Mar Ribero Martino. She belonged to no one. A perennial vagabond.

  Tunis, on the other hand, was a carousel on the rim of the abyss. The beards, if not hidden in collars, were strictly cut. There were no exhibitionist mullahs, no prayers spoken aloud. Yes, of course, it was a Muslim country, so what? “We have supermarkets like the French,” they told everyone, proud of imitating that cruel and distant country. Someone had learned in the history books that they descended from the Gauls, straight from Asterix and Obelix. They were French. They mimicked the old masters, at least. They ate aged cheese and stuck baguettes under their arms. They even had Monoprix. Win al Monoprix? Where is Monoprix? Tunisians smiled at you on Avenue de la Liberté. They watched you with the flippant stare of a people compelled to be prudent, and then they explained that Monoprix was “emsi tul w-ba’d dur ‘allemin.” No one understood the directions they gave with gentle cunning. Sometimes there was an ephemeral twinkle in the well-mannered Tunisians’ eyes. In some eyes more than others. A shimmer. It wasn’t slyness. It was hatred. Hatred for the fact that Tunisia’s land was besmirched with Western artifice. Hatred for a dictatorship that had devoured their rights, their dreams, their belongings. But it was only a shimmer. The violence had to be sedated for a while yet. It would come soon enough.