Beyond Babylon

by Igiaba Scego

  Everything seemed too calm in livable Africa. Even the Indian figs that rained impertinently on your head on the street seemed like part of some exotic comedy. The people themselves were like elements in a horrible, mystifying screenplay. One expected to see Casablanca’s Bogart/Rick materialize from the void, with the same cocky guise and legendary mackintosh. Her too, Ingrid, the smiling Swede, the one who made Hollywood swoon with her eyes, and who would soon steal Magnani’s man…one expected to see her in the white man’s Africa as well.

  Mar was lying down on her twin bed in the Argentinian nuns’ pension. She ran into the nun with the girlish face. They chatted, spoke about the city. The nun complained about loud music. “En mi pueblo…allá en la Argentina, no había ningún ruido.” Ningún ruido, no noise. This city, though, especially from her room, was nothing but stratified noise. Annoying noises, sounds from a disco. The dated songs of Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor. Shakira came on more than once. For every Gloria Gaynor, at least three Shakira hits. Mar was sure of it, she could’ve done a detailed data analysis. She stayed in her room to study. She’d learned the names of colors. Abiad white, aswad black, ahmar red. Learning classical Arabic was like studying mathematics, it was all a game of slots. One had to find the pattern and repeat it. It was like cloning, but adding a shade of difference. Each word wasn’t the exact copy of what came before, sometimes it could mean the opposite. They were kind of like people: patterns, slots, fade-outs, differences. She was beginning to like that strange language. She also liked the fraudulent city. Naked on her bed, books open, alone with her thoughts. The soft wind blew away from her. The wind was coy, smitten with the coffee-colored body that offered itself. Mar was focused. She tried thousands of times to repeat the colors she’d learned to pronounce that very morning. Abiad white, aswad black, ahmar red, red, red like her mother’s hair, aswad like her father’s skin, abiad like the hole her child ended up in forever. Mar recited and got distracted. She thought about too many things at once. Her naked body stirred unconfessed desires within her. She put on a T-shirt and washed her face. The wind was fairly dissatisfied.

  Mar heard the voice.

  The muezzin’s call to prayer. Usually, she didn’t hear anything, only indistinct sounds, grousing, Shakira. Now, for a few seconds, the radios ceased. It rarely happened—a moment of pure silence in Tunis. The muezzin’s voice was beautiful, precise, and convincing. Mar was happy she wasn’t naked while he summoned believers to join others in devotion to the Eternal. She was glad she wasn’t lacking in respect for those strangers.

  Mar realized that not even this Africa was the real one. There was something beneath, more intimate, and that was where people hid their own dreams.

  Tunis didn’t seem like anything. It wasn’t Africa, it wasn’t Europe, it wasn’t the Middle East. It was everything blended together. A scrawl with traces of light. The shadows were numerous, the questions inexhaustible. Mar sensed a desire for change in the air, the subtle tension created by a dearth of freedom. JK explained it clearly. “We’re sitting on a pressure cooker here. People don’t know whether to blow up or not. They just don’t, you know?” Mar didn’t know. She didn’t understand anything. She looked JK in the eye and thought he was beautiful. His eyes were almond-shaped. That precise, sharp slant, like a knife slit. He was tall. Long bones. High cheekbones. He was like an archer from the Tang dynasty, an enormous statue from the Terracotta Army. She liked him. He was funny. You could talk to him, and he didn’t have that powdery white complexion that made her lose her mind. Pati was all baby powder. She didn’t get any sun, she didn’t put on foundation, she didn’t try enlivening herself with showy clothes. She was an unchallenged domain of black and white, an obsolete emo kid, an aesthetic she couldn’t pull off anymore. Everything was black in Pati’s wardrobe. Everything black in the nécessaire for her makeup, everything black even among her junk jewelry. The blackness put her moribund skin in relief.

  Mar felt like a zebra. Not one of those whose every stripe was distinguished from the other by a clear dividing line. She wasn’t a traditional zebra of the African savannah. Mar felt like one put in a washing machine, so every white and every black was tarnished by the nuance of the other. An undertone. A comma of color. She didn’t like being that way. She was nothing. She wasn’t black. She wasn’t white. Only sort of red. And her hair was a nuisance. Her bangs ruined her life.

  Who knows if Elias, the man who’d made love with her mother only once and impregnated her, who knows if he had defiant bangs like hers. In the only photograph she had of the man, Elias smiled but didn’t look up. She couldn’t see his hair. He was wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap.

  She’d made love with JK the night before. It had been pure coincidence. His Asiastic charm had nothing to do with it. JK didn’t leave anyone indifferent. She’d seen those bimbos from Milan at the party languishing behind him with dazed expressions.

  “I heard,” one of the bimbos said, “that the Great Wall isn’t the only big thing in China.”

  Between gasps and giggles, the others devised plans to fuck the beautiful little man with the politician’s name.

  Mar didn’t know at the time that four hours later, she would make love to him. It was a wonderful party. She was dancing. Her mother danced, too. And Katrina was kind, sort of crazy, and by no means like Patricia. A volcano of ideas, not depression. If she weren’t so white, fuck, if only she weren’t so white…she would be perfect.

  “Sabes, nena,” every conversation began. The nena made Mar go ballistic. She wanted to forget how she’d melted like wax at that evil word. “No llamarme nena, por favor…” Call me what you will, but not nena. She didn’t say anything. It wasn’t appropriate. They weren’t close enough; they weren’t even friends. Only strangers, whom destiny had delighted in bringing together for a moment. When Katrina said nena, or when the light struck her, accentuating her paleness, Mar remembered Pati, the woman who’d possessed and humiliated her. That diseased love. Her child. She remembered wanting to vomit. The machinery above her. She never forgot it.

  Life seemed deadened by this strange African land. She felt at home because in fact it was no one’s home, not even for the Tunisians. For them less than everyone else. They couldn’t make anything of their lives or their bodies without Ben Ali’s permission.

  Before making love to JK, though, before being consumed by evanescent passion, before orgasming and asking herself what the hell would happen next, before any of it, she’d gone to that party and dealt with the aftermath.

  The party. A pretense. The Serbian from the mabit was going home—a small town forty kilometers from Belgrade. She’d been in Tunis for twelve months. Twelve months working as a porter in the student residence. Twelve months sorting bars of soap and towels. Twelve months smiling and giving keen tourists a first impression of the city. She’d spent twelve months talking with everyone, people from the neighborhood and those from a world away. Her Arabic was flavored with crass undertones. She could spew obscenities that would make a longshoreman blanch, but it was considered proof of dedication to her studies. She was basically Arab. Blonde, but Arab. Respected because she’d become like them. The same gestures, words, and looks. No judgement. And now the lightly freckled blonde was returning to her tiny Serbian village. They celebrated her farewell. Everyone knew she wouldn’t come back. The crooked streets of that battered neighborhood knew it, as did the few bare trees and the rigged car engines.

  They partied for days, everywhere. Tea with friends, coffee on Avenue Bourguiba, neighborhood couscous, a special massage at the hammam. Gifts, thoughts, best wishes. Even the Westerners, the students from the mabit, not to be outdone, prepared a party worthy of a 1950s TV movie. They decked out the student atrium with red and blue banners and paper flowers and made treats early in the afternoon. Everyone tried recreating dishes from their homeland. The Italians and their pasta, Spanish paella, a Portuguese soup, a Turkish chicken. Alcohol. A corpulent Norwegian procured a surprise stash. H
e knew one Mahmoud who worked in a supermarket. Mahmoud had promised that, in addition to the standard junk, he could also snag some of the good stuff. Next to the useless Tunisian beer, there were also some auspicious bottles of white wine.

  Mar knew she was an intruder. She didn’t live in the mabit, but she felt good there. She thought about the pension, the silence of its corridors, the Argentinian nuns who roamed like blue specters on the balcony. She thought about John Paul II’s picture, Papa Ratzi’s absence, Ben Ali and his pudding face, unavoidable even in that religious abode.

  Mama Miranda was also an intruder, but she seemed to know everyone. She was wearing green, her color. It was a pretty green, glowing incandescently. The people were nearly blinded by it.

  “You’re so beautiful, Miranda,” the enthusiastic, infantile voices commended.

  Everyone knew Miranda. No one knew her, Mar Ribero Martino.

  Mar felt lonely. At home, but lonely. At first, the fake Pati wasn’t even there. She was the only one she knew, the person with whom she hoped to start up some kind of conversation. She was possessed by an idiotic desire to yell “I’m her daughter! I’m Miranda’s daughter, carajo.” If everyone knew that she, the tomboy with the ripped jeans and white tank top, was the daughter of the beautiful woman in green, would they perhaps be less indifferent?

  She was invisible. Enraged, she fished around in her Peruvian handbag for a half-empty pack of cigarettes. She still had five. Maybe that would be enough for the evening. She made a move for the exit. There, too, as in her convent school, smoking was prohibited. A large man ordered her to halt.

  “No,” he told her. No what? Mar wondered. “No,” the big man repeated, shaking his head. Mar was confused. Why no? Why not? She wanted to leave and get away from a festive atmosphere she didn’t belong to. Ready with alibis, she wanted her Marlboro. She wanted to poison her lungs. She wanted a lot of things, but instead this man was preventing everything. She was about to shout and make a scene when a voice from behind explained, “Don’t open the door—he’s afraid all the neighbors will come to the party. That happens when people hear music here.”

  Mar turned toward the voice. She was a beautiful, curly-haired girl, jet black with fleshy, sensual lips. They’d stood in line together for a bathroom at school. She’d seen her a few times in Miranda’s company.

  Mar extended her hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, I’m Miranda’s daughter.”

  The sensual-lipped girl also extended hers. She squeezed Mar’s hand tightly, almost crushing it. “I know, you’re Mar. I’m Zuhra Laamane.”

  The girl’s skin was soft and smooth. Her teeth bone-white. She twirled and laughed, dancing. Mar watched her for a while. Then she saw her struggle with the chicken on her plate. Everyone was at the table. The Serbian, the students, wayfarers, passersby, intruders like her.

  Miranda’s green shone in the half-dark room, which was spruced up like a sad whore. Enough, Mama, enough. You’re beautiful, Mama. Special. Too much for me. Can’t you see that I can’t take it anymore? I can’t stand you. Have you never understood? You’re a volcano, Mama, a volcano to me, and I’m so weak. I’m escaping. From you, from me, from everyone. I escaped from my own child. Mama, please. Enough.

  Enough!

  The black girl kept struggling with her chicken. She was stripping it poorly, nibbling at it pathetically. A battle to the last blood. Pati also used to fight to the end with chicken. She did it with pasta, too—her eggplant fusilli. She inhaled everything without tasting its flavor, then hunched over the toilet to vomit. She’d seen herself bent over so many times. If only she’d known that then. She, Mar Ribero Martino, never vomited. She ate for pleasure. Maybe that’s why Pati had wanted the child, to make her vomit as well.

  Mar snatched the plate from the black girl. “I’ll cut it, but after I do, please eat everything. Taste the flavor.”

  THE NEGROPOLITAN

  I am bent, semi-unconscious, over a toilet. Sweating, hair clinging unnaturally to my neck. My left hand slightly trembling. I’m buried under mounds of hallucinations. I feel horrible, downright vile. In my fugue state, I’ve become the protagonist of a film. I don’t know which one. I missed the opening credits. But I’m the star, I’m sure of this. In my delirium, I dream of marquee headlines at the Hollywood theaters that hosted the most effulgent stars on celluloid. I am honored by dark-skinned blacks, black aswad (Muslim or otherwise), in Harlem’s mythical Apollo. I’m honored by bianchi—white men, pale, ass-pink faces—in some other theater, nowhere.

  I’m honored by yellow faces, too, dark brown faces, olive faces, technicolor faces. I have everyone at my feet. Don’t worry, I washed them. And even if my Genevieve slices reeked, you all would adore me just the same. My fetor would be an exquisite jasmine oil. Nausea a tantric orgasm. You could do nothing less than love me. I’ve gone inside now. I am the radiant star, the estrella, the big star, the only big star of this shit show of a novel that is my life.

  They adore me in Bollywood and Cinecittà. They adore me in Torpignattara and Tufello. Like Gloria Swanson, I audaciously barged into most people’s consciousness. Thinking she’s about to shoot a film, she majestically descends the staircase in Sunset Boulevard—she’s killed William Holden, he’s rotting in the pool—but she doesn’t realize that all she’s doing is falling apart, that all those people want to see her end up in handcuffs like a common thief. They want to see her convicted, without lace or knots, without makeup. She doesn’t know, she’ll never know that she’s become a petty thief. Gloria lives on a set, which imprisons her inside her own head. They don’t call her crazy. She isn’t. They don’t call her anything at all. They simply bask in her.

  She sees herself cloaked in visions and diamonds, with every politically incorrect thing the world has made. Back to a time when people don’t think about the rights of seals or foxes. Fur is a status symbol. Racial segregation is widespread in the United States. The tenacious Rosa Parks, our black pioneer, hasn’t yet planned to sit in the same seats as the whites. I don’t know how old Malcolm X is. He still wants to integrate himself into neoliberal society. He doesn’t know yet that he’s destined to deconstruct the system. Malcolm was straightening his hair. In America, the negroes stank of hair burned by white people’s chemicals. Gloria, meanwhile, walked down the stairs, a queen like few others, in the subconscious. I am like her, eternal and abandoned.

  Except I’m not descending anything. My set doesn’t seem to be a big one. I don’t have a balding butler. Paparazzi flashes don’t blind me. I don’t have the rotting cadaver of William Holden. No stairs, no stilts, no void, no nothing. Instead I am bent, semi-unconscious, over a toilet. Sweating, hair unnaturally clinging to my neck. My left hand slightly trembling.

  This happens to me when my soul is in bad shape. I shake. Doctor Ross said it’s normal in cases like mine. It may be normal, but it hurts my soul every time.

  I look like a Greek tragedy mask. My face is so solemn that I might just stand and do a military salute. I inspire fear. I don’t feel like myself, but like someone else. Older. More experienced. Someone who deserves respect. More formal. More serious. So serious that for a second I mistake myself for Professor Rinaldi… It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about her. Maybe I never did. Not even in school. She was there, she was a part of the décor, like the blackboard, the chalk, the map of our beaten up Bel Paese. Rinaldi taught history and philosophy. She always had snot in her nose. She was in love with one of our classmates, Bertolotti Gianluca, one of the many small fries. She was taken in by a worthless adolescent. Whenever she asked him a question, Professor Rinaldi lamented. Bertolotti was a dumbass, but she really wanted to give him a good mark. The most she could give him was a D- on Plotinus. Professor Rinaldi was very glum when she gave him tests. I always thought she was a bit of an imbecile. She had allergies. Partially to pollen, which explained the mucus, and partially to men, which explained her crush on Bertolotti.

  I have many eyes on me now. They’ve n
ever seen a woman convulse. Their stares make me uneasy. Their lingering eyes bug me. Their eyes are ball-shaped, spherical, like a toad’s. It’s been a while since I’ve had so many eyes on me. Until thirty minutes ago, I hadn’t known that I’d end up center stage. I didn’t know the tremor would return. It happens when my soul is forlorn.

  Today I feel sick as a dog. I left with a boy and he kissed me. In theory, I should be happy. But I didn’t like his mouth or his hands. He stopped kissing me when people walked by. They could’ve been shurta, the police. Orlando didn’t want to get chewed out. The shurta make a fuss over kissing. Kissing on the street is forbidden. You can get into serious trouble if you’re a foreigner, bigger trouble if you’re Tunisian. Orlando kisses badly. He’s not romantic and his breath is raw, but I didn’t want to make a bad impression. I wanted to go on the date. I insisted. I was cruel on the beach. I had a nice swimsuit on and my period spared me.