by Igiaba Scego
The first time she offered herself as a sacrificial lamb, Maryam’s tits hadn’t yet sprouted—she was only a tyke. She didn’t own a flask yet. She was a small, childish reed who ran freely beneath the falcons and butterflies. Her gratitude for the crooked-nosed woman made Maryam Laamane promise oceans, mountains, hills, and a marriage she didn’t want.
The girl still hadn’t seen much of life, but she knew how to console those she loved. She knew that pain was assuaged immediately with honeyed words. She promised what she felt she had to promise. She promised to be the wife of an unknown man in her friend’s stead. She was a lamb to the slaughter, like Isaac, on whom the venerated father was prepared to bring down the ax of devotion to the one and only God. Her friend Howa didn’t comment on the gesture. She limited herself to smiling.
“I promised, Zuhra. Do you understand how unprepared your mother was? I promised on the most precious things, on my honor as a woman. I promised, do you understand? I was doomed. I couldn’t back out. I was destined to become the wife of the seamstress Bushra’s son.”
The thought of the randomly encountered boy, the boy with the beige linen shirt and futah, came to dominate Maryam’s thoughts. He’d made Maryam understand how foolish and excessive her promise was. No friendship could ask for the sacrifice of love. Howa hadn’t asked for anything. Maryam had been impulsive and reckless in her decision.
Why had she promised? Maryam couldn’t say. Maybe she’d screwed herself over because her friend was so sweet. She couldn’t remember the first time someone was sweet with her. Her aunts loved her and old Gurey did as well. But in Howa there was an unequalled tenderness that filled Maryam like a wineskin. On that first of July, Howa Rosario became the most special friend in her life and, in a certain sense, the surrogate mother the girl never had a chance to know.
They told Maryam she’d only drawn a little milk from that distant, unknown woman. Maryam was weaned hurriedly. The reason was contained in the agony of a loss. The death of her beloved husband on Graziani’s southern front exhausted her mother’s womanly sap and accelerated her demise. The liquids in Maryam’s mother dried up in her body. First her milk vanished, then her menstrual blood and, gradually, without anyone realizing it, her other vital fluids as well. Maryam Laamane’s mother died of dryness. Parched by pain. Her life ended in a hostile land, on Graziani’s southern front, where her husband, adored like few others, lost his life because of a weak white man’s impudence. On July 1, 1960, Maryam felt she’d found a new mama: Howa Rosario. A woman who also knew how to be a sister, a friend, an accomplice. Her name was Howa like the first woman of creation and her friendship was a fantastic dream to Maryam.
But nothing, not even the most intense friendship, is comparable to love. Maryam Laamane was by no means prepared for that and, when it arrived, she felt swept up by a cyclone.
“I didn’t even know his name…”
She’d seen him on a deserted street where the bittersweet, spurious odor of bananas reigned. She’d seen him for hardly any time at all, but already she felt like a part of him.
“If I don’t see him anymore, I won’t think about him,” she said to herself.
The days, despite their implacable passing, couldn’t make the memory of the fleeting encounter fade. The boy and his futah were pieces of her heart.
Maryam began behaving strangely. She stayed silent for long stretches of time. Often, to distract herself, she watched the concentric flying of hawks. She didn’t dream about chasing after them anymore. She felt off course, incapable of following the dream of their flight. She looked at her feet, prisoner’s feet, anchored to a land binding her to a life she didn’t want.
At night, languor clenched the base of her gut. She wanted to touch herself to calm the tempest. Her hand slid beneath the sheet. She touched her pubic area quickly, then every night pulled her hand back. The stitching was under there, which had caused her such pain. She remembered it still, the day she was infibulated. Afterward, she couldn’t pee correctly for days. An incredible pain. Now she wanted to tear out the stitching, put her finger there, and appease her misery. But she wasn’t alone in bed. She slept with an older cousin who complained about her tossing and turning. She had to be attentive. Everyone knew it was the jinn that guided girls’ hands to their forbidden areas.
Maryam, at that peculiar point in her life, had begun touching herself briefly, like a thief, fearing the jinn and shame. Maryam shut her eyes and tried visualizing the boy with the linen shirt. She would never confess it to anyone, but how she wished it were his and not her own hand touching her forbidden areas. That was when Maryam understood the meaning of many scenes she saw in Hollywood films, which no one had ever explained to her. Now she understood the meaning of the beds and crumpled sheets, the closed doors after the protagonists walk through them hand in hand. She understood why the soundtrack crescendoed when the camera panned away from the enamored couple and zoomed in on a solitary window. She understood why Doris Day told so many tales whenever she saw a bed, why people made up stories and said they had to stay in because they’d suddenly gotten the chickenpox. Maryam understood everything now. It had something to do with her languor, her pubic hair. It was somehow tied to her.
Her aunts watched her benevolently, whispering, uttering a truth that seemed too obvious to Maryam to be true. “Wa qoqday,” her aunts said. “She’s growing, she’s weathering hormonal storms. May Allah give her comfort, it will pass, she’ll get through. It happens to everyone, men and women. They go to bed as children and wake up as adults. Isn’t that something?”
In those quiet days, the only relevant development in her life was her work at the Somali telephone company. She’d earned the position of telephone operator. It was one of the tidbits of news she wanted to share with her Uncle Gurey, so she went to the Lower Shebelle. She wanted to tell him that she’d become a woman, that she finally got her period and a job.
Getting it wasn’t easy. She’d fought like a lioness and stood out. Two years had passed since Independence Day, when Maryam Laamane introduced herself to the telephone company recruiter. It was February 1962. She’d covered her many curls with a light garbasaar, the only concession to Somalia. For everything else, Maryam and her colleagues were dressed in Western style: long black skirts and white blouses. She’d received word of the recruitment from Ruqia, the hothead, who poked her nose (and ears) everywhere. In Mogadishu, Ruqia kept tabs on the gossip. Ruqia the hothead, with her gaudy lipstick and those long teeth. She looked like a rat. She wasn’t nice to most people, but Maryam thought she was harmless. She was among the first acquaintances to die when civil war broke out. “Her heart stopped when the first mortar shells fell. She talked about other people and their lives because focusing on her own was too arduous a task. When she did, the fear carried her away.” They called her a hothead because every time she had a fresh piece of gossip, she ran from one end of the city to the other like a nutcase.
When Maryam arrived at the telephone company, she saw a slew of girls dressed like her. The same black skirt, the same white blouse.
“There were only five spots, Zuhra.”
Maryam thought the world hadn’t changed much. Everywhere and at every point in time there was the same racket. Job positions were few and the candidates were numerous. Maryam smiled thinking of how electrified she felt in that moment. She would’ve given anything to outdo the other skirts like her. She started praying and bartering with God about her future. She promised to fast, give to charity with her first paycheck, to not go to the cinema for a week, to help Auntie Salado the following Friday, to climb stairs leading with her left foot. Her promises to God became ridiculous acts of superstition.
“You’ll wonder, Zuhra, why so much trouble for a miserable job? It was only a call center. We put the city in touch, we didn’t advertise products like you all do today. But yes, in the end it was just a call center. Like the one in EUR you hate so much. Hmm, how to explain it? That was a job for us. It was enough. We were co
ntent having very little.”
Maryam only knew that she wanted the job very much. It meant being free, paying for her own groceries, the movies, clothes, helping her aunties. She wouldn’t be a snot-nosed child anymore, but a respected woman in her family. It’s true, she would’ve liked to continue studying, but going past the seventh grade was expensive. She knew the important things now. There was no need for anything else. For the essential things of life, she had the cinema. She would learn the rest there.
Suddenly, a powerful voice caught the girl’s attention. It came from a white-haired man. Looking at him, no one would’ve paid him any mind, but his thundering voice was famous throughout Somalia. It was Mr. Sabrie, the hunchbacked national radio DJ, the man with snow-white hair who seemed like he had thousands of years behind him. He’d become a DJ in old age. Before that he’d been a storyteller at local parties. With independence, he started doing the ogeyisiis. Everyone in radio did the ogeyisiis sooner or later, though no one had Sabrie’s pathos. The ogeyisiis was the national broadcasting station’s most followed program. They searched for missing people in the city. Mogadishu was huge and people disappeared. Some in love. Some in pain. Some in mass graves, consumed by envy or ferocious beasts. Years later, when she was in Italy, Maryam saw Chi l’ha visto? on television. She smiled weakly. People from the Third World had already done a show like that. Textbook avant-garde.
Every day, Sabrie described noses, illustrated eyes, and drew mouths with the pencil of his words. He never had enough time to describe the people who’d disappeared in minute detail, so he used erratic brushstrokes of words to convey the sense of a person, their essence. In that way he was able to be precise telling stories that had no semblance of precision. Then, like everyone, he transitioned to music and newscasts. He also brought marriage celebrations to life. Oh, how he loved the aroos parties. He wasn’t as good as his colleague Roble, the DJ everyone dreamed of being, but he didn’t do half bad. He got by rather well.
He was the one corralling the girls in the telephone company forecourt. He leased his voice for a few shillings and it wasn’t unusual to find him in the most extravagant places in the city. Sabrie didn’t look around. Seeing faces didn’t matter to him. He had been called only to make an announcement and hardly cared about the rest. Sabrie had a price; looking around wasn’t included. He carried out his obligation, announcing to this crowd of Eve’s daughters the start of the long struggle for placements. They obeyed like sheep.
“Assalamu aleikum, sisters. Get in line to sign up for the examination. Do you have a pen? A sheet of paper? Your ID?”
Maryam blessed the name of God and started writing. Thou shalt not look at other people’s papers, it’s a well-known commandment, the fifth, common to all religions of the Book. Thou shalt not rob thy neighbor of her destiny. If you deserve it, work will come to you, you’ll see.
“We did a dictation exercise in Italian, my Zuhra. Italian was still the official language of the Somali state, despite our independence.”
Maryam remembered how fluid her handwriting was in those days. Her Os and Ms flowed smoothly on the serrated, horizontally-lined page. The dictation told the story of Marco, a boy from the Apennines who made a long journey to find his lost mother. “Marco, my love, brought me great fortune. I was the best. I began working three days later.”
She reveled in her work. She had a kind of omnipotence about her, connecting the city, its mouths and its many ears. Then there was the matter of secrets. The operators knew everything about everyone. Who betrayed whom, who swindled whom, who usurped whom. They became guardians of discretion. They knew the sycophants, the adulterers, and the conspirators by name, surname, tribe, telephone number. This information was confidential. No one in the telephone company disclosed what they knew. It was an unspoken rule for those who took the job. Open ears and adroit hands to manage connections, but mouths shut, clamped like a virgin’s hips. The operators were respected in the city. Everyone knew how reliable their discretion was.
It was a great job, Maryam knew it. Part of her was happy that the Somali phone operators could count her among their number. She was honored to be one of those revered and pampered women. Yet only part of her was happy, a tiny part. The other, bigger part, the more substantial part thought about how sad her life would be beside a man she didn’t love, the seamstress Bushra’s son, whom she had to marry because of a reckless promise.
Bushra’s son was a mystery. No one ever really saw him. He didn’t live in Somalia then. He went around Africa soaking up the teachings of the best tailors on the continent. The last time someone had gotten wind of him, he was in Mali, gleaning the secrets of oilcloth. Nobody could tell her whether Bushra’s son was pleasant or not, or what he looked like. Not only could no one say whether he was handsome or ugly, but the details they had about his anatomy were fragmented and confused. The color of his eyes wasn’t known, nor was the length of his hair. The same applied for his body: hair, torso, arms, face. “He was always hunched over his damned sewing machine and no one ever saw his face!”
Howa Rosario wasn’t much help. She’d seen him only once. In her fear-stricken memory, Bushra’s son was a monster, understandably. Maryam Laamane asked herself what it would be like being married to such a man.
The Istunka, the bludgeon fest, changed the course of history.
The idea of attending the event brought a smile back to Maryam’s face, and she became chatty again. As the song Maryam heard many years later on the radio in Italy went: You can’t be serious at seventeen years old. Like the teenagers in the song, Maryam’s glass was full in those bygone days. She liked this Têtes de Bois hit. She recalled lost sensations. At seventeen, she fantasized about a kiss, forgetting that she’d never given one. A kiss, in her eyes, was a soft touch on the bicycle boy’s lips. Like any other seventeen-year-old, Maryam dreamed of serial romance novels and the enamored star in her stomach trembling from forbidden emotions. The bludgeon fest briefly made her forget the seam-stress Bushra’s son and the promise she made to Howa. For a little while, she went back to being seventeen and dreaming.
It was Uncle Gurey’s idea to go. Maryam, forcing her aunties to consent, joined a group on its way to Afgooye, where the spectacle happened every year. She convinced her cousin Hirsi and his partner, Manar, as well as the ever-present Howa. Hirsi had a used Fiat 500 that he’d bought from an Italian. He’d paid for it with the sweat on his forehead. The motor was inserted rather poorly, but Hirsi was good with luxury vehicle mechanics and in no time had transformed a living carcass into a beautiful, efficient machine. Hirsi whistled while he drove. His wife was mute, rarely speaking, but when she did say something it was earth-shattering.
“You know, Bushra’s son got back three weeks ago,” she said. “Maybe he’ll come see the stick-fighting. I’d be curious to see him. I barely remember his face anymore.”
A withering silence fell over the tiny 500. Howa began quietly sobbing. Maryam Laamane, for her part, bit her lower lip. It began to bleed.
THE REAPARECIDA
I switched beaches. I’m not at Carthage Amilcar anymore. Carthage wasn’t bad with its voyeuristic boys, squealing girls, and an ocean fouled with baguettes and plastic bags. But now I’m no longer there. I switched beaches. I seem to have switched lives.
Mar, you smiled at me early this morning. I was blown away, and a bit worried. It had been a while since I’d seen you wake up early. You thought, so you told me, that it was right out of a Kellogg’s commercial, an urban legend. You thought only alarm clocks and cellphones cock-a-doodle-dooed. But it was true, “It’s actually fucking true,” you said. You went downstairs to see the rooster. The owner of the bed-and-breakfast showed it to you. You ran onto the terrace to share your discovery. “It has a red crest,” you shouted. You woke Zuhra up and made an adorable, girly face. I hugged you and you didn’t push me away like you usually do. It was lovely feeling your warmth again, dear. Smelling your skin, your scent. I was reminded of when I breastfed
you as Flaca watched us, rocking her body. Flaca sang us the Dylan song, the only one that stayed with her from her past life.
I’m no longer at Carthage. Now I’m at Mahdia. Silence is king here. There are people, but they don’t make noise. They’re like silent film actors. I’m Buster Keaton among mute marionettes. They move in the same way as people in Tunis proper do, but without the mayhem, without the hellish car horns, deafening music, chattering emptiness of the big city. I think it’s because of the dead.
I could’ve sworn I saw them tonight. I wasn’t afraid. On the contrary, I was curious. It may have just been the power of suggestion. Zuhra says she also believed she saw ghosts. “They don’t have chains and sheets,” she said, “they’re only our shadows.” What a strange girl Zuhra is. Sometimes she reminds me of my Flaca, especially when she’s arched over her notepads. The same look of discovery. It was a strange night of pestering thoughts. I think it was partly because we all slept together on the terrace. I’ve never slept on a terrace, not even as a child. When the bed-and-breakfast’s proprietress proposed it to us, I was about to respond uncivilly. Zuhra’s friend—that whimsical shiny-haired Italian—stopped me. Lucy held me back. Her hand was so firm that I was afraid to think of a reply, much less say it. Lucy took the situation into her own hands and we ended up on the terrace.