by Igiaba Scego
Her work with the washing machine was considerable. Without it, Flaca was lost. Today, washing machines are sophisticated. They do everything themselves, remove stains, choose the best setting, guide you like a child. In the seventies, the washer was still inconvenient, not at all sophisticated, and if you didn’t operate it properly, it could ruin your favorite outfit. In the seventies, every good washer needed a good captain, a direction, a route to follow. Rosa was a captain without equal. Sometimes I would find Flaca zoned out in front of the thing. She spent hours gazing lustfully through the window. She watched the filth disappear and turn into ghosts. The washing machine window was her life beginning anew.
She took strange precautions. Her mind assaulted her with unpredictable dangers. Everything was filthy, everything could attack her, everything was insidious and seamy. She slithered slowly along the walls of the house, particularly when she carried food. She was careful at corners, believing them to be deceitful. Soiled crossroads. She looked at us suspiciously. She studied our cleanliness levels. She examined our collars, shirt sleeves, the density of dandruff in our hair, the length of our nails and our breaths. At the table, she tried claiming the seat furthest from the bathroom. She checked that everything was neat, from the silverware to the tablecloth, and subjected the food to a close analysis.
She’d also developed a fixation for handles. In our dump there weren’t many of them. How many doors did we have? Three? I don’t remember anymore. Regardless, they underwent thorough scientific evaluation. The quantity of bacterial microorganisms was assessed. Nothing was left to chance. The handles might have been touched by how many people? By us, certainly, and those who’d paid us a visit. People who had touched other objects, other people. It was a circle of dirty people, dirty things, infected lives. The handle had become, for my Rosa, the quintessence of bacteriological risk. A cause of death. Contamination was certain. This obsession of hers scared me. I wanted to see her again in the ridiculous Marilyn dress. I wanted to hear her sing Dylan. She didn’t sing anything anymore. Her voice had been swallowed by a hermetically sealed pit.
After the discovery of the handles, I decided to read what she wrote. I read it for days. I was devastated. That’s when I knew. My Flaca wanted to clean herself on the inside. That’s all she wanted. It was too late to save her. Resentment stole her from us in the end. And it was an awful end.
I didn’t find her. Pablo did. He told me he’d smelled a wrathful scent, an aggressive odor of carnivorous flowers. He went into Rosa’s room. Each time he entered the house, he went to check whether Rosa was well or not. He saw her empty bed, perfectly in order. On it, a blue plush bunny, the one Nuccia had given her for Christmas. Flaca adored the plushie, she never left it. On the ground were drying, circular green stains. Stains that outlined solar systems and potential worlds. The stains were concentrated at the foot of the bed like puddles. It was there that Rosa lay, in a green sea. From her mouth, pale liquid ran down her face. She was gray. Comatose. The autopsy revealed that she had guzzled liters of disinfectant.
My Flaca wanted to clean herself on the inside. That’s all, carajo.
A month after Rosa’s funeral, a package arrived. It had a stamp from a post office in southern Rome. Inside were ten cassettes. Alberto Tatti had recorded his voice. He’d done us a favor. He’d been too late coming back from Timbuktu or wherever the hell it was. I didn’t listen to the cassettes. Alberto Tatti was of no use to me anymore. I threw them in the trash and didn’t think about him again.
THE FATHER
“It’s obvious that she killed him,” said an old man with henna-colored eyebrows.
“What about the body?” asked an erratic boy.
“The body? She made it disappear, no? Is she or isn’t she a dirty witch?”
Majid had disappeared. For the people in the neighborhood, Bushra was the only culprit. All blame fell on her.
Bushra wasn’t concerned about these rumors. She was used to being accused. She was worried for Majid, though. He’d left without taking anything. No money, clothes, food. In the first week of his absence, Bushra was still hopeful. She hoped to see him materialize in front of her. She hoped to fill her ears with his eloquent silence. She peered out at the world, longing for his winding steps on the sand.
She liked the ritual quality of their chaste nights. She daubed herself with unguents and essential oils, he watched her with one eye, the left, and pretended not to be stunned by his woman’s beautiful shapes. Bushra never completely resigned herself to a sexless marriage. And every evening, the hope of becoming Majid’s woman flourished inside of her. Just before he disappeared, the woman had serious hopes. One of his hands had settled on her breast. It was brief, but for Bushra it may as well have been the preface to a dream. The hand on her chest was followed by a game with the wires of her wavy hair, then a massage, a kiss. If he hadn’t disappeared, would he have finally been hers?
He vanished, and no one had the slightest idea where the cook Majid could’ve gone. She asked everyone in those early days. Poor Bushra ran to every corner of Mogadishu, following hearsay, recapitulating events that never occurred. Even the Pasquinellis, her husband’s Italian employers, groped around in a murky darkness.
Bushra did not give up. Every night she sprinkled herself with unguents and waited, ready to make love. When the nostalgia became too upsetting, she spread hot tears around her. It wasn’t a cry, but an exorcism. In her days of solitude, only Elias’s letters—my letters—gave her comfort. I traveled, Zuhra. I was a curious young man. From Mali to Conakry, Guinea by way of Liberia, I tried imbibing the Africa that was rightfully mine. Everywhere I went, people looked at me and laughed. “You’re not African,” they said to me, “you have a white person’s nose.” I laughed harder than them. “The whites don’t have good noses.” In their eyes, Somalis were Yemeni or white, basically something else. To them, we Somalis were something other than African. I never agreed. I said that we were the Horn and that Africa was plural, that there was diversity in everything, but also convergence. When I was young, I got caught up in heated debates. While I was adrift in fabrics, colors, debates, and passion, my mother, Bushra, silently suffered my father’s absence.
Papa took one thing before leaving. My outfits. Bushra couldn’t find a logical explanation for this, but she was pleased. Although I’m not sure how, this fed her hopes of seeing him again in this lifetime.
While Bushra suffered, the neighborhood around her conspired.
A strange coincidence, or snide fate, would have a mysterious fever epidemic strike the neighborhood. The tribulation was blamed on Bushra. She had become the qumayo to everyone, the witch. Some whispered that she was Arawelo come back to life. Some called her this on the streets and Bushra closed up like a clam. She suspected that the name, which came from a fable, would bring her nothing good. Arawelo was a woman who killed men that didn’t pleasure her. She castrated children and imposed the power of her vagina on Somalia. Then one day, like a dictator, she was killed by a relative. Uli Ual saved himself from castration. He had grown up in secret and, once he was older, decided to kill his grandmother.
Death wasn’t enough. Her body was cut into pieces, burned, and strewn across Somalia. No one wanted the cadaver to reconstitute itself and terrorize men from the great beyond as well. Her ashes were strewn around the country. Arawelo’s tombs were everywhere. But she grew again in every woman. Was not the pendulum perhaps one of Arawelo’s manifestations? The clitoris was cut from little girls so that they wouldn’t become like that dirty, rancid old woman. The clitoris was buried far away or fed to the hyenas. Its ashes strewn around Somalia. Men feared her for their virility’s sake and buried the clitorises far away. Someone had forgotten to cut Bushra. She hadn’t had to suffer a cutting. She was loose like a little girl and her pee had never caused her to suffer. Her sisters had brought her to the infibulation, but they’d forgotten her. She was so silent she could’ve fooled a hyena that hadn’t feasted for seven days.
> The neighborhood knew about Bushra’s clitoris. They knew that she wasn’t like the others. They knew she was whole. Everyone thought the woman was insatiable, constantly famished, gluttonous. The neighborhood had condemned her for this.
“She killed her first husband, Hakim. She cast a spell on him and he ended up under a vehicle.”
“And now,” the neighborhood voices said, “who knows what terrible fate she’s brought upon that poor man Majid. Meskeen… Allah have mercy on his soul.”
Majid was dead to everyone. Many thought he’d died horribly.
“She stabbed him in the heart.”
“She gave him deadly herbs to drink.”
“She sucked his soul night after night.”
“She let jinn kidnap him.”
Everyone had a colorful version of Majid’s death to tell. Details weren’t lacking and the stories of invented deaths became more real than the most awful nightmares.
Before the fevers, people had feared Bushra. No one, however, was prepared to admit it openly. They still acknowledged her before the fevers. They still said, “Good afternoon” or “Assalamu aleikum.” But the fevers changed everything. When she walked on the street, Bushra heard the treacherous rustling of serpents moving behind her. They were the hisses of lies. The bifurcated tongues of fear. Bushra passed and four-dollar exorcisms spewed from the mouths of gossipmongers. The people gripped rosaries, shouted, vade retro satanas, a‘udhu billahi, turned away, spat on the ground. They considered her the daughter of Iblis. A few old men struck her with their rosaries to banish the devil they thought she’d become.
It was all because of the fevers. A scapegoat was needed, someone to denounce for their suffering. The fevers were abnormal. They commandeered your stomach and you couldn’t eat anymore. You shut yourself in the bathroom and shat to the last scrap of your soul. Then delirium. The fever carried people to the mountaintop. From there, the precipice. Some died. Usually children.
The neighborhood was desperate. Someone had to do something. There were no medicines or doctors. People hoped and prayed. Someone said they had to make a sacrifice. They had to kill the demon, the cause of their ills. They went to Bushra’s house, my mother’s house, with pitchforks and bloodlust. They wanted more than anything to see her dead. Her body would be quartered and burned.
Bushra lived outside the world. She only thought about Majid.
“Ya hubbi, my love, where are you? Soo noqo adigo nabad ah, return healthy and unscathed.”
Years later, Hibo Nuura would sing this prayer of Bushra’s. This was the eighties, when men left Somalia to seek temporary fortune in Libya. Libya wasn’t yet the hell where migrants from the South dreamed of a sea crossing that would carry them to the West or to death. There was work in Libya. Somalis set off in search of ephemeral fortune. Some became rich and returned to Somalia to build villas for themselves.
Fluffy-haired Hibo Nuura sang the hopes of amorous women. Soo noqo adigo nabad ah: come back healthy and unscathed. If Bushra had known that song she’d have sung it at the top of her lungs. But it hadn’t yet been written.
For now, she sang a different song. She anointed herself with oil and love and she waited. When they beat forcefully on the door to kill her, Bushra opened it impulsively. She wasn’t aware of anything.
Luckily, it was Elias arriving. His journey was finished.
He wanted to open a boutique. Africa had rewarded him with its colors and he wanted to give them to Somalia.
He stopped the hatred and kissed his mother, trembling like a fledgling.
Outside the door, an evil death. It did not enter their house. He saw it enter the house next to theirs.
The next day, the neighbor’s oldest daughter died. It was a terrible end.
Zuhra, I’m happy I came when I did that day. Bushra didn’t deserve a terrible death. I deflected my mother’s destiny with an unforeseen return. To thank me, she got it in her head to find me a wife. She didn’t want to see me loveless, like her. Bushra still sprinkled herself with unguents every night. She wouldn’t dare be unprepared when Majid made her his.
EIGHT
THE NUS-NUS
“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.” The words seemed to come from a horrible soap opera, where all the women are fair-haired and the men are buff.
Her hair was not fair and she was not at all buff. Nevertheless, the maudlin words were addressed to her, Mar Ribero Martino, sullen and disinterested Mar who detested the sugary melodrama of false television romances.
The authoress of these archaic, flustered words was now three meters from her. The same Mediterranean beach, in the same small African town, with the same sunlight striking their bronzed faces. Around them, the pacific solitude of the dead, laid to rest in pink tombs. Three meters, Mar was just three meters away from an outmoded ponytail and giant sunglasses. A ponytail she’d once known so well, and which she’d loved for what it could have meant for her, had the two of them stayed together. In her agitation, Mar couldn’t think straight.
Seeing Vittoria again as though it were the most normal thing in the world wasn’t part of her vacation plans. She called this poised, inviolable seraph Vicky. Mar felt like a hunchback, an old camel that wanted to disappear, desaparecer. Everything warped beneath the weight of Vicky’s big, self-assured eyes. Mar was shocked by her red veins, swimming in a pellucid white sea. They seemed to pulsate like fresh water serpents. An apparition? The whiteness blinded and destroyed her. Cursed, cursed white. She didn’t know how to resist. She was a wreck.
“I wonder if she’ll notice how I’ve changed,” the girl thought. Vicky’s milky eyes fixated on her shamelessly.
The woman didn’t seem to detect Mar’s inner turmoil. Mar sat Indian style, eating a popsicle that oozed a sweet, syrupy strawberry preserve. Her hands were sticky. She wasn’t given a hand in greeting. Mar didn’t extend hers either. The woman shook and wriggled her limbs, jumping with joy, her wings spread in salute. Her whiteness cleaved the torrid air. The ponytail swung around happily or, who can say, in despair from not having seen one another in ages. Mar wondered if she was experiencing one of her weird dreams, in which the past and present were a single concoction.
She was tempted to pinch herself like they do in cartoons. Instead, she stood up. She put her face in front of the other woman’s, looking at her inanely. The ponytail had changed so little. Her cheeks were as full as they’d ever been. Even her eyes were the same, hopeful, guileless. Her mouth was the color of molasses, tinged with syrup and preservatives. Vicky seemed like a little girl. She was still fond of her.
How many years had passed? Two? Yes, two already. Mar shouted at her the last time they were together. She remembered it clearly. She’d said contemptible things. They were in downtown Rome, in Piazza Augusto Imperatore near the 913 terminal. Spring was nearing. The skaters weren’t infesting Ara Pacis yet. The air was unreal and granular. When evening descends, Rome is unstable. The two of them were wide-eyed, imaginative, at the start of a melodrama. Mar Ribero Martino was fulminating, deformed with rage, shrieking indecencies to the stars. She was crazy and alone. Vicky cried. They both felt impotent, useless. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you, Mar.” In exchange for the girl’s devotion, Mar threw her against a gate, then against a wall. Soundless, incomprehensible strength. She hurt her. Premeditated? Maybe. Her intractable desire for Vicky was putting up a fight. Desire for her body, her gentleness, her nebulous sense of the universe. Mar wanted to strangle her desire. Strangle Vicky. Strangle herself.
“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you,” the girl with the ponytail said. She cried as she spoke. Her tears followed beaten paths, quietly wetting her cheeks and soft lips. She believed what she was saying. It was love, a passing moment, possibly a simple lack of intelligence. Mar wanted to tell her things that were just as sweet and asinine. She hurled her against a wall because she didn’t know how to handle her love.
She started up her gray Honda SH. Her silhouette sp
ed nimbly through the city’s night traffic and she didn’t look back at the girl she’d slandered. The stars withdrew from the sky. Mar spat at the lusterless stars, swearing like a truck driver. She didn’t look back at the woman she desired. She couldn’t look at her. Pati was waiting at home. Pati, who had enchanted her with her whiteness and her malaise. She couldn’t love Vicky, or her outworn ponytail. Vittoria was too good. Pati the sick, the unbalanced, was at home. Mar had to stay with her, deep in the inferno that she fed daily. One day she’d tried explaining her relationship with Pati to Vicky. “You can’t tell,” she told her, “but I’m under a spell.” The girl smiled. But she understood nothing. And how could she? Vittoria was healthy. She had a perfect constitution, an intact brain. Mar was hung up on Pati and her sickness, her craziness. Enchanted. Her brain was amorphous pulp.
And now, two years later, she’d found Vicky again in Mahdia. Two years since the shouting, the curses, the threats, and that woman, the same Vicky with the same cheeks, was standing in front of her on a Tunisian beach. Mar had no defenses.
Vicky wasn’t crying anymore. Her hair was longer, with undertones of red. She was prettier. Mar wanted to flee.
Mahdia had been one of Miranda’s ideas. She’d looked at her daughter. “You come too.” It was an order. Mar was tempted to stand at attention or make a Roman salute. She didn’t do any of this. “OK,” she said. She looked bored and fed up, but she was excited. Miranda was always sentimental with her, amenable, but now she was giving an order, a direction. She liked when her mother was dedicated to her role as parent. Tunisia was doing her a lot of good.