Beyond Babylon

by Igiaba Scego

  There would be three of them on that trip. Zuhra Laamane, the Afro-Roman, would come with them. “We have to get her mind off things,” her mother said. Mar agreed. It was strange having the same opinions as Miranda, but in Tunisia, this was happening too. Zuhra had had an ugly seizure two nights before at the Serb’s party. She was in dire need of peace and good company. Mar thought of herself as a good friend for the girl. Something of a sister. Looking at her sometimes, she saw part of her own life. Even in Zuhra’s despair she saw herself, especially in Zuhra’s tremors. They had the same nose, the same hands. Zuhra was a little bigger, but she seemed so small and defenseless. Yes, Mar felt like a wonderful companion for the girl.

  She sent JK a text explaining that they’d see each other once she returned from the trip with her mother. I miss the way you smell, he replied. Have a good trip. She also missed the way JK smelled, like the mango juice she would buy at the souq in Piazza Vittorio. Acidic, intense. Who knows what would happen between them when she got back. Who knows if it was right to keep seeing him. JK was a man. She’d never lasted with men. She’d never even lasted with women, for that matter, only Pati. That was another thing altogether, irrational dependence. The darkness of her night, her fado. A perpetual, attractive torment. Patricia’s white skin left unsightly traces of madness that Mar couldn’t stop pursuing. She hated white. It blinded her.

  “Can I wash your hair, abbayo?”

  “Abbaio?” Mar asked. She’d just woken up and didn’t recognize the voice. She didn’t understand why someone would want to bark first thing in the morning. She only wanted one thing in the morning: dark, boiling liquid in her mouth. Coffee, rarely tea, that she could swill. No sugar, just black coffee in a soup bowl.

  “Abbayo means ‘sister.’ It’s Somali. Your father’s language. Miranda told me your father was Somali, like my mother.”

  Mar remembered where she was. Her mother had planned this trip. Together with Zuhra they’d taken one of those rundown buses that lurches at every pothole, and beneath the searing noon sun they’d started looking for a hotel where they could rest. Everything was full. Bed-and-breakfasts were bursting at the seams. The (very few) luxury hotels, too. Roaming. “How about we sleep on the beach?” she’d proposed. The evil eye from her mother. A new search, an uncertain outcome. Then a miracle, which first appeared like mockery. One hostel offered a terrace for sleeping on, at least, and a bathroom with a shower. It was a strange set-up, but they accepted it because being able to sleep with only the stars for a roof was a fine thing.

  Abbayo? Evidently it had nothing to do with dogs. It was Zuhra Laamane’s delicate voice, the strange girl who already felt like a part of Mar. She was kind. Mar wondered if it was because of the silly way the girl had of speaking. She stacked her words and sounds on top of one another and made people laugh. It was like hearing a tantalizing radio program. She was a very happy girl.

  “My hair?” she asked. “But…”

  “It looks like a mannequin’s hair, abbayo, it doesn’t seem real.”

  Mar didn’t know what to say. “Can I get coffee before?”

  “Yes, abbayo, there’s no rush. I’m here. I’m gonna go to the tombs anyway. It’s beautiful there, have you been?”

  “No.” She said no more. Mar was afraid of tombs. They reminded her of Pati’s whiteness and the redness of her blood, which she’d wanted to see.

  “You have to, abbayo. It’s relaxing and, well, it’s nice being between the sky and sea, thinking that they’ve given you the most beautiful spot. Yesterday I saw a strange Arab woman there. I want to see if I can find her again.”

  Mar went to the communal toilet. She shat liquid. Since she’d been in that country, her crap had basically become water. “It’s because of the spicy grilled salad, salata meshweyya. Our stomachs aren’t used to it,” she’d told JK. She missed her Chinese man. His hair was smooth and wavy. She liked burrowing between his hands. JK told her stories. Zuhra Laamane did the same. With Pati it had been only silence and fury. JK laughed even when he made love. “I’m a Highlander from the same tribe as Duncan MacLeod, I’m Scottish, an immortal.” Highlander. JK always said he was immortal. “Don’t you all say that the Chinese never die? And that for some reason you’re never able to attend our funerals?” Highlander, from the Scotsman’s tribe, the sempiternal Duncan MacLeod. Ah, how she wished her small-eyed man were truly immortal. He was human, alas.

  “Are you positive people die in China?” she’d teased him once after lovemaking.

  “Aw, don’t tell me you believe that horseshit about Chinese people never dying! Why should we have to die? Chinese immigration to Italy is a new thing. My parents are barely fifty years old. Why do they have to die? I’m only twenty-seven. Why should I have to go?”

  Why did JK have to die? She pulled him closer. Don’t die, JK. She pressed him against her chest like the plush rabbit she had as a child. Oh, if only her almond-eyed man really were a Highlander. She missed him. She felt the echo of his elongated laughter and muddled words ringing in her head. They spoke of Chinese funerals in the suspended moments after love. “They’re very colorful,” JK told her. She remembered that she was the only colorful one at Pati’s funeral, where otherwise white dominated. An abominable color.

  She took a cold shower to harden her muscles. She didn’t have a shower cap. She tried not getting her head wet. Hadn’t she promised Zuhra she’d let her do it? Her hair reassured her, flattened as it was like loose cables. Straightening her hair in Tunis and washing it in Mahdia meant one thing only: fucking up all her delicate work. Her unkempt hair was frazzled like Pati’s. She’d wear it like that after massacring it with a flat iron or a disgusting product that burned her skin. Afterward, she was guaranteed to look like a beautiful Barbie. Mulberry and negroid, but Barbie. She touched the twine on her head and felt as though she were in a barbed-wire nirvana. “You’ll go bald if you keep burning yourself,” Miranda told her. Her mama had made an odd, disappointed grimace, which bordered on resentment.

  Grimacing is easy for you, Mama. Your hair is soft, a wave, mine is like a cricket’s, prickly, irregular, senseless. Pati’s frazzled hair and milky reflections made some kind of sense.

  Me, Mar Ribero Martino, do I make sense? I am fruit of the Third World. A black father, my mother the daughter of terroni. Pigmented with stains of slavery and spoliation. I am conquered land. Earth to be walked on. Colorless hybrid fruit. Uncategorized. A half-blood that belongs to nothing. My blood is contaminated. Confused. There’s too much of others in me. Nothing is wedded. Heavy buttocks. Small nose. Prickly hair. Overflowing pubic hair, of a dark brown hue that doesn’t have the dignity of black. Big eyes. Tiny mouth. Brownish skin. Long neck. I don’t understand myself. I feel like an illegible scrawl. I want to be white. Like Pati. I want to be blindingly reflective. Instead, fatigue seeps from my skin. Half-blood. Semi-negress. I’m ashamed. Not dark enough for the blacks. Not light enough for the whites. I speak like Zuhra Laamane. I’m ungrammatical. I’m piling words. Just like Zuhra Laamane. Having spent so much time with her, I’m adopting her speech patterns. She wants to wash my hair, did you know that Mama? Because abbayo, I know, loves me very much. That’s how you say it, right? Abbayo… I like this word, I feel like it unites us. Oh, Zuhra, don’t wash my hair. I’m not like you at all. You are black, beautiful, light of the sun, proud of yourself. I am a scrawl. Don’t wash my hair. Let me live my life with this mop on my head. Let me live with this odor of burned skin, burned head. I am a half-blood. Leave me be with my obsessions. I’ll never attain the white that blinds me. I’ll never attain the black I do not know. My father, a photo, is the black man to whom I owe this color. Maybe he was a beautiful man. From that one photograph Mama has, I can’t tell. He’s wearing a baseball cap. I wish I’d known him. He would’ve told me that black is beautiful and I would’ve believed him. I believe even now that nigger is beautiful. Maybe I shouldn’t say nigger, but black. It doesn’t matter to me, you taught it to me, abbayo Zuhra L
aamane, that no one should be afraid of words. Nigger is beauty. But half-nigger? Semi-nigger? Semi-white? Semi-pale? Semi-nothing? I wish I’d known Elias. I’m indebted to him for the sperm that created me.

  Mar put on her country-style jeans and went to the pink tombs of Mahdia. She slipped away stealthily; she didn’t want Zuhra seeing her. She didn’t want her hair washed. Like a fugitive, she wandered toward the city, minding the colors. The blue of fishermen’s tombs, the violet of the sky, the gray of her pearly skin.

  Seeing Vicky among the tombs really did seem like a healthy hallucination. She often saw Vicky’s silhouette when she went places. She’d been seeing it everywhere for two years. It showed up in the most unlikely locations. There wasn’t a day when she didn’t think about Vicky. She saw her in the hot soup she made to stop colds, in the eyes of abandoned dogs, between the lines of a real estate ad, in dish detergent foam. Infinitesimal, she promenaded in her thoughts. Infinitesimal yet gigantic. She hadn’t seen her in two years. It was reasonable to think that the Vicky standing among the pink-blue tombs of Mahdia was just the umpteenth hallucination. It couldn’t be her in flesh and bone. The real her.

  Mar didn’t believe in coincidences, but when she moved closer to her, she could do nothing less than believe her sense of touch. She didn’t pinch herself. She stretched out her hand toward the woman she hadn’t seen in two years. Her skin was textured and lightly damp with sweat. She was human. Real, authentic. Not a dream or projection.

  She touched her lightly. The last time they’d seen each other, Mar had thrown her against a wall with soundless strength. She’d wanted to hurt her. She’d wanted to destroy her and make her disappear, make her invisible to the world, her own world.

  Here, among azure tombs, she touched her softly. A feather landing on that body which, just two years and a few ounces earlier, she’d attacked with wanton violence. She touched her softly and felt a shiver pass from her fingertips to her brain and loins.

  “Did I hurt you badly that night, Vicky?”

  The woman looked at her. “You may have done the greatest harm to yourself.”

  Mar felt like crying and she did. She never cried.

  They went to get a coffee. Both were tired of mint tea.

  “How’s Pati?” Vicky asked.

  “She killed herself,” Mar said dryly. She didn’t add anything else because the waiter arrived.

  They only made strong Turkish coffee, but the waiter was frank when warning her. “No espresso, Turkish, ladeed jiddan, strong jiddan.” They ordered two, and apple-flavored hookah.

  “Now I’m trying to survive,” Mar said when the waiter went away.

  “I understand,” Vicky whispered.

  “No, you don’t understand. I’m rediscovering colors now. Pati’s whiteness blinded me.”

  Again, Mar couldn’t hold back the tears.

  Vicky placed an arm around her shoulders.

  “I’m happy you’re recovering, friend.”

  She meant it.

  Empire Hair Relaxer No Mix Crème. Super version for tough hair. It could soften pig bristles. Mar used it constantly on her chaotic head of hair. It was a drug. Without it, she would slip into withdrawal, directionless. Her hair wasn’t exactly kinky, but Mar thought it had tedious, fickle curls. As far as she was concerned, her hairs were anarchists. They obeyed no laws. “They respond to atmospheric changes in their own way,” she noted. She said they didn’t only change according to the season, but also according to the vagaries of the day or even a ruined temperament. Humidity was harmful, a natural disaster, a biblical catastrophe. A variation in the water level could make the girl’s passable existence catastrophic. The worst thing for Mar was that they grew outward. Pointless head fur.

  Miranda hadn’t helped her much with controlling the forest that sprouted on her head. No help, inappropriate advice, embarrassment. As in infancy, so in adolescence. Miranda couldn’t tell the difference. She didn’t know how to be a gentle wave. Mar, however, saw the difference. She saw the waves. When Miranda’s head shook, she looked like a L’Oreal ad. She was silky soft. Because I’m worth it, she seemed to say. “And am I worth it, Mama?” Mar asked. She tried imitating her, shaking her head, but she wasn’t silky. Everything stayed still, a singular block, like a toupee.

  When Mar was younger, Miranda sometimes said to her, “I envy you, hija, you look like Angela Davis.” Mar didn’t know if her mama was messing with her or if she was dead serious. She knew nothing about Angela Davis. No one—not even her mama, who always brought her up—had told her that proud woman’s story. Maybe she would’ve grown up differently if someone had told her. As a little girl, Mar watched the other little girls with envy. She dreamed of a Japanese manga bowl cut. She was the only one in her class in elementary school with a wig of curls on her head. The only one in section B with a false mophead.

  “Can I touch it?” was a common question. Hands violated her head, inopportunely. Custodian hands, teacher hands, friendly hands, familial hands. Everyone planted the seeds of their Eurocentric curiosities in her. They touched her as though she were a species on its way to extinction, a savage forest animal. She was a human beast. An example, not a person. She was lucky she wasn’t born in the nineteenth century, because back then human exhibits really did exist, zoos where ferocious beasts and inhabitants of the Afro-Asiatic colonies were dished out to the curious and the do-nothings.

  Lo and behold…ladies and gentlemen, children and dogs. Only here, in the Zoological Garden of Paris, the ville lumière, will you find authentic Eskimos and Nubians in their natural state. I, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, director of the Garden, can also promise you real Australian cannibals, males and females, the one and only colony of this savage, strange, disfigured race, the most brutal ever found in the interior of the overseas territories. Only here will you find the basest level of humanity imaginable. Only here, beings in their natural state.

  The village nègre were incredibly popular—circuses where humanity was reduced to a feral state, where the dignity of the other counted for naught. She would’ve been placed in a nice cage, Mar thought. A nice cage with a wad of straw and a water bowl. Maybe they would’ve spared her the chains, but surely they’d have exposed her breasts because she was, in the end, only an animal, a thing, a good-for-nothing half-caste. If she’d been a woman of the colony, of her unidentified father’s Somalia, the whites would’ve used her as an orifice to forget their boredom and nostalgia. She would’ve been like Elo, that disgraced woman she happened to encounter in the pages of an awful Italian novel for a literature exam at university. Elo…a worthless slave who must submit her body when the white man has carnal desire.

  Yes, they would’ve revealed her breasts because she was only a thing, a nothing. Her nude chest wouldn’t have caused a scandal. The forest on her head would’ve excited the public—so strange—the ideal fantasy for unconfessed masturbators. They may have also made her wear some necklaces to create a tribal atmosphere. She would’ve been a mãe-de-santo, an officiate of candomblé. A pagan witch who incited fear, but not too much. They would’ve pointed their fingers at her like they did with the Nubians, the Senegalese, and the Laplanders. “Natural humanity,” they would call the beribboned women of the Belle Époque. She wouldn’t have lifted her eyes. She would’ve meekly watched the ground. They would’ve made her do all the circuses and expositions. She would’ve been hailed as the undisputed queen of the 1889 fair together with the Eiffel Tower, which had been built expressly for that occasion. A supreme attraction, star of the village nègre, alpha female of the four hundred indigenous extras. Afterward, in 1900, she would’ve held court, she would’ve astonished the tens of millions of visitors they say went to gape at other human beings equal to them in every way, save for the misfortune of being enslaved.

  Mar was from another age. In hers, the zoos were more devious. They were in the mind, and hadn’t disappeared at all. People didn’t often tell you that you were part of an inferior race anymore. You so
on found out that the races didn’t exist. Now they told you, “Your culture is too different from mine. We’re incompatible.” The zoos transformed into immaterial enclosures.

  Mar watched Zuhra with the can of Empire Hair Relaxer No Mix Crème. She was worried. The creamy nuisance had been her lifeline that whole time. Since she’d known Pati, her hair had grown used to being chemically treated. It was a ritual. A thorough cleaning, good nutritive conditioner, straightening cream, hair dryer, flat iron. There were waiting times to respect, movements to follow. It was a ballet, a military drill. Mar was rigorous. She calmed the flurries of her confused heart by vanquishing her exuberant curls. She’d done solid work in Tunis. She’d been doing a good job for years. Her hair was smoother than Pati’s, more tousled than her mother’s. It was straight, a line, a border. When she shook her head, she felt her hair crackling. Initially, her head burned like hell. She wanted to scratch as though she had head lice. She got used to it. She got used to the burning smell, the tickle of chemistry. She got used to making her crown of hair flutter. Because I’m worth it.

  Zuhra Laamane was holding the can. Vicky had gone with her to the bed-and-breakfast. Vicky laughed and gabbed. Her presence made Mar happy because she was about to rue the day she’d said yes to Zuhra’s impromptu offer to wash her hair. She needed a supportive friend so that she could recover the peacefulness of that morning, when she’d stuck her face in a soup bowl full of black coffee. Vicky’s presence helped her look ahead, seguir adelante.

  “I’m going to be thinking about you!” Zuhra threatened. It was love, but it sounded sinister to Mar.

  The Empire Hair Relaxer No Mix Crème ended up in the garbage. Vicky laughed. Zuhra dragged Mar onto the balcony. She had bucketfuls of shampoo. Mar was relieved to see the same deep-cleansing shampoo there. She wouldn’t have to give up her ritual completely.

  Zuhra made her sit on a wooden chair eaten away by time.

  “Lower your head.” It wasn’t an order, just a request for cooperation.