Beyond Babylon

by Igiaba Scego

  Now, standing before this most beautiful tomb, I seem to have finally grasped a fragment of the truth that has eluded me. It’s like in the fifth Gospel, the apocryphal one by Thomas the Apostle: the Kingdom is inside you all and beyond you.

  Yes, inside me. Far from fear.

  The fat woman told me that the world will end in eighteen months. Only eighteen.

  Not for me. I was just born, by this most beautiful of tombs.

  THE REAPARECIDA

  I came to Mahdia, where I’m finding great peace these days, thanks to you, my daughter. You were the one who dragged me along, even though I proposed it. Your enthusiasm convinced me that it’d be the right destination. We brought one backpack between the two of us. There were two outfits inside, two pairs of pyjamas, two toothbrushes, some makeup, and I stuck the kisses I never gave you inside, dear. I wanted to give them to you all at once at the station while we were waiting for the school group we’d planned the trip with. Besides us and our friends from the Arabic school, the Tunis-Mahdia bus carried a conventional little Tunisian family. The children squealed, the mother shouted unenthusiastically, and the father tried taking a disinterested nap. I was sitting between him and his large wife who, when she wasn’t shouting, tinkered with an evidently new cellphone. The woman smelled like jasmine. Everyone in this bizarre country smells like jasmine. Even I smell like that bright flower here. And they say I usually smell like pain, like chrysanthemum.

  My kisses, the ones I’d kept for you, complained in the meantime, crammed in the bottom of the backpack. I wanted to cover your dry face with their motherly heat. But it was too soon, I had to wait a little while. To distract myself, I pushed them down even further, cruelly. It wasn’t time yet. First I had to finish writing you everything, telling you everything, freeing me once and for all from the shadows of the past.

  We slept, ate, talked, we strolled around town. Early this morning, I saw you heading to the beach with a white-looking girl. With silent steps, I followed close behind you all. And now we’re at the ocean, together, but distant. The girl dove immediately into the water. She vanished for some time. Finally she left us alone. You and I, Mar. A mother and her daughter. I looked around and only saw tombs. I was prepared. Maybe you had told me about this cemetery on the sea. For a while, tombs had been a destination for me. I carried them on my back like a turtle with its shelter. They’re my home, my pain, but in some way they’re also my greatest comfort. They’ve always been there, since the days when I cried on unknown tombs to ease the pain of Ernesto’s loss. I carried you in the womb, Mar, and I cried inconsolably in a Roman cemetery. History had split apart. My cry was an attempt to put it back together.

  It is very beautiful here in Mahdia. We’re together, and the tombs peer out over the sea, like in that Serrat song, A mí enterradme sin duelo entre la playa y el cielo, bury me painlessly between the beach and the sky. Because there is no pain, no duelo in seeing the ocean every day of the year. You can survive death that way, believing that it’s temporary. But Flaca is in Prima Porta, in Rome, and there’s no ocean there. There death is certain, definite, irreversible. Unlike in Mahdia, there’s no possibility of living again in the echo of the waves. I never would’ve expected to see someone die in Rome. People do other things in Rome. One dreams of making love in Rome, or marrying in Rome, or kissing the Pope’s hand in Rome, even though I would never kiss the hand of a religious figure, not even the Pope. I no longer trust them. I don’t like devout people anymore. At least not the ones in high places.

  In Buenos Aires, many bishops knew about the desaparecidos. They knew that people were tortured in the heart of the bustling city. They knew of Esma and the other detention centers. The apostolic nuncio played tennis calmly with Admiral Massera, and his fraternal friendship with the soldiers was well known. I’ve never been devout. Jesus seemed nice enough to me, a hippie with outlandish ideas, a streak of hooliganism or communism in him. Kind of like Flaca, like Ernesto. Jesus was next to them when they were debilitated in the villas miserias. I thought Jesus was blond. It turns out he had the face of the disinherited—our face. In Buenos Aires and in the rest of Argentina, almost no one in the church who mattered resembled him. They were vipers, not people. They committed torture in a way befitting a Christian and assassinated with the Our Father on their lips. Then there was the other church, the one my friend Osvaldo belonged to. He was in the villas miserias with Ernesto. They skinned Osvaldo alive in Esma. His unheard screams, only imagined, still roar inside me.

  You plunged into the Mediterranean. I stayed alone between rocks and tombs. I started reading to pass that interval of solitude.

  “Our men,” the newspaper on my lap read, “are only caricatures.” It was an article on the femicides in Ciudad Juárez. A young Mexican woman ravished, brutalized, killed for Lord knows what reason. A macabre game, perhaps. Every word in the article reminded me of Flaca’s notepads. After her death, Santana and I found them throughout the house. Some writings, some scribbles, some drawings, some colorings. Every page was full. A few were surprisingly lucid. I wish you’d met her, my love, but it didn’t happen. I can only reconstruct her words for you:

  I’ll choose death, Flaca wrote, I’ll ingest liters of corrosive detergent. I’ll be gray when they find me, with rivulets of disinfectant on my face. Coma, hospital, and tubes ending in death. One end. Not the only one. I was finished some time ago. Since the day they loaded me in an unregistered Ford Falcon and separated me from Ernesto. He’d given me a Dylan album the day before. We made love after eating a cream cake. We were clueless. We should’ve been keeping watch, and instead we moaned the entire afternoon and almost through the night. We were young and, in that season of life, death doesn’t seem like a likely alternative to happiness. Our friends, however, were on the edge of nervous breakdowns. No one believed the organization could save them anymore. The organization was no longer there. It was dissolved, liquefied. I kept believing in it. I thought it would take care of us and let us escape. We celebrated my birthday that day.

  Only three days earlier, Marisela, a Montonera friend, had told me, “You’re crazy, Rosa. Haven’t you realized where you live yet?” Where did I live? In Buenos Aires, no? Marisela shook her head. “Buenos Aires has changed, my friend.” She had been in shock since she’d seen a pair of glasses swimming in a pool of blood. The collective had to meet. Marisela was someone who, as the hours and minutes wore on, always got us fighting. That day she was half an hour late. In the meantime, hell broke loose. The Fords sped crazily up and down the block. Everything was in chaos, utter pandemonium. People, objects, dust mites, everything in motion. Gunshots rang out. Marisela hid in a courtyard. Someone let her inside. That was something that never happened at the time. Shortly before entering the unknown house, Marisela saw the collective director’s glasses swimming in a red sea. She was afraid, but she was able to communicate. I was senseless, though. When they came to take me and Ernesto, I thought maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as they said and that people tended to imagine the worst. I had the cyanide capsule with me. What could I do? Swallow it dry? A heroic death? Like that hippie on the cross, Mary’s son, who died for his friends, who died for perfect strangers?

  I wasn’t able to swallow it. They made me spit my capsule out. No martyr for the cause.

  Mahdia. Me, you, and a white girl on the beach. Me, reading about the femicides in Ciudad Juárez. Me, who can’t see any difference between Buenos Aires and Ciudad Juárez, who can’t see differences between Flaca’s pain and Maya’s pain, the girl in the article.

  “The medical report on Maya’s death was clear,” the journalist wrote. “She was a mixed-race girl, twelve years old, who was beaten, strangled, and raped by two mercenaries. Bruises were present on the thighs and torso. Her right eye had been struck with a sharp, pointed object. At the time of her death, she wore a teal tutu and a T-shirt with a smiling Donald Duck. Cigarette burns were found on her skin.”

  Cigarette burns, like Flaca at Esma. She
’d written it in her notepads. But it was the picana that replayed obsessively in every description, every lived excerpt.

  My first picana wasn’t at Esma, she’d written. It was in another place. Maybe at the air force base… I don’t know, it was somewhere with piss-colored walls. An awful place. Or perhaps I thought it was ugly because I was afraid. I remember the walls and a gargantuan space that seemed like a stage. It was like the stage of the Rosario Theater, where I danced for the first time. I did Odette there, the stage adaptation. My knees trembled and I forgot how to stay en pointe. I was sixteen. My instructor, Mrs. Gloria Campora, flicked me twice on the cheek and said, “Fool.” I danced divinely. A splendid Odette.

  I pined for Mrs. Campora in the piss-colored place. She wasn’t there. There was only me on a grimy stage, me and an excessive number of brutes. They shouted disconnected phrases. Daughter of a whore, filthy Montonera, commie piece of shit. Floodlights blinded me, but they put a hood over my head nonetheless, the infamous capucha. They bound me everywhere. I was nude and exposed. My pubic hair, my fear, my breasts. Afterward, they screamed more violently. It was a classic script, violent thugs shouting obscenities. A horror film.

  They removed the capucha. It was the perfect moment to unleash my fear. The spectacle was predictable: someone with an open fly and an erect penis on full display. Multiple rape threats. Being raped didn’t matter to me. I was more worried about the contraption I saw near the torturers. They put a shade over my eyes so I couldn’t see. I felt a hand. A hand that sweetly stroked my hair. Terror. Something I didn’t expect. No one yelled anymore. Just that sweet hand on my hair. “If you talk, nothing will happen to you.” I didn’t expect the hand, the whisper, the pleasing voice. It was a beautiful, fake voice, like a radio broadcaster’s. I was afraid.

  What could I have confessed? I didn’t know anything. I worked in the villas miserias. I danced. They wouldn’t have believed me. They wanted names, dates, places, plans. I had nothing to give them. Wooden table. Me on top of it. Nude, always. Tied, always. More insults. Another table. The sensation was like wire mesh. They splashed water on me. Those sons of bitches wanted to make me feel more pain with every electric shock. They kept giving it to me, like a cutlet in oil. I sizzled everywhere. Bowels, eyes, nose, vagina, lips, torso, big toes. I lost my senses. When I awoke, they began again. It was one session, maybe the longest. They threw me in a cell. “Don’t drink,” they said and left me there for a while.

  There was a guy, a man, or maybe a ghost. He didn’t speak. He shook. I thought I would’ve preferred being raped. At least I expected that. When it happened, months later, I didn’t feel much pain. I was almost cooperative with the green, the soldier who climbed on top of me. In the cell that first day, I heard the screams of the others tortured after me. I also heard the shouts of my companions as they were subjected to their torture sessions. I never entirely got used to it. It’s horrible hearing a man slaughtered. I was alone in that piss-colored place. They took the trembling man immediately. I had no one, not even that ghost to take my hand. At Esma when I was in the sótano there was always a shoulder I could lean on, someone who supported me in our absurd predicament, in the moment when they slaughtered another human being. I felt powerless. I couldn’t save anyone. I couldn’t save myself.

  I liked remembering Flaca’s language. A savory language. Her Spanish flowed from the heights of the Andes, contaminated. Adulterated with the sweetness of Cervantes’s dialect. It drifted like a comet between confused and intact letters. Like you, Mar, Flaca was a puzzle of sounds. And maybe like me. We speak the language of the frontier, of continuous crossings. How many languages are within us? Do you know, my sweet girl? I can guess, but I don’t really know how many languages we’re made of. Certainly the ancestral Indian language is inside us, the language of Coatlaxopeuh, of fertility. Then there is the language of history, Spanish exported with blood and deceit. But in our mouths it changed. I feel it. We refined and animated it. It is no longer the language rolled up by the compact consonants of the world’s beginning. It becomes air and stars, sun and moon. It becomes flesh. It lives. It becomes something else, a secret language spoken since childhood, a language to communicate with the angels.

  How many languages did Flaca speak? In the end, not even she knew anymore, my poor friend. She sputtered. The tragedy made her permanently lose the ability to speak with any coherence. In moments of calm, she wrote in her notebooks. They held her mouth open, my poor Flaca, and poured sperm and cigarette butts inside. She wrote it in her notebooks. She often drew her mouth filled with trash. It was as though they had cut out her tongue. When she spoke in Rome, I struggled to recognize her. I had to watch for a while to make sure it was truly her. It wasn’t my Flaca from before, from more beautiful times. It was an altogether different woman, someone I didn’t understand well. The bastards had stolen her sounds. They had robbed her of everything. Poor Flaca couldn’t even shout or condemn. Con cara fea le han cortado su alma, su voz. No tiene voz, mi Flaca. With hideous faces they ripped out her soul, her voice. She didn’t have a voice anymore, my Flaca.

  Now I, Miranda, your mother, a woman, write. I transform my cry into a language, into rebellion. Before, I was out of focus. Your mother, Miranda, the poetess, was blurry. Almost useless. I couldn’t see myself or make myself seen. Now that I’ve told you about Flaca, my greatest love, my image reappears. I am here, a reaparecida. I feel magisterial. Soon your mother will give you all the kisses she crammed into her backpack.

  Our path, yours and mine, must now face the sun.

  THE PESSOPTIMIST

  Vehicles cruised on the street toward the Istunka, the bludgeon fest.

  The street was filled with Mogadishu’s people. A blaze of vans, Fiats, Land Rovers, hajikamsin, public buses. People were gathered like ripe grape clusters and happily overflowing on poorly tarmacked roads.

  “Think about it, Zuhra, the Italians boast so much about having paved the streets, but in all honesty they’re like big blocks of Swiss cheese. Like everything else they made, I mean. From Mogadishu to Afgooye, the holes were little more than pitch.”

  The memories rolled through Maryam Laamane’s mind. A determined, emphatic, poignant stroll. Sitting on the wicker mat in Rome, in 2006, Maryam could still make out the sound of the seventies, the sound her shoulder blades made every time Hirsi’s modified 500 went up against one of the holes the Italians hadn’t cared to plug.

  It was a great trip, except her cousin’s wife, Manar, almost ruined it with an announcement about Bushra’s son.

  Yes, a decidedly good journey had brought Howa and Maryam to the Afgooye Istunka. The fresh breeze that entered through the small car windows cooled them, and belting their favorite songs wasn’t a bad touch. Maryam Laamane liked music, but her tastes were different from those of her friend. Howa preferred the Italian melodic school. Maryam, on the other hand, was all about syncopated, modern rhythms. She liked the Americans. She liked Sam Cooke and Wilson Pickett. Their voices didn’t sound foreign to her. She didn’t understand anything they were saying, but she figured her skin couldn’t have been that far removed from those notes.

  Maryam mangled more than she sang. She mumbled the basic melodies and made up the words entirely, but the girl gave it her all. In her own way, she tried repeating everything her idols said. She imagined herself with them, in a rhinestone dress on a gilded stage, in front of many perfumed people who were there to see her. The theater in her dreams was always the Apollo in Harlem. There was a large photograph of that theater in the record store near the American embassy. Maryam was fascinated by it. When she was sad, she only had to think about the Apollo to make her smile again. The owner of the store, the only guy in all of Mogadishu who sold imported records, had told her something and Maryam engraved it on her heart: “That’s where they make dreams, girl. The dreams are black like the color of our skin. Free dreams. Do you know what that means?”

  Those were times of independence and still no one knew what be
ing free truly meant. Maryam shook her head, clutching the vinyl she’d just purchased to her chest. The owner merely smiled. Concerned, Maryam wondered why the hell he didn’t explain it to her. The owner had a nice long, pointy beard. He stroked it casually. “It’s all in a yeaah!”

  Maryam was perplexed. “I didn’t catch that,” she said.

  “You are free only if you say yes, yes, yeaah, without anyone telling you to. Do you understand? When you hear a yeaah in a song, put your whole heart into saying it. That’s your liberty. Remember that.”

  That’s why every time she muttered, “Bring It on Home to Me” she shouted all the song’s yeaahs with exaggerated fury. She liked that song because of the love it contained. Years later, in the dark ages of Siad Barre, when her husband was persecuted and they were in the government’s bad graces, humming the song was all she needed to stop feeling pain and to believe in life again.

  She and Elias were still together. He called her Darling and she told him I love you. The dictatorship formed around them. When they lived in Somalia, the dictatorship had been christened “scientific socialism,” then after their exile, Siad Barre’s socialism had miraculously become “capitalism,” aided by a retinue of corrupt Italians and Americans. That was the age of the Garoe-Bosaso expressway, when Somalia was doused in toxic waste. The dictatorship changed form, but not substance. There was too much suffering from the start. To resist, Maryam sang her freedom in a yeaah. She sang for Elias and Zuhra, too.

  On that muggy day in the seventies, Maryam didn’t think she’d have to deal with a frightening military dictatorship. Maryam didn’t think anything. She didn’t know, for instance, that she would marry the son of the much-feared seamstress Bushra. She didn’t know that she would love him more than she loved herself, that she would have a daughter named Zuhra, that labor would last forty-nine hours, that exile was waiting around the corner, that those impertinent jinn in Rome would cast a malign spell on her with a transparent bottle, that when she was old she would participate in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and that thanks to a therapist named Rosanna she would save her life and her daughter’s as well. Her mind was free that day, like the full-throated yeaahs she sang.