TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY MARIE ORTON

 

 

Of all the years I’ve spent in Italy, I wouldn’t know which one is to blame for what’s happening to me now. I know I should decide once and for all; I should cut the umbilical cord that binds me to this bad habit, this sort of sickness. I can’t even remember how it all started, though it must have been after I returned to Togo from Italy.

“Italy!” In those days just thinking of the possibility was like touching the sky. For years my brother Fofo had been promising that, he’d bring me to Europe with him. I don’t even know how to describe my joy when that long-awaited letter arrived. My cousin who lived in the city brought the letter to us, since his mailbox served as the refugium peccatorum for all of the correspondence from our relatives and everyone else in the village.

My father was reluctant.

“A girl traveling to the Whites’ country all alone! Don’t even think about it!”

My mother took my side.

“She’s not going alone, she’s going to meet her brother!” When her husband repeated: “Don’t even think about it!” she nodded at me to leave the room, and that nod comforted me because, appearances aside, I knew who wore the pants in our house.

The very next day my mother took me to the market to buy a suitcase, some second-hand slacks, and my father went to town to get all the documents required for the trip.

The night before leaving I saw tender tears mark my mother’s face and I had a fleeting sense of guilt, knowing that I was leaving her alone to do all the work in the fields and the house. Papa withdrew into a defensive silence until the last moment, then, while saying goodbye, he put a talisman of inlaid leather into my hand with a shell and muttered, “Take care of yourself.”

Italy! God, the cold! I never imagined it could be so cutting. My lips chapped, my fingers froze, and my skin took on that lizard gray color, though I slathered myself with coconut lotion. The first night was infernal; I spent it in a hotel in Rome where my brother had made a reservation for me: I was half-frozen, lying on top of the bed as I used to do on the mat at home, not knowing that I was supposed to crawl under the sheets. Fofo explained it the next day and laughed at me when he picked me up at the station in Bergamo.

My brother sent for me to look after his children and take care of the house because he and his wife both worked. He, his Italian wife, and their two children lived in Torre Boldone, a little town not far from Bergamo where he was a doctor. They’d prepared a room for me in the basement. It was obvious that they were doing well, even though I saw that my brother was a little henpecked.  Just like my mother, his wife was the one in charge, only more overtly so.

It was difficult at first to communicate with my sister-in-law and niece and nephew because I couldn’t understand the language and my brother refused to act as translator.

The one thing he immediately did do was give me a set of rules: keep my room clean, wear the “house skates” when I went into the living room, don’t take a shower every day because the heating costs were high, don’t leave the lights on over the stairs or in the bathroom, don’t take three hours to finish the ironing, don’t speak our language, and keep the volume low on my “African funeral music.” Included in this list of commandments was the prohibition on preparing foods that took too long to cook and especially foods that filled the house for days with the aroma of spices (“that stink”).

I spent days agonizing over my mistakes, like crunching on the bones during a meal, something that my brother loved to do back home. Why was it that here it seemed to call up some sense of shame for him?

I didn’t know my brother anymore: he let his children call him by his first name as if he were some school friend. He and his wife gave into them for everything, they even had to beg those kids to eat meat! They were spoiled rotten. For myself, I would raise my children right (I wanted to have at least six as we do in Africa) and teach them obedience and respect. I didn’t like how children talked back to their parents here.

I smile now recalling all of this, at my shock when I first saw my nephew throw one of his temper tantrums because a “little skin” had formed over his milk. When I saw my brother get up, I was happy, thinking of the well-deserved smack he was going to give the boy, but instead, he simply took a spoon to remove the skin and beg the boy, “Come on, sweetie, just drink a little more!”

Horrified! I was completely horrified!

I had to take care of those kids, but I could not get them to mind me. One day when I was beside myself, I screamed at them in my language and they burst out laughing, literally aping my “African talk” with “Abuga bongo bingo!”

“And yet,” I thought bitterly, “this is the language of their father’s fathers!” But I didn’t say another word to them. I didn’t know how to act anymore. My sister-in-law made me feel like an intruder, she looked at me suspiciously because, out of politeness, I never looked at her in the eyes when I talked to her. One day I heard her tell a friend on the phone that I was sneaky and hypocritical.

My dream of Europe was quickly mutating into a nightmare, too cold, too little time, and then the indifference, the loneliness.

I spent more and more time locked in my room to cocoon myself in memories. I quickly used up the sack of cassava flour and peanuts that my mother had slipped into my suitcase. I couldn’t adjust to always eating pasta: even though they said there was a huge difference between tortellini, bucatini, spaghetti, and lasagna, to me it was all pasta. I wanted to taste la pate[1] with a hearty sauce of gombo and chicken with a lot of hot pepper, taste it with my hands, take smoking hot handfuls, mince it well, roll it into a ball and press a deep indentation with my thumb in order to easily gather up all the sauce before swallowing it, then lick my fingers deliciously and crunch on a piece of bone.

I smile today at my shame when my body first saw the moon there and I didn’t know what absorbent pads were (I’d brought pieces of cloth with me), or my first adventure buying pantyhose, not knowing that they came in different sizes, colors, and prices.

I still see as if it were yesterday, the alarmed face of my sister-in-law when she saw me pull my first attempt at doing laundry out of the washing machine—sweaters that were knotted up and white shirts and underwear had turned pink or were spotted with purple.

I owe my survival to Conception, a Filipino girl who was the housekeeper for the family next door and who spoke a little French. We first saw each other from our balconies while I was trying to beat a carpet, then we met doing the shopping at the supermarket. She’d been in Italy for the past five years and her friendship and her advice were like manna in the desert.

With her, I quickly learned the language, how to cook Italian dishes, and how to keep the house better. I worked quickly so I would have time left to read or watch TV. And very quickly, I learned to appreciate the food. I tried to assimilate as much as possible, to completely forget who I was. With time I became more demanding. I wanted my brother to let me go out every so often, I wanted my day off, just like Conception, I wanted money to send a present to my mother or to buy clothes that I liked and not just take my sister-in-law’s hand-me-downs. In the arguments born out of this, my brother and I both made accusations I never would have thought possible. He said, “You are ungrateful!” when I told him that I’d found a place working for an elderly woman in Bergamo because I wanted to be independent. At first, he’d shout. “If we’d wanted to pay for a babysitter or housekeeper, we didn’t need to bring you all the way from Africa, you know!” Then when he saw the firmness of my decision, he played the emotional card, “So you don’t care that you’re leaving when we need you, you’d abandon your niece and nephew, you only pretended to care about them! You are completely heartless!”

I alone know what it cost me to leave my brother, resisting the temptation to embrace him, trying to explain to him that I could not come all the way to Europe without at least trying to accomplish something on my own; unlike him, I dreamed of going home someday and creating something of my own, that I didn’t want to be a servant in a foreign country my entire life.

So one spring day when the morning air stung my face and nostrils, and nature was rising from her dark lethargy with the sprouting of the plants and the sweet birdsong of freedom, I made my flight toward independence. I went to live just outside of Bergamo with Maria, an elderly lady who cleared my residency with the police and got me all of the documents to stay in the country legally. Meanwhile, I enrolled in a sewing course and saved my money in order to buy a sewing machine all my own.

After the first period of anger passed and after a letter from our father, my brother came to visit me unbeknownst to his wife. There at my new house, I found again the Fofo I had always known; we spoke out our own language, I cooked our food for him, hot and spicy, which he scooped up with his hands and swallowed greedily…with his hands, he snapped bones with his teeth and sucked out the marrow, making an infernal noise, and I even heard him laugh as we do at home, a belly laugh, and talk, and remember people and events from our village. One day watching him let loose and dance to the rhythm of our traditional music, I laughed at him, “Doctor, if your patients could just see you now!”

And he laughed, “They would say, ‘And yet you seemed like one of us!”

He left with a light heart and with the ironic glint in his eye of someone who’d had fun betraying himself.

My friend Conception came to visit me every other Sunday and together we’d fantasize about everything we wanted to accomplish once we’d returned home permanently. My idea was to start a co-op of tailors and make European-style clothes with African fabrics, maybe even to sell to the big distributors in Europe . . . .

I also had the opportunity to meet other compatriots and started speaking with the other Africans that I met on the street. Some came to visit me, because I was lucky enough to have my own apartment on the first floor of the house where we could be together and braid hair, listen to music without disturbing anyone, talk out loud. Our meetings were my only chance to show off my flashy bubu.

Signora Maria was genuinely kind. One night while we were embroidering the thousandth doily and as I bent over the lace pillow with tired eyes, she confided in me that we had brought light and the joy of living back into her house even though initially, seeing us talking and gesturing from a distance, it looked like we were arguing.

One day Fofo found me at home with some of my girlfriends dancing to a piece of music from our country. When he arrived, a silence fell out of respect but also full of reproof because many considered him a traitor. Not so much, because he’d married a white woman, but because, they said, he’d become like the Whites: cold and indifferent toward his people, as if he were ashamed of his origins. And also no one understood why, with all the room he had in his big house, he never organized an occasional evening to dance, not even on important holidays. He felt uncomfortable and after a little while he ran off with the excuse of needing to see a patient. From then on, he started to call before stopping by, as they do in Europe. I’m not defending him, but I understood that he’d made the choice to stay permanently in Italy; to keep peace in his family, he’d sunk to making personal compromises.

Knowing my sister-in-law, I understand that he couldn’t bring “people” home with no warning as we do at home or invite them to lunch or dinner or even to spend the night. Here everything is different. At home, being used to big families and the fact that we eat just one course, usually with a sauce for a base, it’s easy to heat up a little more, or to stir some pate in a pan or crush up some fufu[2] to make room for one more guest around the table. Some people blamed my sister-in-law, but I believe it’s the pace of life here that dilutes feelings, devouring life and people. And if it was fine with him like this, as he confided to me one day, it should be fine with us, as he claimed he had the right to live his life as an individual and not as part of a collective as African solidarity required, and besides, he didn’t feel obligated to associate with someone simply because that person was Black or came from Africa.

“Here in Europe,” he pontificated, “everyone must think of himself, end of story. I only feel a duty toward my close relatives and only if they are in need and are deserving.”

Clearly, I didn’t share his point of view. I only replied, “Fofo, this country, this fog, it’s not for me. I miss the sunshine, the holidays in the village, the weather, the laughter, living together with others.”

And still, I went on working, saving, suffocating my homesickness with a single goal: returning home and opening my tailor shop.

Then two years ago, with a lump in my throat I embraced Signora Maria who had been so good to me, knowing that my departure corresponded with her entering a nursing home. Holding back my growing tears with difficulty, I said good-bye to my brother, to Conception and all my friends and I went “home” with my suitcase full of gifts, plates, and silverware, and a dream to fulfill.

After returning to Togo, the first week evaporated away before I understood that I could no longer live in the village where there were no lights and no running water, as I had become used to certain conveniences. I could no longer even start a decent conversation with my girlfriends from before; by now they had gotten married and some already had two or three children and I felt that they envied me maliciously. My aging parents insisted that they wanted to choose a man for me to marry, but I had already decided on the liberated life of a single person; I didn’t want to be any man’s servant and even less did I want to give up my plans.

I decided to move to the city, partly to avoid the daily assault by swarms of relatives who came asking for something, and partly because the heat, the flies, and the mosquitoes had become unbearable to me and I needed to live in an atmosphere that was air conditioned, clean, and calm.

The first year was not very easy, but slowly I managed to build up a steady clientele and one of my clients, Sonia, who had her hair styling salon opposite my shop, had become my confidant. Sonia is a shapely girl, nice and determined; she returned from Germany where she’d worked in escort business and came back to invest all of her savings in her salon.

Now things are going better for me.

Honestly, I would have to say, things would go even better for me now if it weren’t for this strange sense of restlessness that every now and again invades me down to my very bones. In moments like that,  I take my car, I go downtown and look around the shops, I go to the grocery store and buy some spaghetti, some cans of tomatoes, some meat imported from France, some taleggio cheese, then I go home to cook it all up and invite Sonia to come and have dinner with me. Sometimes we go to have a cocktail at the Gattobar and then we run out to devour a pizza Da Silvia, then finish off the evening we go see some nice movie starring Mastroianni and Sofia Loren. Sometimes we stay at my house and look at all of my photos from when I was “home” in Italy, listening to the songs from the Festival of Sanremo, the music of Baglioni, Ramazzotti, or Zucchero.

Sundays, I drive all the way across the city to attend Mass in the parish with the Combonian missionary priests so I can talk with them a little in Italian afterwards.

Sometimes it’s Sonia who invites me to have a beer at the Bavaria, the tavern for the German sailors, whom she astonishes with her perfect German, then we go to her house to eat sausage with sauerkraut and mustard and dance Viennese waltzes.

I don’t know how to explain this weakness, this mania that I can’t seem to get rid of, and which even makes me root for the Azzurri[3] when there is an international soccer match. Once after an Italy vs. Germany game, Sonia and I didn’t speak to each other for a week.

Ah, Italy! To think that in Italy I wanted so much to go home! Now I feel like a tenant in two countries: sometimes I’m happy for that, other times I feel divided, a little unbalanced, as if a part of me remained there, and yet I know that there I would still have suffered from “mal di Africa.”

Maybe it’s just nostalgia, or maybe it’s “mal di . . . mal di . . . Europa.”[4]

 

---

[1] A white polenta prepared without salt.

[2] A West African dish made from mashed yams, cassava roots, and/or plantains

[3] National soccer team of Italy

[4] The term “mal d’Africa” was used by Italians to express nostalgia for a colonial life, or for the exotic life, they had in Africa.

---

Also, read a book review of I’m Your Poet: Selected Poems by Nilim Kumar, reviewed by Aritra Sanyal, and published in The Antonym:

---

Follow The Antonym’s Facebook page and Instagram account for more content and exciting updates.