Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (10 page)

S
unday June 4, 10:33
P.M.
I’m like a newborn, I need milk every day. Italian is my daily milk. Stefania is life; that is, the present and the future. I love Stefania because she is closely attached to life, I adore her memory free of nightmares. I want to be infected by life, love, future, and a happy wail. Auuuuuuuuu . . .

Monday November 17, 11:57
P.M.

So many people consider their work a daily punishment. Whereas I love my work as a translator. Translation is a journey over a sea from one shore to the other. Sometimes I think of myself as a smuggler: I cross the frontiers of language with my booty of words, ideas, images, and metaphors.

Wednesday September 29, 11:09
P.M.

Poor Stefania, she’s worried about me, she thinks I’m suffering from stomach pains. The problem is that the stomach of my memory hasn’t yet digested everything I swallowed before coming to Rome. Memory is just like a stomach. Every so often it makes me vomit. I vomit memories of blood non-stop. I have an ulcer in my memory. Is there a cure? Yes: wailing! Auuuuuuuuu . . .

Sunday March 9, 11:17
P.M.

Today I finished reading Amin Maalouf’s novel
Leo Africanus
. I reread this passage over and over until I knew it by heart:“ I, Hassan, son of Muhammad the weigh-master, I, Jean-Leon de’ Medici, circumcised at the hand of a barber and baptized at the hand of a Pope, I am now called the African, but I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia . . . I’m the son of the road. My country is the caravan. My life the most unexpected of voyages.” It’s marvelous to be able to free ourselves from the chains of identity which lead us to ruin. Who am I? Who are you? Who are they? These are pointless and stupid questions.

Thursday November 18, 10:51
P.M.

Stefania is very pleased at having started teaching Italian to the Bangladeshi women. Yesterday she said to me, “Soon we’ll establish the first Bangladeshi feminist organization in Italy!” I told her that that wasn’t the agreement. She laughed, adding, “Don’t you remember that Louis Aragon quote? ‘Woman is the future of man.’” I said, “Soon I’ll be like
le fou d’Elsa:
Stefania’s madman.” I love Stefania because she is my future.

Thursday February 2, 11:13
P.M.

Today I started reading the aphorisms of Emil Cioran. I was struck by this one: “We inhabit not a country but a language.” Is the Italian language my new dwelling place? Auuuuuu . . .

Saturday October 24, 10:45
P.M.

Stefania is never tired of seeing
The Sheikh,
with Rudolf Valentino. I’ve seen her weep sometimes, with emotion. Maybe it reminds her of her father, who died in a drilling accident in Libya several years ago. Her father was an expert at finding oil. Stefania believes that the word “expert” was his curse. She always says to me that the Sahara has no pity for those who do not show respect for it.

Thursday June 24, 10:57
P.M.

The damn nightmare is pursuing me. Stefania told me this morning that I cried out in my sleep and that I kept repeating the name Bagia. I didn’t want to tell her the details. It’s pointless for her to join the game of nightmares. My memory is wounded and bloody: I have to heal the wounds of the past in solitude. A shame, Bagia shows up only in nightmares, wrapped in a bloodstained sheet. Oh, this open wound that will never heal! I have no consolation but wailing. Auuuuuu . . .

Sunday March 30, 11:48
P.M.

This morning I reread the novel
The
Invention of the Desert
by the Algerian writer Tahar Djaout. I paused for a long time on this sentence: “Happy people have neither age nor memory, they have no need of the past.” I’m going to wail all night long in search of consolation: Auuuuu . . .

W
hy did he call himself Amedeo? That’s the question that leaves me so perplexed. His real name is Ahmed, which is a precious name, because it’s one of the names of the prophet Mohammed—it’s mentioned both in the Koran and in the Gospels. Frankly I don’t much appreciate people who change their name or deny their origins: for example, my name is Abdallah, and I know perfectly well that it’s a difficult name for Italians to pronounce, but in spite of that I’ve sworn not to change it as long as I live. I don’t want to disobey my father, who gave me this name, or God, who forbids us to disobey our parents. Changing your name is a capital crime, like murder, adultery, bearing false witness, like stealing from orphans. Many Italians I know have tried to persuade me to change my name, proposing a series of Italian names like Alessandro, Francesco, Massimiliano, Guido, Mario, Luca, Pietro, and others, but I have resolutely refused. The problem doesn’t end there. Some have used a trick that’s very common in Rome, which consists of eliminating the first or second part of a name. So I’ve been called Abd, which means “slave,” or even Allah! I’ve asked forgiveness from God because He forgives all sins except polytheism. I’ve tried to keep my composure as I explain to them that all men, including the prophets and the messengers of God, are His servants, and so my name has nothing to do with the kind of slavery that was everywhere in the time of Kunta Kinte. So I found myself caught between two fires: either fall into the trap of polytheism every time someone called me Allah or endure the insults of those who called me Abd. Finally I found a way out of this impasse, thanks to my Egyptian friend Metwali, who advised me to make a small change in my name. He told me that the Egyptians have a custom of calling Abdu people whose name begins with Abd: Abdrahman, Abdalkarim, Abdkader, Abdrahim, Abdjabar, Abdhakim, Abdsabour, Abdaraouf. I agreed, because this solution avoided the problems I’ve mentioned. Unfortunately there are some people who have first and last names steeped in polytheism. Take Iqbal, the Bangladeshi. I’ve told him many times that his last name, Amir Allah, is polytheistic. If he knew Arabic, he would understand that there is no difference between Amir Allah and Amir “superior to Allah.” God save us from Satan!

I will not change my skin, or my religion, or my country, or my name, for any reason. I’m proud of myself, I’m not like those immigrants who change their name to please the Italians. Take the Tunisian who works in the restaurant Luna at the station. His real name is Mohsen, but he’s had himself called, or they called him, Massimiliano. God says in the Koran: “Jews and Christians will not accept you until you follow their religion.” God the Great is right. I can’t bear it when people deny their origins. You know the story of the donkey who when he’s asked, Who is your father?, answers, “The horse is my uncle”? You know about the crow that wanted to imitate the dove’s way of walking and, after various futile attempts, decides to go back to his natural way and at that point discovers that he no longer remembers it?

Amedeo is from my neighborhood. I know him very well, just as I know his whole family. His younger brother was one of my dearest friends, my schoolmate and playmate. Ahmed was a person who was loved and respected in the neighborhood. I don’t recall that he ever fought, although there were frequent brawls among gangs, which are a widespread phenomenon in the neighborhoods of Algiers. Ahmed’s troubles began when his fiancée, Bagia, died; she was the neighbors’ daughter. Ahmed had loved her since he was a child, and wanted to marry her, but unfortunately things turned out differently. Bagia, which in Arabic means “joy,” is a female name, and a name, too, for Algiers.

One day Bagia went to see her sister in Boufarik, not far from Algiers, and on the way back the bus was stopped by terrorists who had set up a fake checkpoint, passing themselves off as police. They cut the throats of all the passengers except the girls. Bagia tried to flee, to avoid being raped, so they shot her in a burst of machine-gun fire. Ahmed couldn’t accept that tragedy. He shut himself in the house for days, then he disappeared. In the neighborhood various hypotheses made the rounds: some said that he had enlisted in the army, seeking revenge against the fundamentalists, some maintained that he had joined the armed fighters in the mountains as a sign of rejection and condemnation of the state, some said that he had gone off to join a Sufi sect in the Sahara and live like the Tuareg, and finally someone said that Ahmed had gone mad and was wandering, naked, through the streets. One neighbor even assured his family that he had recognized Ahmed at the station in Annaba, in the eastern part of the country, waiting for a train to Tunisia. I never understood why his family didn’t resort to a well-known television show,
Everything Is Possible
, which looks for missing people. One day I asked his mother, Aunt Fatma Zohra, for news of Ahmed, and she said sharply, “He’s outside.” The word “outside” has a thousand meanings: outside of reason, outside of Algiers, outside the law, outside the charity of his parents, outside the grace of God. I preferred not to insist and left the cover on the well, as our old proverb goes.

Then one day I saw him in the market in Piazza Vittorio, where I sell fish: I called to him, “Ahmed! Ahmed!,” but he didn’t respond. It seemed to me that he was pretending not to recognize me. Finally he greeted me, but coldly. He was with an Italian woman, only later did I find out that she was his wife. We met often at the Bar Dandini. He wasn’t enthusiastic about hearing the latest news from Algeria, so I decided to avoid talking to him on subjects that had to do with our country—I didn’t want to upset him. I didn’t even dare to advise him to give up the name Amedeo and return to his original name, Ahmed, which is the name of the Prophet, peace be upon him. It’s said that returning to one’s origins is a virtue!

Ahmed or Amedeo—as you call him—worked at the Supreme Court in Algiers as a translator from French into Arabic. He had bought an apartment in Bab Azouar for him and Bagia to live in after their marriage, but destiny held another life in store for him. As you see, the story of Ahmed Salmi is simple, it’s not that complicated. The truth is different, it’s not what you thought up to now. There are no particular secrets, no twisted events in his life before he settled in Rome.

I’ve sold fish for years, and I find no difference between the lives of fish and the lives of immigrants. I know a proverb that the Italians often repeat: “Guests are like fish, after three days they stink.” The immigrant is a guest, no more or less, and, like fish, you eat him when he’s fresh and throw him in the garbage when he loses his color. There are two types of immigrants: the fresh ones, who are exploited inhumanly in the factories of the north or the agricultural lands of the south, and the frozen, who fill the freezers and are used only in an emergency. You know what Gianfranco, the owner of the shop where I work, calls the girls from Eastern Europe who sell their bodies for a little money: fresh fish!

Gianfranco is over sixty, he is married and has four children older than me. His favorite hobby is to drive out on the Appia Antica at night in search of girls from Nigeria or Eastern Europe, girls who are at most twenty and often much younger. So he spends a peaceful hour with the fresh fish—so he calls the girl of the moment—before returning to the arms of his wife, whom he makes fun of with his friends, calling her a frozen fish, who always needs a little time to thaw and warm up before being consumed. Gianfranco, or the Pig—as his friends call him—likes to sit in front of the shop all day with them and, before the astonished gaze of his customers, recount in detail his adventures of the night before. Often enthusiastic laughter greets him, followed by obscene comments like “Gianfranco, you’re a pig! Gianfranco, you’re a fat pig!” And the cad isn’t bothered by that odious nickname, because the pig is the symbol of virility in Italy. In fact, he’s proud of it!

I haven’t changed the subject, I’m still talking about Ahmed. If I heard someone call me Pig I would cut out his tongue, because the pig or
halouf
—as we call it—is hateful and has nothing to do with virility and masculinity. In fact, it’s the worst insult. The pig is a dirty animal, it lives in the garbage. I don’t understand why there hasn’t been an outbreak of mad-pig disease. Why has that dangerous disease affected only cows? It’s a perplexing question.

In Rome there is the Termini station. “Termini” means terminal, the journey is over. There’s something strange about this city. It’s very difficult to leave. Maybe the water in the fountains is mixed with a special substance that has magical origins.

Have you seen the difference between us and them? Ahmed hasn’t grasped the substantial differences between our religion and Gianfranco’s. I can still remember the fear that struck me when I heard people call him Amedeo. I was afraid he had renounced Islam. I didn’t hesitate an instant, I asked him with distress and concern, “Ahmed, have you converted to Christianity?” And he answered serenely, “No.” I sighed deeply and said aloud, “Praise be to God! Praise be to God!” My fears were legitimate, because usually someone who changes his name has embraced a new religion, like the famous English singer Cat Stevens who had people call him Yousef Islam right after his conversion.

Don’t you see what the newspapers are saying about Ahmed? As soon as they discovered that he was an immigrant and not an Italian they didn’t hesitate to accuse him of murder. Certainly, Ahmed made a mistake by swimming outside his natural harbor. His disappearance reminds me so much of his disappearance years ago, which caused such dismay in our neighborhood. The question is the same today: what happened to Ahmed, or Amedeo—as you call him?

S
aturday March 25, 10:56
P.M.
What’s the difference between a dove and a raven? Am I a raven that wants to imitate a dove? What is wailing? There are two types of wailing, one for grief and one for happiness. Many of the alienated immigrants hugging their bottles of wine and beer in the gardens in Piazza Vittorio never stop wailing sadly, because the wolf’s bite is painful. Every so often the wailing is like weeping. I, on the other hand, wail with joy, immense joy. I suckle on the wolf with the two orphans Romulus and Remus. I adore the wolf, I can’t do without her milk.

Monday January 21, 11:15
P.M.

When he called out to me—“Ahmed!”—I didn’t recognize him right away. I felt a hand on my shoulder and I tried to remember. “I’m Abdallah, from your neighborhood. Your brother Farid’s friend.” I barely remembered the neighborhood, my brother Farid, Algeria. Greeting me he said, “I’ll see you next Friday at the big mosque, then we’ll go together to a Moroccan restaurant nearby to eat couscous.” At that point I remembered how once, overwhelmed by homesickness for couscous, I went to an Arabic restaurant, and after a few bites I threw up. Only afterward did it occur to me that couscous is like mother’s milk, and has a special odor that has to be inhaled accompanied by hugs and kisses.

Wednesday September 5, 11:27
P.M.

It’s sad spending Ramadan far away from Bagia! What’s the point of giving up eating and drinking, only to eat alone? Where is the voice of the muezzin? Where is the
buraq
? Where is the couscous that Mama prepared with her own hands? Where is the
qalb alluz
? Where is the
zlabia
? Where is the
harira
? Where is the
maqrout
? How can I forget the nights of Ramadan in the neighborhood, and coming home late? Mama’s voice full of tenderness, the love that charmed my ears: “My son, it’s time for the
suhur
.” The month of Ramadan, the Little Feast, the Big Feast, and the other feasts fill my heart with anxiety. People say: “Why don’t you go to the big mosque in Rome for the prayers for the Big Feast?” No, thank you. I don’t want to see hundreds of needy people like me, needy for the odor of their loved ones.

Friday October 25, 11:22
P.M.

Tomorrow the end of Ramadan is celebrated. Of course my mother will weep because of my absence. On days like this the distance increases and the warmth of the feelings of our loved ones grows cold. I’ll call her tomorrow with good wishes, as I always do on these occasions. I know she’ll reproach me a little at first, as she always does, then she’ll pray for me. How I long to hear her say these words: “Ahmed, my son, may your feast be blessed and may you be well every year.”

Tuesday March 20, 11:15
P.M.

I have the flu, I can’t get up. Illness stirs up the devil of homesickness, or the beast—as we call it—that is the fear of dying: dying far from the eyes of our dear ones, dying alone, dying far from our mother. “How can I tell my mother I’m afraid?” De André wonders in a song of his. Isn’t eternal rest a return to the mother’s womb? What anguish is a tomb that holds your remains in exile! Auuuuuuu . . .

Saturday April 26, 2:14
A.M.

The guest of the shadows woke me a little while ago, the same nightmare that visits every so often. I can’t get back to sleep. What is the nightmare? The nightmare is a fierce dog. My grandfather was a peasant, who never left his village in the mountains of Djurdjura, and he would say to me, “When a dog sniffs you, don’t run away, stand still and look him in the eye. You’ll see, he’ll back off. Instead, if you run away he’ll run after you and bite you.” I don’t run away from my nightmares. I look them in the face, remembering all the details. I challenge them fearlessly, because the toilet is the nightmare’s tomb. Here’s the nightmare in its full version:

I see . . . I see myself emerging from the hole of life covered with blood. The hearts of my relatives are pounding. Courage, mama! My mother fights the birth pains, struggles to lift her head. Before drying my tears and planting the first kisses on my red cheeks, my mother glances with anguish and anxiety below my navel. Now she heaves a long sigh. God and the saints have heard her prayer.

“
Dhakar! Dhakar! Dhakar!
”
[2]

“Yuuuuyuuuuuyuuuuuuuuuuu…”

So I greet life with tears, and it, life, welcomes me with
zagharid
.
[3]
It doesn’t matter if the newborn
dhakar
is handsome or not. It doesn’t matter if the newborn is healthy or sick. It doesn’t matter if the unborn child . . . it doesn’t matter . . . it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is a
dhakar
. What matters is that I am a
dhakar
. Rather, what counts in the end is not me. What really counts is my
dhakar
.

I see . . . I see my
dhakar
or the
dhakar
of my family grow until the moment of circumcision. I will see my blood flow and I’ll curse the
zagharid
that suffocate my sobs. I’ll remember the
zagharid
of birth again, and again see my blood falling, drop by drop, on the ground. Why did they cut the throat of the
dhakar
? They call it the festival of purification! For them singing, dancing, and joy; for me pain, tears, and suffering: what hurts me is the fact that I wasn’t consulted. But to whom does the
dhakar
belong, me or them? I’ll watch the
dhakar
grow, and its secret activities. And quickly the small red head will enter public life with marriage. So my
dhakar
gets married and I’m in trouble. On the wedding night my hatred for those who tricked me will increase.

I see . . . I see myself alone before the wall of virginity. The Chinese wall! The mountains of the Himalayas! How I grieve for the lost years! They told me that adultery is punished with a hundred lashes. They fought me with all their weapons: God, the prophets, the saints, religion, custom, good behavior, people’s opinion, AIDS. So we went into the ring like two fighters at their first match. She is afraid and I am, too. The advice, the recommendations will remain outside our bedroom. But she is more afraid than I am. I screw up my courage with a glass or two and some cigarettes. What do I say to her? I won’t say anything. My words will encourage her and weaken me. Victim or executioner! There is no other choice. She won’t look up. She is more afraid than I am. Will I kiss her? Caress her? What is this hesitation? They’re all waiting outside the door. The mouths of the women are filled with
zagharid
. Goddam
zagharid
! The
dhakar
has to penetrate the wall. This is indisputable. It could betray me at the last minute, and I would pay a price that’s too high. I don’t trust it. I might fall under the spell of evil women who rob men of their virility. I would be struck by the curse of the marbout. But it’s not Mr. Dhakar who can save me from this folkloric night. Let’s go, onward! The
zagharid
won’t be heard if the sacred liquid doesn’t flow. The
dhakar
is the knife that cuts virginity. Onward! Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood!

“Yuuuuyuuuuuyuuuuuuuuuuu…”

I see . . . I see myself coming out of the room covered with blood. My family, my wife’s family, and the guests assault me like wasps hovering pitilessly over carrion. After a while I feel teeth in my flesh, I see my blood on the ground, I struggle to open my eyes, and see wolves surrounding me on all sides. Auuuuuu . . .

In the meantime an old man with a long white beard passes me without stopping.

“Help me, grandfather.”

“I’m not your grandfather.”

“Then who are you?”

“I’m Luqmanè.”
[4]

“Help me, Luqmanè, O wise man.”

“Listen to my advice, learn it by heart. My son, if, as you walk, armed men stop you and force you to be the judge, asking you, ‘Who is right and who is wrong, Cain or Abel?’ woe to you if you answer, ‘Cain is right and Abel is wrong.’ The armed men might be Abel’s men and it will be the end of you. Oh my son, woe to you twice if you say that Cain is wrong and Abel is right, because the armed men might be Cain’s men, and it will be the end of you. Oh, my son, woe to you three times if you say that neither Cain nor Abel is wrong: it will be the end of you, because our time is very short, and there is no room for neutrality. My son, cut out your tongue and swallow it. Oh, my son, run away! Run away! Run away! Woe to strife, because it’s more dangerous than the teeth of wolves. Auuuuu…”

On the crest of this nocturnal wail I woke trembling, I went quickly into the little bathroom and began recording the nightmare’s words.