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meeting

ingy mubiayi kakese

My wife has decided to get together with her father. In fact, to be more precise, she has decided to meet him, considering that the last time she saw him was 25 years ago. A likeable fellow, right? He married a much younger woman, had a daughter, took them to a foreign country and then, what do you know? he's gone. Perhaps his last words were "I'm going out to buy some cigars" (because he is not a common sort of man). I told her that I'd go with her gladly, we'd enjoy the trip, we'd see a new city and meet her father. After all, what did she have to worry about: she had a job, she had everything she needed. She would only be facing an embarrassing encounter with people she didn't know, and in any case we had the advantage, didn't we? With the result that now I find myself here, in a room of about 20 square meters with a dozen or so adults and twice as many children ranging from a sleeping infant to the gloomiest of teenagers. And all this thanks to a simple web link on line, she says. She clicked onto the city where her father was presumably living, she searched for the site of the local council, she typed in his name and it all came up: telephone, address, even a map of the town and the best way to get there. And I can't even pick up her traffic fines without a proxy statement.
It's unbelievably noisy, they all talk at once, they're all relatives she probably never even knew existed. I can scarcely manage to tell the two languages apart: one is a collection of nasal sounds, where the words sound like one incredibly long drawl; the other is completely guttural, it sounds like two or three consonants repeated in infinite varieties. I try the tactic of using gestures - after all, people say that we Italians can communicate with everyone. But this doesn't seem to be the case here, since the only result is that they all fall about laughing. I'm sure I must look like a half-wit and they're all thinking I am one. She's not doing so well either: sitting stiff-backed on the edge of the sofa, with her legs crossed and the leg bearing the weight moving convulsively, without giving a moment's respite to the person next to her, that is to me. She's even put on her glasses, something she almost never does. Meanwhile her voice and her smile are fixed, calm, modulated to a single frequency. I'd like to give her a hug. She'd like that too, I know. Every once in a while a glimmer of capitulation passes over her eyes, a plea for pity, but then they are ready to do battle anew. Because she told me that she's declared war against everything. Against her past, her present, perhaps even the future. A war against her skin, her lips, her hips, against her accent, against everything she can neither hate nor love. A war that has brought her face to face with the person who left her in a world that was not her own, to fight by herself. My wife is a fanatic. I told her it was all a load of crap. That a person is the way he is. Full stop. My head is full of our repeated discussions, I'm only vaguely aware that a dozen pairs of eyes are directed at me. An infinity of black points surrounded by white re- immersed in black are staring at me expectantly. Now I'm the one that has a beseeching look, then a phrase and everyone breaks out laughing. Even the children are shaking with laughter.
Seeing all those gaping mouths, I can do nothing except pretend to be part of it all, I smile, almost as if to excuse myself, but why? Meanwhile my chest feels heavy and I'm having trouble breathing, I'm hot even though it's snowing outside. I'm sweating and when I sweat I get nervous, or maybe I sweat because I'm nervous. Whatever - I'm sweating and I'm nervous. I try to understand what they said, but she pretends there's no problem and translates something else instead. The air is heavy and all these bodies close up give off a sour smell, made even worse by the fact that the heat is turned on. I need to get outside, breath a bit of fresh air, but she's busy chatting with someone. Now she's leaning on the arm of the sofa, totally focused on the person she's talking to, and her leg has stopped dancing. She's laughing, gesticulating, she's taken off her glasses. I wish I could get away, be someplace else, someplace normal.
Now I'm in a disco. It's just a bit bigger than the room I was in before but the situation is the same. I'm still the only white person. I'd thought that places where only blacks went existed only in films. Who knows what they're thinking, seeing me here. She's dancing with the others. She gestures to me to come onto the dance-floor, but then she gives up. I twist and turn in the armchair. I don't know how I should behave. Then I remember her sitting on my grandmother's sofa, back in my hometown, her back stiff, her leg moving incessantly up and down, the glasses she never took off for three days and her calm smile. She twisted and turned. With all my relatives around her. Who knows how much of the local dialect she couldn't make out. The only black among whites, always. With all the eyes of the town on her, being judged by everyone for what she looked like, at the mercy of questions that didn't really expect any answer.
Maybe I'm seeing her for the first time: with her skin, her lips, her hips. I hear her accent, I hear the din of her battles, I see her past, her present. I imagine the future. She comes over to me. She says that tomorrow it will all be over. We'll all go back where we belong.

translated by Brenda Porster

Ingy Mubiayi Kakese was born in Cairo in 1972 of an Egyptian mother and a Congolese father. At the age of four she moved with her family to Rome, where except for brief periods she has lived ever since. She has a degree in the History of Arabic-Islamic Civilization from the University of Rome "La Sapienza". Over the years she has taken part in various associations involved mainly with immigration. She has worked as a translator and a teacher. In 2000 she opened a small bookshop at Primavalle, where writing is an activity done along with reading. In 2004 she won an award in the Eks&Tra literary competition; her stories have been published in anthologies and literary magazines.

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Anno 2, Numero 9
September 2005

 

 

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