June 2023 marks the 10th anniversary of Carla Macoggi’s passing away, This translation by Pina Piccolo and the article by Jessy Simonini, in the Non Fiction section, are meant as a tribute to her writing and life, the graceful mark she left on this world.
[…] I sat on the doorstep, watching the sky, beyond the silent courtyard, because wherever my mother was, she too had the same blue sky I was seeing here. I had noticed this by watching the sky carefully on my way to school or on my way to my aunt’s and cousins. The houses were different, the people’s faces were all different, the streets were never the same, but the sky was, it was the same everywhere, it was the only thing that was there, always the same.
The more time passed, the more the ball of fire that lit everything made its way down toward the ceiling of the house across the street, causing what was formerly blue to become red. As the sphere lowered, flocks of birds that dotted the firmament, drawing amazing harmonic figures, returned to their nest from time to time and Mimmì would tell me:
-You see, even birdies come home from school and go to eat? Come on, dinner is ready, gulp something down.
But I didn’t want to. I would never eat again without my mother. Suddenly the sun disappeared behind the house, and the sunset, more beautiful than in the pictures seen in school, enveloped everything, even me, and I began to cry, because Mama, my North Star, was not there with me, as the endless lights of the houses in the sky lit up.
Is it its immutability that makes the sky peaceful?
Once it was Thuban (and it will be again), but today it is Polaris, the pulsating one, and tomorrow it will be the shining Vega, not far from the solar apex and the smoke ring.
My mother was my North Star, yes, but North was not always indicated by the same star. Was this the fate of mothers? To become something else with the passage of time?
I went on crying for hours and hours. I allowed Mimmì to close the front door, but I refused to eat and put on my pajamas, because I would wait for my mother to fall asleep beside her. Conquered by fatigue and sleep, I lay down on the big bed, my head on the pillow, sobbing softly.
The next morning I woke up and smelled breakfast. I called Mom, sure I would hear her voice, but I received no answer. I got up in despair: the nightmare I had experienced the day before was not over yet. I could not understand why mother had gone away and left me alone, why she had not returned yet.
If we knew the road that leads
To the pure essence of separation, ah!
How much would we make her pay for the heartbreak she causes
By pouring the gall of division
My father would have said this. Words from The Thousand and One Nights. Poetic words to express the pain of distance. But what about when you are close?
The day of my birthday came. Not that I knew it or that it was important-watch what you say, you rascal-but I saw that the neighbors were making preparations to celebrate their daughter’s birthday and I remembered that last year I had blown out six candles on that very day. The sadness I felt was due, yes, to the fact that there was no cake, nor a new dress and who knows what else, but mostly because I was convinced that I was the only one who knew that my mother had not returned yet, the world totally ignored her absence, so much so that it allowed everything to go on as if nothing had happened.
That day, someone made gestures that were different from the usual ones: a woman rejoiced in sending her daughter to blow out the candles and then smilingly applauded as if a daring and heroic feat had been accomplished, just as my mother had done until the year before. That day I thought that no person in the world had pity for my mother, lost who knows where, nor for my existence, far away from her. It was unbearable to me that Mimmì every day would tell me:
-Eat everything, or mother won’t come back.-
And yet, even if I left the plate empty as I was asked to do, still Mother failed to reappear.
So much time had passed since I had not seen mother; I hated those days that were always the same, days when my mother had made herself invisible to my eyes.
Since you walked away,
How many places have become useless
and devoid of meaning, the same
as lights in the daytime
This is what my father would have told me. This is what the blind Borges said as he pictured the face of his beloved and imagined lights added to other lights, now invisible to him.
Kkeywa- Storia di una bambina meticcia, Sensibili alle foglie, 2011
[…] A little girl named Fiorella was born to Selamawit, a seventeen-year-old Ethiopian girl who had met an Italian seducer in a boarding house where her mother, Fiorella’s grandmother, had sent her to work for a few months, to scrape together what she needed to dress fashionably and enjoy her carefree youth. Selamawit means peaceful, serene. The name was given to the girl because she had come into the world smiling, after a short cry, which was a relief for the mother who had held her in her womb hoping it would be a girl, so that she could say she had two boys and two girls in the house, six in all with her and her husband, an even count.
Sew in Amharic means person and is also a collective name, people. T “ru sew means good person and also good people. Upon seeing Fiorella when she was born, everyone told Selamawit that she had gotten her from a t’ru sew, because the child was particularly whitish, more so than other Ethiopian babies who are born beige, anyway, and then get darker and darker.
Fiorella, daughter of a good person.
Her mother always kept her sheltered from the sun and the evil eyes of those who were envious of that pale-faced little doll.
Fiorella, daughter of good people.
Fiorella’s father did not know of her existence, but she was immediately taken care of by an old fascist turned anarchist who had remained in Africa, in the old Colonial empire, in spite of his responsibilities as a husband and head of family in Italy.
Loyalty and honor in a purified conscience in the Abbay, upper Nile river, sculpted by Bernini with its eyes blindfolded in Piazza Navona.
That man was, thus, Fiorella’s father. He wrote to her that he adored her, so much for the racial laws that he had never approved of because he did know Africans and knew he could count on them sometimes much more than he could on his wife, who was bent on buying furs and gold from her investments in these overseas lands. He had told her, “A textile factory, that’s what I want to set up, just the opposite of my banking job in the gray air of the Po Valley.”
Luck in business he had none, but for nothing in the world would he give up that eternal spring.
“Yes, I will come back,” he would say, but he never returned and instead would send pleas to his daughter to join him in Africa, to enjoy all that sunshine and those enchanting sunsets.
Thus, Fiorella was the replacement daughter, and he was the replacement father.
Romana, the owner of the boarding house where Fiorella had been conceived, the same one in which Fiorella’s old father lived permanently, would have liked to have that Colonel Giuseppe as her partner, because he was an educated, nice man with courteous manners and she had been forced to marry one of her father’s helpers. On his deathbed, her father had said to her, “I will only die in peace if you promise me that you will marry Antonio Tonin, the best driver among all of mine, the most reliable of all.” “Yes, Daddy,” Romana had replied, “I will do as you wish, because I know that if you live in the Colony you need to be respected and we women have to get married as soon as possible.”
Romana could not bear Selamawit’s happiness. She was a protégé of the Colonel, along with that Fiorella. And that child’s name reminded her of Donna Flora, the Friulian woman who her husband Tonin had taken home to Italy with him when he left, fed up with the Colony, fed up with her and her vulgar laughter.
Romana was a separated woman who ran a guesthouse and restaurant in Addis Ababa, accumulated lovers and money, could not live without her daily blue Valium tablet, and exploited the labor of forty Africans whom she called my forty thieves.
Forty plus one, when the Colonel died, and after almost three years from that day, she took Fiorella with her to work in her boarding house. Romana said to Fiorella’s mother, “I’ll raise her for you, I’ll pour water under her feet like I do when I water my ferns, ha ha, but she’ll have to pay for the water, she’ll have to work for me. I haven’t forgotten you know, that you, as soon as the Colonel told you he would support you and his daughter, you stopped slaving away in this boarding house and you paraded around proud like a queen. Colonello Giuseppe is gone now and debts need to be paid paid anyway, so what you didn’t do, your daughter will do. That’s life! You are free, but I will take Fiorella and water her feet so that she will grow like a plant and as soon as I consider that the offense you inflicted on me by leaving has been made up by her labor, I will return her to you as an adult who has received mandatory education.”
Forty plus one that enabled her to buy herself as many as three apartments in Vicenza, in a nice residential area, full of trees and clean streets.
When Mengistu came to power, Romana did not suffer any financial harm: she had already sold the restaurant and bar, and the guesthouse, which she rented, was expropriated from its longtime owners, Indians who had come to Africa who knows how many centuries earlier.
The provisional government had proposed that Romana pay rent directly to the state, but she had said no, because she had other plans in mind.
– You can keep these 75 rooms, I’ll give my friends some of the furniture and leave the rest to you, because I already brought everything I cared about to Italy anyway, including the money I earned as a colonialist with a fifth-grade education, daughter of colonialists who had a second-grade education.
She had made an exploratory trip to Italy in 1977 with Fiorella. Before that trip she called Selamawit and told her:
-I’m taking your daughter to Italy, let’s go sign some papers so Fiorella can be allowed to leave this country. You sign everything I tell you, because otherwise you will never see her again, I swear on the God you believe in.-
Selamawit signed all the papers that were placed under her uncertain hand, and Romana gave a few coins to the false witnesses and extras in that farce, which the Court recorded as an adoption proceeding. Romana promised the Ethiopian state that she would be Fiorella’s new mother. She had bought Fiorella. For nothing. During her absence from Addis Ababa, Romana entrusted her guesthouse and restaurant to her lover’s wife, who, oblivious to everything, considered her a benefactor.
The stay in Italy for Fiorella lasted five months, for Romana a little less, as she spent three of those months in New Zealand at her eldest daughter’s, forgetting that she was the mother of a new daughter she had just acquired.
After having Fiorella, Selamawit had become the mother of two more children. Fiorella was with her when she had her second child and just before her little sister was born. Each time she reached the seventh month of pregnancy, her belly would become as swollen as that of Annie Golden hovering in the sky in the movie Hair. Selamawit, fearing that Fiorella would be terrified, vanished just like the females of savannah felines who suddenly disappear only to return with their litter weeks later. When her little brother was to be born, Selamawit left Fiorella home, along with the maid, and for the third-born daughter she left her with her aunt, her older sister. Days and hours of separation, that felt like an eternity to Fiorella.
After the experience she had gone through with Fiorella, Selamawit kept her two little ones close to her, always refusing anyone else’s help in raising them and looking suspiciously at those who approached her saying, “Ah, what beautiful children!”
From: La nemesi della rossa, by Carla Macoggi, Sensibili alle foglie, 2012. Translated by Pina Piccolo, with permission from Fabrizio Fantini, executor of Carla Macoggi’s estate.
