Human Cargo Read online

  But the episode was still not quite all over for Nene and Vera. At ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, a fine calm day when the tourists were all back on the beach, Vera saw a body floating in the water about twenty yards from the shore in front of the house. She called Nene, and together they stood at the water’s edge. A second body bobbed to the surface, not far from the first, and then a third. Over the next two hours, as they stood watching with horrified fascination, nine other bodies, bloated and purple, the skin flayed away by the sharp volcanic rock, shot like corks to the surface of the flat sea. From a distance the Sciortinos thought they looked rather like the tourists peacefully floating in the warm, still water. By then, the shore was once again crowded with onlookers, and the police sent frogmen to bring in the bodies and look for others. This was the worst part of the whole naufragio, and for several days neither one of them could sleep for the horror of what they had seen.

  For a few weeks, fragments of clothes were washed up at the water’s edge and even part of a torn life jacket, but the people who collect Realmonte’s rubbish eventually took them away, when it was felt that they made a bad impression on the tourists. Though no one was ever able to establish precisely how many people had been wedged into the Liberians’ carretta di mare—a “sea cart, some ten to twelve meters long, and open but for a very small cabin”—ninety-five had been saved. At least thirty-five were known to have drowned. One body was that of a girl the police doctor thought was no older than fifteen. Most of the dead had no names, the survivors being unable or unwilling to say who they were. One or two, taken to identify the bodies, hesitated, then said nothing.

  By Christmas, Nene had been able to put it all behind him. It had helped when Father Giuseppe, Realmonte’s parish priest, held a mass on the beach, exactly a month after the shipwreck, and the villagers threw flowers into the water where the boat had gone down. It helped, too, that journalists and tourists curious about the naufragio came by and banged on the Sciortinos’ door and Nene was able to talk about it with them, though he was very angry when a cartoon appeared in the scurrilous local La Sicilia, showing a pedal-boat with two tourists’ corpses floating alongside, captioned “Turismo macabro.” In the end, Vera had decided that she could no longer eat fish, not knowing what flesh they might have fed on; when Nene goes out fishing in the small, red-bottomed wooden boat he keeps pulled up outside their house, Vera will cook his catch but she will not put it in her mouth. She says that she will never eat fish again.

  • • •

  FOR THE YOUNG Liberians, whose savings had gone into this journey to a new life, whose families had sold their houses and lands and animals to pay smugglers to take them to a continent where they would not be persecuted and where they would be safe and prosperous, this last lap, on a boat carrying ten times the number of people it was built to carry, had been a time of terror.

  For Mercy, Happy, and Roland, two sisters and a brother from a town called Maryland, not far from Monrovia, the journey had started many weeks before, on a truck that carried them to the coast, then on a first ship, which paused after five days, they do not know where, to transfer them to a second boat, which itself paused, some four days later, far out at sea, to transfer them to yet another boat, this time the small, open wooden boat on which they had been standing and crouching for almost five days, thirsty and very hungry, when the storm arose. Clinging to the boat’s wooden rim, too closely packed and too frightened to move, as the storm gathered strength and the hailstorms—the likes of which they had never seen or imagined—pounded them, they could see the lights from La Playa, and, between the gusts of wind and the thunder, they could just hear snatches of music from the dance floor. Mercy, clinging to her sister on the boat, remembers the moment of impact with the rock, when the small boat, with a sudden shuddering lurch, crashed against something hard. Those on board were flung violently to one side, and she saw some of her companions lose their hold and slip over the side and into the darkness. Almost at once, she lost sight of Happy, and in the jostling, crying, flailing crowd, found herself pushed to the very edge of the boat. As it began to tilt and sink, she started to slip over the side herself.

  Mercy cannot swim. When I went to find her, she was still living in Realmonte, some 300 yards from the beach of Capo Rossello. She told me that she could remember the water seeming to draw her down, and then feeling a sharp edge of rock just under the surface. She reached out and grasped it with all her strength, as those around her slipped past and disappeared. She is short and slight and does not look very strong. But because she was young, just twenty, and because she simply could not bear for all the months of skimping and saving and planning and indecision and longing to be lost so casually, in a single moment of disaster, she went on clinging to her small piece of rock. She was still there four hours later, when the rescue boats from Porto Empedocle arrived. The sailors pulled her up and on board and took her to land, where ambulances were waiting with blankets and hot sweet coffee. What she did not know then was that she was two months pregnant. The father of her baby was a boy from Maryland whom she had planned to marry, but who had not got together enough money for the journey by the time she and Happy and Roland set out to make their new lives in Europe.

  For Happy, the naufragio was the end of that dream. Mercy never saw her again after that moment when, clinging to each other, the two sisters felt the terrible crash against the rock. Roland did see her once more: it was when he was taken to a mortuary in Porto Empedocle and asked to look at the dead Liberian refugees, lying side by side in their torn clothes. Happy’s was the first body he saw. She was twenty-two.

  Later, after my visit to Mercy and Roland, driving back along the superstrada toward Agrigento—a city built, as Plato noted, as if its people would never die, while they ate as if they had not an hour to live—I was directed to the wrecker’s yard where, as the Italians put it, a “cemetery” had been created for the boats that carry the extracomunitari. There, among smashed Fiats and BMWs, lay the Liberians’ boat, wedged at an angle between two other similar, wrecked boats, scraps of netting still hanging from their sides, what remained of their decks littered with empty plastic water bottles, a couple of torn jackets, a dirty blanket. Happy’s boat looked absurdly small to have carried so many people, and almost festive, with its bold stripes of blue, yellow, and red paint, and its name, a flourish of Arabic lettering along one side; it was not easy to imagine it at sea, tossed around in the dark and the hail, with 150 terrified people clutching the sides and each other. Salvaged by the coastal police when the fine weather resumed and taken to the wrecker’s yard to await any subsequent inquiry into the shipwreck, the boat sits with some dozen others, a few smaller, one or two larger, wrecks, condemned as unseaworthy long before their final journeys, gaudy and infinitely sad. Beyond the yard lies a meadow, which in spring is bright with yellow daisies and the deep red of the wild clover that covers this part of southern Sicily, while above rises a rocky escarpment that leads, not half a mile away, to the ridge on which stands the Doric Temple of Concord, which held out against the Carthaginians for eight months. It is perfect against the clear sky.

  • • •

  EVEN DON GIUSEPPE, the priest of Realmonte, feels that there was something demonic in the fury of the storm that hit his parish on the night of the naufragio. He has lived in and around Agrigento for many years, but he has known no weather as terrible or as ferocious as that night’s. Don Giuseppe has been proud of the way that his parishioners behaved at the time, the way they hastened to the shore when they heard about the shipwreck, carrying with them blankets and coats, and he admires the insistence with which they pressed him to find a house not only for Roland and Mercy, but for Daniel and Adrean, the only married couple among the survivors, who were expecting a baby. In Sicily, he says, “we are used to strangers. We’ve had Arabs, we’ve had the Spanish, we’ve had the Greeks, we’ve even had the Americans. And now we have Liberians.” Realmonte is very poor. Though the people do not go hung
ry, unemployment is as high here as in all parts of Sicily, and there is very little luxury to be had. As it happens, Realmonte has within its commune a salt mine, and a second, smaller mine of malachite, which could give work to a number of the villagers; but some years ago a dispute broke out between an industrialist from the north, who wanted to buy them, and the Italian authorities, who refused to let him begin mining until favorable terms were worked out for profit sharing. The mines have stayed closed ever since.

  When the living had been sorted out from the dead, and the single young men sent off to a hostel in nearby Racalmuto, the Misericordia, Italy’s voluntary ambulance service, decided to give the two couples the use of a flat off Realmonte’s main square. Francesco di Salvo was on duty with the ambulance that night, and saw the bodies lacerated by the sharp rocks. As he sees it, they must have been truly desperate to risk so much. He is haunted by the memory of a very young girl, rescued from the water too late to be resuscitated, who was brought to shore already dead, clinging so tightly to her sole possession, a small handbag, that her fingers could not be prized loose from its handle.

  By the time Mercy realized that she was pregnant, not long after the shipwreck, Adrean was about to give birth. When her little girl was born prematurely in January 2003, and had to stay on in the hospital for several weeks, Realmonte’s women took it in turns visiting her and helping her plan the baby’s return to the village. Mercy’s baby, Angela, arrived in April, after a Caesarean birth, and when Mercy brought her home the women again visited to show the young mother how to care for her child, though they worried that she seemed curiously inept at feeding the baby, and less attached to her than they expected her to be. As Mercy and Roland are Christians, Angela was baptized by Father Giuseppe in Realmonte’s church. All through the autumn and winter, neighbors dropped by with vegetables from their plots of land outside the village, with baby clothes and toys and even a baby carriage.

  Roland is as reluctant as all the survivors to go into details of his escape from Liberia, but he is eager to talk about the conditions that drove him and his two sisters to flee—the marauding bands of rebels that descended on Maryland; his fears of being forcibly recruited as a soldier; the collapse of his business selling building materials—and about the terror and cold of the long journey at sea, with too little food and water and no idea where the boat was heading. Like many of the young Liberians in Cairo, Roland and his sister are Mandingo, among the most persecuted of the various ethnic groups. Since his rescue, though he is not yet officially recognized as a refugee and so not, in theory, permitted to work, Roland has been able to do casual work in Realmonte’s supermarket, the villagers feeling only too conscious of his need for money, being so constantly in need of it themselves. However, he still cannot bring himself to write to tell his widowed mother, who stayed behind in Maryland with a cousin while her three children set out for their new life one hot August morning, of Happy’s death. He thinks she would prefer not to know.

  • • •

  IT IS QUITE possible that the Liberians’ boat was not heading for Sicily’s southern shore at all. Roland told me that the first he knew that his destination was not another African country was when, swimming to shore after the shipwreck, he saw that the people on the beach were white. This is a joke repeated with pleasure by Sicilians: Not long ago, a young Senegalese man was brought by a smuggler to within a hundred yards of shore, pushed overboard, and told to swim. He climbed out of the water on the beach and approached a fisherman working nearby. “Wo ist der Bahnhof?” he asked, having been assured by the trafficker that he was being landed in Germany. The same joke is told, with equal pleasure, by the inhabitants of Capri, off the coast of Naples.

  More likely, Dr. Moscat of Agrigento’s Prefetura explains, Roland and Mercy’s boat was destined for the island of Lampedusa, a hundred miles farther south, and it was here that I went next, looking for other refugees from Africa’s civil wars. Though none of the Liberians in Cairo had traveled this way, some had made long sea journeys, terrifying and bewildering experiences that themselves had become a kind of passport. Unlike the documents they shed along the shore and in the sea, this one conferred dignity and promise. Very few of the refugees coming from the landlocked parts of Africa have ever seen the sea and few can swim, which makes the prospect of crossing these great expanses of often rough water horrific.

  In 2002, eight thousand extracomunitari arrived on Lampedusa from Turkey, Malta, and the ports and beaches of North Africa, where they had collected and waited until enough were assembled to make up a boat. Sfax, a known gathering point for the Tunisian smugglers, lies barely seventy miles from Lampedusa, and it is here that the would-be asylum seekers learn how much their journey will cost them and what their destination might be. It is the traffickers, said to operate in Mafia-like associations, who tell the asylum seekers to give away as little as possible when they land, to get rid of all their documents so that they can lie about where they have come from and so cannot then be sent home or the traffickers themselves traced. In the tangled process that seems to govern southern Italy’s response to the asylum seekers and migrants who flock to its shores, in which the coast guard, carabinieri, harbor police, immigration authorities, and the scafisti themselves all play their interlocking parts, Lampedusa has taken on a vital role. Lampedusa is Europe’s southernmost tip, the first toehold in the climb toward northern Europe.

  A spit of barren, flat, rocky land, the island looks, on the map, like the skull of a primitive, long-jawed creature, its nose tapering to a thin wedge. The property of the feudal princes who founded Palma, on Sicily’s southern coast, in the early seventeenth century, the island is bare, baked hard and dry for many months of the year into a uniform stony whiteness. Lampedusa is neither pretty nor, with its jagged, limestone cliffs, hospitable. The author of The Leopard, last in the line of Lampedusas, never even visited it, though the family retained a rampant gattopardo—the word is more properly translated as “ocelot”—on their coat of arms. According to legend, the founder of the Lampedusas was Tomasso, “the Leopard,” commander of the Imperial Guard of the sixth-century Byzantine emperor Tiberius, whose daughter Irene he married; the island was a gift in recognition of services rendered.

  Lampedusa was once thickly wooded. Today, the dozen or so stunted pines that are its sole trees lie almost parallel to the ground, bowed by the winds that blow from the west. In the autumn, hunters come from Sicily and the mainland to slaughter the protected hoopoes and golden orioles migrating to winter in Africa, and leave their spent cartridges scattered between the rocks and wild herbs on the low hills; but otherwise Lampedusa is popular mainly with scuba divers, fishermen, and tourists in search of sun, heat, and the deep and unpolluted waters that surround the island. Once a NATO base, it was discovered by Italians overnight, in the summer of 1986, after Colonel Muammar Qaddafi fired two missiles toward Italy. They landed a dozen miles off the coast, bringing journalists to the island and in their wake several thousand tourists, who slept on mattresses on the ground until enough rooms and hotels could be built to absorb them. Dry stone walls, demarcating plots of land long since abandoned to stones and wildflowers, stretch away from the single small town, where the uncontrolled building of summer shacks has made the island resemble the rest of Italy’s ruined coast.

  Lampedusa is where Italy ends and Africa begins. Spring and summer, on the long calm days, the refugees arrive almost daily, in their battered and crumbling boats, frightened, unsure, expectant. Experts in asylum matters, who study the flows of refugees and their journeys to the north, call the way to Lampedusa the blue route after the blue waters of the Mediterranean; and it enjoys a lucrative share of the estimated $5 to $7 billion revenue of the world’s traffic in smuggled people. Gangs reported often to belong to the same Mafia as those that traffic in drugs run complex shipping networks that involve large boats carrying 600 or more clandestine illegal arrivals, for the first part of long journeys, transferring them to small, ancient,
unseaworthy craft for the final stretch to shore. Since arrivals seem to mesh neatly with available space in Lampedusa’s single reception center, it is said that there is a basista, a spy or lookout, for Tunisia’s Mafia, who phones to say when Lampedusa is ready to absorb more newcomers.

  On Lampedusa, I looked for people to tell me about their clandestine boat journeys from Africa, and I found Alex. Alex is a twenty-three-year-old Liberian who, having lost his family in the civil war, spent eleven years with his sisters as a refugee in Cote d’Ivoire before deciding to escape the constant fear of being picked up by rebels and forced to become a soldier. He described a journey that began in Monrovia with twenty others, hidden on a large ship and not being told its destination by their trafficker, to whom they had each paid $200. For four days, while the vessel was still tied up in port, without food or water, the young men hid in different corners. After it set sail, they were gathered together, then transferred, far out at sea, to a smaller boat. This took them to Turkey, where three of them were dropped off on a remote beach. They made their way to the nearest town and found some “black brothers” who put them in touch with a new set of smugglers. They paid over $1,000 each, then went into hiding. A few nights later, they were led back to the coast, put onto a small boat, and taken out to a larger one. On board were eighty-five other extracomunitari, all Africans, from Nigeria, Ghana, Sudan, and Tunisia; all but four were men, reflecting the fact that most of the asylum seekers who make these hazardous journeys are men in their twenties and thirties, while the refugee camps across Asia and Africa are full of women and children for whom the journeys are too difficult.

  The asylum seekers had been told to bring food and water for eight days. The weather was very bad, the seas were rough, and the boat developed engine trouble. It drifted without power for two days, sprang a leak, and began to sink. A fishing boat appeared. It came alongside and was able to take eleven people off—Alex among them—before the boat went under, drowning all the rest, including the four women. Alex, who could not swim, broke his hand when being pulled on board; his two friends were drowned. The fishing boat was extremely crowded, but it took them into Lampedusa; Alex was taken to a hospital and his hand treated. He still had $800, the rest of his life’s savings, hidden in his shoes. “They asked me a lot of questions,” he says, “but I didn’t really have much to tell them. I had planned for my life to be secure, and I wanted a place with peace of mind.” The Italians have given Alex a humanitarian permit to remain, a halfway measure that ensures him protection for a year and permission to work, if he can find work; the permit is renewable. But he has changed his mind about escape, for he has not found the life of an exile what he imagined it would be. “I want to go home to my sisters and my farm,” he says. “I don’t want to be alone.”