by Bruno Di Tillo
There is a place in Rome where Marijuana is stored in fake tree branches and rocks; where heroin is sold in small grocery bags and brought by elderly ladies walking with a crouch. There is a place where silent individuals guard both entrances and exits to ensure that the area will never be busted by police force. There is a place where fear and dust are one. There is a place where teens don’t come to smoke but rather come to buy dreams for a shallow fee. There is a place where every story becomes important, but all truth is omitted. There is a place where the earth is that a color one day and another the one after because of the different ethnic groups that choose that place as a temporary bed.
That place is ***** *****.
Abukar stands in his corner of the park, looking vaguely in the direction of the approaching car. As he turns, covering his hands making the quick dial to his friend
Muhammad in the stationary post in the other side of the place, alerting him of the impending danger, the dark black car speeds up, firing the blue and red lights characteristic of the Carabinieri. The sirens are dwarfed by the screaming of the two cops; they are asking Abukar to put his hands on their vehicle and demand to search him.
Abukar, a Somali thirty-something-year-old, does what he’s asked. In Napoletan dialect the two cops exchange insults referring to the color of his skin, the dust on his hands, and then search his pockets. They find nothing. But that is not without reasons; Abukar never keeps the drugs or the money on him, he delegates other three individuals (always different ones) to store the lot in some place that he himself could not find. The cops turn him around, they search his jacket. Nothing, just an old lottery ticket and a couple of paper filters. It never crosses their mind that they are standing right on top of the emergency stash of Abukar. The cops let him go, they are done with the searching and they are happy to have contributed to the safety of their country from people like him.
As soon as the cops cross their street, i reach for Abukar. He knows my face, i’ve been there more than once for his products. He’s not shook from the searching; he’s had years of experience to teach him the tricks of remaining calm with the Italian police. He looks at me with his dark brown eyes, the eyes of someone who’s seen enough, but still could go for a little more before evaporating into thin air. In the meantime he’s already alerted Muhhammad of the event: nothing passes without notice, they’ll have to double the shifts that night.
I ask him for the usual, i wait in my designated spot and when he comes he swiftly throws the brown package on the ground. The package is far away from where i am, but he takes no chances; if there is no formal exchange between the two involved in the transaction, an incognito policeman wouldn’t be able to jail him. I wait some time and then go and pick the pack up. The weed looks regular, not of the highest of qualities, but still usable for teenagers and general recreational users; most importantly it’s the quantity that makes me smile.
I walk with the pack some meters along the sidewalk of the park, and then i throw the money on the floor. I know for a fact that Abukar is looking this way, i can feel his scarred cheek and his brown gaze gazing in my general direction, as if they were looking at some house in the background. I, for one, know he isn’t. He’s making sure he can go pick up the stash in the most stealth way possible. A million eyes in the “base-camp” are doing the same; control is their top priority, control of the territory they guard.
Sometimes Abukar would let me sit with him around the illegal perennial fires he and his people would start in the middle of the park. They use these to cook, fabricate wire tools for picking locks, heat themselves at night during the summer, or the entire day during winter. The fireplace is quite simple in reality; it’s made of five or six different industrial oil cans, a couple of stones around to keep the fire from spreading to the birch of the trees, and assorted chairs, logs, carton beds (even a full Ikea carpet). All of it is situated in a comfortable niche near a pine tree, so as to safeguard it from both wind and rain. The roman walls in the background make the atmosphere all the more surreal.
I sit down on one of the chairs, Abukar wants to speak today. He tells me of how he’d come to Italy escaping from hunger, poverty, and unemployment; he wished to work as an engineer. Abukar has a Masters Degree and was attending his Phd when his mother gave birth to her seventh son. He had come to Italy, hoping to get a job in some construction facility, a white-collar job of any kind. But Abukar’s skin is pure black, an endless void for his chances of getting a job in a very secretly racist country such as Italy. He speaks very little Italian, that too doesn’t help. But English, that he speaks perfectly. He gives witty remarks every once and a while during his life-revelation. I ask him of his deep scar; he says that’s how the two young Italians in Genova had greeted him in 2006, when he’d just arrived in the country. No one was charged, no one saw a thing: no witnesses equals no culprits. But someone must’ve seen, someone must’ve! He doesn’t know i’m Italian; he thinks from my accent that i must be American, or on the very least Canadian. He probably wouldn’t have talked so freely to me, and more so, he wouldn’t have let me sit down like one of them had he known. He lived on the streets for a year, until charity organizations started helping him up.
He tried several times to cross the frontier, but his passport wasn’t valid, they said. Trapped, he started drinking, become violent, went in and out of jail, stayed in for a couple of months for stabbing an Armenian, got busted for coke a couple of times, and more. Through his scavenging, he’d met some of his countrymen who’d asked him if he wanted to deal drugs for a relatively small amount of money. Being him on his last stand, he accepted happily, also for the fact that that he’d finally be with people who wouldn’t batter him, make monkey sounds as to show he was from Africa…. He can at least send money to his family now. He’s not proud of what he must do at times to ensure that the Mafia doesn’t kill his comrades or control that area. He isn’t proud of having to sleep in tents all year long, next to flames with toxic smoke. He isn’t unhappy either.
Around us there are other men, some guarding, some selling, some buying. others just listening the high chimes of bells in the background, high on very different forms of substances, stranded on some comfortable rock or a piece of an ancient roman column stranded in that sea of brown eyes and green fields.
He stops reminiscing, he gets up and asks “Josh”, his subordinate, to get up and get the necessary drugs for the evening. Josh, a thin man in his twenties with a deep disgust for policemen, lifts a rock near the second tree from where we are sitting and lifts out a small package of weed. We roll a joint and start laughing. After that, Abukar suddenly asks me to leave; his role of chaperone is done.
I walk away from the money, Abukar takes it while he fakes tying his shoelace. All is well, all is done. I know he’ll be there the day i need my fix, i know he’ll be, he must, he is that place. And the day that he won’t be anymore, i’m sure Muhammad will probably tell me of the day he stopped being a farmer.
THE NEW OUTSIDER 