Divorce Islamic Style (14 page)

T
he landlady, Teresa alias Vacation, arrives early in the morning for a surprise inspection. And by sheer coincidence she finds two illegal Egyptians sleeping in the kitchen. Immediately we start on a small digression. For Teresa the true illegal is not someone who doesn’t have a residency permit but someone who doesn’t pay rent. A tenant offered hospitality to some friend unbeknownst to her; it’s very likely that she was tipped off. There’s some truth to the hypothesis of the spy, of the informer in her pay; it’s not bullshit or an urban legend. The lady does not show up like this as a courtesy call. In other words, she’s not a person who goes to any trouble to be kind or to ask us, “How are you doing?” or “Boys, do you need anything?” As a good Sicilian I say, “You don’t get something for nothing.”

Teresa merely complains about the presence of the undeclared guests, insisting at length on the importance of trusting a relationship. Signora Vacation trusts us and we ought to trust her. She doesn’t mention the threat of increasing the number of beds. Maybe it’s not the moment to attack. Some of the tenants take advantage of this opportunity to bring up the problem of the hot-water heater, and she promises to take care of it as soon as possible. The real reason for her unexpected visit is the case of Saber. There’s been a real dust-up, or, rather, a tragedy. The cause? Simona! Who? Simona Barberini. Yes, her.

So let’s go in chronological order, starting from the beginning, that is, from the other day. My Egyptian friend returns home from work late. He’s very tired, so he changes and goes to bed. As usual, he wants to give a good night kiss to his Simona (yes indeed, to the photo of Simona Barberini hanging next to his bed). Unfortunately it’s not there. Someone has taken it, stolen it, seized it! Saber makes a scene. He refuses to go to bed without getting to the bottom of the situation. He starts shouting “Who stole my Simona?” “Who took my Simona?” “Give me back my Simona!” and “I waaaant Simonaaaa!” He was like the madman in Fellini’s
Amarcord
when he climbs up a tree and refuses to come down, shouting, “I want a wooooman!”

Compared with Fellini’s madman, Saber has a precise and sensible request: he doesn’t want a generic woman, but a woman with a first name and last name. It’s not a small thing.

In Arabic Saber means “patient.” In reality this man could have all the qualities in the world, but patience isn’t among them. So, when one of the tenants points out, “This Simona isn’t your wife!” he gets furious and says, “Simona is more than a wife, get it?” someone else tries to make him see reason: “Don’t be foolish, Saber. Remember you’re illegal and you can be expelled.” And he, weeping, “I’m not afraid of the bolice.”

The “abduction of Simona” took an unexpected turn when a dispute broke out between the observant tenants, on the one hand, and the non-practicing, on the other, after which Saber openly accused the former of stealing the photo. Finally, as a challenge, the Egyptian placed an ultimatum: “If you don’t give back my Simona within twenty-four hours, I swear I’ll hang up the calendar that shows her naked, and not in the bedroom but in the kitchen, the bathroom, everywhere! Then we’ll see what you do!” A real declaration of war.

Saber has become the knight of individual liberty, the enemy of fundamentalism, the last bastion of freedom of expression on Viale Marconi. To listen to him speak you’d think he was a great enlightenment intellectual. I was struck by some of his arguments, like “Today it was boor Simona’s turn, tomorrow it will be someone else’s,” “Sooner or later they’ll force us to have a beard down to our neck, and wear the loose shirt, and marry a woman in a burka.” Or: “Fucking shit, this house is a nest of Taliban.”

Anyway, the fundamental basis of his reasoning is a liberal principle: everyone has the right to do what he likes provided it doesn’t irritate his neighbor. Since Simona (O.K., the little photograph of Simona Barberini) didn’t bother anyone, whoever stole it has committed a serious crime. But evidently the presence of Simona (alas, the last trace of a woman in the whole apartment!) disturbed the peace and the slumbers of one of the tenants.

Finally, around dawn and after many attempts at mediation, we managed to calm him down. He slept like a child exhausted after playing all day.

The business will not stop here but will surely have consequences. The question to pose is the following: will the power of the observant in this household come to a halt? In other words: will the non-practicing have the balls to bring home wine and women? Only time will tell.

My priorities are different from Saber’s. For me bringing my mission to a conclusion is more important than anything else. So I follow Judas’s order and decide to start my prayers today, Friday, the Muslim holy day. The rumor has spread among the tenants that I’m about to cross over into the caste of the observant. Saber is rather amazed, but I relieved him by telling him that I consider religion a strictly private matter. In other words, I’m not against Simona Barberini’s presence in the house. Anyway, I accept the good wishes and congratulations of my new observant companions. I wait to see the first concrete advantage of this choice: saying goodbye to the line for the bathroom.

Islam doesn’t fool around with hygiene. To pray it’s essential to be clean. Many observant believers, including my fellow-tenants, take advantage of the Friday prayers to have a shower. In order not to rouse suspicions I do, too, even though heating the water in the kitchen and then carrying it to the bathroom is a real pain in the neck.

In the late morning I say goodbye to Mohammed, who is leaving for Morocco. The signs of melancholy and depression in his face have vanished. He has rediscovered his smile and his taste for witty remarks and, especially, jokes. He tells me he can’t wait to embrace his children (about his wife not a word). Before he got his new residency permit, he lived like a hostage. He couldn’t leave Italy without running the risk of being stopped at immigration on his return and sent back to his own country.

Before leaving to go to the airport Mohammed takes me aside and says in a low voice, “I’ve noticed that you go to Little Cairo every day.”

“Right, I go to call my family in Tunisia.”

“Be careful!”

“Of what?”

“Don’t talk too much on the telephone.”

Right afterward he explains to me that in recent years many Muslim immigrants have been arrested on account of telephone calls, and thrown in jail to await trial. And he tells me the story of a fellow-Moroccan, a resident of a city in the North, who was arrested because he said this phrase to a friend on the telephone: “I intend to open an Islamic
màjzara
, inshallah.” Some interpreter, out of incompetence, perhaps, or in bad faith, translated the word
màjzara
as “slaughter” rather than as “butcher shop”! The investigators had no doubts: the Moroccan immigrant was an Islamic terrorist who was planning an Islamic-style slaughter. The poor man, blameless and the father of a family, spent a long period in jail.

I leave the house and stop first in the park in Piazza Meucci, then at the Marconi library: no sign of the beautiful girl in the veil. I go on to Little Cairo hoping to see her there, but not a trace. Akram, too, is absent. Maybe he’s preparing for Friday prayers. In his place there’s a smart young kid, on the threshold of adolescence. I find out that he’s Akram’s son; his name is Galal. Today Little Cairo is full of people. Waiting for a booth to be free I listen to him talking with two Italians. I’m impressed by the way he speaks: in a very pure Roman dialect, just like the street kids played by Carlo Verdone. Curious, I ask him some questions.

“Bravo! You speak the Roman dialect perfectly. How did you learn it?”

“Naturally. I was born in Rome. My friends are almost all Romans.”

“How many languages do you speak?”

“Arabic, Italian, Roman, and a little English.”

“Bravo!”

“Normal.”

“You’re really lucky.”

“Me lucky? I wouldn’t say so.”

“Why?”

“In Rome they call me the Egyptian and in Cairo the Italian.”

Neither fish nor fowl, Galal means. Like being everywhere and nowhere. Bum deal! His isn’t an isolated case; it’s a problem for an entire generation of immigrants’ children, who were born in Italy or who came here as children. There are almost a million waiting to become Italian citizens.

I call Tunis. My “mamma” answers. We talk for ten minutes. Subject of the conversation is my marriage. “Son, you’re not a child anymore. You have to settle down.” I let her talk—I don’t have much to say on the subject. Every so often I interrupt with some nonsense like “You’re right, mamma,” or “Inshallah, I’ll get married soon, mamma.” Anyway, at the end I give her carte blanche in the search for her future daughter-in-law. Better not to waste time. You have to be practical.

Around one o’clock I head for the Mosque of Peace. It takes a few minutes to get there. I’m sort of excited. It’s the first time I’ve gone into a mosque to pray. During my trips to Arab countries I’ve visited a lot of mosques. Exactly: I went to visit, not to pray.

From the outside the place resembles a garage rather than a mosque. Let’s say it’s just a place of worship: the real mosque is a whole other thing. I take off my shoes and enter with my right foot, as tradition requires. I see the imam, Signor Halal, and I go to say hello to him.

“
Assalamu aleikum
, Imam Zaki.”

“
Aleikum salam
, brother Issa. Welcome to the house of God.”

“Thank you.”

“Prayer is essential for us immigrants. May God bless you.”

“Amen.”

I sit on the floor and wait for Felice. After a while Ali, the convert I met the other day as I was leaving Little Cairo, comes over. Judas told me a few things about his past: before converting to Islam he was a militant on the extreme left, a hard-line Communist who would not accept compromises. He may have been connected to the Red Brigades, but no evidence was ever found. He’s probably the ideologue of the cell, or at least has an important role in the new organization. Does Operation Little Cairo provide a chance to make him pay his outstanding account: does he have blood on his hands? Certainly if he is guilty it wouldn’t be right to let him get away with it. Anyone who does wrong should pay, always.

We start talking about the situation of Muslims in Italy. Now Ali is a lawyer who does volunteer work for the foreigners. He explains that the Italian constitution guarantees freedom of worship, but adds that in reality Muslims are heavily discriminated against. Although Islam is still considered a religion of immigrants, in fact there are more than ten thousand Italian citizens who are followers of the Koran, and they all have the sacrosanct right to have decent places of worship. A couple of times he cites Articles III and XIX of the Constitution; the first is the one that concerns the equality of all citizens before the law, the second sanctions freedom of worship.

Then he tells me that this place used to be a warehouse. It’s always very damp, hot in summer and freezing in winter. He adds that it’s very difficult to get permission to open a mosque, and complains about certain Italian political leaders and their extreme provocations of Muslims.

Ali isn’t sparing in his criticisms of the Italian government, which wants to adopt a law like the Patriot Act—the law that Bush passed after the attacks of September 11th to combat terrorism, which gave much greater power to the security services and reduced individual freedoms. Then he offers a comparison between the current campaign of alarmism and the strategy of tension carried out by the services during the seventies and eighties, Italy’s “years of lead.”

“When I was at university I was drawn to the ideas of the Brigades.”

“Brigades?”

“The Red Brigades, you know who they are?”

“No.”

“They’re the ones who in 1978 kidnapped and killed Aldo Moro, then the leader of the Christian Democrats.”

I’m astonished by his confession. I wonder: why is Ali admitting this particular? Shouldn’t he keep his ties to the Red Brigades hidden?

The convert continues to tell me, briefly, his story. At university he came in contact with a group of Brigade members, but he was never involved in bloodshed. At the time, he was certain that violence was the only means of changing and improving the world; now he admits that he was wrong. “Power is corrupt to the marrow and tends to militarize dissent in order to sweep it away. Today I believe that nonviolence is a more effective tool. I always urge my brothers in Islam not to fall into the trap of terrorism.”

At this point Felice arrives. He greets me and sits down next to me. Imam Zaki starts the sermon. The theme is peace in Islam. After the sermon, the faithful rise, and then begin a series of movements punctuated by ritual formulas uttered by the imam. I imitate them mechanically, like a robot.

When the prayer is over I go, as promised, with Felice to his house. It’s near Little Cairo. I buy an apple cake. The elevator stops at the fourth floor. Felice rings the bell and who should open it but . . . It’s her . . . the beautiful woman in the veil. She—she is Felice’s wife . . . I see the child hiding behind her and calling her mamma. It’s her daughter.

I’m overwhelmed with emotion, or, rather, I’m literally stunned. The food is good, but I can’t fully taste the chicken and rice. I feel ill at ease, out of place.

Before going to work I stop at Via Nazionale to see Captain Judas and bring him up to date on the situation. I find him sitting in the living room intently reading a document.

“Tell me, Tunisian, how did your first day as an observant Muslim in the mosque go?”

“Fine. The imam devoted his sermon to . . . ”

“To peace in Islam.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s written in this report, Tunisian.”

“Ah . . . so I’m not the only spy in this operation.”

“What a cheeky bastard, your imam, he talks about peace while they’re plotting attacks. Anything else?”

“After prayers I went to Felice’s for lunch. I met his daughter Aida and his wife . . . ”

“Safia, Sofia to her friends, a very beautiful woman. Don’t you think?”