Nadifa Mohamed - Black Mamba Boy

Jama looked on as it ran past him and away into a dark tangle of thornbushes and aloes. He chucked the last few stones in his hand at the leopard’s back. “For fuck’s sake, chase it, Alfredo, don’t let it escape, tell him, Lorenzo!”

“It’s gone, Silvio, leave it,” said Lorenzo, lowering his rifle.

“Goddamn it!” exploded Silvio. “A leopard! I said if there was one thing I would bring back from Africa it would be a leopard that I had shot myself, and look! This imbecile just lets it run right away. I’m tired of blacks, I really am, I have had it up to here with them.” Silvio raised his fingers up to his neck.

“Calm down, Silvio, it wasn’t his fault, we weren’t fast enough.” Lorenzo pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face and hands. The gunshots still rang in the air with an electric effervescence. “Come, let’s collect what we’ve got and go back,” said Lorenzo softly.

“Tell him to collect any birds that are still alive,” Silvio demanded.

Lorenzo gave a long sigh and told Jama to collect them. Jama poked around the grass, found a few birds still moving and guiltily picked them up by their wings, piled them in front of the Italians.

“He wants you to grab one by its feet and hold your arm out to the side,” said Lorenzo as he lit a cigarette. Jama did as he was told, though the bird was nearly half his size and it hung heavily, flapping its wings and struggling forcefully for its life, digging its claws into his palm.

Silvio, a few paces away, brought his rifle up. One of his blue eyes scrunched up into a white and pink fist, he moved his shoulders around and steadied his aim. Jama looked at the rifle barrel pointed straight into his face, flared like the angry nostrils of a charging bull, and bit down on his tongue as he realized what the Italian was about to do. But Lorenzo grabbed Silvio’s arm just as he was about to fire and pulled him back.

“What’s your problem? I haven’t come all this way to let little black bastards lose me my quarry,” shouted Silvio, shoving Lorenzo in the chest.

Lorenzo gave him a few sharp slaps in the face. “Calm down! You’re behaving like a fucking animal. If you’re not careful I’ll send you home with a bullet in your fat peasant behind.” Jama looked on in shock, holding his bladder tight.

“Come on, you son of a bitch, Jew, Jew, you fucking Jews think you are so much better than everyone else, I’ll teach you a lesson,” dared Silvio.

Lorenzo grabbed Silvio by the testicles and wrenched them down until his knees buckled and he cried out. Lorenzo released his grip and snarled, “Stay the fuck away from me, Silvio, or I will turn you into a Jew with my fucking teeth.”

The tall Italian’s glasses were twisted across his face and his teeth were bared like an angry dog’s. “Hey, boy! Come on! Let’s go!” he shouted at Jama, his voice strained and hoarse.

Jama walked after him, his knees weak. He stepped around the short Italian as he lay on his side in the dry grass, clutching his groin.

The office was inside a khaki tent. A table sat in the middle of the dirt floor with brown files and papers neatly piled on top, a typewriter sitting silently to the left. Maggiore Lorenzo Leon pinched dried tobacco between his fingers and dropped it into the mouth of his pipe. A cup of coffee steamed beside him. Jama waited in front of the desk.

“Welcome, Jama, what can I do for you?” asked Lorenzo, the pipe wobbling in his mouth as he spoke.

“I want to know if you still need an office boy,” replied Jama, using his best Italian. He played down the kh and gh so common in his own language and mimicked the sibilance with which Italians spoke.

Lorenzo took matches from his shirt pocket and lit the pipe. “Yes, I am going crazy with the dust and filth in here, why don’t you get started now?”

“Si, signore,” said Jama. He stood waiting for an instruction, while Lorenzo carried on smoking his pipe.

“Well?” laughed Maggiore Leon.

“What do you want me to do, signore? And signore… how much will you give me?”

“Good question. Let’s start you on five liras a week. You are only a small thing, I don’t expect to get much work out of you.”

Jama’s heart fell. Five liras! It wasn’t worth leaving the café for, and at least he got fed there, but Maggiore Leon seemed to be an important man, and in a place like Omhajer proximity to importance mattered a great deal.

“Start by sweeping the floor, and then I’ll find something else for you,” continued the maggiore. So you’re not so busy after all, thought Jama, his suspicion rising.

Lorenzo watched Jama’s clumsy sweeping, the broom slipping from his grip. Lorenzo laughed and Jama looked questioningly at him.

“Don’t worry, Jama, I just remembered something,” said Lorenzo, still laughing. If only his friends could see him now, sweating in a uniform, watching a native boy cleaning up for him. He found everything amusing now, Fascism, communism, anarchism, he could only trust in the patently idiotic. The blackshirts marching in front of his balcony in Rome, deliriously howling for an Italian Abyssinia, senile housewives rushing into the street to hand over their wedding rings to pay for Mussolini’s war. Demanding the civilization of a country they could not place on a map. He had joined the army late enough to miss most of the fighting but early enough to benefit from the generous officers’ allowances. To his delight he had also found a few Abyssinian girls to enjoy before the others had infected them with unpleasant diseases, but Omhajer was still a hardship posting after the leisure of Libya — a dusty, impoverished town full of the dregs of the Italian army, and a battalion full of ex-prisoners, alcoholics, and lunatics, few of whom had even finished their elementary schooling. They hated Lorenzo’s books, glasses, rumored Jewishness, and bullied him the way only soldiers can their officers. Lorenzo intended to study anthropology back in Italy so took photographs of the local villagers and notes on their lifestyles and societies; he had learned a smattering of Somali from the askaris, and he had even been invited home for a meal by a well-to-do Sudanese merchant. The other officers were shocked and disgusted at this intimacy with the natives, and one had threatened to report his crimes against racial hygiene to the commander.

Lorenzo had been struck by Jama’s self-possession the day he had been thrown off the bus. Lorenzo sometimes observed Jama muttering to himself in the teahouse and saw him loitering around town late at night, and began to feel sympathy for him. He was always alone, his forehead screwed up in concentration, and he reminded Lorenzo of his own solitary childhood. When Lorenzo’s mother’s letters had first arrived, describing in her unsteady, spidery hand the murders and assaults on Jews in Germany that she read about in the Corriere della Sera , he had brushed aside her concerns, reminding her that she had trundled off to the synagogue the day Italy had invaded Abyssinia to sing the Fascist anthem “Giovinezza” with the other neighborhood crones. “Not in Italy, Mama,” had been his final word on the subject. Now that he had spent time with rough, country Italians, and heard their anti-Semitic jokes and rants, he grew more circumspect and advised his mother to get her savings out of the bank and prepare to leave for France. Soldiers idle in their barracks said incredible things. Even Lorenzo was startled to hear a soldier claim the most exhilarating experience he’d had in the army was firing into a civilian crowd in the Ethiopian highlands when villagers there had protested the massacre of monks at Debre Libanos. “Sir, I am finished. How much will I get as a soldier? Can I become a soldier for you instead?” asked Jama, leaning on the broom.