Giuseppe Catozzella - Don't Tell Me You're Afraid

That leg was supposed to last four days. We waited only for the times when the jeep would stop, twice a day. Once, in daylight, to do our business and sip some water. The other, at night, to sleep on the sand. The days had turned into a single, endless, prolonged waiting. From the moment you set out again, you started counting the minutes until the next stop.

All around, a lunar landscape in which earth and sky are one. Your points of reference vanish. It’s like diving into a mirror. An endless expanse of sand. So uniform that you too end up turning into sand. And not just because it filters in everywhere, so that it quickly fills your eyes, throat, and lungs with grit, and you have to swallow so it won’t clog up your mouth. Soon you stop fighting it and simply close your eyes, clamp your jaws shut, and count. You count to a thousand, and at every hundred you swallow what little saliva you have left, keeping count with your fingers. You know that when you get to a thousand, twenty minutes will have passed. Amir, a Somali, taught this to me on the first leg of the trip from Addis Ababa to Al Qadarif. Then you count to ten thousand. That comes to over three hours. When you’ve counted to ten thousand three times, it’s almost time for the stop. Going on like that, you too end up becoming sand, because you see yourself as a minute grain of that white expanse, or as one of the seconds of time that, like a madwoman, you can’t get out of your head.

I kept my plastic bag tucked under my T-shirt.

We had ten liters of water per person for four days. Two and a half liters a day, which in the intense heat of the Sahara aren’t enough for even a few hours.

Every so often someone would fall asleep or pass out from lack of air. It happened to me too. The woman next to me, an old Somali, noticed it and tried to wake me up by nudging me with her shoulders, but I didn’t respond. Then someone who had managed to hide a bottle of water pulled it out. They passed the word and in a few minutes the bottle reached the woman. She poured a little on my head and I came to. What had happened to my strength? Where was the little Olympic warrior? Had I really been in Beijing, or was it all a dream? The opening ceremony, with me a bright star in the firmament of the strongest in the whole world? And Mo Farah in the middle of the field, laughing and relaxed? Another hallucination?

In the evening we traveled until even the drivers were ready to drop. To avoid being seen by police helicopters patrolling the desert, the traffickers keep the lights turned off, using them as little as possible. You’re in the Sahara at night with no light, crushed among dozens of bodies on a dilapidated jeep creeping along like a snail.

As soon as the sun went down it felt like we were traveling in a nightmare. Counting relaxed me and fed my imagination. Every now and then I thought I was on a plane, like when I went to Beijing and took the sleeping pill. As it had then, the constant noise of the engine made me dream of being in an endless, dark tunnel. Suddenly I opened my eyes and everything slipped away. I was going to China; they were my Olympics. The hotel would be beautiful. I would shake hands with Veronica Campbell-Brown. She would look at me curiously at first, then with admiration. I would run in a huge stadium in front of TV cameras from around the world. I would give it my best. At the end everyone would stand up to applaud me, journalists from throughout the world would interview me, my face would be seen in every corner of the planet.

Then a sharp bump, an abrupt swerve, or a deep depression, someone vomiting. I was plunged back to where I was. In a dark tunnel that wasn’t a dream. Hours and hours without headlights, guided only by GPS.

Eighty-six of us clinging to the technology of a GPS.

There are no roads in the Sahara. There are no tracks. Each trafficker on each Journey follows his own particular route. In the morning the tire marks are covered over by sand. Erased forever. No Journey is the same as another.

For days you’re in the hands of human traffickers who in turn are in the hands of a small box that communicates with a satellite.

Around three in the morning we’d stop someplace in the midst of that expanse of sand dunes, eat moffa, a grain and corn-flour mush, and try to get some sleep; we lay there huddled around that rusted vehicle, which from outside seemed minuscule.

The families stayed together, the children crying. The older people moaned and groaned.

I had become friends with an Ethiopian girl, Zena, a little older than me, who wanted to be a doctor. Her dream was to get to Europe and enroll in college. Any university in any European city — to her it made no difference. She was traveling with her elderly grandmother, who was always glued to her.

In spite of everything, we couldn’t sleep. It was difficult to sleep. Many people prayed. They prayed out loud. The children were never still and the parents didn’t know what to do. There was one child in particular, Said, four years old, with his mother and father. Said seemed possessed. He cried all day and didn’t stop, not even at night. He never stopped. Given the way he kept crying, making his throat sore and scratchy, his voice had become hoarse and croaky, like that of a muttering, demented old man or an abandoned dog tied to a post for weeks. The parents did their best to keep him quiet. Every night they had to take turns moving a distance away in order not to disturb the group. Otherwise someone might go berserk. You had to be careful about everything.

On those nights, lying on the sand with the aimless, dark forms of the desert cockroaches and beetles, I thought about Hooyo and I thought about Aabe. I cried and silently begged my father for help. Or I talked to Hodan, telling her that I would be with her soon. I thought about Beijing, the happy days, about that first morning at the hotel in front of the BBC. About the applause, the fans standing and shouting my name.

I focused on the upcoming London Olympics and tried to bear up.

By doing that, I was slowly able to fall asleep.

At noon, after driving for two days, the Land Rover broke down, this time for real.

It started jolting and jerking for a while; then it got mired in the sand. We were in the middle of the Sahara with brutal heat and no protection.

We all got out. The traffickers tried to disassemble a few parts without letting anyone get near the engine. After three hours they realized that there was nothing they could do and called for help, transmitting the coordinates of the GPS.

The children were already crying; the elderly tried to take cover in the meager shade under the jeep. We were stranded there for twenty-four hours. The water had been used up long ago. We thought we would all die, and that individual thought became a collective one. Somehow, all of a sudden, everyone began to buckle under the same pressure, as if a huge mallet had materialized and begun pounding down on all our heads simultaneously. The endless hours stretched out in hallucinations: Sitting on the sand without protection, those visions became a common delirium.

Then the sound of an engine was heard in the distance. We didn’t know if it was real or imaginary. But before long the silhouette of a vehicle appeared from behind a dune. They had found us. And they also had water; there were lots of jerricans tied to the outside.

That same evening we resumed the trek.

You quickly become ruthless. Everyone thinks only of himself.

No one tells you this before; you learn for yourself that it’s up to you not to fall out of the jeep. If you fall off, the traffickers won’t stop. They tell you that right away, before the start of each stretch.

There are only three rules, the same for every trip, and each time they’re repeated.