Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (4 page)

We are a strange people. We murdered Mussolini and his lover Claretta in a public square in Milan, we threw out the king and his family and wouldn’t let them return, we defied the Pope and the Holy Church when the majority voted in favor of divorce. Then we all saw Giulio Andreotti on television sitting at the defense table, and that no-good Cicciolina in parliament. I’m not educated like you, but I still have the right to ask: If Andreotti had dealings with the Mafia, does that mean I voted for the Mafia and didn’t realize it? Does that mean that the Mafia governed Italy for decades? Lately we’ve been hearing about that Northern League that’s doing its best to divide the country in two and found a new state, Padania. What country are we living in? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Madonna, help us!

I hope Signor Amedeo comes back soon. Then you will discover the terrible mistake you’ve made. I tell you, this country is a wonderland. From now on I won’t be surprised if I hear someone say that Giulio Andreotti is Albanian or Pakistani or Filipino. Signor Amedeo is the only tenant who stops to talk to me. He always calls me Signora Benedetta and he avoids using the elevator because he respects my work, he knows how I struggle to keep things peaceful for the tenants. The disappearance of Signor Amedeo and the groundless accusation that he murdered the Gladiator make me long to leave Rome for my final return to Naples. Yes, that’s San Gennaro calling me! I’ll go to the church of San Domenico in Naples to pray for Signor Amedeo.

T
hursday February 4, 11:14
P.M.

I tried unsuccessfully to convince Benedetta, the concierge, that Parviz isn’t Albanian, and that
merci
is a French word meaning “thank you” that is used, with the same meaning, in Iran. When I got home tonight she stopped me, as usual, and after a long tirade in which she kept repeating that I’m like her only son she advised me to stay away from the Albanian, saying, “That crook! He’s just going to cause you a ton of problems, because witnesses have seen him selling drugs in Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore while he’s pretending to feed the pigeons.” The police have arrested him several times, but she couldn’t understand why they release him right away.

Tuesday June 4, 10:57
P.M.

The morbid relationship that Benedetta has established with the elevator raises a lot of questions. This morning she was very angry with Parviz. She complained for a long time, saying that the Albanian, as she calls him, “wrecks the elevator” in order to get her fired from her job, on the pretext that she’s old and can’t look after the tenants. I promised to speak to Parviz to try and resolve this problem. I hate the elevator because it reminds me of a tomb. I hate confined spaces, except this bathroom. It’s my nest. Today I read an article about the hoopoe in the magazine
Focus
; apparently it’s the only bird that takes care of its needs in its nest! There’s another bird as mysterious as the hoopoe. It’s the crow, which showed Cain how to get rid of the corpse of his brother Abel by digging a pit. It’s said that this was the first murder on earth, so the crow is the first expert on burial in history. I am a special sort of crow. My mission is to bury bloodstained memories.

Friday September 6, 10:35
P.M.

Our neighbor Elisabetta’s dog has vanished. Tonight Benedetta asked me insistently the names of the countries where people eat dog. I answered that I don’t know, then she surprised me with a strange question: “Does your friend the Albanian eat dogs and cats?” I swore that Parviz has never in his entire life touched dog or cat! This old lady has a disarming naïveté.

Wednesday November 17, 11:27
P.M.

Today Benedetta revealed a very sensitive secret to me. She said in a low voice, in order not to be heard by anyone else: “The disappearance of the dog Valentino isn’t accidental. He was kidnapped by the Chinese children who play in the gardens in Piazza Vittorio! They hunt for cats and dogs the way our children chase butterflies.” Then she advised me to avoid Chinese restaurants because their favorite dish is made with dog. I restrained myself from bursting into laughter, said goodbye in a hurry, and ran up the stairs. As soon as I opened the door I started laughing like a lunatic. And then I had a brilliant idea. I wondered what would happen if I knocked on Elisabetta Fabiani’s door and said to her: “I’ve just come back from the Chinese restaurant next door, and I had rice with some delicious meat; when I was leaving I asked the restaurant owner what kind of meat I’d eaten and he said, ‘It’s from a dog we found one morning near our restaurant, he was wearing a collar that had “Valentino” written on it.’” I haven’t laughed so much for a long time. Anyway, I hope little Valentino comes back soon, so I’ll be able to listen to him wailing at night.

Saturday January 7, 11:48
P.M.

Benedetta usually complains about everything: the tenants in the building, the government, the businesses in Piazza Vittorio, how bad the health service is, the high price of medicine, taxes, rain, the immigrants. But today she talked to me about her son Gennaro, who’s unemployed. She asked me to help her find him a job, repeating that when it comes to relatives, “familiarity breeds contempt,” and even, “
Parenti serpenti
”—relatives are like snakes. This proverb resembles the Arab “Relatives are like scorpions.” After talking about Gennaro, she began her usual complaint about the foreigners who make trouble in Piazza Vittorio and why don’t the police arrest criminals like Iqbal the Pakistani who sells drugs and runs a prostitution ring. What she doesn’t know or perhaps doesn’t want to hear is that Iqbal is Bangladeshi, not Pakistani, and that he’s not a drug pusher and has nothing to do with prostitution. Iqbal is a member of a cooperative made up of fifty Bangladeshis, and he doesn’t own either the van or the shop. I’ve never seen anyone work like him. He’s a human bee. I thought of telling Benedetta everything I know about Iqbal, then I thought twice: to what end? It’s really pointless to know the truth. The only consolation is this nighttime wailing. Auuuuuuuuu . . .

Tuesday October 26, 10:53
P.M.

This morning Benedetta told me, “Today they’re going to announce the final judgment on Giulio Andreotti. I don’t trust informers who accuse upstanding people like Andreotti just to muddy the waters.” She is waiting very anxiously for the verdict, she wants to know the truth about the relationship between the state and the Mafia. Tonight I finished reading
The Day of the Owl
by Leonardo Sciascia, which is considered one of the best novels ever written about the Mafia, and I stopped at this passage: “The truth is at the bottom of a well: look into a well and you see the sun or the moon; but throw yourself down and there is neither sun nor moon, there is the truth.”

S
ignor Amedeo is one of the few Italians who shop in my store. He’s an ideal customer: he pays cash—I’ve never written his name in my credit book. There’s a real difference between him and the rest of the customers, like the Bangladeshis, the Pakistanis, and the Indians, who pay at the end of the month. I’m well acquainted with their problems. A few can afford a fixed amount every month, while the rest live like the birds: they get their food day by day. There are a lot of Bangladeshis who sell garlic in the markets in the morning, flowers in the restaurants at night, and umbrellas on rainy days.

Signor Amedeo is different from the other Italians: he’s not a fascist, I mean he’s not a racist who hates foreigners, like that shit Gladiator who despises us and humiliates everyone. I’m telling you the truth: that bastard got what he deserved. The Neapolitan concierge is a racist, too, because she won’t let me use the elevator when I deliver groceries to my customers who live in her building. She hates me for no reason and won’t answer when I say hello. In fact, she insults me on purpose, calling me Hey Pakistani! I’ve told her many times, “I’m Bangladeshi, and I have nothing to do with Pakistan, in fact I have an unbounded hatred for the Pakistanis.” During the war of independence in 1971, Pakistani soldiers raped many of our women. I can’t forget my poor aunt, who killed herself in order not to bring shame on the family. Ah, if only we had had the bomb! I say the Pakistanis deserve to die like the Japanese in the Second World War. Not to mention the professor from Milan, who even asked me to show him authorization to use the elevator. I wondered if you need a residency permit just for the elevator.

When I see Signor Amedeo with his Iranian friend Parviz in the Bar Dandini I feel happy. I say to myself, “How nice to see a Christian and a Muslim like two brothers: there is no difference between Christ and Mohammed, between the Gospel and the Koran, between church and mosque!” Because I’ve been in Rome a long time I can distinguish between racists and tolerant Italians: the racists don’t smile at you and don’t answer if you say ciao, or good morning, or good evening. They don’t give a damn about you, as if you didn’t exist; in fact, they wish from the bottom of their heart that you would turn into a repulsive insect to be ruthlessly crushed. While tolerant Italians smile a lot and greet you first, like Signor Amedeo, who always surprises me with his Islamic greeting: “
Assalam alaikum
.” He knows Islam well. Once he told me that the prophet Mohammed said that “to smile at someone is like giving alms.”

Signor Amedeo is the only Italian who spares me embarrassing questions about the veil, wine, pork, and so on. He must have traveled a lot in Muslim countries; maybe because his wife, Signora Stefania, has a travel agency near Via Nazionale. The Italians don’t know Islam properly. They think it’s a religion of bans: Drinking wine is forbidden! Sex outside marriage is forbidden! Once Sandro, the owner of the Bar Dandini, asked me:

“How many wives do you have?”

“One.”

He reflected for a moment, then said:

“You’re not a real Muslim, so no virgins for you in paradise, because Muslims are supposed to pray five times a day and observe Ramadan and marry four women.”

I tried to explain to him that I’m poor, I’m not rich like the emirs of the Gulf, who can maintain four families at the same time, but I didn’t see that he was convinced by my explanation. In the end he said to me:

“I respect you Muslim men, because you love women the way we Roman studs do, and faggots really piss you off.”

And Sandro isn’t the only one who says to me: “You’re not a real Muslim.” There’s the Arab Abdu, who sells fish in Piazza Vittorio. That asshole never stops hassling me—he gets on my nerves. One moment he swears that the true Muslim has to know Arabic, the next he criticizes my last name, Amir Allah, which he considers an offense against Islam. Once he said to me:

“My name is Abdallah and you are Amir Allah. If you knew Arabic, you’d understand the difference between Abdallah, which means Slave of God, and Amir Allah, which means Prince of God.”

So I told him that’s my father’s name and I won’t ever change it, so then he called me a heretic because I consider myself a prince superior to God. This is an extremist Arab and he deserves to have his tongue cut out.

Signor Amedeo is a wanted man? I can’t believe that charge. What really puzzles me is the story that all the news shows have broadcast: that Signor Amedeo is not Italian, he’s an immigrant like me. I don’t trust the TV reporters, because they’re always looking for scandals, and they exaggerate every problem. When I hear the bad things that are said about Piazza Vittorio it makes me suspicious: I wonder if they’re actually talking about the place where I’ve lived for ten years or the Bronx we see in cop movies.

Signor Amedeo is as good as mango juice. He helps us present our administrative appeals and gives us useful advice for dealing with all our bureaucratic problems. I still remember how he helped me solve the problem that gave me an ulcer. It began when I went to get my residency permit at the police station and realized that they had mixed up my first and last names. I explained that my first name is Iqbal and my last name is Amir Allah, which is also my father’s name, because in Bangladesh the name of the son or daughter is traditionally accompanied by the father’s. Unfortunately all my attempts were in vain. I went to the police station every day, until one day the inspector lost patience:

“My name is Mario Rossi, and there’s no difference between Mario Rossi and Rossi Mario, just as there is none between Iqbal Amir Allah and Amir Allah Iqbal!”

Then, with the residency permit in his hand:

“This is your photograph?”

“Yes.”

“This is your signature?”

“Yes.”

“This is your date of birth?”

“Yes.”

“Then there’s no problem, right?”

“Wrong, there’s a huge problem. My name is Iqbal Amir Allah, not Amir Allah Iqbal.”

At that point he got angry and threatened me:

“You don’t understand a goddam thing. If you come back one more time I’ll seize your residency permit, take you to Fiumicino airport, and put you on the first plane to Bangladesh! I don’t want to see you here one more time, get it?”

I immediately talked to Signor Amedeo about it, confessing that I was afraid of Amir Allah Iqbal and that a lot of problems could arise in the future because of this change of name. Let’s say for example that someone whose name is Amir Allah Iqbal is a serious criminal or a ruthless drug dealer or a dangerous terrorist like that Pakistani Yussef Ramsi the Americans captured recently. If I adopted that new identity, how would I prove that my children are really mine? How would I prove that my wife is really mine? What would happen if they saw the marriage license and discovered that the husband of my wife is not me but another person, whose name is Iqbal Amir Allah? How would I get my money out of the bank? After my outburst Signor Amedeo promised that he would intervene to release me from this nightmare.

A few days later he kept his promise and went with me to the police station on Via Genova. It was the first time I had gone to a police station without having to wait for one or two hours. His friend, Inspector Bettarini, was expecting us, and he asked for my residency permit. Then he left the office, came back in a few minutes, and I really couldn’t believe my ears when he said to me:

“Signor Iqbal Amir Allah, here is your new residency permit!”

Before thanking him I glanced quickly at the first lines of the document. Name: Iqbal. Surname: Amir Allah. I breathed a sigh of relief, truly a big weight had been lifted off my shoulders. As we were leaving the police station I had a brilliant idea: “You know, Signor Amedeo, my wife is pregnant and soon I’ll be a father for the fourth time. I’ve decided to call my son Roberto. His name will be Roberto Iqbal!” And so it was. My wife had a boy and I called him Roberto. It’s the only way for him to avoid the disaster of a mix-up between name and surname. It will be impossible to make a mistake because Roberto, Mario, Francesco, Massimo, Giulio, and Romano are all first names, not last names. I must do all I can to spare my son Roberto these serious problems. A good father should look out for his children’s future.

I don’t know where he is now, but I’m sure of one thing: Signor Amedeo is not an immigrant or a criminal! I’m positive he is innocent. He isn’t stained with the blood of that young man who never smiled. I’ve known him ever since I unloaded trucks in Piazza Vittorio, before we started the cooperative. I also know his wife, Signora Stefania, she’s a friend of my wife. He helped me find the house where I live, even though the owner had refused to rent to immigrants. He even persuaded me to send my wife to school to learn Italian. I really hope that Roberto turns out to be like Signor Amedeo. Now I just have to decide whether to send him to the Italian nursery school or the Islamic school, where he would learn the Koran and the Bengali language.