Human Cargo (11 page)

With Silvio Berlusconi’s 2001 election much of the leniency has vanished. Migrants seeking to work in Italy can no longer simply arrive
and then look for jobs; they must apply for work permits first at the Italian consulate in their own countries, and once their contract is over, they must return home. Under the Bossi-Fini law, passed in 2003, those who arrive illegally on Italy’s shores may now be held for sixty days in a CPT for processing, after which those identified in preliminary hearings as coming from “safe” countries—hence the reluctance of asylum seekers to say too much about where they come from—or judged criminal or too blatantly in search of work, are given deportation orders. It was Umberto Bossi of the Lega Nord who declared that cannons should be set up on Italy’s coasts to deter would-be asylum seekers. Only around 10 percent—compared, say, with Sweden’s 50 percent or the UK’s 40 percent plus— of all who enter Italy illegally are said to be ultimately recognized as genuine refugees and given that status under the Convention. While they wait to be processed, they are released, like Roland and Mercy, to cope as well as they can, until summoned before a commission in Rome to put their case for asylum. However, since this process can now take up to a year or more, many have left their designated addresses long before the summons, to disappear into Italy’s vast black economy, or to drift northward illegally into other European countries. Only 20 percent of those who apply for asylum are reported to turn up in Rome for their interview with the commission.

As of 2001, Italy was said to have over 1.5 million legal migrants and as many as 1 million illegal ones. On average, 75,000 of the latter are deported each year. (Only Greece expels more.) Over a third of Italy’s prison population is now said to be foreign. In 2002, it was reported that only 16 percent of the nation’s 50,000 to 70,000 prostitutes were in fact Italian; the rest came mainly from Albania, followed by Yugoslavia, Nigeria, and South America. The word
extracomunitari
has come to have distinctly racist connotations, and violent attacks on refugees, Jews, Gypsies, and especially on African and black immigrants, attacks previously almost unknown in Italy, have become widespread. Officially, Italy has no Maghrebini— people from Algeria, Tunisia, or Morocco—because the North Africans have earned the reputation of being involved in drugs and
crime and so tend to fail the first screening process. After September 11, there was a sharp increase in the number of negative decisions handed down to asylum seekers.

The Permanent Temporary Centers have attracted considerable hostility among Italy’s liberals, who fear that the secrecy and high walls, the rolls of barbed wire and hangarlike structures, conceal deprivation and ill-treatment. Sixty days, they argue, is a frighteningly long period to spend locked up, in total idleness, not knowing what will become of you. Migrants emerging from the CPTs complain of inedible food, extreme discomfort, and a pervasive despair and anxiety. Not long ago, Medecins Sans Frontieres carried out research into Italy’s sixteen CPTs. They found that in some of them, the refugees were kept in small enclosures, freezing in winter, boiling in summer; that the guards were sometimes brutal; that there was excessive use of antidepressants and tranquilizers; and that self-mutilation was endemic. A politician of the left, Calogero Micciche, amid considerable publicity, insisted on being allowed into Agri-gento’s CPT, which is housed in a former factory in one of the town’s newer concrete suburbs. Conditions inside, he told waiting reporters when he emerged, flustered by having his video camera confiscated, were appalling, with excrement all over the walls, and women detainees offering their services as prostitutes.

After the fuss died down, those who are allowed to visit the centers officially, the priests, doctors, and welfare officers, expressed astonishment at his words, insisting that the CPTs, though indeed charmless since most are housed in former barracks and factories, behave honorably and generously toward the asylum seekers. “The paradox,” says Daniela D’Amico, who recently helped set up a new voluntary organization dealing with issues of migration in Agri-gento, “is that all these new laws which are designed to stop arrivals in fact make no difference. Migration, asylum, these are a social phenomenon of our time. We have lost the memory of our history. Immigrants are the myth of our particular culture.” The truth is that many Sicilians have mixed feelings about the asylum seekers: they are at least partly proud of the hospitality they accord their unexpected
and unwanted visitors, remembering that the Italians, out of all the people of Europe, most softened the Nazi persecution of the Jews, so that of 60,000 Jewish Italians a third survived the war. They are also pleased with their apparent efficiency at dealing with such large numbers, and they are understandably reluctant to see in these detention centers anything but humane holding operations for a fair and just refugee policy. Sicilians regard themselves as rather apart from the people of the mainland, and with some reason: Cavour, the prime minister who achieved unification in 1860, and who had per-sonally never been farther south than Florence, once said in Parliament that he thought Sicilians spoke Arabic.

A third of the migrant inmates have served prison sentences in Italy, for a variety of criminal acts, and are sent to the CPTs to await deportation. Those from Sicily may be incarcerated there or on the mainland, for as one center fills up, newcomers are shunted to those that currently have space.
Clandestini, extracomunitari
, illegal migrants, refugees, asylum seekers: nowhere is the muddle that surrounds migration more apparent than on the shores of Sicily, and nowhere is the line that separates those judged worthy to enter from those turned away more gray.

•   •   •

THE SHIPWRECK THAT;
killed Happy and landed Mercy and her unborn child on the beach at Capo Rossello has had ripples all along Sicily’s southern shores. Something about the intensity of the freak storm, the extraordinary size of the hailstones, and the way that the survivors clung for so long to the lacerating volcanic rocks touched a chord with Sicilians more accustomed to tourists enjoying the tranquillity of their beaches. In the days that followed the accident, as journalists and television reporters flocked from all over Italy, people from miles around Realmonte arrived with offers of clothes and food. Dr. Palumbo is the village physician for San Biagio Platan], some twenty-five miles up into the mountains above Agrigento. He was having lunch, at three o’clock on a sunny afternoon, after a long morning with his patients, when I found him at home, surrounded
by wisteria and orange trees. It was after his wife read about the bereaved Liberians in Realmonte, he explained, that he went to the prefect in Agrigento and offered to help. Dr. Palumbo knows all about the
clandestini:
he is the chairman of his local branch of the Misericordia, and the director of social services for the CPT in Agrigento.

After Dr. Palumbo’s intervention, fifteen young Liberians, five of them women, moved to San Biagio, a small town set among high summer pastures, where the inhabitants were quick to come forward with offers of help. Like Father Giuseppe in Realmonte, Dr. Palumbo was proud of his patients’ generosity toward their visitors. His wife, a teacher, soon borrowed a room in a neighbor’s house and fashioned a classroom with a borrowed blackboard and chairs and books scrounged from the local school; she began giving lessons in Italian. One of the young Liberian girls found work as an occasional maid; several of the boys were invited to help out the local builders. I hough none could be officially employed, it was tacitly understood that they should be paid like everyone else while they were waiting for their claims for asylum to be heard, and that they should not stay idle and penniless. When one of the young women was found to be pregnant, and had her baby, the Italian woman who had become close to her offered to adopt and care for both mother and child.

But soon, the warm relationship between the Sicilians and their Liberian guests seemed to turn a little sour. As Dr. Palumbo sees it, everyone understood that at first the Africans would be reluctant to talk much about who they were and where they came from. But everyone assumed that their reticence would evaporate once they felt secure and appreciated. But it didn’t; if anything, it grew stronger. It was as if word had reached them that they should give away absolutely nothing about themselves, not even their real names. They began changing their names, and then their ages, and any details that they had previously let slip about their journeys. After he overheard two of the young men speaking French to each other, Dr. Palumbo began to wonder whether some were not in fact Sierra Leoneans or Guineans; he thought that they might have been primed by the
smuggler to give as their home Liberia, a country so bedeviled by constant civil war that refugees believe that no European nation would feel able to return refugees to it. Several of the young women turned out to be pregnant; when one gave her age first as eighteen, and then as twenty-five, and then as twenty-two, Dr. Palumbo was at first amused, and then mildly irritated, and he begged her to find an age and stick to it, if only for the sake of convenience.

In the early autumn of 2002, when the group first settled in San Biagio, several of the young men had gone willingly to the local bars in the evening, to play pool and listen to music. But as the weeks passed, they went less and less, preferring to sit in the rooms lent to them by the villagers, watching television and talking to one another in the Liberian English outsiders find so hard to follow.

The inhabitants of San Biagio, and down the mountain, those of Realmonte, where much the same thing was happening with Roland and Mercy, were perplexed. They could not quite see why people on whom they had lavished genuine concern and affection, whose futures they felt personally involved with, did not appear to trust them enough to confide their true stories in return. They began to feel a little resentful when the young Liberians simply smiled when asked to talk about the terrifying boat ride, or looked vague when questioned about their families and their past lives. Even a few confidences, as Dr. Palumbo says, would have made a difference. There would have been something in return for all the fruit and clothes and attention; it wasn’t that his patients—or Father Giuseppe’s parishioners—wanted to be thanked, but they would have appreciated, enjoyed, a little recognition; the absence of it rankled. In Realmonte, the local people now hesitated before taking around fruit or presents for the babies. Because of the increasingly taciturn replies, the blank looks, which could seem at times almost like hostility, the cutting short of any conversation leading to a question, they were soon not quite sure whom to believe when Roland went on saying that Mercy was his sister, or when the local midwife let it be known that Mercy was having sex with someone right up until the day her baby was born.

And in San Biagio, as autumn turned into winter, and freezing winds blew through the high mountains, the Africans clearly began to suspect that the life of a remote Sicilian town, safe as it was, might not be so desirable after all. Security was all very well, but what of the new life that Europe had seemed to promise? What of the affluence, the comfort, the good things they had seen on their televisions back at home? At least, that is what Dr. Palumbo assumes they thought, for the young people themselves said nothing. After a few weeks’ halfhearted appearance at Signora Palumbo’s Italian classes, one by one they stopped attending. The day came when San Biagio woke to find three of the Liberians gone, departed on the early bus for Palermo. A few days later, another five had vanished. By January, there were none left. Even the girl with her new baby had disappeared. Not one said good-bye to anyone. “It wasn’t that we wanted thanks,” said Dr. Palumbo again. “We didn’t help them for gratitude. But to leave saying nothing? It made us feel foolish, used.” It also made them feel sad, thinking about these wandering young Africans, slipping quietly into the night, to scatter and vanish into Europe, to lives as uncertain as those that they had left behind them. No one imagines that they will ever see their Liberian guests again.

Not everyone, of course, was able to leave so quickly. Traveling with a premature baby, or while heavily pregnant, even in Italy, in dead of winter and with no papers, no money, and nowhere to go, is not simple. In Realmonte, the four young Liberians and their two little girls felt that they had no choice but to wait out the weeks until their summons from the commission in Rome. Because they are Liberians, or at least appear to be Liberians, from a country still not settled, because they are survivors of a shipwreck and the parents of babies, they do not anticipate problems with their refugee status. But as the months have passed, their irritation with Realmonte has grown. They are not content. It is as if the long wait to reach Europe has once again been extended; and this last wait, until they can set out for a life somewhere better, more interesting, more promising, more like the Europe they had imagined, is almost unbearable. Realmonte has become just another limbo.

Before leaving southern Sicily, I went back to Realmonte, to the ground-floor flat with its tile floors and television set, and the furniture and the baby things provided by the Misericordia. I wanted to see Daniel and Adrean, the young married couple, who had been away in Palermo on my first visit, taking their premature daughter for a checkup with a pediatrician. I wanted to ask Adrean to tell me about her journey from her village in Liberia to Monrovia, and about the boat that finally sank, leaving her, like Mercy, clutching a rock, and about what it had been like to be pregnant and frightened and not to know where the child would be born, or whether it would survive the hours she spent in the sea. When I knocked on the shutters of the flat, I found the kitchen unexpectedly full of people, young men from Ghana and Sierra Leone, and other arrivals from Liberia. Some had been in Italy for almost twenty years, part of earlier migrant waves, and were now possessors of legal work and residence permits. The authorities had complained agitatedly about parties and noise made by the two Liberian couples, about brawls and shouting matches, but this was a muted gathering, though not a very friendly one. It was my first and almost only encounter with the rougher side of migration. Among the young men gathered in the room, there was little pretense about their reasons for coming to Europe: they were in search of better lives, and they were resentful and angry that Italy seemed to offer them so little.