It is a cliche that no one struggles with an overabundance of paternal love—that children are more likely to lack it than to have it in excess. In Baba, the debut novel of Tunisian-Italian writer Mohamed Maalel, young Ahmed is confronted with both lack and excess at once—with a loving father whose repeated expressions of care can never amend the traumatic betrayal this excerpt describes. Clarissa Botsford’s translation is haunting, expertly capturing a child’s tilt-a-whirl emotional life and dawning awareness of adult complexities, his simultaneous craving for love and his harsh refusal to forgive. In Botsford’s words, “The narrative microcosm in Baba powerfully embodies the new dynamics of a multicultural, colorful, and contradictory world, giving life to a story about the search for a blended identity amid religion, tradition, and queerness.” Read on!
A Boy Becomes A Man
When I was six, my father made me a man. Back then, I was convinced I could be anything I wanted. First, I wanted to be a superhero, then a fairy, and later a policeman. I watched the kids’ shows on TV. At six, I fell in love for the first time with Céline Dion, with Lara Croft, and with a cow in the yogurt commercials called Fruttolo. At six, I admired my cousins’ Barbies from afar, imagining what it would feel like to hold something with a figure like my mother’s. When I was six I was a child, with all the typical imperfections of children. When I was six I experienced intense pain. I tried to give it some kind of ironic significance over the years, but pain can only be ironic when it’s not your own. The pain is set against a Tunisian backdrop.
We were traveling with the usual food parcels for my father’s family. Outside, the high temperatures made the car windows scorching hot. My father was listening to the Koran on the radio, which made the air even more sultry tense. My ears received the unintelligible sounds as an annoying hum. During the whole the car ride, he insisted my brother memorize them. He couldn’t do it; he lowered his eyes when my father reminded him how immoral his life as an unbeliever was. He didn’t bother me. Instead, he’d ask me to choose a song on the radio. “You listen nice music Ahmouda, not like your brother’s haram junk,” he’d say.
Every year a huge line of cars packed tight with suitcases and food formed at the port of Palermo. We used to take over peanuts, milk, Nutella and small electrical appliances. On the ferry, our cabin with its dusty carpets and dry, brittle sheets that reeked of bleach awaited us. The size of the room made me feel even smaller. The wooden panels and porthole encrusted with saltwater made the air even heavier. I asked my father if I could climb up onto the top bunk. From there I watched my parents sort out our luggage while my brother tried to grab some sleep. Dad took take me to the bar and asked me what flavor of ice cream I wanted. He drank a cup of coffee staring out at the sea, never letting go of my hand. I brought my face close to his hand and felt the hairs tickling my skin.
Dad, when I was six, you held my hand tight, you spoke in Arabic to your Tunisian relatives, and I didn’t understand a thing. But I trusted you.
We spent the first two nights in a hotel in Tunis, the Amira Hotel Resort. I dove into the pool, while my mother tried to hide her shapeliness behind a long blue robe. My brother played alone, imagining he was a diver in the Atlantic Ocean. On the third day we stayed at Aunt Dounia’s, in Ksar Hellal, near the beautiful city of Monastir. I called it the city of chickens. Dead chickens hung in the itinerant butcher stores, where my father habitually stopped to buy something; you could catch glimpses of sheep and lambs grazing on the garbage on the streets. Aunt Dounia lived on the first floor of a construction that had never been completed. She had inherited it from her late husband’s father. After her husband’s death, the money had soon run out and she’d left the work half done. She greeted us with a gleeful smile, but I didn’t like her: she was big and awkward, and her clothes were too gaudy. She’d finish my chocolates and never thank me for them.
Standing beside her were my two cousins, Nasil and Walid, who started rifling through our suitcases right away. Nasil grabbed some cheese slices, pulled the packet open, and licked them before putting them in his mouth and chewing. Walid was dipping his fingers into a jar of Nutella and sucking on them with delight. I hugged my mother and she held me close. She lowered her gaze, as she was expected to, out of respect for her husband’s sister.
Mom, if I’d had any idea what pain meant when I was six, I would have hugged you tighter.
The next morning, Aunt Dounia woke me up very early. She looked like she’d slept far too well. She was annoyingly elated. My father had brought breakfast: baklava and makroudh, which Aunt Dounia greedily devoured. She was wearing a long red dress with faux gold embroidery. She took my hand, her rings pressing into my little fingers. We arrived at a store that sold clothes for special ceremonies. The window display was garish, filled with headless mannequins. My aunt was talking to the salesman, who would occasionally shoot me a look without saying anything. He took some measurements as I gazed at the passersby on the street. She bought a little white tunic, a little red hat, and embroidered linen shoes. “What a horrible birthday present,” I thought to myself. I spent the afternoon with her. Every now and again, she’d come to a halt and try speaking to me in Arabic. When I didn’t understand her, she stared up at the sky with a bored expression and carried on walking. By the time I got home that evening, the atmosphere was asphyxiating. There were hundreds of Coca-Cola bottles stacked on the floor. My mother was in tears. One cheek was red and swollen. She had been fighting with my father, but I had no idea what about.
My brother wasn’t there. My father sat there, smiling. There was a big, burgundy carpet with frayed edges on the floor. The sitting room was full of people I didn’t know: some looked at me and smiled, others focused on the taralli we’d brought from Italy. My father asked me to put on my new clothes. He helped me with my shoes, buttoned up my new tunic. He kissed me on the forehead, twice. Then he took me down onto the street, where a fancy decorated carriage drawn by two white horses was waiting for me. There was another boy who sat next to me and smiled happily. Stupidly, I tried to speak to him in Italian, but he didn’t understand a word. We kept each other company in silence. We began our tour of the city, everyone watching us. I felt strange, smiling by osmosis. People were hoisting posters of President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali in a pose of greeting his people. My father was taking photos of me and asked me to look into the lens and smile. I can still smell the scent of jasmine in my hair. When I got back home, everyone was still there, but this time they came up to me and hugged me. I’d never had so many hugs. My mother looked at me. I looked at her. She walked away with my father.
They asked me to lie down on the carpet. I didn’t ask why. It smelled of dust, mold and dirty feet. They pulled my pants down; at that moment, fear made my body go rigid. My aunt held a small pair of scissors in her hands, the kind she usually used for her toenails. My cousins pinned my arms down. They were laughing at me, I was scared. I was crying, yelling, calling out to my mother.
Mamma, you weren’t there. But I could hear you crying on the balcony.
I still remember the pain. After a few minutes, I was so used to it that I no longer felt it. I was looking at the ceiling, while everyone in the room was clapping. I was looking around, looking for my mother.
They call it al-Khitân, the Islamic celebration of transition to adulthood. They did the whole thing in two hours, without any kind of anesthesia. They threw the bloodstained gauzes into the garbage. They believe that circumcision makes you a man. “You won’t be scared of anything anymore,” they promised me. When I was six years old I began to hate my father, while in the other room people guzzled Coca-Cola.
I became a man, but I still acted like a child. That night they made me sleep in my aunt’s bed. She took the couch, while my mother and brother slept on the floor, on a pile of rugs. My father stayed out all night. I was bleeding. Every now and again, my mother came over to change the gauze. I’d pull away, scared. She’d sit there looking at me, stroking my hair. I tried to touch myself inside my underpants, but it hurt. I needed to pee, but I wasn’t allowed to. I had to lie on my back until morning.
The next day, my brother woke up to my yells. I was crying, screaming out in pain. The wound had reopened and I was bleeding out. My mother tried applying pressure with a rag. She was trying to communicate with my aunt, who didn’t understand. My cousins, in the meantime, were fast asleep. They weren’t interested in my pain. For them it was routine, the pain was part and parcel of the event I’d starred in. Walid had been through it, too. All my male cousins had been circumcised. My brother, too, who hid his tears under his pillow. He was terrified of blood.
Selem, your tears were the sincerest thing you could give me at the time.
They lifted me up like a deadweight, my aunt’s hand was bloody. I was bleeding out, I was weak. My mother was yelling, my brother was hiding behind the couch. They rushed me to hospital, thirty minutes away from Aunt Dounia’s house.
I fainted a few minutes later. The back seats were drenched in blood. My mother was staring at me, gripping onto my hand. She was scared I was going to die. I knew I was in pain but I no longer felt any. Then I fainted again.
Hôpital Charles Nicolle was a luxury for Tunisians. Most people had to deal with their pain at home, or in the pharmacy. The hospital was a last resort. It was empty, no one in line. My mother was carrying me. Aunt Dounia explained what had happened as I, now revived, tried to figure out what was going on. I was so out of it that I began to translate her words in my imagination. “Mom, they have to operate. They just told my aunt,” I said. She looked at me, then glanced around. They covered my wound with patches of gauze soaked in a dark brown liquid. They had me lie down on a bed. Next to me, an elderly man was watching television. From that moment on, there was an escalation of simultaneous translation. The doctor talked to my aunt. My aunt talked to her nephew on the phone. Her nephew, who spoke Italian, talked to my mother. The diagnosis was serious: they’d cut deeper than necessary, and nicked the upper dorsal vein. I needed surgery, or I could get an infection. There was still no news of my father.
The operating theater stank of chemicals. I could smell the drugs. There were three doctors. They spoke to me in Arabic. I answered in Italian, “I am not Tunisian, I don’t speak Arabic,” I said. I was lying, as I had started to do quite often. They brought a mask up to my nose. They gestured to me that I should breathe, I held my breath. The bitter smell entered my nostrils, I tried to breathe with my mouth. I fell asleep in a few seconds. When I woke up, my father was holding a stuffed animal. It was a brown camel, with a woman standing on it. If you pressed its belly it played a tune. He had stayed out all night to find me a gift.
Baba, a camel was certainly not worth my pain.
I looked at him, I looked for my mother. She was sitting at the bottom of my bed, drinking some water. I tried getting out of bed. My father watched me and did nothing to stop me. Mom came closer and tried to calm me down. I was convinced that my father didn’t understand my pain. That day, I stayed away from him. I lay there in my bed without moving. I was wearing two pairs of white underpants, and there were little blotches of blood on them. My mother tried to explain what had happened. “It’ll get better, don’t touch yourself and don’t strain yourself.” I received lots of visits, but I knew no one. My brother arrived in the evening, along with my two cousins. He had changed, he was smiling. I think that was the first time he’d understood the importance of being the older brother. He hugged me and started joking around, imitating my cousin Nasil licking cheese slices out of the fridge.
In Italy I had routine checkups for a few months. My grandmother had not taken the news well. My Italian aunts were furious. Aunt Vincenza tried to console me. I really wasn’t looking for any consolation. I’d gotten used to the idea of wearing pads inside my underpants. The physical pain was over. What remained was the trauma of the pain and the moral detachment from my father. I couldn’t forgive him. I watched him praying on his green rug. I imagined him as a boy, going through the same trauma. I wasn’t able to feel any pity. Maybe when you’re six you don’t know what it means. For a few weeks, he would come home with a gift for me. I accepted them, but I didn’t say a word. I would eat my strawberry ice cream, play with the little toy car, but nothing made up for the anger I harbored inside, anger that was amplified fear. I had forgiven my mother quickly enough. I hugged her as she apologized. She would climb into my bed when it hurt. She would sing a song, waiting for me to fall asleep. My brother in the other bed would listen while pretending to sleep.
The wound was completely healed after six months. From a cosmetic point of view, there was no change, but the circumcision led to a change in my urinary flow: I was peeing upwards. The family doctor couldn’t explain why, but he wasn’t worried. “The important thing is that he still has a willy,” he told my mother. We found a quick solution with a seaside bucket. Yellow, like my pee. It was an old bucket I’d used to make castles on the beach. I would pee into it, the liquid splashing loudly against the plastic. Then I would empty it out, and leave it in a corner ready for use again.
I would compete with the neighborhood children to see who could pee the furthest. I held on to my pee all night long. Once we were outside, we’d go and hide in some alley or other. Then I would pull down my underpants and show them my scar. I always won, to their amazement. I was like one of those historic old water fountains. The other kids would stare, torn between curiosity and horror. My mother would run down to get me off the street, scolding and shoving me until we were back home.
“You don’t have to do this anymore, Ahmed. Do you want people to laugh at you?”
“I’m not hurting anyone, it’s just fun.”
“Children have fun in other ways.”
“But I’m not a child.”
Meanwhile, my father kept bringing me gifts. He brought me breakfast in bed every day. I’d eat it in silence then fall back asleep. I heard his footsteps going toward the bathroom. He’d shave and rinse my bucket out with bleach. Then he’d take his green rug out and pray at my bedside. And start to cry as he knelt and asked God’s forgiveness for his sins.
Translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford
Mohamed Maalel was born in Andria (Puglia, Southern Italy) in 1993 to a Tunisian father and an Apulian mother. He writes for “Giornale di Sicilia”. He has also been an analyst on the Rai program “Tvtalk”. Baba is his first novel.
Clarissa Botsford lives in Italy, where she works as a literary translator and Humanist celebrant. Her translations include works by Elvira Dones (featured in Asymptote), Alessandro Baricco, Lia Levi, Sasha Naspini, and Viola Ardone.