All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [24]
The social workers spend each night offering the women working the streets a little warmth, some coffee, medical advice, condoms, and a ready ear to listen to their problems. When we slow down to approach the girls, most wave us away fearfully. We pass groups of girls from Nigeria, Ukraine, Albania. Most of the girls, Giusi tells me, thought they were coming to Italy to make money working in a hair salon or a bar or as an au pair. Maybe some suspected, but they felt they had no choice but to leave the poverty they were living in; nothing, they believed, could be worse. Most grasped it as an opportunity, a way out. “They were doing the best they could, taking the only chance they had, to help themselves and their families,” she tells me.
None of the women anticipated or could have imagined, in their darkest moments, what would actually happen: the people who had made those promises smuggled them into Italy; took away their passports; beat, raped, and brutalized them; and kept them imprisoned except for the hours when they were forced to work the streets, spilling their purses at the end of the day and keeping all the money to repay an ever-mounting debt.
The immigrants, most of whom barely speak Italian, usually work twelve-hour shifts, engaging in quick sexual encounters in clients’ cars or behind bushes by the road. Their pimps monitor their every move by cell phone, so even grabbing a coffee in a passing van is dangerous for them.
At one desolate corner, we stop and let a Nigerian, Marika, into the van. She’s working alone, and Giusi reminds her, as she makes an espresso on the van’s little stove, that it’s a lot safer to work with someone else. Marika shrugs helplessly. Up close she looks so young and vulnerable. She’s wearing a miniskirt that barely covers her bottom, gold eye shadow, a ratty pair of high-heeled black boots, long fake black braids, and a top that reveals false breasts. (Giusi explains to me later that the girls often wear plastic breasts, not to appear sexier but to protect what little they can protect of themselves and their feelings, to keep the men from touching their real breasts.)
Marika warms her hands and waits for the espresso to brew. She complains that there isn’t much work this evening, because there are too many police in the area. Prostitution on the streets is legal in Italy, but the girls get hassled anyway. She sips her coffee slowly, to make it last, and says she’s worried because she still owes $15,000 to the people who brought her here, even though she’s already paid them $40,000—at about $5 per five-minute trick. She has a calculator always running in her head.
I ask her how long she has until she’s free. She looks at me suspiciously, and I slide my notebook out of view.
“Who the fuck is she?” she asks, quickly turning to Giusi, her tough question hiding her terror. “Is she the police or something?”
“No, no,” says Giusi, patting her arm. “She helps us. She’s a nurse. She brings us condoms.”
I smile and rip open a condom, then blow it up to a huge size. “Best kind,” I say.
Marika laughs at the balloon like a child. I bat it into the air toward her, and it falls to the floor. Her smile fades. “Two more years,” she tells me wearily, “and I can do some other kind of work.” It may be longer, though, if her recent luck holds up—not long ago she was robbed at gunpoint, she tells me, by a client who took all her money.
“When I came here,” she says, “I thought I was getting a job at a supermarket.” She rolls her eyes at her childish naiveté—she was nineteen then, and now she’s a much older, harder twenty-one. But at least, she tells me, she doesn’t have the problems the Albanian women on the street have.