In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [57]
I remember I didn’t get on too well with my classmates during the first year, because I really liked being at school. For me it was a privilege. I studied a lot and if I got a bad mark I immediately went to the teacher to say I wanted to catch up, and that was something that bothered the others a lot. Even those who were younger than me said I was a swot.
Then things started getting better. I made friends. I learned a lot of things that forced me to look at life with different eyes, like when you put on a pair of sunglasses with tinted lenses. When I studied health education, I was surprised by what they told me, because when I compared it to my past, to the conditions I’d lived in, the food I’d eaten, and so on, I wondered how it was possible that I was still in one piece.
I was at the end of my second year when a letter came to the house saying that I had to go to Rome to meet the commission that would decide if I could be granted asylum as a political refugee. I’d been expecting that letter. I’d been expecting it because I’d met an Afghan boy at the Parini Center who’d arrived in Italy just before me and whose story was very similar to mine. So everything that happened to him tended to happen to me, too, like being summoned because of his papers and things like that. He’d received the letter a few months earlier, had gone to Rome, had met the commission and the outcome had been that he wasn’t recognized as a political refugee. I remember his desperation when he came back and told me. I couldn’t understand it. Why hadn’t they granted him asylum? If they hadn’t granted him asylum, they wouldn’t grant me asylum. I remember that he put his head in his hands, this friend of mine, and wept, but without tears, wept with his voice and his shoulders, and said, Now where can I go?
One day I left on a train with Marco and Danila and traveled the same route I’d taken to get from Rome to Turin but in the opposite direction. We presented ourselves punctually in this building in an area the name of which I forget. We waited a short while, then they called my name, which echoed down the corridor. Marco and Danila stayed there. I went in.
Sit down, they said.
I sat down.
This is your interpreter, they said, indicating a boy next to the door.
I said I preferred to do without. Thank you.
So you speak Italian well, they said.
I replied that yes, I spoke it quite well. But that wasn’t the only reason I didn’t want an interpreter. If you speak directly to people you convey emotions more intensely. Even if you stumble over your words and don’t get the intonation right, the message you get across is closer to what you have in your head, compared with what an interpreter could repeat—don’t you think so?—because emotions can’t come from the mouth of an interpreter, only words, and words are just a shell. We chatted for forty-five minutes. I told them everything. I told them about Nava, about my father and mother, about the journey, about how, when I slept in Marco and Danila’s house in Turin, my nights would be disturbed by nightmares, a bit like the wind disturbing the sea between Turkey and Greece, and in those nightmares I was running away from something and, in running, I often fell out of bed, or else I would get up, tear off the blanket,