Human Cargo (12 page)

There was, it was immediately made clear, no question of talking to the women. Daniel, who was rather suspicious about my visit, told me that the women were looking after the babies, and that in any case they were ill. What, he asked, was there in my visit that would help him? What would I do for him if he answered my questions? Wasn’t it true that reporters paid for information? He could tell me nothing about the boat, he said: he had spent the whole time belowdecks, and since he possessed no watch he had no idea how long they were at sea. He had not noticed who was in charge. He had no idea whether anyone had been seasick or what food they had been given. The only thing that he could say was that he had been aware of a lot of running up and down on deck just before the boat
hit the rock. As it happened, I knew that the boat had no proper cabin, and that, with up to 150 people on board, wedged immovable together, there would have been no running anywhere. He soon drove me away with the truculence of his manner and his anger against the people of Realmonte. Was it true, he asked, that in Germany, at least, refugees were treated really well, given houses and money and cars, not forced to work?

•   •   •

TO THE EMBARRASSMENT
of Realmonte’s inhabitants, the parish had a cemetery too small and too crowded to accommodate the coffins of the thirty-five drowned Liberians. After the bodies had lain in the graveyard of Porto Empedocle for several days and the smell of decomposition was so bad they had to lock the gates, the priests and mayors from nearby towns and villages were invited to provide burial plots for the dead
clandestini
. Agrigento, whose lemon groves, fish ponds, and bird pavilions had been the marvel of the ancient Greek world, had no room to spare. The most generous offer, to take fifteen, came from Canicatti, a bustling, rapidly growing town some twenty miles inland, where the cemetery, once standing isolated in the lee of the mountains, is now surrounded by factories and the hideous, tall, square boxes that are Italy’s answer to cheap housing. Sicily’s destiny, Lampedusa once said, had been set by a combination of the cruelty of its climate and twenty-five centuries of “foreign invasion and indigenous folly;” the conquerors landing from every direction had among them destroyed most of the paradise that the island had once been, though even so the warped grandeur of its chaotic towns and eroded hillsides still shone brighter than the drabness of the industrial north.

It was to Canicatti that Happy had been taken. I wanted to find her before I left.

The custodian of Canicatti’s cemetery, a slight man in a pea-green jacket and with a bad squint in one eye, was just locking the iron gates when I finally located his cemetery. I was very lucky to find him, he said, taking the key out again, for he would normally
have closed long before, but he had decided to have a shower before going home that night, though the sun had set long before. He did indeed know where Realmonte’s Liberians were buried, because he had gone to Porto Empedocle with Canicatti’s mayor when the coast guard was bringing in the bodies, but for his own part, he thought the whole event had been tragically mishandled.

There is a brand-new wall just inside his cemetery, with some sixty new graves, not yet used or even promised but waiting for any arrivals, and it was here, he says, that the
povere creature
should have been put, all together, and not separated and scattered all over the place in different cemeteries, so that even the fifteen in Canicatti are not together, but slotted away in ones and twos, wherever a wall had a place still to fill in. Even in death, he said, they had been given no dignity.

And there she was, Happy, three graves up, in the middle of a wall: “Cittadina Liberiana, Naufraga a Porto Empedocle, 15 Set-tembre 2002.” Her surname, on the piece of cardboard that identifies the grave, is wrongly listed as Roland, her brother’s first name. Not far from her, in another row, high up on an identical wall, among the plastic flowers and the chiseled saints, shaded by the ancient cypresses for which Italian cemeteries are famous, lies Joy, another Cittadina Liberiana, the youngest of the drowned, said the custodian; and not far from the two girls, three other Liberians, all young men, only these have no identities, and below the words Cit-tadino Liberiano there is only a single bold, black letter to distinguish one from the others, for there was no one among the survivors able or willing to give these bodies a name. Happy and Joy, and three nameless Liberian boys, come to lie under the cypresses of a continent they dreamed would make their lives.

——————

O
ne night in October 2003, when cold winds and low temperatures had already come to the bare mountains along the border between northernmost Mexico and southern California, a thirty-eight-year-old Mexican woman arrived at a refuge for migrant women in Tijuana. She was very thin and very poor. With her were her children, two girls aged twelve and nine; they too were small and underfed. They came, the woman told Sister Hema, the missionary nun who runs the refuge, from Guadalajara in the south, where they had been working on a ranch until the job ended. They planned now to go north, to cross into California, where they had been told there was work in the fields and on farms, and even modest fortunes to be made. The woman’s husband was with them, but because Sister Hema does not take men into her refuge, he had gone to sleep two doors away, in the Casa del Migrante, which is run by Father Luis from the same missionary order of San Carlos.

Sister Hema never saw the husband, but she looked after his wife
and small daughters for fifteen days, trying to build up their strength with hot, nourishing food. Like their mother, she says, the little girls were remarkably fair-skinned, and with their blond hair and pale eyes could have passed for white North Americans. The family said little, but Sister Hema kept thinking how frail and vulnerable they seemed, with their light shoes and cotton clothes and their air of uncertainty and apprehension. In her cupboards, she found thick clothes for them to wear, and sturdy shoes for the long walk ahead. In the evenings, when the girls were asleep, Sister Hema would warn their mother about the journey across the border, which has been closed by a fence that runs intermittently for sixty-four miles toward Arizona; even the open stretches of mountain and desert are thickly covered in sensor wires and floodlights and regularly patrolled by U.S. border agents. She talked, too, about the
coyotes
—as the human-smugglers are called—who, for $1,000 a head, will guide groups of migrants through the wilder mountain areas or across the canals and waterways that separate Mexico from California. The woman would listen but say only that they had to cross, there was no going back, the family had no money and no land and the job on the ranch was over, and that she had elderly parents who had to be looked after; and that the
coyotes
and their extortions and abandonments were nothing to her, as she did not have dollars to pay them. They would be crossing on their own.

Very early one morning, when Sister Hema came down to breakfast, the woman and her daughters had gone. From Father Luis came word that the husband had also disappeared. Sister Hema waited, hoping for news. Often, she says, people who have successfully crossed into the States telephone from California to let her know that they are safe. A few days later, Father Luis heard that the husband had been caught in the mountains by the U.S. Border Patrol, after he had fainted and been found lying by a track. After a short spell in the hospital, he had been returned to Tijuana, and had made his way back to the Casa del Migrante. Of his wife and daughters, there was no news. A few days later, the man disappeared again. This time, he did not come back.

Sister Hema waited, but she heard nothing. The thin woman and her fair-haired little girls did not come back and have not sent word. She thinks about them, wandering across the cold mountains in the dark, following a route they must have planned during the two weeks they lived with her; Sister Hema wonders whether the bands of smugglers and robbers who prey on migrants caught them, or whether they were picked up by the Border Patrol and are now in detention somewhere. Or even whether, since the husband fainted from exposure and cold, they never reached the other side, but lost their way and died in their attempts to reach America. She worries about whether she did enough for them; whether the clothes she gave them were sufficiently thick and warm.

When Sister Hema first came to Tijuana, no one had yet put up the triangular signs along the freeways that stretch away from the border and into southern California: these picture a man, a woman, and two children, running, rather like the signs you see in rural areas warning of deer or cattle crossing. These signs, telling drivers to slow down lest they hit migrants as they run across the freeways to escape the Border Patrol, are everywhere now. But when Sister Hema arrived ten years ago, Tijuana was only just becoming one of the most frequented jumping-off spots for people crossing illegally. And that was before the migrants took to making their dashes for freedom across the five-lane freeways, where cars travel at well above the limit of sixty-five miles an hour, and where the light is dim and the headlights confusing at dusk. What Sister Hema thought, seeing all the women and children hanging around the streets of Tijuana, waiting for darkness to fall, bewildered, hungry, all that they possessed left far behind in southern Mexico with parents and friends, was that she could provide a small measure of safety in the hours before the crossing. A sister of the order of San Carlos, which works with migrants across much of Latin America, Sister Hema had started her mission as a teacher in her native Brazil, before spending six years in the mother house in Rome. “Wherever there are migrants,” she says, in her mixture of Spanish and Italian, “there we will go.”

It was Father Luis, of the same missionary order, who first called Sister Hema to Tijuana from Rome. She arrived in the spring of 1994, to find his Casa del Migrante recently opened on one of the steep hills that overlooks the city, with beds for eighty men, who, as Father Luis puts it, had “lost their way” somewhere on their journey north, had run out of money or been robbed of it, or had simply been caught by the U.S. Border Patrol and sent back. The Casa del Migrante was for men only, so Sister Hema opened a second refuge, which she keeps spartan and spotless but not unfriendly, with a large courtyard of orange and fig trees, where the hummingbirds come to feed and where, on warm days, the women sit and their children play. Sister Hema is in her sixties, an energetic, kindly woman of great warmth and shrewdness. She wears large spectacles and her face is creased with the lines that come from laughter and smiling. She grows fond of the young women in her care, who treat her with respect and consideration, and she tries hard to provide them with the kind of guidance that will make them question the decision to make the perilous journey across the border. But she knows, even if not all of her visitors tell her so, that they have little choice: if they have gotten as far as her refuge in Tijuana, it is because they have nothing left to hope for at home.

I had started my research along the border in the autumn of 2003, when forest fires were burning all down the coast of California, fanned by a strong Santa Ana wind. I wanted to see the fence and to meet migrants whose reasons for crossing had to do with poverty and not flight from persecution—the so-called economic migrants—so I went to visit Father Luis, a purposeful man whose concern for the migrants who pass through his refuge is more than matched by a crusading determination to see the current border situation, with its deaths and ambiguities, reformed and clarified. Father Luis sees no sanity in a border so guarded, against people so desperate that they are only driven away from the safer areas to cross farther into the rocky and arid mountains. For him, the distinction between economic migrant and asylum seeker has little meaning, when people are driven to the margins by need: “Do people have to
die in order to work? Something has to be wrong.” Since 2001, Father Luis has watched the border grow more impenetrable, as new technology is invented and installed and ever larger numbers of border guards are taken on; he has also watched the numbers of those trying to cross grow. “There are a lot of families,” he says, “who have lost their men.” The men using his tidy dormitories and his generous canteen have attempted the crossing again and again, only to be caught and sent back; many of them have crossed successfully only on a fourth or fifth attempt, gone on to spend months or even years in California, then returned to see their families; now they are heading north once again. The Casa del Migrante is a waiting room in which to gather strength and courage and to exchange news on the state of the border. It is also, though Father Luis does not say so, a place where the migrants can learn where a
coyote
might be contacted, with whom to seal a deal for a safer crossing north.

In Father Luis’s courtyard, with its tiers of balconies rising several stories high, where the men gather as night falls to sit on benches and exchange information and make plans, the air is full of expectation. They are permitted to stay in the refuge no more than fifteen days, so the pressure to be gone is strong. Visitors are young, mostly under thirty-five; old people, as Father Luis explains, do not migrate. They have neither the strength nor the desire. Sitting on their benches around the courtyard, the men, dark and stocky and watchful, talk of Atlanta and San Francisco and Houston, of farms where cousins and brothers have found work, of the dollars they will send home and the sadness of leaving behind wives and small children; of the dangers of the canal at Mexicali, where the current is strong and the Americans have built slopes into the water, so that the migrants who swim across cannot find purchase and climb out on the California side. The Mexicali canal is famous for its deaths. Their stories, recounted as night falls, in quiet soft voices and with a touch of bravado, are of chases in the desert, and accidents to friends, of the venality of
coyotes
and the huge hopes they have for better futures. Nowhere was I as struck by the ambiguities of refugee and migrant life, by how asylum and migration overlap and
complement each other, and how slender the distinctions can be. As with some of Sicily’s boat people, the reasons for these men’s flight were complicated; some at least were driven by determination to find a better life. It was the women whose stories I found sadder; in Sister Hema’s courtyard, the mood was not so buoyant. San Diego’s forest fires, not far away, were still burning, and the sun had turned into a small, intensely red marble, glowing eerily in the yellowish light, as ash drifted out of the sky. Fears of the uncertainty and the unknown, the risks of the crossing and the dangers for their children, prey on the minds of the women who wait.