My mother used to send me to fetch the water because I was the oldest. I had strong, round arms, presaging an adolescence filled with dreams, and tiny, brittle ankles for playing in the schoolyard of the mission, where they taught me God in the afternoon. Maybe it was there that I became a buttana, because I fantasized about the priest’s member brushing against my soul, I imagined the evening shadows, his hands, the white, immaculate skin of his buttocks. I can’t remember having fantasized about anything else.

I became a buttana when the ship was out to sea. It was a ship all rusted out and it didn’t even have its navigational lights on. They had us board the ship at night, but we didn’t depart right away. They were waiting for favourable winds and a pause in the patrols which monitored the entrance to the port. We stayed in the ship’s stronghold that entire night and the next day. It was hot, and we had to keep quiet or they threatened to put us ashore. We marvelled at the miracle of the floating ship, and in the twilight we followed the sea’s reflection in shimmering waves, which made sounds like moths.

We left at night, and it was pitch black. In the hold there were no more reflections of shimmering light–there was only blackness, repeated a thousand times over, countless times; and a thousand times over the sound of suffocating gasps, the salvation novena, the prayer of the tormented. And everybody repeating ad infinitum the little story they’d memorized on departure in order to fool the coast guard, the port authorities, the border guards, the customs officials–first names, last names, lies, countries of uncertain idiom: "I come from the Tukul," "from the other side of the Atlas mountains," "from beyond Lake Victoria." And each one without a face–only short breaths in the darkness, performing the shaman’s rites against the evil eye or invoking his formulae for good luck, repeated over and over again and driving you crazy. It gets all confused and jumbled up in your mind, because later, when they asked me where I was from, I answered, "I know how to cook, I know how to cook, I know how to cook." And when they asked me what my legal status was, I answered, "My name is Shobba, but you can call me Dalia, Ophelia, or Felicity, and if you give me papers you can fuck me, and if you don’t tell anyone you’ve seen me, you can bugger me."

And in the hold, the darkness of my own skin blurred into and joined with the darkness of the skin of others, trembling with fear no matter the little tricks we used to try to lessen it. The only smells I could recognize were sweat and the acrid odour of fermented excrement–they wouldn’t allow us into other bowels of the ship. And when they opened the skylights to pass down the potato rations, sailors wearing shoes were shocked by the stench, and they cursed, and they left some places open for air to get in. Others appeared over the opening where a crack of light came in, and we could see a human silhouette counting us, looking at us, listening to us. They would stay there for a long time, observing us, studying us. Then they would close the hatch, like a submarine, and we would drown in our oxygen-less night, in our own breath–talking to one another only with our breathing, because we hadn’t found words for our new condition as seafarers. There were only the remains of little sing-song rhymes from the swamp, songs from the rainy season, prayers to placate the hungry lions. I prayed, my cheeks stinging with the chill of the bulkhead, and in that darkness I didn’t want to see, I didn’t want to imagine the other faces–because they were the same as mine.

I became a buttana because he penetrated me, taking me with my back turned, and he moved with the certitude of the ship’s engine, and I loved him because he was not part of that wave of gasping. He pinned my back down with his elbow and put a hand to my mouth. As he took my virginity, my cheeks were pressed against the steel, swelling up as they hit against the wall. And my ear could hear the straining metal of the connecting rods turning in the engine’s cylinders. Along with the coded sound of the engine I could hear the water splashing up against the hull and the cries of the whales as they made way for the surging prow of the ship. And I implored them, "Sink it with your mighty tails, wipe it out with one great swirling surge." And I could hear the call of the dolphins, gathering together to leap over the waves with an instinctive, aimless joy. And I could sense the creatures of the deep observing from the ocean floor the outline of the enormous, black ship as it passed on, leaving in its wake a trail of swill. I felt the trembling of the starfish and the octopus tightening its grip on its rock, the shark gone mad and the flying manta ray torn asunder, the schools of silvery fish which had lost their path. It seemed to me as though all the flesh of the sea–in reality so indifferent and distant–were shuddering on account of my pain. And through the fingers of his hand I let out a moan–and he gave me a pitying caress by lessening the pressure of his elbow. Pleading with him, I called him mother. But I wasn’t crying out for my mother. I cursed him with a gesture of my hand, and I sunk my nails into his forehead because there was nothing closer to me in all the world. And again, the pressure of the elbow, enough to break my bones, and I loved him, crying out to him not to abandon me to the thud of the engine, to the dizzying swirl of the sea, on this first night of my many nights of cocks and loneliness.

When streaks of morning light lit up all the faces, I went searching, and one by one I looked into the whites of their eyes. With each stirring of a blanket they turned their gaze upwards, and in all of them I could only find astonishment that we were afloat. And no one carried on his forehead the mark of my curse. I alone could see: he had opened the eye of my belly while I was half-asleep in my inner oceans, now dried up into crusts of blood on my thighs.

And they want to turn back. But neither the God of men, nor the God of water, nor the God of snakes ever showed me another path.

* The author uses the Sicilian word for "whore," buttana, with slightly euphemistic connotations (translator’s note).