The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Page 25

  At the police station, though, Arefaine became convinced that they had made the right decision. “It was like I was born again—I had been given a second chance,” he recalled. As the teammates pleaded with the police chief, he softened, and admitted that they had the right to apply for asylum. After waiting a week in jail, they saw a Botswana lawyer, and were allowed to call their families. Arefaine told his that he was safe.

  One Sunday afternoon in Asmara, I went to see Adulis, the Asmara municipal team, play Red Sea, owned by the Red Sea Trading Corporation. The players, wearing crisp uniforms in yellows and reds, warmed up on a wide green field, surrounded by a red-brown track. Old men in corduroy blazers sat on concrete bleachers, alongside boys in sweatshirts with headphones plugged into their ears. Everyone was talking and laughing with excitement.

  The defection of so many good players in the past decade had left a dearth of talent. These were two of the best teams in the country, but the players’ footwork was sloppy, and passes kept going out of bounds. “It’s like the ball is moving on its own,” one spectator said. Another, a bald man in a camel-colored blazer, looked on in disgust. “I’m not happy with this team,” he said.

  After halftime, Adulis scored a goal—but the ball trickled out through a hole in the side of the net. The stadium erupted. “How can that be a goal?” a bearded young man in a blue button-down shirt yelled in front of me. (The man asked not to be named, fearing retaliation from the government, so I refer to him as Freselam.) Freselam told me he had been a finalist for the national soccer team that had competed in Botswana but had narrowly missed the cut. Now he was playing for another club team. It was a decent life, he said: he practiced twice a week and got paid 1,600 nafka a month, along with room and board at the clubhouse.

  As the game went on, the fans’ frustration gave way to scuffles in the stands, and then to an all-out fracas. In the last minutes, a referee called a foul on Adulis, and Red Sea scored on a penalty kick, winning the match. Policemen wielding batons had to escort the referee out of the stadium amid fans shouting threats. “I’m going to kill you,” Freselam shouted at a man who was hassling the referee. “People like you shouldn’t even be here!”

  After the match, Freselam headed to a pizzeria to celebrate with some of the winning athletes and fans. He had become friends with several national-team players who are now in Botswana, and had been saddened when he learned that they weren’t coming back. “I was disappointed that I wouldn’t see them again,” he said. “But it was their choice.”

  When I asked about Arefaine, Freselam smiled broadly. “He was one of the strongest players, especially with his speed,” he said. “He scored a lot of points.”

  “He’s a nice guy,” another player said. “We miss him a lot.”

  The two players said that they hadn’t been surprised when Arefaine defected. It was just something that happened in Eritrea. But they were surprised to hear that he had been dissatisfied with his life there: he always seemed happy, they said. Later, Arefaine told me, “You don’t want to seem to anyone that you are not happy in Asmara. Because if you do, they may arrest you.”

  A few months ago, Arefaine and Russom, the left back, took a minibus from the refugee camp where they have been staying to Galo Shopping Center, a fashionable mall in Francistown. An airy, light-flooded complex with an attached supermarket, it was filled with late-afternoon shoppers. The men were relieved to be away from the camp, an uncomfortable place with limited electricity and running water. “It’s not what we expected,” Russom said. Unaccustomed to the local food, the players had grown skinny. They had little money, scrounging what they could from sympathizers in the Eritrean diaspora and trading their food rations with local shops to buy pasta, as well as minutes for the phones they shared. They had nothing to do and nowhere to be.

  “Most Eritreans—refugees and those inside the country alike—are living in extended limbo,” Zere, the exiled journalist, said. “Home has turned into a source of deferred dreams and destitution, characterized by brutal dictatorship, while fleeing is becoming equally challenging.” Refugees who flee the Horn of Africa face the risk of torture, rape, and murder by smugglers in the Sahara, and then a treacherous journey by sea. Yet those who make it fare much better than those who stay in Ethiopia and Sudan, who can get stuck in desolate camps. Some of the players who defected in 2008 have reconstituted their team in the Netherlands, and Arefaine and his teammates talked dreamily of their compatriots’ new lives. At the camp, they ran and kicked around a ball when they could, but they were worried that they wouldn’t get a chance to play professional soccer again. An official at the U.S. embassy in Gaborone, Botswana’s capital, told me that the worldwide exodus of refugees, from Syria and elsewhere, had made the team a low priority for resettlement. The UN, which administers the camp, is turning it over to Botswana in a few weeks, and the government has expressed a desire to send refugees home.

  A sister of one of the soccer players lives in the U.S., and she contacted John Stauffer, the president of an advocacy group called the America Team for Displaced Eritreans. Stauffer had been worried that the “astonishing” reach of the Eritrean government would thwart the team’s asylum application. “The Eritrean regime strives to control the diaspora, including through agents operating out of the embassies, in order to punish refugees and defectors,” he said. Refugees who wish to obtain an Eritrean passport are pressured to sign a “form of regret,” admitting that they have committed an offense and agreeing to accept any punishment. They must also disclose the names of family members back home, who may become subject to fines and imprisonment. Sometimes Eritrean security forces seize refugees from camps and residences in Sudan and return them to Eritrea.

  At the mall, the players tried to stay cheerful. In the parking lot, Russom gazed at the people walking toward the entrance. “I’m trying to find Samson a girlfriend,” he said, laughing. But at times they still seemed disoriented by their situation. Arefaine mentioned that he had recently gone to Gaborone to meet with Eritreans living there, and they visited a huge, gleaming shopping mall called Game City. “I was confused. I thought, Is this Europe?” he said, half-jokingly.

  The players missed eating injera and fata and hanging out at the cafés on Harnet Avenue. They missed their friends and families. Arefaine’s older sister Helen told him on Facebook Messenger to be strong, and sent him photos and updates from home. “It makes me homesick, but it’s better than not having any news at all,” he said. Their families have yet to experience repercussions from their defections; the players hope that the team’s high profile will prevent the government from retaliating, but they can’t be certain. “My family was angry I left them, and they were afraid,” Arefaine said. “The government is going to do something. I am still afraid.”

  Outside the supermarket, Arefaine surveyed the mall: a stretch of boutiques selling clothing, shoes, books, electronics. “There’s nothing like this in Asmara,” he observed. “It’s nice.” After a moment, he corrected himself. “The cafés in Asmara are better. There’s nothing nicer than the streets of Asmara.” At last, though, he had managed to leave Eritrea. When I asked how it felt, he said, “We are one step ahead from where we were.”

  TIM PARKS

  A Palpable History

  FROM T: The New York Times Style Magazine

  “In the name of God and of the Virgin Mary and all the Saints of Paradise,” the story begins, “this book belongs to Matteo di Nicholò Chorsini, and in it I, the said Matteo, will write down every thing of mine and other facts about me and my land and houses and other goods of mine.”

  The year was 1362. A trader in woolen cloth, Matteo Corsini had just returned from years abroad with enough money to buy property around San Casciano, eleven miles south of Florence. From then on and for 600 years his descendants followed his example, writing down everything about themselves and preserving everything they wrote. Again and again, huge old books of accounts begin with an invocation to God the Father, Son, an
d Holy Spirit, then proceed to list endless incomings and outgoings, profits and losses. But mainly profits. By the seventeenth century the Corsinis would be among the richest families in Florence.

  “At what point,” I ask Duccio Corsini, present head of the family, “did they start to think of their papers as an archive?” We are standing at the window in the grand villa that was eventually built on the land his ancestor bought and where all these papers have recently been gathered.

  “From the very beginning,” he replies proudly. “It was a Florentine thing.”

  In fact, all the Florentine merchant bankers of the Renaissance could be recognized, it was said, by their “ink-stained fingers.” Partly it was a matter of careful accounting, but also of passing on family identity and attitudes from one generation to the next. Up to the seventeenth century the papers in the Corsini archive were written by men who all bore the same half-dozen “Corsini names”—Filippo, Tommaso, Duccio, Neri, Bartolomeo, Andrea—as if they were hardly individuals but temporary representatives of an ongoing family project.

  Built in the fourteenth century but massively enlarged in the sixteenth, Villa le Corti is a half hour from Florence by winding road. The sweep of vineyards and olive groves is breathtaking, as is the view of the villa, a white stuccoed pile topped with two towers set in geometric lawns. Do not, however, expect comfort inside. When Duccio and his wife, Clotilde, moved here in 1992, the house had not been lived in for almost a century. “Because,” Duccio observes knowingly, “when you have so much it gets hard to use it all.” The couple renovated a small part of the building for themselves, transformed the cellars under the lawn into a restaurant and a shop for their wine and olive oil production, and started arranging visitor attractions such as cooking lessons and wine-tasting sessions.

  But the rest of the house stood empty. The decision last year to have the archive moved here from its previous home in the family’s grand palazzo in Florence was thus part of a business plan to bring the villa back to life—the papers attract a steady stream of scholars—and place it at the heart of the family enterprise. “In the end,” remarks Duccio, “it was mostly about money.”

  Moving the Corsini papers was itself extremely expensive, the largest operation of its kind since Florence’s huge state archive was relocated in 1989. Four thousand feet of steel shelving had to be set up and more than 12,000 files resettled. Since the villa wasn’t in any way designed for this purpose, there is no specific entry point, nor any easily apparent order to the rooms. All the same, wherever you come into the archive you are immediately overwhelmed by an intense awareness of paper. This is not the experience of an ordinary library where parallel lines of standardized print in neatly bound volumes seem to detach the words from the material they depend on. Here, bundle after bundle of raw papers are tied together with string and squeezed into shelves, from floor to ceiling. There is the thick sepia-toned, slightly porous paper of the 1400s and the ultrathin glossy correspondence paper of the nineteenth century. There are papers with elaborate watermarks, and with tiny cuts made in the sixteenth century to show that the surface had been disinfected against the plague. Some papers have been eaten away by silverfish; others have gotten wet and smudged. Scratchy nibs have poked holes. A name is missing. A date. At every point you are made conscious of the moment in which event was turned into document.

  I arrive at Villa le Corti at 9:00 a.m. Clotilde orders coffee and I am soon settled down in a tepidly heated room and introduced to the archivist, Nada Bacic, originally from Croatia. As she pours espresso from a silver pot, we speak Italian, each with our foreign accents, and then set off into the past. The archive is spread through a half-dozen rooms, some little more than cubbies, others as grand as they are cold, one with a taxidermied eagle hanging from the ceiling. Stone stairs and oaken doors abound.

  In the bottom left corner of the smallest room are Matteo Corsini’s “Recollections” but this is a copy, made in 1475. The difference between a merchant’s handwriting and a scrivener’s is clear enough, the one scrawled and bold, the other neat and careful. In any event, Italian calligraphy has changed so much since then that both are largely illegible to anyone who isn’t an expert. To digitize here would cost a fortune and take an age.

  Opening an early tome, I stumble on the last will and testament of Cardinal Pietro Corsini who died in 1403. Written in both Latin and Italian, it fills a thick book eighteen inches tall. The fine clothes he is dressed in for burial, the cardinal warns, must not be removed from his body. Two hundred gold florins are left to a monastery, on condition that the monks recognize a “solemn obligation” to say prayers for the cardinal’s soul “in perpetuity.”

  After various commercial ups and downs the Corsinis consolidated their fortune in the sixteenth century when three brothers, Filippo, Bartolomeo, and Lorenzo, simultaneously ran three merchant banks in London, Lyons, and Florence. Bacic asks my help to shift a fifteen-foot-long bench, behind which the brothers’ correspondence is stacked in a dozen mammoth white-and-gold folders. Some of the messages are coded, substituting numbers for letters, to protect business secrets. In 1579, I read, a consignment of wool has disappeared from a ship in Lisbon. In 1583 Bartolomeo in Lyons reports being feverish and sweating through three shirts every night. “But our business in Naples is going well,” he assures Filippo in London.

  Along with the letters is a slim account book listing Bartolomeo’s donations to religious institutions on an almost daily basis. At the end of each page, the entries are added up and carried over. In the months before his death, the sums are notably larger.

  All these Corsini brothers meant to return to Florence in their old age; the family identity was tied to the city. But Filippo didn’t make it. His body, his armor, his vast wealth, and his voluminous papers came back from London. Twenty thousand of the 900,000 ducats accumulated were spent on transforming the property in San Casciano into the huge villa it is today.

  “And the pope?” I ask Bacic, who is struggling to push a massive folder of letters back onto a high shelf.

  In 1730, the family’s habit of pushing the second son into the priesthood, so as not to split the estate, paid off when a Corsini was elected pope and chose the name Clement XII. Aside from opening the Capitoline museums and commissioning the Fontana di Trevi, Clement bestowed the title of Prince of Sismano on his nephew Bartolomeo and made another nephew, Neri, a cardinal. Clement also built a chapel in San Giovanni Laterano, dedicated to St. Andrea Corsini. Whether it was business or religion, the goal was always to enhance family prestige. In reality, as princes of the tiny Umbrian village of Sismano, the Corsinis were sovereigns of their own backyard.

  By noon, my feet are freezing. Fortunately, Duccio and Clotilde have invited us for lunch in the villa’s handsome restaurant. At the table, the sense of continuity between archive and contemporary life is uncanny. Duccio talks about his son, Filippo, who is traveling abroad before hopefully returning to become involved in the family business. The wines on offer are produced by the company Principe Corsini and have such names as Don Tommaso and Sant’Andrea Corsini. The waitress has a Principe Corsini T-shirt.

  However, when I ask Duccio if the family continues to add papers to the archive, he answers in the negative. “They ran out of space around 1960 and stopped.” It seems strange to me that a family that owns so much property could not find space for more archives if it wished. Something must have changed. Perhaps the perception that everybody keeps business archives these days took the shine off the practice. Or perhaps the strict control the State exercises over the archive, constantly checking its contents and the conditions in which it is kept, has taken away that sense of liberty in secretiveness typical of Florentine families in the past. In any event, as if in enigmatic confirmation that the world is no longer what it was, in this very Italian restaurant both Duccio and his wife order hamburgers and fries.

  The afternoon is dedicated to the women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who were sufficie
ntly emancipated to be regular correspondents. Eleonora Rinuccini (1813–1886) wrote touchingly affectionate missives to her husband and children. Opening a small notebook, I read: “So long as I was in my father’s house my existence was like a preparation for life . . . but a life I knew nothing about. Even in my mother’s drawing room there was never any talk that wasn’t proper . . . When I married my poor husband had to open my eyes, bit by bit.”

  The near impossibility of keeping these papers in any kind of order, I reflect, or of establishing their exact relation to each other, makes you realize how precarious our interpretations of history must always be, how dense and elusive real life is.

  “I’ve worked in this archive thirty-six years,” Bacic tells me, “and I think I have at least leafed through all the hundreds of thousands of papers here. But what does that mean? How much can anyone remember?” Indeed. Back in my hotel after a hair-raising bus ride back to Florence, I find myself hurrying to write down my own record of the day, before it slips away.

  SHELLEY PUHAK

  Eva, she kill her one daughter

  FROM Black Warrior Review

  1. The Motive

  Seventy miles upslope from my father’s village, the sky is almost obscured by fir and spruce; by larch lower down the slopes; and lower still by sycamore, ash, and elm. Here in the remote foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, I’m looking for a village once called Rychwald, so named for “rich forest” from the earliest settlers’ tongue. Medieval documents refer to “the black forests [that] stretch as far as Rychwald,” thick and silent, and even today, over 600 years later, the forest’s silence is impenetrable. There is no cell-phone service. And at one point, the asphalt ribbon thins, then becomes gravel, and then just stops. The old road has been swallowed up, reclaimed by the hornbeam and white birches. One of the car’s front wheels is caught in a muddy rut; my only option may be to turn back.