I Was an Elephant Salesman: Adventures between Dakar, Paris, and Milan

Fights in the Metro

114 Pap Khouma ing to have to confiscate your merchandise and take you to the police headquarters for deportation papers,” they add as a grand finale. The only thing that is weighing on me is the merchandise. I even get on my knees to beg the police commander, “Please be kind to us, Commander, we won’t do it again. Please, we’re begging you to be kind. You won’t see us around here anymore. But leave us the merchandise. Otherwise we have absolutely nothing.” My pleading finds a soft spot in the commander’s heart and he gives us our merchandise back, but they don’t spare us the police headquarters . The officers are concerned for us: “You know that at the headquarters they will give you deportation papers and send you back to your country? Do you have any bags to go and get? Where do you live?” “We have nothing and we live at the Central Station,” we reply. We illegal aliens always live at the Central Station. We never give the address of the hotel or the people hosting us because if they have the address the police can go there at any moment, arrest the others, and then print out a pile of deportation papers. When we get to the police station, they lock us up in a cell. They keep us until four in the afternoon. Then they call us one by one. We have to leave Italy for France via Ventimiglia . We find ourselves on the road. N’Diobo and Samba fold the deportation papers and place them in their pockets . Mine meets its usual fate in the first trash can I come across. I Was an Elephant Salesman 115 Lacoste I feel really old compared to my little brother Samba and to N’Diobo. We belong to different generations. I was one of the first to know what it was like to be an immigrant and an illegal alien. I went through some tough times, but I also had a lot of adventures on the way. I went without food many a time and felt every kind of humiliation possible. I knew loneliness and homesickness. Instead, the last ones to arrive look like they are always playing a game. They have fun here. They’re not scared. They are sure of themselves. They have little respect for us and even for the elderly who carry a lifetime of hard work and suffering on their backs. They don’t like to get up early, don’t want to take the car to hunt around for a better deal, and can’t stand going around selling with heavy bags on their shoulders. Instead, they prefer to set up their merchandise at the metro station and wait for customers to come to them. Samba tells me in all honesty, “I can’t keep up with you guys, out on the streets at the crack of dawn, covering kilometers and kilometers by car, then some more on foot. The earnings don’t justify this kind of pain and suffering.” I let him talk. I don’t want to hold my little brother back. I was the first to go down into the metro to sell and I had no luck. It just might happen that he’ll get lucky. I’m worried, but I don’t want to transmit my fear to him. N’Diobo and I continue in the markets and the 116 Pap Khouma caffès with a new product that everyone likes: brass vases and pitchers, made of the heaviest brass we could find, and carried as always in the bags hung across our shoulders. We get all the way to the Piazza del Duomo. On the way back, before we arrive in Cassano, we stop in the area around the Sesto Marelli metro stop. We’re tempted, but still undecided , even if we know business is better there. Selling always has its traps. Police surveillance was getting tighter and the markets around the metro were the easiest target. I’m not convinced, but N’Diobo insists. It’s worth trying anyhow so we go down into the metro with our vases and pitchers and stay there from morning to night. Later on we change location for a promotional tour in the Piazza del Duomo. By morning we are back on the mezzanine of Piazzale Loreto, and at the mercy...