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130 Pap Khouma and urgent. But at the emergency room they send me home with a prescription for the usual vitamins. This time my friends don’t leave me outside the door. They drag me up to the top floor. “Go slow, guys. I’m better now. Thanks.” I close the door and move toward the bathroom and collapse on the floor. I can’t even lift my hand, never mind get up. I stay there on the ground without moving, but I don’t lose consciousness. I study the tiles in the bathroom, the cracks, the geographies of the world, the seas, the moon craters, our mountains. I dream, wake up, and doze off again. I am not dead. I know this for sure the next morning. I even manage to get up and move an inch, then another, and finally a third. I walk to the metro station, and then manage to walk all the way down to the platform, at which point I hang on to Samba. “Are you sick, brother?” “No, just a little weak.” “I’ll bring you to the hospital.” “No, not the hospital. I just need a little rest.” Samba doesn’t listen to me and takes me to the hospital in Cassano d’Adda. The doctors in Cassano are quick to discover that I have an ulcer. I’m losing blood; I could have died. But now I’m saved. After a month they discharge me. I go back to living in Cassano with Samba and back to being president and searching for solutions for everything and everyone. That is, until I finally decide that the only way for me to survive is to get away for a little while. So with Samba and other friends I decide to buy a car for nine hundred thousand lire, another very lucky Peugeot 504. This way we will be able to move around, go to local festivals and markets, and above all avoid the metro and all the people demanding to speak to the president. We don’t miss a single town festival within a hundred kilometers of Como, Brescia, Bergamo, and Parma. We keep going like this until summer arrives, at which point we can’t resist going to the beaches and the seaside at Cesenatico, Rimini, and Riccione. By now I am well-known here by my undercover name, Pascal. I still don’t trust anything or any- I Was an Elephant Salesman 131 one: the soul of the illegal immigrant can’t be changed overnight , even if new laws are passed in our favor. Our vacation on the Riviera in Romagna is the same old routine of beaches, confiscated merchandise, caffès, and more confiscated merchandise . On our return to Milan there is a gift waiting for us: a new law, or better, a decree that reinterprets the earlier law and that should guarantee us some good possibilities for work. But in exchange, the police are even more scrupulous in making us observe the rules. It’s one confiscation after another now. The number of African people in Milan has grown considerably and finding a home seems impossible. The number of guys working in the drug business also continues to rise. I continue to give advice, but I feel powerless, as if I were stuck in a vise. Every step forward seems like one step back in some other area. I join forces with two guys, Sidi and Mamisko, and go back to working the festival circuit, far from the metro and the duties of the association. We push as far as Genoa, Florence, Siena, and Perugia. Mamisko proposes something that appeals to me: there’s a festival about to start in Reggio Calabria. It lasts fifteen days and we can go for the second week. We load the car and leave. When we arrive there’s no sign of the festival: it was cancelled this year, someone tells us. We are exhausted. I feel like stopping . I can’t take selling anymore. But we leave with our pitchers and vases and brass plates—I chose not to take the elephants with us since people seem to like our heavy brass from Africa and India better. Next Genoa, Florence, Siena, Lucca, Perugia. On the way back from Perugia we stop for the night in a hotel where we have stopped once before. In the morning some plainclothes police officers bring us to the station to be searched. We are legal now...

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