I walked out of Rome’s Tiburtina Station utterly lost, following a vague set of directions past a confusing array of other entrances and exits to the metro and bus corrals and taxi stands, way out past everything to a fenced field with a rip I climbed through. A banner on the fence proclaimed in Italian, merrily, “We’re all in the same boat!” At the center of the field stood the abandoned building I sought, the former station, surrounded by tents. In the largest one hastily erected by volunteers I taught an English class to a dozen migrants from various parts of north and central Africa. They took notes, repeated after me, and practiced in pairs, and I think I taught them how to discuss the weather. As I wrapped up and gathered my things, I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“Excuse me, can I ask you a question?”
“Of course,” I replied.
The young man before me in an overlarge beige coat leaning on an umbrella asked, “Um, how can I publish my novel?”
Eltaj explained that his uncle had come to Europe decades ago and become a famous novelist, and that he himself had always dreamed of following in his footsteps. When the war in Sudan finally made life unbearable, he began his journey north with a clandestine ride through the desert of Eritrea in the trunk of a car in the hopes of finding a publisher for his already written novel of Darfur. He also had a poetry collection called “Waves and the Sea.” Both were in Arabic. I wish I knew how to publish his work, let alone my own.
Instead I took Eltaj to John Keats’ house on the Spanish Steps a few days later. On the way over he said that he had been delayed in Libya, enslaved for half a year until he could escape in the night, run, and find his way to the shore, get on one of the human smuggler’s boats and cross the Mediterranean with fifty others to Italy where he has been hiding in Rome waiting for his asylum application to process. “I hope to go to Germany where my uncle is.”
I had already met the curator of the museum at Keats’ house, sat and listened to the story of how at the end of his short life, the great English poet had come to Rome as a last ditch effort to stave off the tuberculosis he knew was killing him. He took this house and slowly passed away writing final letters which are splayed on the walls among very tall dark wood bookcases. You can stare out the window as he did from the bed where he died and look into his face at the moment of death, because they have preserved his death mask. It has a troubling calm.
Eltaj traced the letters on the wall with a long finger, sounding out what he could silently in gathering awe that culminated as we stood on the threshold to leave. “Excuse me. What is his most famous poem?”
The best I could, I paraphrased “When I have fears that I may cease to be:” “When I am afraid that I might die before I finish writing everything that I hope to or before I get to express how beautiful the world is or before I fall in love … ‘then on the shore of the wide world I stand alone, and think till love and fame to nothingness do sink.’”
Tears gathered in Eltaj’s eyes as he listened. He said very quietly, “Yeah, nature heals us. Nature is a gift from God that heals us.” We became friends on Facebook, but his account disappeared a few weeks after I left Rome.
