All Over the Map (8 page)

Soon we’ve paid the check, maneuvered a van out of an impossible
parking spot, and then, abruptly, we’re in an entirely different atmosphere, cruising the roads near the train station. I’m not prepared to suddenly shift from the beautiful, dreamlike Italy to such a harsh, dirty reality. I wake up and realize I’m here to work. Suddenly, all the beauty of Italy has been swept aside like a curtain, revealing a dark and seamy underside, a side I’ve never seen, where young girls stand on the curbs, shivering, waiting for a strange man in a car to pull up and let them in.

The social workers spend each night offering the women working the streets a little warmth, some coffee, medical advice, condoms, and a ready ear to listen to their problems. When we slow down to approach the girls, most wave us away fearfully. We pass groups of girls from Nigeria, Ukraine, Albania. Most of the girls, Giusi tells me, thought they were coming to Italy to make money working in a hair salon or a bar or as an au pair. Maybe some suspected, but they felt they had no choice but to leave the poverty they were living in; nothing, they believed, could be worse. Most grasped it as an opportunity, a way out. “They were doing the best they could, taking the only chance they had, to help themselves and their families,” she tells me.

None of the women anticipated or could have imagined, in their darkest moments, what would actually happen: the people who had made those promises smuggled them into Italy; took away their passports; beat, raped, and brutalized them; and kept them imprisoned except for the hours when they were forced to work the streets, spilling their purses at the end of the day and keeping all the money to repay an ever-mounting debt.

The immigrants, most of whom barely speak Italian, usually
work twelve-hour shifts, engaging in quick sexual encounters in clients’ cars or behind bushes by the road. Their pimps monitor their every move by cell phone, so even grabbing a coffee in a passing van is dangerous for them.

At one desolate corner, we stop and let a Nigerian, Marika, into the van. She’s working alone, and Giusi reminds her, as she makes an espresso on the van’s little stove, that it’s a lot safer to work with someone else. Marika shrugs helplessly. Up close she looks so young and vulnerable. She’s wearing a miniskirt that barely covers her bottom, gold eye shadow, a ratty pair of high-heeled black boots, long fake black braids, and a top that reveals false breasts. (Giusi explains to me later that the girls often wear plastic breasts, not to appear sexier but to protect what little they can protect of themselves and their feelings, to keep the men from touching their real breasts.)

Marika warms her hands and waits for the espresso to brew. She complains that there isn’t much work this evening, because there are too many police in the area. Prostitution on the streets is legal in Italy, but the girls get hassled anyway. She sips her coffee slowly, to make it last, and says she’s worried because she still owes $15,000 to the people who brought her here, even though she’s already paid them $40,000—at about $5 per five-minute trick. She has a calculator always running in her head.

I ask her how long she has until she’s free. She looks at me suspiciously, and I slide my notebook out of view.

“Who the fuck is she?” she asks, quickly turning to Giusi, her tough question hiding her terror. “Is she the police or something?”

“No, no,” says Giusi, patting her arm. “She helps us. She’s a nurse. She brings us condoms.”

I smile and rip open a condom, then blow it up to a huge size. “Best kind,” I say.

Marika laughs at the balloon like a child. I bat it into the air toward her, and it falls to the floor. Her smile fades. “Two more years,” she tells me wearily, “and I can do some other kind of work.” It may be longer, though, if her recent luck holds up—not long ago she was robbed at gunpoint, she tells me, by a client who took all her money.

“When I came here,” she says, “I thought I was getting a job at a supermarket.” She rolls her eyes at her childish naiveté—she was nineteen then, and now she’s a much older, harder twenty-one. But at least, she tells me, she doesn’t have the problems the Albanian women on the street have. “The Albanian women are raped by their pimps, but not the Africans,” she tells me in her broken Italian. “The Albanians hit them. All I have to do is pay back my debt.”

I am shocked by her story. I want to whisk her away, take her back to my hotel, run a hot shower, hand her a fluffy towel, find her some new clothes, drive her to the train station, and buy her a ticket away from here. But she is being watched.

Giusi tells Marika that she knows some girls who never paid back all of their debt, and they’re working somewhere else now, not on the streets. Nothing bad ever happened to them. This is the real reason behind the roaming van, to help these girls escape.

Marika considers that, then dismisses it. “No,” she says, “they lie all the time.”

“Really, it’s true,” says Giusi, but she can’t push. If the organized criminals who traffic in women found out she was encouraging the prostitutes to escape, the van would become a target. As it is, it’s only barely tolerated by the police and racketeers. All Giusi can do is hint and hope that Marika finds the widely distributed pamphlets and the courage to call the
numero verde
, the free “green” number to get help.

Maybe someday Marika will make that call, but not tonight. Tonight she’s too scared. She doesn’t trust Giusi when she says there’s a way out. Marika got into her present situation by trusting someone who was going to “help” her out of poverty by bringing her to Italy. She doesn’t trust the fact that I’m in the van, since she’s never seen me before. She can’t afford to trust anyone.

Marika’s cell phone rings, and she jumps. She drops her plastic coffee cup and, without saying good-bye, slips back out into the night.

A
LL OF THE
girls I talk to—in the van, in Trieste, and in a safe house in Rome—left home out of desperation, but also out of some sense of gumption. They craved adventure and independence; they wanted to see something of the world, to be someone. A crack opened in their world, one where they had almost no choices or independence, and they slipped out, having no idea that their kidnappers were ready to pounce, exploiting that smallest urge for freedom, for which they’d pay an unspeakable price.

Kira, a Nigerian hairdresser I met at the safe house, was offered work in Italy at a shoe factory. Kidnapped, forced to hike
over the mountains to the sea, then crossing in a dinghy, she ended up in Italy with a $40,000 debt; when she escaped and contacted her family, she found out that the thugs had beaten her mother in Nigeria so badly she would never again walk without limping. Serious, intelligent Dara, a dark-haired, twenty-one-year-old Moldavian computer programmer, was abducted, raped, and sold. A friend of her boyfriend had told her he could find her work in Italy in a pizzeria, and before she could think it through or say good-bye to her family, a group of men with cell phones took her and several other girls to Hungary, changing cars several times along the way. They were taken to a house where men came to look them over, touching their bodies and genitals, and when they left with the men they understood that they had been sold. She was forced to work on the streets in Bologna and to have anal sex with clients to double her price. When she tried to escape, her boss beat her viciously, locked her in a bathroom without food, then sold her again, to a group of Albanians. After working for several more months, always accompanied by men who held her head down in the car on the way to work, a client helped her escape.

A
T AN INNOCUOUS
house in the suburbs of Rome a week before, I watched Dara, cheerfully clearing the table as the other girls did the dishes, taking turns holding a baby, and wondered how she could be so resilient. But watching more closely, I could see that the girls did only what the social workers told them, no more. Whatever gumption they’d had was gone. Anna, a psychologist
who works with the girls, told me it’s hard for the girls to take an active role in shaping their own lives, since they did what other people told them to do in order to survive, turning themselves into machines, repressing their thoughts of autonomy, relying on their captors. Many of them are passive, thinking that what happened to them happened because they’re fundamentally weak. Others feel punished for having left their families, for having stepped out of line. They focus on making money, as if their debt still exists. Some of them constantly wash their hands, obsessively, as a way of trying to rid themselves of their dirty experience. But the very fact that they lived through the experience and managed to escape, Anna said, is a basis, though shaky, for rebuilding their self-esteem. “These girls have survived,” she said. “Now they have to take their lives into their own hands.”

It’s the girls who played a more active role in their stories, the ones who took off for reasons of opportunity or even adventure, who have the best chance of recovering a sense of self, Anna told me. They don’t see themselves entirely as victims and are more apt to be able to work their way out of the degradation, humiliation, and violence they experienced. In some ways, finally, after all they’ve been through, the terrible price they’ve paid, they may realize that they’ve managed to make their dream of living and working in Italy come true. Now they can start afresh and get a job in a boutique or trattoria. The challenge will be whether they can rewrite their stories, no longer be victimized or passive but able to heal themselves and somehow become the agents of their own lives. Giusi and my friend Carmen are doing all they can—single women devoting themselves to helping out other
single, unprotected women—but at some point the girls will have to take over. I am amazed at the strength that has taken the girls this far, engineering their escapes and starting over, even if they are still in shock.

I know that for weeks after, my heart will be breaking for these girls. The consequences of their efforts to be independent are so much harsher than for American women; there’s no comparison. In their native countries, they too have grown up in a new world that requires them to work, both in the home and outside, but they’re severely limited in their movements, punished if they do what they must to survive. They’re protected as long as they adhere strictly to traditions, in cultures whose global demands no longer make that possible. They crave the freedom, education, and experiences that go along with the new roles they’ve taken on—they want to travel, have boyfriends, buy pink hoodies and silver tennis shoes—but they’re at risk of rape, exploitation, and slavery. They’re caught between the old and new worlds, bearing the brunt of the ambivalence and anger about how women and the world are changing.

L
ATE AT NIGHT
, after we’ve made the rounds in the van, Giusi and the other social workers drop me off at my hotel. She offers to pick me up in the morning to accompany me to the train station, but I tell her I’m fine, I can take care of myself. I appreciate that it’s a natural part of the culture to take care of single women, but I don’t feel vulnerable. I can call a taxi.

I think about how easy it is for me to travel alone, how much
real independence I enjoy. I can’t get the images of Marika and the other girls out of my head. It’s such a luxury to travel when women all over the world are constantly coming up against constraints to their freedoms, testing the limits out of desire or need, almost always paying a price that is measured by their culture: sometimes loneliness and uncertainty; financial instability; sometimes fear for their safety, their lives; sometimes the horrible brutality and violence the immigrant women I’ve met on this trip have endured. There is an uneasy balance everywhere of cultures wanting to protect and control women, allowing them some autonomy out of economic necessity, then punishing them for taking it, leaving them without any protection at all.

Italy has probably managed a better balance than most, making it possible for women to feel independent yet protected and included even if they aren’t married and don’t have their own children. Single women in Italy are always part of a larger family, whether bound by blood or by friendship.

Leaving Naples after three weeks of talking with Italian social workers, sex-trafficked women, and prostitutes’ advocates, I feel glad to be able at least to write something about them. That’s such a small thing to do. It seems like an obligation to use the advantages of my independence to bring to light stories of other women who are suffering for their small attempts at freedom. (I write the story and turn it in, but six months later, the magazine changes top editors; the new editor kills the piece, saying, “We’ve just had too many sex slave stories lately,” as if she were talking about fashion spreads featuring hobo bags. Eventually I give it to an online publication, where it’s up for a day, and then present it
to an audience at a global grassroots women’s organization event where, at least, the participants care.)

Every time I encounter women who have survived such dire circumstances, with unacknowledged bravery and resilience, I’m overcome with gratitude for my freedom and a desire to do more. Whatever price I feel I have paid for independence in my life is insignificant compared with theirs.

I buy my train ticket, find my seat in the compartment, nod to the other passengers, and head back to Rome.