Prayer to Lucy
The pandemic has arrived in Addis Ababa.
The city is under quarantine, though few carry out its rules; the cafés and shops are still open, people move through the streets exposed to the disease, and meanwhile at night, after curfew, the police beat stragglers with their nightsticks.
Zahra Bayda and I are to report to the Ethiopian MSF team tomorrow to start working with them, so today we have the afternoon free and we decide, out of courtesy, to visit Lucy.
I’m speaking of Lucy Australopithecus afarensis.
“I’ve arrived in Addis Ababa and I’ve got you here before me, Lucy, incredibly remote mother,” Zahra Bayda says to her with devotion.
“You, first female human on the planet, me here outside and you in there, sheltered in your glass urn in the middle of this dusty museum.
And here come the rest of us, Grandmother Lucy, sometimes well-anchored, sometimes crawling on our hands and knees, all the womankind of the world following in your footsteps.
“Just look, Lucy, our grandmother, grandma, alaleisho, abuela, nonna, àvia, aljada, amona,” Zahra Bayda prays on, “just look at what a crowd it is, we are thousands upon thousands walking the paths of this earth still seeking, as you did, a place where a good life might open its doors to us. And with us go our Selams, which is what your first child was called, Selam, also exposed in this forgotten Addis Ababa museum, stiff and nestled in the glass urn next to yours. You must have borne several more children too, fertile Lucy, and when I ask the guide how we know you were a woman, whether that’s in your bones somehow, they say it’s in the width of your pelvis.
You had some hips on you, Grandma, like we all do, and you too endured the pain of childbirth.
“Because you are the Alpha and Omega, old Lucy, you the Madonna and you the pietà, with you the immemorial drama of the human race begins, this birthplace and deathplace through which we all ride, you, me, all of us.
On a desolate street in Sanaa, in the shadow of tall clay towers, there crouches an old woman whose face I did not see.
But does it still exist, Sanaa—the most beautiful city, oh!
the oldest on the planet—or has it disappeared by now in the boom of missiles and hum of drones?
Do you have a name? I asked the woman curled up in deserted Sanaa, and she said nothing.
Do you have a dream? I pressed. I have a dream, she replied, a small one, I dream of someone giving me a coin.
“A young woman called Eliana has to ride her old motorcycle across the long bridge of Morro, which connects the two halves of Tumaco, a port on the Pacific Ocean with a Black population.
She uses the bridge to reach the flower shop where she works.
At the entrance to the Morro, men from a guerrilla commando throw her off her bike and gang-rape her.
Eliana gets away when she can, adjusts her hair and clothes, gets back on her motorcycle, and manages to cross the bridge.
At the other side, police officers await her, and they rape her too.
“On the island of Lesbos, at a refugee camp, I met a Syrian woman called Fatimah,” Zahra Bayda goes on.
“Fatimah is constantly gazing out at the Turkish coast, which glimmers on the other side of the Aegean.
Her rubber boat sank while attempting to cross, and she managed to swim to safety, saving Huna, her younger sister, a baby only a few months old who now wails in her arms. Her mother and her other sisters all drowned.
Oh, Aegean, sea of Death. When the fishermen of Lesbos cast their nets, they occasionally catch corpses instead of fish.
“But why tell you all of this, Lucy, lion, source of all lineage, untamed shrew fighting for survival? Better to greet you in silence, little grandma, it’s better that way.
” Zahra Bayda sighs. “What words could I use to explain what, to you, would seem incomprehensible, if, as they claim, your brain was the size of a peach, you were hairy as a monkey, and you loved climbing trees, as learned from the strength of your arms? How to explain, then, that you’ve left a never-ending trail of descendants because you reproduced like a bunny, and you were the first to defend your offspring with your own life, just as we all do, following your example, Lucy, lion.
“And now, with what words can I explain what would surely seem unfathomable to you, little grandma, that all of it has been great, but deep down not so much, things haven’t gone so well, because you are the Alpha, yes, but also the Omega, beginning of the story and at the same time the announcement of its end.
Today your energies collide against enemies that are too vast, you can’t imagine how vast, you’d feel diminished and shrunken in the face of the drama’s scope, you’d even laugh if it weren’t a weeping matter, I’m talking about wars, famines, hatreds, racisms, poverty, fascism, pogroms, catastrophes, and epidemics, not to mention the three most ancient faces of death: storms, loneliness, and fog.
“Give us your strength, millennial mother, little Lucy,” Zahra Bayda asks, on her knees.
“You wouldn’t have been a virgin, or even a queen, just some common woman from among the hordes, the shortest and most wrinkled, but nevertheless what a spirit, your spirit, Grandma, what resistance and vigor, how unbreakable your commitment has been.
I bow before you, as you see, and if it weren’t for this glass that separates us, I’d kiss your feet, which are so childlike, scorched, tiny, but tireless, insistent, nomadic.
How you must have roamed, old wanderer, up and down, all across this gorgeous, tremendous earth.
Maybe you can see us, there in the depths of your empty eyes?
Here we women are, Lucy Australopithecus, look at us, then, and smile, show us those teeth you no longer have, with which you bit and mauled and chased adversity away.
Weep and laugh with us, we’re the overflowing river of your great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughters.
Tiny and powerful hominid, give us your blessing with that scrawny little hand.
They say that the archaeologists who discovered you happened to be listening to ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,’ that Beatles song about LSD, and that’s how they chose your name.
Are you up there, Lucy drowned with diamonds, as in a hallucinogenic trip?
Could you be a saint, then, and are you really in the sky?
Fine, then. We’ll make reliquaries with the fifty-two bones you left us as an inheritance.
Come on, Lucy Afarensis, sweet grandmother, on this day, your birthday (turning three and a half million), remember us, tell us how to honor your example and follow in your footsteps, on this day when the blows are rough and the future so uncertain, oh, Grandmother, oh, oh, oh, look, things are getting ugly. ”