Conflicted Destiny - Season 1 Episode 39

Episode 8 years ago

Conflicted Destiny - Season 1 Episode 39

more than pleased to send me there to see how long I could survive. I told them I had nothing more to say to them and that they could send me wherever they pleased, but I’d prefer if they would send me home to the Bahamas.
They weren’t kidding. A few hours later, some security types barged into the room and ordered me to go with them. They put me into a security vehicle and sped away from the airport.
That was my first time seeing London, and I was not impressed with the little I saw. All my life, I had imagined London as a fantastic, absolutely beautiful city, but the London that I saw wasn’t even close to what I had pictured. There were many bumps in the roads and the weather was gloomy. What seemed like a multitude of poor people roamed the neighborhood and there were countless run-down houses.
After what seemed like an hour, we arrived at the detention center. I was processed and they searched me and my belongings, but they never found my asylum card hidden in my boot.
The first two nights at the detention center were absolutely horrible. The officers’ narrative about it wasn’t far from the truth; in fact, it was actually a lot worse than they described. It was one of the scariest places I had ever been. There were all kinds of people in the center, including drug dealers who had been detained for immigration violations. The most vocal and aggressive group was the Jamaican group. Unfortunately, one of the leaders of the Jamaican group found it offensive that I was claiming to be Bahamian; he kept insisting I was a Nigerian. He said he could tell a Nigerian when he saw one, and he knew their reputation. He even said I was specifically Igbo. I didn’t argue with him, given the number of followers he had, but I was never known to be one who shied away from a fight. I respectfully told him that he was full of poo, and that infuriated him. Apparently, no one at the center had ever talked to him like that.
Before I knew it, a handful of Jamaicans jumped me. I fought back, but I knew it was no use because of their sheer number. Nonetheless, I wasn’t going to sit back and let them beat me. I did my best to defend myself, but not even Superman could have fended off ten angry Jamaicans. However, my pride wouldn’t let me stop. In the end they left me alone, either because they admired my courage or because they were tired, but certainly not because I gave up.
When I was a child, my father used to beat me, but I always fought back. I would scream and kick until he would get tired. In my adolescent years, my Uncle Francis used to beat me whenever I presumably did something wrong, but I never yielded to him, either. It was understandable, then, that I was not about to give in to a bunch of no-good Jamaican criminals. They had beaten me up, but I was very satisfied with myself for fighting back. That was the important thing, and I was sure at least some of the other detainees admired my courage.
Things did not get better at the detention center. There was no food and I went hungry for two days. At the end of the second day, I kneeled and asked God not to let me be detained for more than three days. After my prayers, I relaxed and went into deep reflection. I finally came to the conclusion that it was best to return to Spain.
I asked the security officers who managed the center to call the immigration officers at the airport and tell them that I was ready to talk. That same day, I was whisked back to the airport, but before leaving the detention center, I had retrieved my asylum card from my shoes. When I got to the airport, I was taken to the same room where I had been interrogated two days before, and minutes later, the same two officers from the last time walked in. I calmly explained to them that I was ready to return to Spain, where I lived. I pulled out my asylum card and showed it to them. They had a smug look on their faces, but it didn’t matter to me. The two officers left—I assumed to call the Spanish authorities to confirm the authenticity of my asylum card. When they returned, they told me I would be going back to Spain the next day. I sarcastically responded, “That’s where I want to go anyway. I live there, for crying out loud. So should I be excited and give you kisses for sending me back to where I live?”
With that out of the way, I had nothing else to hide. I demanded to make a call to my girlfriend so she could pick me up from the airport, and they obliged me. I called Maria Joana and explained that I’d had some problems and was returning to Spain the next day; I would give her the details when I arrived. I doubted that she understood a word I said to her. At this time my Spanish was still rudimentary, and she didn’t speak a word of English. Nonetheless, she seemed glad to hear my voice. She had been very concerned because I hadn’t called since I had left Spain. I finally got her to understand that I needed her to pick me up at the Barcelona airport. An officer drove me back to the detention center, where I spent the night, and I was put on a flight to Barcelona the next morning.
Two hours later, we landed in Barcelona, and I had no problem going through immigration. Maria Joana was waiting for me outside the airport. I got into the car and we drove back to her place. She didn’t particularly care to hear my explanation; she was just pleased to have me back.
The next few weeks in Barcelona were the most challenging for me. I had no job and no money, and was completely dependent on Maria Joana. I tried as much as possible to find work, to no avail. My days began with a run along the beach. There was an open-air gym at the beach, where I would work out after my run. I tried a few other things to keep myself busy; I bought Rollerblades and skated every day with a female friend from Belgium. After a nasty fall, I decided to give that up and stick to running. Usually, after my run, I would spend the rest of the morning and the afternoon watching Spanish and American soap operas and American sitcoms like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Family Matters. In the evenings, Maria Joana would return from work and make us dinner, and after that, we would take her dog on a long walk. Occasionally, I would convince her to let me go out and party as I used to, and she would grudgingly let me. Knowing my reputation, Maria Joana must have been afraid that some other girl would snatch me. Of course, she had reason to fear because each time I went out, I would hang out with other girls and do what I normally did.
Sometimes in the afternoons, as much as I hated dogs, I would end up playing with Quis out of boredom, and he grew very fond of me. I walked him every evening, too. For some reason, my new relationship with the dog didn’t go over well with Maria Joana. One day we were having a conversation and I asked her, hypothetically, if her apartment were on fire and she could only save one life, who would she save: me or the dog? Of course, Quis, she said, and that did it for me. I decided to turn the dog against her. I got much closer to Quis and he became more attached to me, walking behind me instead of her, and listening to me rather than his owner.
Maria Joana became very jealous of my relationship with Quis, and became infuriated one day when we were walking him. She had yelled for him to come to her, but instead, he ran up to me, and she broke down and started crying on the street. After that day I stopped trying to interfere between her and her dog. It was obvious that the dog had a special place in her heart, and as for me, as long as I lived under her roof, I needed to understand my place.
An idle mind, they say, is the devil’s workshop. As I continued wallowing away with nothing to do, I gradually started to drift back into my old ways. Sometimes, after my morning run, I would spend some time walking on the beach or along Las Ramblas, interacting with beautiful girls. On one occasion, I met an absolute beauty from France called Muriel, who was a tourist visiting Barcelona. We got along well and spent the entire afternoon at the beach chatting and laughing. She was a year or two younger than me. Muriel told me that she was in Barcelona for the summer, but would perhaps stay through the fall so she could enroll in a Spanish university to learn Castilian. Later that day I accompanied her to Plaza Reyes, where she was staying in a rooming house. After that, I invited her to my apartment, knowing Maria Joana would still be at work at the time. In the apartment, I explained to her that I was living with a girl, and she seemed to understand. We spent a while kissing and making out, and she left just before Maria Joana came home. I continued seeing Muriel on a regular basis while Maria Joana was at work.
One day, Muriel found an apartment and asked me to help her move her things from the rooming house, and I agreed. Unfortunately, the move was supposed to take place in the evening, when I usually spent time with Maria Joana, and on the day of the move, she was in an emotional state. I couldn’t leave her like that, and besides, there were no good excuses for leaving the apartment that night. Muriel waited for me, and when I didn’t show up, she started calling our house phone, something I had specifically told her not to do in the evenings. Each time she called, I would pick up the phone and pretend it was a wrong number. After a while, Maria Joana became more relaxed and I was able to convince her to let me leave the apartment briefly.
I rushed over to Plaza Reyes and met Muriel on the street. The expression on her face was one I had never seen before; she was fuming. She asked what I was doing and why I hadn’t taken her calls. I told her that I had been busy, but she didn’t accept that excuse. She became more agitated and kept asking me to tell her the truth. She asked if I was making love to Maria Joana and if that was the reason I couldn’t talk on the phone. I said no. Then she started yelling at me, accusing me again. She called me a bastard and, before I could utter a word, she slapped me across the face several times.
I was too shocked to react. I noticed people on the street watching us. I had a flashback to my last fight with a girl, back when I was in secondary school, when the girl had injured my head with the heel of her shoe. As I was recovering from my confusion, Muriel slapped me again, insisting I admit that I had been making love to Maria Joana when she was calling. To stop the humiliation, I told her that she was right and I was sorry. Then she stopped. She ordered me to carry her luggage, and I obeyed. We were supposed to have moved her belongings with a taxi, but she said that because of my actions, we would have to walk five miles. As we walked, I begged her to forgive me and remain friends with me, but she wouldn’t say another word. When we got to her new apartment, she opened the door, took her luggage from me and, without looking at me, walked right in and slammed the door in my face. That was the last time I ever saw Muriel.
I got tired of being idle. I wasn’t satisfied with sitting in the house, expecting someone else to take care of me. I continued searching for a job. Every day I would go out, and at times I would join my friends who were street performers on Las Ramblas, putting on a dancing show for tourists. Sometimes we would make reasonable amounts of money. But street performance was not my thing. I couldn’t imagine doing it on a regular basis. I wouldn’t want to be seen by people who knew me. One day I came up with a brilliant idea: selling cold water at the beach. The weather was still hot like it was the middle of summer, and there were always lots of people at the beach, but I didn’t remember anyone selling directly to the sunbathers there. When the people at the beach wanted to buy cold drinks, they had to walk back two hundred to three hundred meters to the stores to get them. Why not bring cold drinks directly to them? I discussed it with Maria Joana, and she thought it was a good idea.
In the evenings I would buy boxes of cold water and soft drinks, and put them in the fridge. The following afternoon I would carry the beverages to the beach. I would take my shirt off to expose my highly athletic body and get the attention of all the females, since majority of the people at the beach were young women. It worked like magic every time; my products were always sold within minutes of my arrival. After four days I thought I had finally found a way of making a living, but on the fifth day the police intercepted me, confiscated my wares, and told me that I couldn’t operate at the beach without a license. They threatened to throw me in jail if I ever showed up at the beach again. That was how that adventure ended.
As time went on, I became increasingly restless. I came to detest depending on Maria Joana and knew it couldn’t go on forever. She could get tired of me and throw me out of her place, even though so far there was no indication that she would. She seemed to understand my plight. Fortunately, the apartment we lived in belonged to her, so she wasn’t paying rent. She and her friend Jessica had moved from Mallorca to Barcelona right after college and bought different apartments in the same building. Maria Joana’s apartment was on the fourth floor, while Jessica bought one on the third floor. Jessica had also bought a building adjacent to our apartment complex. She was an American from Florida and had inherited a large sum of money from her grandfather, who was a millionaire. Right after her parents got divorced, her mother took her to live with her in Mallorca.
I got along very well with Jessica and sometimes I wished I were with her instead of Maria Joana. She was single, and if I married her, I would become an American citizen. And it wouldn’t hurt to marry someone wealthy. Unfortunately, she had a nice boyfriend, Nike, whom I liked very much. They were good for each other. Jessica also had an annoying little dog, one of the smallest I had ever seen. Though tiny, she barked more than any other dog I had heard and always attacked dogs ten times her size.
Maria Joana also came from a very wealthy family; her grandfather had died and left a substantial amount of money and property, which she and her brother shared. She owned a house in Mallorca and had used part of her inheritance to buy the apartment we lived in. I had never met her parents. From time to time she would visit them, but she never invited me. Her whole family was white and very racist, particularly her brother, who ran a successful business. She was afraid that if she introduced me to them, they would disown her.
After much pressure from me, she told her parent that she was seeing a black guy. She said her mother had almost fainted and told her never to mention it to anyone, especially not her brother or her father, and that she must never bring me to their house. After she told me this, I became infuriated and had no interest in meeting the hopeless bigots. I didn’t care too much about people who refused to accept me because of my race. I respected people’s freedom to choose who they wanted to associate with. Maria Joana’s parents’ behavior wasn’t too surprising to me, though. At the time Spain was still embroiled in bigotry and racism. On a daily basis the police harassed me on the street for documentation just because of the color of my skin. This racist behavior existed in every institution in Spain. Whenever black people were riding on the metro or a train, for example, it was not unusual for the conductors to assume that they hadn’t paid their fare. They would rudely ask for their tickets, while ignoring all the white passengers who may or may not have bought tickets.
Since I moved to Spain, I could hardly remember a day that had passed without being stopped by the police and asked to show my papers. Sometimes I would walk down the street and people would yell at me, calling me “fu-Cking Negro monkey” and telling me to go back to Africa. I would just smile and marvel at their ignorance. It never bothered me so much because each time someone tried to insult me with a racist comment, I would compare myself to him and conclude that I liked what I saw in myself and had no reason to be offended by his comments. I had a body to die for and considered myself highly intelligent. More so, I had tremendous intellectual capacity and could compete and excel overwhelmingly better than any of my detractors in any challenge, be it physical, mental, or academic.
On one occasion, during the Olympics, I ran into a TV crew along Las Ramblas. They were covering the issue of racism in Barcelona, and they picked me from the crowd and wanted to interview me. At first I was a little reluctant, but I later agreed to be interviewed. The reporter never told me what questions I would be asked before they turned the camera on me, and I was offended when they started filming. The reporter asked me all sorts of idiotic questions and went into very personal questions. I finally lost it when she asked me to say how I felt when racist white people threw derogatory comments at me. With disgust in my voice, yet without losing my composure, I said, “Excuse me, lady, why do you assume that black people are always the ones on the receiving end? Why would you conclude that racism is always directed at black people? Did it ever occur to you that a black person could also choose to be racist? I could be the one saying racist things against nonblack people. I completely reject the notion that black people are the ones always on the receiving end of racism and bigotry. I think there needs to be some balance; I’m sick and tired of playing the defense. I want to be on the offensive and have people of other races….