Goodbye, Padania Page 3

  His neck almost snapped under the momentum of Daria’s hand going under his collar and jerking his head up and back. Her left knee rammed the small of his back. As she fell on top of him, her arm movement slipped her knife into her right hand. She held it against the soldier’s jugular vein and paused to let him feel fear. Daria, too, for the first time in years, felt fear: fear that the series of easy killings would never end, that she was just a macrobot carrying out a programme she had neither written nor wanted. Her fury mounted, and she plunged the knife into the ground beside the man’s head. Then she pulled it out, staggered to her feet, slipped the knife back inside her sleeve, picked up the soldier’s fallen rifle and smashed the fingers of both his hands with its butt.

  She targeted the laser on her stunned followers to get them to move: out of the orchard and across the patch of open, scorched earth to the Wall, then through it. Daria followed them, into Italy. The land fell away westward from the pass. In the distance, the sea glittered. Just below them, still to the west, a lorry loaded with Italian soldiers and a FPAT 8x8 manned by para-military police drove toward them at full speed. The vehicles came to a halt. The soldiers dismounted and fanned out to take up position by the wall, near the section that Daria had sabotaged. An officer got out of the FPAT and approached the group, smiling.

  “Welcome to Italy. Congratulations. You’re safe here. The soldiers are to discourage any cross-border incursions by Padanian forces. Those people are not above sending a few young men to their deaths: it lightens the payroll and they can call them martyrs. In any case, we guarantee you full protection on Italian soil. I assume you’ll all want to claim refugee status. It’ll take us a few days to sort out proper housing for you. In the meantime, please come to our barracks, get cleaned up, see a doctor if you need one, maybe choose some new clothes, and have some real Italian food.”

  Relief and joy, a forgotten emotion, took hold of the refugees. Rita lifted the cassock over her head and let it fall to the ground. She stood there, arms raised, blushing happily at the immodesty of her long-sleeved T-shirt and track suit trousers. Only the Sri Lankans held back, unconvinced. The Carabiniere strode over to them.

  “Look, it’s just an offer. You’re perfectly free to go wherever you want. France isn’t far away. Except around Padania, the walls are down all over Europe. But you must be hungry. My family would be honoured if you would eat with us.”

  The word “family” seemed to trigger good memories. The Sri Lankan couple looked at each other; their expressions softened. Aravinda turned to the Carabiniere.

  “Of course we will. Thank you.”

  Daria was tempted to join them. Italy was home, and its government was not out to get her. But if its police ever went back to detective work rather than welfare work, they might find reason to downgrade the hospitality on offer to Daria Rigoletti. And there was no demand for people-smuggling on this side of the border.

  She walked slowly toward the hole in the wall. The soldiers gazed at her with a mixture of astonishment and respect, but made no move to stop her. It was a voice that held her back. The older Padanian woman was calling her name, clutching her cassock as she ran to her. She threw herself to her knees in front of Daria, clutched her hand and kissed it. Daria looked over her bent head. Below her, all the refugees were down on one knee, heads inclined in her direction. Daria let the sight sink into her subconscious, then withdrew her hand, turned again and walked into Padania with an inkling of how she might graduate from people-smuggling to a vocation that would help her to give up killing for good.

  **************

  Chapter 4

  The Harvest of Delirium

  The Spring of 2034 was a bitter one in Padania. The world’s juiciest cherries rotted on the trees because the undermanned factories could spare no children to pick them, while the pariah state could not afford the genetically enhanced seeds that would have made other fruit abundant on its few functioning farms.

  Discontent rumbled. To counter it, the government staged a Triumph: a four-nation soccer championship, in which Padania duly saw off three other countries unable to gain acceptance by the international association: Greater Pershi’a, Tibet and Somaliland. Fifty thousand spectators packed the decrepit National Stadium in Bergamo for the final game. The celebrations in the town afterwards degenerated into an orgy of drunken looting. The Greenshirt militia was summoned to restore order, which it did with gleeful, effective brutality.

  Brief months later, the government declared, with significant terminological inexactitude, that the nation had now finally been cleansed of all dark-skinned inhabitants. Although what they termed the historic name of “Padania” would remain forever, its citizens were henceforth to be known as “Padaryans”. Some of them, however, sought to escape.

  The soldier’s hot blood stung as it spurted into Daria’s eye. Blindly, she pulled the knife out of the man’s neck, then knelt there on the ground, beside his dead body, waiting for her mind to cool and her eyes to focus. Once she had calmed down, Daria realised how badly she needed a holiday.

  This time, they were waiting for her as she led her group of refugees through the section of the Umberto Wall that her nanobots had destroyed.

  The entire group she had brought through the first time, a couple of months previously, had reassembled on the Italian side of the Wall. Daria saw them now as she had left them, each on one knee, heads bowed towards her. They had brought with them the curious and the media. There was a collective gasp at the blood on her face and her cassock, at her exhausted expression. Some of the people on their knees prostrated themselves. Some of those standing fell to one knee. The media stood, watched and recorded.

  The Italian police moved in to welcome the refugees, protect them from the media and let them know their rights: food, medicine, housing and freedom to stay on the soil of Italy, or leave, as they wished.

  A bearded youth was the first in the reception party to get to his feet and approach the people-smuggler.

  “Daria,” he said, “stay with us. We need you.”

  Italy, she thought, was always good for a holiday, and though this would be a working holiday for Daria, it was a homecoming, too.

  “You know,” she answered in a low, hoarse voice, “I think I might.”

  She focused on his face, recognised it, staggered, struggled for the name.

  “Davide?”

  He nodded.

  “Davide … Take me shopping.” Daria collapsed into the young man’s arms.

  News of Daria’s breakthroughs had reawakened Italians’ conscience about the plight of the people with whom they had once shared a state. For years, the attitude had been “They wanted independence; they got it; now let them stew in it,” while Italians set about tackling the problems of what was left of their nation, and doing so with a flair and an unprecedented thoroughness that soon made Italy a social and economic beacon. Now that Daria had broken through the Wall the Padanian government had put up around the country, and her refugees had torn through the curtain of silence it had brought down over the land, Italians were shocked at what they learnt was happening in Padania. Calls for action started to resonate.

  The 2022 Constitution obliged the Italian government to treat refugees well, but in the spotlight of publicity it was keen to be especially generous to Daria and her groups. When Daria made known her intention to stay a while in Italy, it found her a villa in the hills above Genoa, near a village called Tiglieto.

  There, Daria called to her the first group she had brought through the Wall, the followers she called “The First Fourteen”.

  “Fourteen?” said Roberto, the most practical among them. “But there are only thirteen of us. Plus you.”

  “14.8,” said Daria. “One tenth of the ideal group size, 148.”

  Roberto coughed.

  “I’m the 0.8,” explained Daria. “Let us call our fourteenth member ‘The Missing Migrant’ to symbolise those who didn’t make it, those we have left behind. They’re in
our hearts, if not – yet – in our midst.” There was a silence of assent.

  Davide broke the silence. “How many people did you bring through this time?”

  “Twenty-six. Two more tenths. Flexibly interpreted.”

  “The vanguard of the revolution against the evil Padanian regime!” shouted Davide, his eyes burning.

  “No,” said Daria. “Our revolution will be against no-one. It starts with us. The house of Daria has room for everyone.”

  “Dar … Daria …” stammered Shantha.

  “That’s it!” interjected her husband. “Dar Daria – the House of Daria in the banned language, Arabic.”

  “Banned in Padania, not here,” chipped in Rita.

  “I’m not surprised they banned it,” snapped Walter, “after what Al-Qaeda did.”

  A stonier silence fell. In the early days of Padanian independence, the Greenshirt thugs had forged an anomalous alliance with Al-Qaeda. The terror organisation helped them with weapons and ruthless raids to eliminate people who opposed the new, racist regime, be they Padanians or “foreigners”, including local moderate Muslims, especially those who had integrated. In return, vast quantities of cash flowed from the coffers the new regime inherited into secret Al-Qaeda accounts, and its operatives in Padania were allowed to leave unscathed, once their job was done.

  “It’s a good name,” insisted Aravinda. “Here in Italy, Arab culture is valued. Some people even know what the name means.”

  “Dardaria,” said the small, strong woman from Calabria. “I like it.” And so it was.

  It was Walter, not Davide, who took Daria shopping. He was the man with the money.

  He accompanied her to Genoa, where she bought jewellery, shoes and fashionable clothing in chic Via Luccoli. The jewellery she favoured was the “ethnic” variety that was forbidden in Padania. The shoes mostly had heels high enough that she would need practice walking in them. Her taste in clothes turned out to be for soft fabrics, but also for the latest techno stuff that could change its pattern as well as its colour. However, it did not always understand the instructions you whispered to it. Unless you spoke with a Roman accent, the results could occasionally be embarrassing.

  Three hours into her shopping spree, Daria was trying on a vaguely seductive outfit. She stared into the mirror, and lost touch with her surroundings.

  A snake’s head stared back at her.

  As it raised its head to strike, several arms emerged from its changing shape to pose, then launch into the dance of death of Kali. Before the goddess finished her dance, she transformed again, into the adolescent Daria, tears cascading down her sun-tanned cheeks. Then the figure was Don Francesco, the priest who had seduced her and so many others, disappearing towards the cliff leap that would save him from his shame.

  The clutch of a hand on her shoulder snapped Daria out of her reverie. It was Walter’s. His concerned face swam into view.

  “Daria, are you all right? You’re pale as death.”

  Daria swayed; Walter tightened his grip.

  “Walter, don’t leave me. Don’t any of you leave me.” She steadied herself, pushed away from him. “I’ll kill you if you do.”

  Most of the adult members of the group were surprised Daria did not want to sleep with them, refused their open propositions and ignored their hints. They would have been less surprised, less hurt in some cases, if they had known about her first priest.

  Her abstinence, however, led them to try and impress her in ways that were useful to the group as a whole: Roberto with his organising skills, Davide with his enthusiasm, Rita with her flair for public relations, Walter with his money and his financial acumen, his wife Stella with her technological savvy, Aravinda with his keen brain, and Shantha with her propensity for issuing stammering soundbites.

  Life was peaceful and pleasant in their villa in the Ligurian hills. Daria did not push them, but a consensus emerged that they should try and spread their way of living, under Daria’s guidance, further into the world. Roberto was keen to start by contacting and organising the refugees Daria had brought out on her second trip. They proved receptive.

  Roberto decided they needed an urban centre, and together they chose Savona. It was a bit of a dump by Italian standards – a longstanding cultural backwater – but the shopping was good: Linux, MaraDolce and Google Fabrix all had boutiques there. Walter negotiated a loan from the Italian government and bought a building in a central square, Piazza Mameli, that housed a once-flourishing language teaching concern called the European School, which had fallen on hard times now that heavy investment in Italian state schools had brought them into the vanguard of foreign language teaching.

  The former private school had a good air conditioning system, and Daria did not rebuff Stella’s suggestion that they guarantee the success of its opening as the first urban Dardaria by using the system to disseminate Empathspray into the air. Daria herself preferred Inhale/Inhearty, but she was teaching herself to delegate and to rely on others.

  The opening ceremony of the Dardaria in Piazza Mameli was kept short and sweet: just long enough for the Empathspray to take effect. Daria felt it breaking down the barrier between herself and the audience as she prepared to take the refugees’ questions. The toughest came first.

  “Daria,” intoned a man standing near the back, “How must we live?”

  Daria’s answer was a spontaneous “Don’t ask me.”

  Shantha interpreted: “Don’t … ask … Daria. No favours … no prayers.”

  “And no priests,” Daria added decisively. Then, more thoughtfully, “No hierarchies.”

  A woman near the front spoke up. Daria recognised her as one of Davide’s politically-minded associates. “We have enemies,” she said. “May we spill their blood?”

  “No!” Daria blurted out, “No killing. No violence.” She thought of her own history, some of the acts that had made all these people see her as their saviour and protector. “Except in a divine rage, with a very good reason.”

  Her ear-ring vibrated. She took up her meditation position and listened. The ear-ring relayed Aravinda’s suggestion to her brain. Daria was rarely impressed by feminist rhetoric, but since this idea was coming from Aravinda, a South Asian male, it might pass muster even among the men eager to follow her.

  Daria drew herself up from the meditation position and took hold of the microphone. “We women sacrifice our blood every month. Let our men shed a few drops of their own blood every month. That will be enough.”

  This was greeted with a stunned silence. At Aravinda’s suggestion, Daria launched everyone into deep breathing exercises, so that they drew the Empathspray deeper into them.

  Roberto’s elder son, Manlio, put the next question. “Who can join us?”

  The answer was obvious: “Anyone. Dardaria is open to everyone, without discrimination. If anybody causes trouble, we’ll expel them. But let there be no discrimination in my house.”

  That would take a while to sink in. Daria led them in a short meditation exercise, then Roberto took over to organise the practical life of the first two Dardarias, the one in the city and the one in the hills.

  Daria wanted to end the evening on a positive note.

  “There’s one thing I strongly recommend,” she said, dropping her voice so that they would strain to hear her. “Whether or not you live in Dardaria. Every day, I want each of you to make a point of calling home.”

  Three months later, Walter sat at the head of a long table in the Vegia Zena restaurant in Genoa. He was still picking at his friseu, whereas Daria had launched into her stuffed aubergines. She sat at right-angles to him. The chair next to her strained under the weight of her morning’s shopping. Now that she had become used to shoes with heels, she was discovering their infinite variety. The Vegia Zena was quite full, but Mundu, the head waiter, seated nobody and set no places beside them.

  Daria was happily spooning up fruit-of-the-forest ice cream when Manlio appeared in front of her and greeted her resp
ectfully. She looked up to see that all the other “first fourteen” had followed him in and were solemnly arranging themselves around the table, mumbling greetings to her.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “That’s the problem,” Davide answered, from the far end of the table. “Not enough.”

  “We’re not attracting very many followers,” explained Rita, who had sat on the nearest empty chair to Daria.

  “And the money’s running out,” added Water, eyeing Daria’s pile of purchases, thinking how much she deserved them.

  “Plenty of refugees have joined us,” Rita went on, “but not a lot of local people. It seems a dozen years of rational government has made their lives too easy to want to change. And the experience is too new to have got boring.”

  “Whereas in Padania,” broke in Davide, “we hear that people are crying out for you. We managed to webcast your arrival in Italy. Plenty of people back in Padania hacked through the government filters to see it, and were mighty impressed. It gave them hope. Dardarias are springing up all over.”

  “With 14.8 people in each?” Daria asked.

  “More or less.”

  “Good. Let’s make that the minimum. Maximum 148, the perfect size for an organization or community. When they reach that number, new members must set up somewhere else, starting with 14.8.”

  There was a silence while the first fourteen digested that.

  “The point is,” said Aravinda, “Padania needs you. And we need you to go back to Padania.”