My dad owns a small cottage in the Salento countryside with a little parcel of land where we’ve been hosting Ali, a 40-ish years-old man from Sudan. I’m not sure about his age because he himself doesn’t know with certainty. Moreover, as he explained to us, filling this knowledge gap by asking the local Sudanese mosque or government offices would have exposed him to the risk of being forcibly conscripted.

Despite his many herniae and general aches, he often travels around Southern Italy working in the fields during periodical harvests (fare la stagione, as we say in Italian; literally, to do the season), dealing with off-the-books recruiters (read: kapos) and small business owners (read: slavers) who show their bestial selves whenever he asks for decent pay for a decent job. “These negri, coming here thinking they own the place. What the fuck are they thinking?, that they’re the masters?”.

Several of his many brothers died in the past few years. Some were casualties in the current Sudanese civil war. One of his sons was killed last year, among the firsts after conflict broke out.

He came by some weeks ago and showed me some pictures and videos he received a few days prior. Opening fire on civilians is normal. Everyday routine. Drones bomb open markets without a single care: piles of bodies, people with limbs torn to shreds wailing in pain among the indifference of passersby. In this one video, a person’s belly was cut entirely open; three militians surrounded the body and started playing with the insides, dipping their hands like in a pot of meat stew, stirring flesh and organs and unravelling the intestines like a ball of yarn.

While I struggled to suppress a barf and tried looking away, Ali was almost serene in his own resignation. As he said: in our lives there, this is routine. What’s “not good”, he said, is that they specifically targeted a street market. “That’s not good”. Everything else didn’t appear to stir him much. I wonder what else he might have seen.

Side-note. For a few months, Ali was among the recipients of a State minimum-income program, the so called “reddito di cittadinanza” (citizens' income). When he suddenly stopped receiving it, he blamed the stereotypical Italian bureaucratic mess and moved on with his life. A few weeks ago, he was served a formal complaint by the finance police: the State of Italy argues that he received this sum while not residing in Italy. He’s been in Italy for almost 15 years on a special-protection permit. He has a codice fiscale (a kind of social security number that allows access to public healthcare). At the local police headquarters they know he lives here because my dad registered an actual, official, one-hundred-percent legally binding statement declaring that Ali is our guest at our cottage, including the address and everything else required by law. Still, he’s being investigated for… like, fraud against the Italian state? Apparently, other friends of Ali are being investigated as well, and they’ve been in Italy for years too.

This is what happens when your government is run by fascists, I guess.