Hiding in Plain Sight by Nuruddin Farah

Kenya, where they were declared stateless and were made to stay in a refugee camp. Fiori came in person to take them out of the refugee camp and fly them to Nairobi, where he presented them with Italian visas so they could go with him to Rome. It was a couple of months later that Digaaleh, who had remained behind in Mogadiscio, had surgery on his prostate. Half a year later, he would be dead.
    Bella remained in Rome with Fiori, who supplied her with the obligatory papers allowing her to remain in Italy and pursue her studies. When she was older, she moved into an adjacent one-bedroom apartment that he paid for so they could be in constant touch, sharing evening meals often and spending a great deal of time together. Still, she led her private life discreetly, never speaking of her Neapolitan lover, a cameraman working in the studios of Cinecittà, the film studios established by Benito Mussolini on the outskirts of Rome in 1937. No one could be more aware of the importance of Cinecittà than Bella, as she had been brought up on Italian cinema, popular during her days in Mogadiscio. Her Neapolitan lover showed her the precise location where
Ben-Hur
was shot, and they gave her a private tour of Teatro 5, where Federico Fellini made his most famous films.
    Aar and Hurdo eventually relocated to Toronto, where they were first granted refugee status and later Canadian citizenship. Within a couple of years, Hurdo learned she had ovarian cancer. Aar cared forher even as he pursued his graduate studies in human migration. After Hurdo died, Aar joined the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental organization headquartered in Geneva.
    It takes the taxi a little more than three hours to get to Bella’s hotel. By the time she arrives, she is too exhausted to evaluate just how terribly the place has aged since her last stay, but she can see that the walls need more than a lick of paint and the chairs are sunken with use. She asks for the room she occupied a decade ago when she was on assignment here and met her Kenyan lover, HandsomeBoy Ngulu, who is no longer in the modeling business and now works for an NGO specializing in the eradication of illiteracy in Africa. But she still remembers him as an exemplary subject, patient, willing to do as many takes as she wanted, always smiling, forever prepared to make her happy.
    What a disaster it was, their first lovemaking! But things began to improve with each night they spent together, and Bella still thinks of him as her
bell’uomo.
Now that Bella is in Nairobi, however, she thinks that she must seek out HandsomeBoy Ngulu to apprise him of her new situation and suggest that they cease being lovers; life now is just too complicated.

3.
    In her hotel room, Bella takes a shower. Drying herself, she stands on the tips of her toes, craning her neck as though to see something beyond the scope of the mirror. She is a dark-eyed beauty with a prominent nose, heavier in the chest than she likes because of the attention it draws from men, even though she is overjoyed that she boasts the slimmest of waists for a woman her age and an African’s high buttocks. Drop-dead gorgeous, she also strikes most people as charming, well read, and intelligent.
    Which of her names goes with which of her attributes? She is a woman whose disposition is rarely at variance with other people’s assumptions. She only reaches for the unattainable when it comes to photography, where her ambitions soar. And yet, not only as a woman but also as a Somali woman, she has had to defy harsh social conditioning to establish herself as a person equal in all respects to a man.
    She puts on a robe and starts to unpack, but she makes very little headway, distracted as she is by several loose photographs of Aar that fall onto the table and floor. He is in different situations and in the company of different people, including his children, the photos having beentaken when they met in Istanbul during