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This country where no one ever dies is made of clay and dust. The sun scorches it until even the leaves on the grapevines look rusty, until our minds begin to melt. Living in this environment has one inevitable side effect: megalomania—a condition that sprouts everywhere, like a weed. Another consequence is fearlessness, although this might be caused by our people’s flattened, malformed craniums—the seat of indifference—or a simple lack of conscience.
      The word fear has no meaning here. Look an Albanian in the eye and you can tell right away that he’s immortal. Death is something that has nothing to do with him.

Morning raises its head at five o’clock, in summer. At seven, the old people are already having their first coffee. The young sleep in until noon. God decreed that time in this country should be spent as agreeably as possible, like with a sip of strong espresso on the terrace of the café around the corner as you stare at the nice set of legs on a girl who’ll never deign to look back.
      The steaming coffee seeps slowly down your throat, warming your tongue, heart, and guts. Life, after all, isn’t as bad as they say. You savor the bitter black liquid while the lady behind the bar, who’s just had a fight with her husband, gives you a ferocious glare.
      It’s eleven thirty. Thank God you still have the whole day ahead of you, and lots of time to waste. There are all sorts of things you could do—thousands of them. Dusk is nowhere to be seen.
      Suddenly, Xifo comes in, rubbing her chapped hands, going on and on for the umpteenth time about her ailing heart and liver, giving us the details as though they were part of some old fable that had nothing to do with her—something very important, but far away. Everything here seems exaggerated and distorted. And then, in a low, conspiratorial voice, she adds:
      "Have you heard the news? Our neighbor, you know, Suzi’s father, died in the shower last night. He came home from work, had dinner, took a shower, and kicked the bucket."
      "You’re kidding! He was so young, poor guy!"
      “Well, what can you do? Life is full of surprises.”

As you can see, it’s only other people who die.

That’s the way life goes in a country where everything is eternal (with the exception of whatever might happen to other people). But there are things even dearer to Albanians than death. It’s no exaggeration to say that one of these things is the quintessence of their existence.
I’m referring to fornication.
      They take endless delight in the subject. Their hearts burn with it (though, really, Albanian hearts can ignite over just about anything). Everyone is completely preoccupied, young and old, educated and illiterate, to the point where they even begin to hallucinate.
      Thus, certain maxims have arisen, quite naturally, in our nation’s thought. They grow like leaves on a tree. These maxims derive from one universally held supposition: a good-looking girl is a whore; an ugly one—poor thing—is not.
      In this country, a girl has to pay particular attention to her “immaculate flower.” A man can wash with a bar of soap and be clean, but a girl can never be pure again, no matter how much water she uses—not even a whole ocean’s worth.

Whenever a husband is away on business, or in prison, people tell his wife that it would be a good idea for her to sew up her slit, to convince him, when he gets back, that she’s been waiting for him and only him—that his absence has shrunk the crack between her thighs—because she missed him so much (men have a highly developed sense of private property in this country).
      Whenever a pretty girl passes by, muffled sighs rise from the terrace where the men are sitting around and enjoying the day—sighs that are steamier than their coffee:
      “Look who it is!”
      “She’s not worth it! You know how many times she’s had herself stitched and unstitched?”
      But still they go on, nostalgically:
      “Oh, Ingrid, my Ingrid! Who was it that broke the stitches between your sweet, hot thighs last night? Come on over here, my beauty. When we’re finished, I’ll give you the money to have yourself stitched back up again . . .”
      They stare so hard as you pass by, it’s as though you’re becoming transparent. As soon as you’re penetrated by one of their stares, it transfixes you forever.

At home, it’s the same story. “Don’t worry now,” my aunt tells me, “we’ll take you to the doctor to find out if you’re a virgin or not.”

Her menacing glare cuts into me as she spits these words from between her teeth, and though I’m only thirteen and haven’t even seen what men have in their pants yet (a secret I’m sure has something to do with the fornication), I already have the feeling that I’m a perfect whore. My aunt’s staring makes me blush.
      Stiff with fear, I crawl into bed, thinking: “What if they do send me to the doctor and he finds out that I wasn’t born a virgin? Like those children born blind, or deaf, or without hands, or—worse still—without a built-in devotion to the Party?”
      Sleep finally overwhelms me as I beg my aunt to accept the tragic fate that’s struck our family: “I swear, Auntie, I swear I haven’t done anything wrong! It’s the way I was born! Believe me! I swear it!”

In this country where no one ever dies, my aunt is no exception. She doesn’t die either.

I used to have a recurring dream (which I’ve never told anyone about). Before I fell asleep, with my eyes half open, I’d have a vision of her funeral.
      I saw myself in a black scarf (a nice lace shawl would have suited me better), draped around my neck just like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina would’ve worn it. Of course, I was pale and cried a lot because I really did love her, but my desire to escape her outbursts—which were always directed at me—was simply too great.

Since I’d grown up without a father and apparently wasn’t bad-looking, it wasn’t long before I was confronted with the aforementioned subject of fornication.
      “Someday, you’re going to turn into a big whore. Yes!” My aunt’s voice and my cousin’s would always tremble when they said this, as if they meant to tell me: “Come on, we know all about you.” They would shake their heads. “There’s nothing we can do about it. We didn’t choose to take you in. And soon we’ll have to swallow all the shame you bring home—just swallow it, like bread. What else can we do? One day, you’re going to come home with a swollen belly.”
      My aunt and my cousin put on expressions of great sorrow, as though they were being forced at that very moment to swallow their shame-filled sandwiches, while my grandfather silently rolled himself a cigarette.

The thought of my swollen belly was terrifying. Do you know Bosch’s paintings? The anguish and madness on the faces, and the bodies of the fallen pressed together like souls in hell? Yes, I could see it clearly: a brownish and dark-red mass, brimming with scraps of organic refuse, with me as its container. You can’t hide a swollen belly, and you can’t crawl out of your own skin. You’re marked. A swollen belly means that you’ve been screwing around in the bushes (I’d learned from my aunt and cousin that fornication took place in the bushes—bushes were apparently the ideal venue for these vague activities). It means that you’ve been letting the worms of shame get fat off you—nourishing an embryo that will disfigure your body and make it obvious to everyone that you’ve been screwing around.
     Even today, I have trouble keeping it out of my head—that a pregnant woman is someone who’s been screwing around in the bushes.

How they longed for tragedy! My whole wonderful country thirsted for it! It created tragedies out of nothing, just like God created us from a handful of dust.

Whenever I was sick, everyone would make a fuss over me. They would come into my room and whisper “my dear,” and when they went back out, murmur “poor thing.”
      They would prepare delicious foods for me without ever considering the possibility that the illness might have robbed me of my appetite. I stared longingly at the pots of jam they’d left on the night table beside my bed. I exchanged loving glances with the meatballs, but the sight of these delicacies made me nauseous, and I had to look away.

Whenever I was sick, my mother, my grandmother, and my aunt suddenly turned into the most affectionate people on God’s earth, and I was convinced that, with them at my side, and given their foresight concerning my future fornication, I would be able to be strong. I would never make them ashamed of me.
     I had a great time whenever I was sick. I didn’t get yelled at, didn’t have to bake potatoes after school, and I could sleep in as long as I wanted. I didn’t have to husk rice, grain by grain. There was no wood to be chopped and, for some reason, I was no longer a whore . . . until the day of my recovery—that unlucky day when I finally had to get out of bed, when the insults and reproaches would resume. I was a whore again, and the consoling pots of jam vanished, to find their way to the bedsides of other sick children. You only get jam if you have one foot in the grave. Otherwise, forget it!

In our beloved country, where no one ever dies, where bodies are as heavy as lead, we have an old adage, a profound saying: “Live that I may hate you, and die that I may mourn you.”
      This proverb is our country’s lifeblood. When you die, no one says another bad word about you. I’d go so far as to say that no one even thinks badly of you. There’s a real respect for the institution of death.
(It’s no mean feat to gain an Albanian’s respect: it only surfaces when you’re on your deathbed—and when you breathe your last, you’ve finally won it.)
      All of a sudden, after death, men are imbued with the noblest of qualities, and women are exceptionally virtuous. Everyone weeps for you, lamenting the loss of such a wonderful human being. All anger evaporates.

And then sometimes I’d hear my aunt use another old saying that was popular in our country—her voice trembling like a sibyl’s: “Your own people (meaning blood relatives) may gobble up your flesh, but at least they’ll save the bones.”
      I sensed that, in this saying, my country was in possession of a sublime truth.
      And, indeed, my aunt’s voice exuded a sublime beauty.
      “But Auntie,” I said to her once, “if they gobble up my flesh, they might as well throw away the bones too. What good will they be?”
      She threw me one of her withering glares, reducing me to ash. It was her way of reminding me that I didn’t share the distinguished pedigree of my mother’s family—no, I’d been an unfortunate accident: I resembled him. Her stare was a rebuke: “Shut your mouth, oh daughter of that man.”

I shut my mouth and could hardly wait to get sick again.