La Suprema, a cruise ship built in 2003 for $120m (about R960m then), can carry nearly 3,000 passengers, plus 1,000 cars. The length of six or seven soccer fields, the ship has 567 cabins, three restaurants, six bars, a dozen or so shops, a casino, a movie theatre, a nightclub and a chapel.
Its eight storeys are connected by glass-encased lifts, so that holidaymakers can avoid overexerting themselves on the stairs after a few rounds at the buffet. Many of the ceilings are panelled with mirrors, to give a sense of greater spaciousness.
But natural light is scant; what little sunlight can be found squeezes in through tiny portholes. The narrow hallways, marble lobbies and chandeliered dining rooms hum with fluorescent light. Thick carpeting muffles the low growl of the engine and the tireless smacking of waves on the hull.
Last year, I spent time on La Suprema, but not on a cruise. The lavish vessel, along with eight others, had been chartered by the Italian government and staffed by the Italian Red Cross to quarantine migrants rescued at sea, in order to keep them from bringing Covid-19 ashore.
The ships had become giant floating holding pens — reportedly maintained at a monthly cost of more than €1m (R16.5m) each — where thousands of migrants, mostly from the Middle East and Africa, were being held. I wanted to see the conditions on the ships for myself, but the Italian government had forbidden any journalists from boarding. So I applied to the Red Cross to work as a volunteer, and on a balmy, cloudless day in November, I boarded the ship.
On any given day towards the end of last year, several hundred migrants and a few dozen Red Cross staff were on board La Suprema. The passengers were confined to designated floors and areas, which were cordoned off with barriers of clear plastic sheets that had been taped across doorways, to lessen the potential flow of Covid-contaminated air. The ship was kept impeccably clean, and Red Cross workers enforced mask wearing indoors.
For all its wood panelling and velvet upholstery, the ship felt less like a holiday destination than a nursing home — a place humid with worried waiting, and smelling of boiled broccoli and carrots. The ship’s golden railings served as clotheslines, where laundry air-dried. The video-game arcade had become a medical storage cupboard, with boxes of latex gloves, hand sanitiser and toilet paper stacked between the Galaga and Pac-Man machines. Single-serve packets of olive oil from the buffet had been repurposed as a balm for rashes.
Most of the time we were anchored a couple of kilometres from the shore, off the coast of Sicily, and though the sea sometimes swelled, the ship was so massive that it only ever swayed gently. We were circled at all times by two patrol boats from Italy’s Guardia di Finanza, which polices immigration and financial crimes.
Several times a day, Red Cross staff led the migrants, single-file, out of their cramped hallways to the ship’s upper deck, where they were allowed half-hour fresh-air breaks. The deck, which on a typical cruise would have been dappled with sunbathers, was filled instead with migrants dragging on cigarettes as they paced around a drained, blue-tiled swimming pool strewn with sweet wrappers.
I had first learnt about the quarantine ships from my friend Francesco Taskayali, a 29-year-old Italian pianist. Last September, Taskayali e-mailed to say that he was working as a Red Cross volunteer. His concert tours had been cancelled, he explained, and with time on his hands, he wanted to see what life was like for migrants on the quarantine ships.
Taskayali was first assigned to another quarantine ship, the Allegra. On his second day on the job, he told me, a humanitarian ship operated by Médecins Sans Frontières delivered 353 migrants, pulled from flimsy dinghies in the Mediterranean waters off Libya. A narrow metal ramp with rope railings was laid across the gap between the two ships for the migrants to walk across.
First came a woman from Egypt, several months pregnant, with two toddlers in tow. Next came an unaccompanied eight-year-old girl from Morocco, wide-eyed and afraid. Then came others — from Tunisia, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Libya, Syria and parts of West Africa. As they arrived on the Allegra, a nurse took their temperature and Taskayali brought them to their rooms.
A few weeks later I joined Taskayali on La Suprema, where he was performing odd jobs. He brought people cellphone chargers, shampoo and tampons. He fitted them for shoes, which most had arrived without. He handed out ointment for scabies, an intensely itchy and extremely contagious skin infestation that afflicted roughly a third of the migrants.
He also plunged toilets, which were often clogged with underwear, flushed by migrants to protest their confinement on the ship. Because the Red Cross knew that my main goal was to shadow Taskayali and report on what life aboard La Suprema was like, my only job was dinner duty, checking names and ID numbers on a clipboard as people were handed a tray.
The migrants spent most of their time sitting on the floor in the hallways outside their cabins, huddled around their cellphones, watching music videos. The cabins typically held two or three people, the majority of them men between 15 and 25 years old, from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Somalia, Bangladesh and Eritrea.
On my second day aboard the ship, as I loitered awkwardly in a hallway feeling like a high-school misfit, a 15-year-old boy named Ahmed took pity on me, asking to see what music I had on my phone. Because my 17-year-old son listens mostly to international rap music, I have hundreds of hip-hop songs from Egypt, France, Tunisia, Algeria and Venezuela on my phone. Ahmed reacted with shock to my collection; he immediately disappeared with my phone into a crowd that erupted in cheers as it played a song by Lacrim, a French Algerian rapper.
Most of the migrants told me they deeply appreciated the Red Cross workers, but they nonetheless felt imprisoned at sea and desperately feared deportation once they reached dry land. If migrants can’t prove that they are fleeing conflict or persecution, rather than poverty, Italy typically rejects their claims for asylum.
Several of the migrants I saw on La Suprema had extensive fuel burns: during their attempted crossings, petrol had spilt in their dinghies, where it had mixed with sea water and come into contact with their skin. One doctor told me that some of the migrants she had attended to on La Suprema had arrived so soaked in petrol that merely handling their clothes had made her latex gloves melt.
At night, Taskayali’s job was to stand watch outside two glass doors on the eighth-floor deck, to ensure that none of the migrants went outside, where they might try to jump into the water and swim to shore. When the ship was in or near port, migrants would press their faces against the glass for hours, staring at the land.
During my week on La Suprema, the ship pulled into port twice to disembark people whose quarantine period had ended. The first time, as people left the vessel, they were met by dozens of police officers standing at the water’s edge, arms crossed, waiting to usher them onto buses and transport them to one or more of Italy’s many “reception centres”. These centres collectively house more than 75,000 migrants, most of whom are awaiting decisions about their asylum applications.
The second time La Suprema came into harbour, at the Port of Augusta in the east of Sicily, I watched the police onshore grow impatient with a teenager who was scheduled to disembark. They wanted to arrest him, for reasons they did not disclose. Batons drawn, several uniformed officers walked up the ramp and onto the ship and grabbed the boy, who fell to the ground and tried to wriggle free. Other migrants began yelling. Shoving escalated into punches. The captain of La Suprema rushed to the scene.
“You have no authority here,” he yelled at the officers. “You will leave my ship immediately!” They left, but soon after, the boy was removed from the ship by the Red Cross and arrested.
On board the ship, several migrants who had witnessed the scene went upstairs to their rooms, where they drank shampoo and other chemicals to induce vomiting, believing that their chances of staying in Italy would be greater if they were to land up in a hospital rather than a reception centre, because doctors might be more apt to help them than police or bureaucrats. At the end of October, nine Tunisians on one of the other quarantine ships had been evacuated after swallowing razor blades.
“If Libya is hell and Europe is heaven, this is purgatory,” Taskayali said to me one night at dinner.
On another night, Taskayali was on his way to his cabin when he passed a Libyan migrant in the stairwell. The man seemed distraught. Concerned, Taskayali made a U-turn and followed the man, who noticed and started to sprint. Taskayali gave chase, following him up to the eighth floor and onto the deck. After running the long way round a barrier to get to the port side of the ship, the man began climbing a railing. Taskayali tackled him before he could jump.
The man spoke with a mediator, who helped him calm down, and then he returned to his quarters. After the episode was over, Taskayali walked back to the spot where he had tackled the man. During the chase, he had assumed that the man was trying to escape the ship by leaping overboard into the ocean. Looking over the railing, however, he saw not ocean but a concrete dock, eight storeys down.
Born in Rome, Taskayali began studying piano when he was six years old and composing when he was 11. His talent earned him a deal with Warner Music when he was 24. On the Allegra, when Taskayali overheard another volunteer say that there was a piano, he decided to look for it. He found it in a cordoned-off section of the ship, in the back of a dark, empty restaurant on the seventh floor: an upright Yamaha covered in dust. He sat down and played Chopin’s Nocturne No 20, among the saddest songs he knew, and one of his favourites.
Word spread among the Red Cross workers that a renowned pianist was in their midst, and several of them asked him to play a concert for them. He agreed, but asked if he could do a concert for the migrants too. The logistics were tough, but eventually he persuaded the ship’s captain to allow him to play for migrants on the upper deck during some of their outdoor smoke breaks. The concerts were inspiring.
One day I watched Taskayali play Eski Dostlar, a traditional Turkish song, while a group of women from Sudan and Nigeria danced and ululated with joy. Another day, as Taskayali played a song he’d composed, Black Sea, a group of teen boys from Egypt and Libya formed a circle and took turns gyrating and break-dancing in the centre as the others cheered.
A couple of days later, I found Taskayali leaning over a railing, smiling coyly. He told me that he planned to play a concert in the Covid-19 ward, a section of the ship we were normally forbidden to visit. We met there that afternoon, and two Red Cross workers helped us into hazmat suits.
I watched Taskayali play while a group of women from Sudan and Nigeria danced and ululated with joy
Taskayali played for half an hour, during which the place vibrated with an invisible current. The migrants in this section, who rarely got visitors, seemed shocked that we had entered their area. After the concert, I noticed a man in his mid-30s standing silently in front of the keyboard, weeping. I asked him if he was OK. “This man, so kind,” he kept saying.
When Taskayali shyly tried to beat a hasty retreat, he was slowed by a gauntlet of migrants wanting to take selfies with him. As we peeled off our hazmat suits, Taskayali turned to me and said, “I’ve never experienced anything as beautiful.”
One night on the Allegra, Taskayali met a 15-year-old from Ivory Coast named Abou Diakite. The boy had arrived only two days earlier, after being rescued with nearly 200 other migrants off the coast of Libya by a Spanish nonprofit called Proactiva Open Arms.
He had high cheekbones, wide eyes and short, braided hair, and he sometimes wore a stud in one ear or a hoop in the other. At the time of his rescue, Diakite was severely dehydrated and malnourished. He had scars on his limbs, which some thought may have come from his having been tortured in Libya.
A week after boarding the rescue ship, he started suffering intense lower-back pain. He tested negative for Covid-19, and medical staff — suspecting a possible urinary-tract infection — put him on antibiotics. When he was transferred to the Allegra the next day, his fever had gone down and he seemed to be improving.
But his condition soon worsened, and Red Cross officials requested that the health ministry allow an emergency evacuation, so that they could take Diakite to a hospital in Palermo. The day before the evacuation, Taskayali stayed up all night writing Diakite a farewell song, in three parts, the first corresponding to Diakite’s departure from Ivory Coast, the second to his time on the ship, and the third to his arrival in Europe. The song was meant to convey a sense of hope — what Taskayali imagined Diakite would feel when he finally arrived on land in Italy.
The next morning, Diakite’s friends helped him into an ill-fitting green hazmat suit and a new N95 mask. Diakite resisted, feebly; he had worked as a tailor in Ivory Coast, his friends said, and he cared about his clothes.
Taskayali helped move Diakite onto a stretcher and down to the lowest deck. Onshore, an ambulance and a gaggle of police officers were waiting for him. As he was taken away, Taskayali pressed his shoulder and said, “My friend — the land, finally.” Barely conscious, Diakite did not reply. He fell into a coma and was transferred to a second hospital in Palermo, due to lack of space in the first. He died shortly after arriving at the second hospital.
“When I was growing up, I always thought that the world was unfair,” Taskayali wrote to me when he learned of Diakite’s death. “I lacked the proof until I found it at sea.”
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