Free All Over the Map by Laura Fraser

were forced to work the streets, spilling their purses at the end of the day and keeping all the money to repay an ever-mounting debt.
    The immigrants, most of whom barely speak Italian, usuallywork twelve-hour shifts, engaging in quick sexual encounters in clients’ cars or behind bushes by the road. Their pimps monitor their every move by cell phone, so even grabbing a coffee in a passing van is dangerous for them.
    At one desolate corner, we stop and let a Nigerian, Marika, into the van. She’s working alone, and Giusi reminds her, as she makes an espresso on the van’s little stove, that it’s a lot safer to work with someone else. Marika shrugs helplessly. Up close she looks so young and vulnerable. She’s wearing a miniskirt that barely covers her bottom, gold eye shadow, a ratty pair of high-heeled black boots, long fake black braids, and a top that reveals false breasts. (Giusi explains to me later that the girls often wear plastic breasts, not to appear sexier but to protect what little they can protect of themselves and their feelings, to keep the men from touching their real breasts.)
    Marika warms her hands and waits for the espresso to brew. She complains that there isn’t much work this evening, because there are too many police in the area. Prostitution on the streets is legal in Italy, but the girls get hassled anyway. She sips her coffee slowly, to make it last, and says she’s worried because she still owes $15,000 to the people who brought her here, even though she’s already paid them $40,000—at about $5 per five-minute trick. She has a calculator always running in her head.
    I ask her how long she has until she’s free. She looks at me suspiciously, and I slide my notebook out of view.
    “Who the fuck is she?” she asks, quickly turning to Giusi, her tough question hiding her terror. “Is she the police or something?”
    “No, no,” says Giusi, patting her arm. “She helps us. She’s a nurse. She brings us condoms.”
    I smile and rip open a condom, then blow it up to a huge size. “Best kind,” I say.
    Marika laughs at the balloon like a child. I bat it into the air toward her, and it falls to the floor. Her smile fades. “Two more years,” she tells me wearily, “and I can do some other kind of work.” It may be longer, though, if her recent luck holds up—not long ago she was robbed at gunpoint, she tells me, by a client who took all her money.
    “When I came here,” she says, “I thought I was getting a job at a supermarket.” She rolls her eyes at her childish naiveté—she was nineteen then, and now she’s a much older, harder twenty-one. But at least, she tells me, she doesn’t have the problems the Albanian women on the street have. “The Albanian women are raped by their pimps, but not the Africans,” she tells me in her broken Italian. “The Albanians hit them. All I have to do is pay back my debt.”
    I am shocked by her story. I want to whisk her away, take her back to my hotel, run a hot shower, hand her a fluffy towel, find her some new clothes, drive her to the train station, and buy her a ticket away from here. But she is being watched.
    Giusi tells Marika that she knows some girls who never paid back all of their debt, and they’re working somewhere else now, not on the streets. Nothing bad ever happened to them. This is the real reason behind the roaming van, to help these girls escape.
    Marika considers that, then dismisses it. “No,” she says, “they lie all the time.”
    “Really, it’s true,” says Giusi, but she can’t push. If the organized criminals who traffic in women found out she was encouraging the prostitutes to escape, the van would become a target. As it is, it’s only barely tolerated by the police and racketeers. All Giusi can do is hint and hope that Marika finds the widely distributed pamphlets and the courage to call the
numero verde
, the free “green” number to get help.
    Maybe someday Marika will make that call, but