Silvia* and Abrehet are both expecting a baby. Silvia is beautiful, educated, wealthy and famous. Her family is influential and she has a bright future ahead of her. She is thirty years old and as fresh as a rose. Abrehet, too, is thirty years old, and like Silvia, she too is four months’ pregnant. Her eyes are dark and deep like the night sky in the Horn of Africa, the land she has escaped from in order to preserve her life. But her ebony skin is withered and marked by years of hardship and suffering.

The Italians love Silvia, they wait impatiently with her for her privileged child to be born. They leaf through newspapers and magazines searching for photos of Silvia with her rounded stomach, their faces all smiles and affection. Abrehet has no place to go, no shelter. She is hungry, cold. Her husband, Yousef watches her with love and sadness.  He longs to nourish her with his breath; warm her with his gaze. But Abrehet and Yosef are “clandestini” (“illegal” immigrants).

A ruthless law, born out of pure evil, forces them to go into hiding. The police seek them out, everywhere. Determined and angry like hunters, their eyes bloodshot with hatred, they scour the derelict buildings where the Africans and other unfortunate people remain hidden from the sight of “respectable people”. People hoping to prolong their desperate lives, hoping to escape the brutality of arrest, the horrors of imprisonment in the Detention and Expulsion Centres and deportation towards countries where the only things in store for refugees are suffering and nothing else. Silvia is an Aryan star, Abrehet is a modern Jew.

Silvia is Eva, Abrehet is Anne. Abrehet has faith in human kindness when she holds out her scrawny hand, and her living skull breaks out into a desperate smile as she utters a single word, a moan: “Help!”

Sometimes it gets too hard, too painful when you’re involved in defending human rights - particularly in times like these, cruel times, in a country dominated by monsters. Why do we bother? Because, in spite of everything, we continue, if not to believe, at least to hope? We do it because we love Abrehet, because Abrehet is beautiful, much more beautiful in our eyes than Silvia – and her baby is a blossom.

*Silvia Toffanin is the girlfriend of Piersilvio Berlusconi, italian entrepreneur in the media business. He is son of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.