She was used to freedom, to endless warm weather, to the park with its majestic palms and large stone water basins, to the deep and inebriating smell of the souk, of roasted nuts, of fritters, of an infinite variety of coffee fragrances.
She stood out as rebellious, dishevelled. Her mother tried to make her like other girls, Italian girls born in Italy. Angelina looked around her. She, too, would have liked to have something or someone to resemble.
She looked for a fixed point in the sky. Perhaps an Arab star had followed her.
Outside her classroom windows, she no longer saw palm trees and colourful birds, just grey walls and cranes on construction sites for housing projects.
No one came near her at school. They all knew each other already. They looked at her bare legs. Angelina wore sandals until Christmas. Her feet were never cold.
No one knew anything about Tripoli. Even the teachers looked upon her as a foreigner from far away.
Her classmates called her the African. You smell like a camel, they said. The school was in an outlying neighbourhood of cheapened people who knew no way to approach others except poorly. Like different species in the savannah. The same circular walk of hyenas sliding, full of fear, towards their hunger. Angelina tried to adapt. She was excluded as a matter of course, without any real malice.
She made her alienation into an adventure.
She made things up, told stories about lions, children torn to pieces, baleful Tuaregs. Tripoli was a fearsome place and she had survived thanks to countless clever ploys. The stories earned her a bit of respect.
It was language that divided them. She didn’t know Sicilian dialect, only the ornate Italian they taught at the Italian school in Tripoli.
She walked home alone. The stretch of road was truly long amongst all the cement and the stinking second-rate sea. Not a single whiff of asphodel or carob, not one friendly soul.
She thought about Alí. His heart. The oyster knife he carried in his pocket. One day, he’d join her. He’d marry her. They would go back to Tripoli. She could, if she married an Arab. Alí would be rich – he was smart and brave. He was thirteen years old and he’d already saved a nice little bundle of dinars. They’d buy the candle workshop. Her mother, standing before the doughy mixture the colour of silence, would start singing again. Her father would twist candles again for Ramadan and for Christmas.
That was her one thought: how to bring her life back to that point.
The point where it had been interrupted.
It would mean uniting two bits of land, two bits of time.
The sea lay in the middle.
She lay split figs over her eyes to remember the flavour, sweet and lumpy. The seeds tinged all she saw with red. She was looking for the heart of the world she’d left behind.
Every time she went into the water she swam towards the open sea.
As she grew, she brought books with her to the black mineral beach.
She spent hours in the sea. She swam until she reached silence, where nothing and no one could get to her. She remembered how Alí swam, like a drowning seagull.
She looked back towards the beach, the industrial city without a sunset. It looked like a drawing of death, of the world after the end of the world. No voice, just billowing smokestacks.
She dived towards the depths, passing fearlessly through stands of slimy funereal seaweed like buried arms. Her long blue flippers bore orange flame decorations. She thought she would swim to Tripoli. She’d end up half fish, half woman, like the mermaid in the legend. She’d linger near the city of carob trees and whitewashed walls and sing her secret song.
Vito looks at the sea, the island’s beautiful sea, turquoise like in Africa. He looks at the coast with its mossy green inlets. They remind him of armrests on a big green velvet armchair set beside the water where a giant sits and surveys the horizon as he organizes the world and its movements.
Vito has thought more than once about the giant who organizes the world. He has wondered whether the giant is made of people, lots of people piled atop one another. And whether he’ll be one of those tiny but fundamental people.
That’s what a boy is supposed to want, to participate in the organization of the world. He’s always been a fugitive, at school and elsewhere, a fugitive from any type of learning.
He lowers his head. He’s ashamed of this sudden burst of ambition. He won’t accomplish anything either good or remarkable. It’s more likely his life will pass without notice. The sun flickers on the swampy, hot horizon. Vito feels the weight of his destiny moving slackly ahead of him in that swamp. He should seize it, shouldn’t he? Take a leap. But how do you know which destiny awaits you? No one had an envelope with the answer to give you.
Why doesn’t he jump into the sea for a swim?
This year he doesn’t feel like it.
His mother has told him about her endless swims as a teenager. The sea was the only friendly place, the only place with a familiar taste and smell.
She says the sea saved her. It could have killed her, because more than once she swam until dark, unsparing of herself, and then had to swim back to shore through the black sea, her body shaking with hypothermia, shivering so hard ten blankets wouldn’t stop it.
But without the sea she really wouldn’t have known where to go to digest all that emptiness.
Vito looks at the sea.
His mother doesn’t even get wet any more. Now and then she’ll float a bit. Then she comes back out in her one-piece bathing suit, her towel round her waist.
That’s all she does, floats like a dead person looking at the sky. She says she thinks and feels the surface stretching beneath her. She says it’s a good feeling.
She adapted to the new world. She went to high school, made love for the first time. She got an IUD coil and forgot about Alí and her Arab childhood. It was the end of the 1970s. She wore the shabby uniform of that turbulent time: a loose sweater, black clogs, a macramé bag full of books, the woman symbol on her forehead. During the student demonstrations, her hands clenched into fists, she shouted like mad, her face that of a banished monkey’s. At last, her rage found its audience in an entire generation of kids.
She couldn’t stand her parents’ exile any more, the constant stream of memories of Tripoli. The world was moving on, and she would do her part to make it better. There were social injustices, workplace fatalities, massacres of innocents the world over. Her family’s wound was not the only one.
She created a wall for herself.
She could no longer stand the smell of their household, choking on nostalgia. Defeated people ceaselessly lamenting what had been snatched away. Her father clipped every article on Libya, on the story of their downfall.
They had relatives in Catania whom they’d visit a couple of times a year. Angelina made friends with her cousins. Santa and Antonio smiled and ate their lemon cassata, but they were like two deportees. They sat side by side and went through the motion of talking about other things, but they weren’t really interested, and they ended up silent, her mother with her handbag in her lap, her father fiddling with the ten-lira coins in his pocket. They couldn’t wait to leave.
They wanted to go back to their exile, where they were free to complain, to wallow in eternal sorrow.
Angelina began to flee, to slam the door.
She studied, too. She knew the true story of Italian colonialism now. Her family had been deported, exported, along with the Roman colonies, the Fascist eagles, the flames of a dying empire.
Antonio was a moderate. He voted for La Malfa’s Republicans.
But there had been an antecedent. They had left more behind them than fine-grained sand and infinitely pure landscapes of dunes and oases.
There had been kangaroo courts, planes that landed in the desert and killed Libyans in bunches after hasty trials. Once, Avanti! printed a picture of a Christmas tree, Bedouins hanging from its branches instead of ornaments and garlands.
Vito looks at the sea.
> His mother once told him that beneath every Western civilization lay a festering wound of collective guilt.
His mother isn’t fond of people who protest their innocence.
She’s one of those people who wants to assume responsibility for things. Vito thinks it’s a form of presumptuousness.
Angelina says she’s not innocent. She says that no people that has colonized another is innocent.
She says she doesn’t want to swim any more in a sea where boats full of migrants sink.
There’s nothing worse than an old revolutionary. She’s always planting bombs in your thoughts.
There’s nothing worse than having an unconventional mother. A mother who resembles no other mother, who wears beach sandals everywhere, whose handbag has nothing in it, cigarettes, house keys, ten euros, a mobile phone she never uses. A handbag without miracles. Like her life.
One day, Vito will leave her. The two of them have lived alone. If there was a light on in the house, it was her, no one else. The books propped open on the couch. Like an eternal student. She’s shrunk since she turned fifty. He’s the one who tells her to stand up straight, not to slouch. He’s the one who tells her not to smoke.
She just shakes her head and says Falcone and Borsellino smoked, too, and that’s not what killed them.
She’s always saying things like that, absurd things that carry on speaking in the silence.
That illustrate her worldview, bitter but alive.
One day, he will leave her. She doesn’t seem to be afraid of that day. If anything, she’d like him to go and study abroad.
She doesn’t like Italy any more. But she goes on teaching Italian to middle-school kids without ever taking sick leave, not even for a day.
Her former students come to see her, hug her, drown atop her. She makes coffee for them and looks at them, all grown up.
When he was little, Vito would get seasick when they were crossing to the island. He’d go greenish. Angelina would hold his forehead with one of her hands, which were always cool to the touch. She’d tell him to find a still spot on the horizon and keep his eyes on it.
If he thinks about it, Vito can feel that discomfort all over again, his stomach heaving and dumping itself out like a plastic bag tossed around by the undertow. He can still feel that cool hand supporting him and pointing out the distant spot to look at.
He looks for a still spot on the horizon.
Something that will help him get through the despair that rises now out of nowhere in the morning. He opens his eyes and his first thought is, Why should I get out of bed?
Vito looks at the sea. As if he were casting a net to land and bring something back. He thinks about his mother. She’s had breast cancer. She had an operation and came back home as if nothing had happened. Her face never changed. Vito wasn’t kind. He was rude. He grabbed the packet of cigarettes away from her and tore it up. Angelina bit his hand.
Who does she think she is?
Then Angelina’s sea closed.
She married, a Norman Sicilian, blond and freckled, an expert in civil law who defended hookers and juvenile delinquents from the blighted San Berillo neighbourhood. Angelina got a job as a substitute teacher. Vito was born. Angelina separated from Vito’s father. Now her ex-husband helps Catania’s wealthy to divorce well.
Then one day, out of nowhere, the ban was lifted. They could go back to Tripoli if they wanted to on a plain old tourist visa.
The Day of Revenge, 7 October, which commemorated the banishment of the Italian assassins by the colonel’s Jamahiriya, was transformed overnight into the Day of Friendship. Gaddafi was now a friend of Berlusconi and of Italy. He came to visit with his Amazon Guard and his satin slippers. Champagne in the Bedouins’ tent. No one said another thing about terrorism, exploded planes. His had been the first Arab government to condemn the attack on the World Trade Center. The actor of a thousand faces was now after a new role as mediator in the Mediterranean. Angelina laughed. He’s hoping for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Nonna Santa, cleaning broccoli, whispers, History is a millipede with every foot pulling in a different direction, and our body is in the middle.
By then Nonno Antonio had already died without ever seeing Tripoli again. But he’d dreamt it, dreamt a white wall and the café in Corso Sicilia where he used to play pool. He’d ordered a cup of mint tea, the pretend kind from the supermarket.
‘Mum, I want to go.’
It was Vito who dragged her back to Tripoli.
He was sick of hearing that broken story.
So Angelina and her mother travelled back with Vito, who’d never been.
Beforehand, he took a tour with Google Earth, saw Tripoli thanks to his mouse.
Angelina wouldn’t come near the computer.
She went around with that expression for days, hunched into her shoulders, absent, paralysed by her thoughts.
She was anxious, caged in. She put things in her handbag and took them back out. She talked about nothing but what weather they would find and the intestinal antibacterial they’d better bring along in case they got the runs.
She’d waited for this moment for who knew how long, and now that it was here she seemed uninterested, cursory, like a person who finally has to go through a small but necessary operation she’s put off many times. Yes, it was the same agitated calm as when she went to the hospital to get the lump in her breast removed and sat on the stretcher fully clothed, not making up her mind to change, to put on her hospital gown, until the very last minute.
That very same almost autistic determination, that habit of fighting against herself, of never choosing a new wall to scale.
In the end, she shuffled off in her slippers as if she were headed to the beach for a day.
Nonna Santa was like a little girl on Saint Agatha’s Day in her white dress and new orthopaedic shoes.
They flew on Libyan Airlines.
Nonna looked out of the dirty window and studied what she saw.
It was the first time they’d seen that sea from the air. Without the flavour, the foam spray, the anguish. Without the fear they’d drown.
It was a strange interlude within that pressurized cabin as it crossed the sea of their lives without moving.
The first thing they saw from above were the fields the Italians had created in the desert around Tripoli, a geometry of tidy pieces. A docile pattern. That was the best bequest, the work of thousands of arms. Citrus and olive groves, rows of agave planted as bulwarks against the mobile horizon of dunes.
They had no baggage and yet it was as if they didn’t want to leave the airport. They closed themselves in the toilets. Nonna had a swollen bladder. Vito’s mother rinsed her face, and when they came out, she had wet spots on her T-shirt and her hair was glued to her temples.
Vito noticed she’d grown old. The thought pained him. Later, she’d go back to being young, but in that moment, he saw what she would become.
The air of that sea, those cities unfurling themselves along the Arab coast, flat, caressed by the wind going in and out. Needle-like minarets, buildings surrounded by majestic palm trees. Vito was happy to be on holiday. They took a taxi. The country’s oil wealth was tangible. Tarmac roads with multiple lanes sliced through the desert. Sparkling Toyotas drove arrogantly, making U-turns and nonchalantly cutting through roundabouts in the wrong direction.
The taxi stopped along the seaside promenade.
Nonna Santa straightened her neck, made a dizzy face, stretched like a grey bird. Her daughter helped her up from the sweaty car seat.
The two of them looked like they’d just stepped off a spaceship. The first steps they took were weightless, as if they feared setting down their feet.
Angelina lit a cigarette and put on her dark glasses. Her eyes darted here and there, taking everything in as quickly as a pickpocketing. Then she began moving forwards. Like a mine remover in the desert.
Her motionless eyes sought to catch everything possible in her visual field. Viole
ntly they brought all the changes into focus to avoid being wounded too much.
New buildings surrounding the old medina. Dusty old roads that had been paved over. The conference centre had not changed. Nostrils stretched wide as they breathed in Tripoli’s smell. Sniffing after that eaten-up time as if checking for a gas leak. And it really did seem like something might explode. Angelina turned towards the sea.
The sand . . . where is the sand?
Their beach near the castle was no longer there. The promenade was an immense car park.
All of a sudden, she burst out laughing, like a crazy lady.
A cat rubbed up against her. A wary and absent creature, just like her, with flea-bitten ears and reddish fur. It tickled her leg. It was one of those soft cats, maybe in heat, that turn over and let you touch them. It lay there on the ground, four legs in the air, rubbing against the tarmac. Angelina bent over to pet its white belly. The cat purred. Angelina picked up the animal and kissed it on the nose as if it were a baby fresh from its bath. She didn’t seem to want to leave the cat. Vito smiled. He liked animals, too, but there was something odd about his mother’s sudden passion for the stray, as if she’d come all the way to Tripoli to find this sick and wounded cat. When she stood up, though, Angelina looked like something had healed her. She pushed her sunglasses back on her head and looked at the city with naked eyes. Then she looked at Santa.
Mum, do you remember all those cats when we left?
Nonna walked the entire length of Corso Sicilia without saying a word, unsteady on her feet. She sat on the pavement under a palm tree and Vito thought, There she is sitting at the end of her life. She took a deep breath. A hard, satisfied breath like a blade slicing in and reaching a vital organ.
Many of the buildings in the city centre were intact, though smaller and dirtier than they remembered. Others had literally been erased, submerged by layers of architecture, of lives. The old Jewish cemetery had disappeared, buried by extravagant, accordion-shaped skyscrapers set upon cement stilts.
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