Let’s get an ice cream. A lemonade.
His mother took his grandmother’s gnarled hand, and it was like looking forty years back in time, when Nonna would have been the one dragging little Angelina towards the cathedral, towards the Italian gelateria Polo Nord.
The streets were a jumble of cars, bikes, street vendors. But they moved in a tight pattern. The two women were happier now. Two gun dogs looking for the scent, the right trace of blood. Their heads raised, they blocked out the noises of the city, the new bank buildings and conference centres. They were looking for their city, closed up too long. They scrambled through the narrow lanes and passageways of an interior topography. The stores had remained pretty drab, old mannequins in out-of-date clothes. In the market, beside the camel-hair bags, they saw piles of fake Louis Vuittons. The colonel’s image graced every corner.
A year earlier, Vito had travelled to New York with his father. An all-male trip, the two of them and Vito’s father’s new son, who, unlike Vito, was fat and always wanting to eat and drink and suck on something. But he played the violin in a pretty miraculous way. They’d slept in a room with three beds with a view of the Hudson. One of those short and constantly excited holidays, always taking pictures of things before actually seeing them.
Vito wanted to go to Ground Zero. It was what interested him most. Like everyone, he remembered exactly where he was on that September day. He was alone with Nonna. His mother had a meeting at school. His parents had just separated. He thought it was the end of the world. He waited by the window for the plane that would crash into their building.
At Ground Zero, he stayed watching the immense black space of the construction site. There were hordes of tourists glued to the security fences, taking pictures and talking.
Vito didn’t reach for his mobile phone, didn’t even make the gesture. He had imagined this crater in the city, but seeing it was different.
It really was the end of the world. Everything had been cleaned up. Years had passed. And yet it was all right here in this immense, empty black space.
Vito had seen the stories on TV, the people trying to recognize a flying body from a still frame. A man eternally frozen, head down in mid-air.
His father’s kid wouldn’t shut up. OK, he was his brother, but only half. He lived with another mother, and they had a lot more money.
He felt incredibly alone.
Like that day when his parents were the two towers that fell.
He suppressed his bad mood. They went to Central Park, walked round the lake. He couldn’t shake the image of the big burnt lake a few blocks away. That night when they went to eat at Joe Allen, he didn’t want to play superheroes on the table with his brother. His father got angry with him, and he got angry back. He spent the entire night looking out at the skyline with the two towers chopped out, the laptop glued to his knees. Once upon a time, he’d had a family. Now, he had only uncertainty and the money his father gave him every now and then, to buy an iPod or some clothes. He fantasized about breaking the glass that reached down to the street and jumping out, but it was probably shatterproof.
In Tripoli, he realized that the sensation had stuck with him, the burnt stink of his Ground Zero. Because out of nowhere, as he looked down an alley that smelled of coffee and pungent spices, which may have reminded him of the multiethnic stink of New York, he noticed a sense of panic that came and went. Just like cigarette smoke dissipating after someone blows it out.
Tripoli was their zero level, their memory razed to the ground, liquefied.
His father said Angelina was still a deportee. A person waiting for return. And that the marriage itself had been a sentence of internal exile.
His father is cut from a pattern just like his lawyerly jackets, always slipping away behind a river of words that watered down life, diluting it until it lost its bite. His mother is the exact opposite. The only thing she can be is herself. She doesn’t dress up. She doesn’t even wear a bra. Now Vito understands his father’s divorce. Sometimes he feels like he’s been taken in himself. Angelina is capable of saying nothing for days on end. She doesn’t reproach him. She just does everything in silence, like Gandhi. She leaves notes. She was born to be an old maid. A solitary climber.
Once, in one of those notes, she’d written, Break the emotional wall. Was this meant for him, or herself? Vito crumpled it up like the others.
During those days in Tripoli, Vito understood a lot about her and her mal d’afrique. That minor affliction, fleeting, consisting of attacks that came and went like malarial fever, and her eyes afterwards, at once opaque and wounded, her sore tongue incapable of speech. As if she’d been bitten from the inside by a hidden animal. Now the animal was out in the open, sumptuous, voracious.
Vito watches his mother. Her hips and stomach move differently here, as if she’s absorbed the rhythm of the sea, the waves with their long tendrils, the boy playing the oud beside the Fountain of the Gazelle. She’s even taken off her beach sandals, which dangle from her hand, and her heels are turning black as if that were something to be proud of.
She’s performed a biopsy of the city. She’s analysed the unpleasant things that have replaced the beautiful missing things, and now she’s enjoying the mutilation. Like when she recovered from cancer.
Nonna moved along like a zombie in the calvary of their return, all the more intense because it was so sudden. Angelina kept her going.
They poured themselves into that sifter of memories, at first fearful and then nearly crazed, hovering between anger and joy. Hair mussed, eyes flickering, a mirror of the fear of all the time that had passed, all the hunger. All the fishing boats that reached their destination and the ones that went down in the storms. Berber eyes, really. Eyes that dug into the depths of things that had been stolen and never returned.
Nonna grew more and more daring. She didn’t have arthritis pains any more. She was agile and clever. She nosed her way into a mezzanine beneath the Ottoman arcades. This is where Ahmed and Concetta had their kitchen. Do you remember? That focaccia with custard and aubergine . . . the vine leaves stuffed with spicy meat. Next came the old Fascist buildings . . . And the barber was here. Do you remember? You used to ride horses with his daughter . . .
The Church of the Madonna della Guardia was now a gym, the cathedral a mosque. Piazza Castello and Piazza Italia had been joined to make the colonel’s immense Green Square.
They crossed the railway bridge towards the Case Operaie quarter.
Their old neighbourhood was unrecognizable. The new had paved over the old. It was difficult to get their bearings. They found a metal-framed building where the house should have been. The candle workshop had also been buried somewhere. Nonna went around in a trance, murmuring to the stones like a diviner questioning the earth.
Vito thought again of Ground Zero. Of what would rise there. Of the fact that a day would come when no one would think about it any more.
Later, they got to Hammangi Cemetery. Rubbish bags and abandoned bed frames languished beneath the sun. Now, the new foreigners were buried here – Chinese, Egyptians. The old Christian cemetery had come back to life. The Italian area was like a construction site. Entire walls had been emptied of remains once harboured in individual recesses, shelf after shelf like an empty library. They passed the abandoned tombs of unknown Italian soldiers and Italo Balbo’s marble mausoleum, empty now too.
They came to the children’s section. All the children who died during the gastroenteritis epidemic and others.
Nonna Santa went looking for her baby, dead fifty years earlier. She put on her glasses and climbed the ladder to see the names up high. She stuck her head into every gap, rummaging around the remains as if it were something she did every day, like at the market when she chose fruit and vegetables by moving boxes and rummaging beneath the top layer. As if it were something she was accustomed to, when instead it was so unreal. Dirty holes where mice had left their tracks. The richest families had managed to repatriate the remains o
f their loved ones, but their family hadn’t had the money to insist on anything. But now, in her old age, Nonna Santa no longer remembered things in quite the same way. She’d rearranged her Libyan memories. Now, she said it was a blessing they’d left little Vito’s remains in Tripoli, where he’d been born and lived his short time.
Vito was restless. A hard burp rose and stung his throat. He was hopeful for his grandmother, but personally anxious about the prospect of reading his own name on a tomb. Angelina wandered around across the aisle from them. Her memories did not coincide with her mother’s. She stopped, angry.
What are you doing? Not there! Nonna was yelling.
She started fighting with her daughter. They had an absurd argument in the cemetery. They hollered at each other as if they were at the market. They threw rotten old things in each other’s faces. It was almost comical. They were exhausted. It ended the way it usually did. Angelina took her mother’s arm in her own, held back the tide.
The Christian cemetery had been vandalized repeatedly, human remains used in gruesome rituals. They searched until dark. In one part of the cemetery stood a big tree whose roots had grown into the graves. Maybe the baby had nourished that ancient plant. It was the most comforting thought they were able to muster.
Then his grandmother wept. Her elderly face began to tremble, and it seemed it would never be dry again. It was a terrible scene for Vito. He thought it was incredibly unfair to see an old person cry. More unfair than anything in the world.
She’d brought a bunch of sunflowers, which had wilted during their search. She didn’t know what to do with them. She bent to set them down in a corner, a tuft of yellowish eyes that looked like they’d been plucked from shabby stuffed animals.
Before going back to their hotel, they wandered around the souk. Copper artisans, red henna, black dates, spices. Now they really were torn and wandering souls. Angelina, tinted blue by the veil she’d bought to go into Dorghut Mosque, allowed the crowd to drag her along, beat her like a rag.
Only then did Vito understand what his nonno had meant when he said, The story of man is the story of hunger. Hungry people moving around. The hunger of the poor, colonists, refugees. And the greedy hunger of the powerful.
Vito stuffed himself with spicy couscous.
The next day, they enlisted a guide. Namek was a university student who seemed a lot younger than his twenty-two years. He was a diversion for Vito, someone to whom he could talk. Namek was nice and a little crazy. He was mad about art and rock climbing. They set off to see Berber villages and archaeological digs, Leptis Magna and the sea.
They passed the rural Italian settlements. Porticoes that opened wide onto nothing, buildings marked with red for demolition, a defunct train station. Nonna said, Who compensates you for what’s been stolen? We had olive groves and friends. We had a history.
It wasn’t until they were about to leave that his mother started looking for Alí. She found the rubber tree where they used to meet. It had been reduced to a crooked old trunk, sick with dark, hard lumps. On the edge of the city, she found the old house with its powdery bricks.
There was no trace of the beehives and the rest. The place was abandoned. One door, its boards rotted and ragged and needlessly blocked with a rusty bolt. They caught a glimpse of the interior, dark as a barn. Some tiles were missing from the cracked walls. Splotches of light filtered through. Prickly pears had grown up everywhere, and the sagging roof had become a shelter for birds.
Some kids were playing football in a sandy patch of land. An old woman wrapped in a woollen shawl sat on a car seat in the parched field packaging up gunpowder for the festival of Mawlid, the Prophet’s birthday. Angelina stopped to question her.
It was the first time Vito had heard his mother speak Arabic. Her voice sounded different, as if it were coming out of some other throat. The old woman shook her head. Gazel, the old beekeeper, had died a while back. Alí lived in the centre, in the special area.
Namek brought them to the building in the old Jewish quarter of Tripoli but refused to follow them under the arches and up the stairs. He shook his head and said he would wait for them at the bar with the big awning behind the clock tower.
There was a metal eyehole on the dark door. They heard someone stirring on the inside and realized they were being watched. Angelina coughed and rearranged her hair, her eyes on the spyhole. Then the door opened and a voice emerged from behind a tip of nose they glimpsed between the door and the wall, in the little space permitted by the door chain.
A massive woman let them in. It looked like she’d hurriedly tossed her rumpled veil over her head. She led them to a large room with high painted ceilings. Two big French doors, half closed, overlooked the street from one side of the room. The wail of the muezzin calling noonday prayer arrived from the mosque next door. Vulgar modern furniture clashed with its surroundings. Shiny furniture, leather sofas with enormous armrests.
Vito and his mother were invited to sit. A younger woman brought a tray with colourful carbonated beverages. Fake orangeade, fake Coca-Cola.
They waited about an hour, watching the dark screen of an immense plasma television on a little glass table beside a decorative plant. Every now and then, children of varying ages peeked through the door, but they never crossed the threshold.
At last, Alí arrived. He was elegantly dressed but didn’t seem to have come in from outside, and Vito couldn’t understand why he’d made them wait so long. He was handsome, tall, and without a bit of fat. He had a thick head of hair and a big black moustache beneath his glasses. He was wearing a bush jacket and copper-coloured summer-weight loafers.
He held out his hand to Angelina.
He didn’t sit on the couches with them but on a chair with a tall, rigid back, crossing his long, thin legs.
His Italian was good.
He had a polite but firm manner. Two hard wrinkles cut through his hollow cheeks. Melancholy tinged his dark, persuasive voice. At a certain point, he said something in Arabic that Vito did not understand, a mysterious call.
Vito saw his mother shrink on the couch. She couldn’t find a comfortable way to sit, couldn’t avoid sinking in too deep, had to maintain the awkward position.
Alí was no longer tapping his fingers like a drum; he was looking Angelina right in the eyes. They were remembering old times, diving off the raft at the castle.
Angelina didn’t ask him why he hadn’t kept his promise. After all, she’d forgotten about him, too.
But perhaps never entirely.
That’s what Vito thought, looking at her.
He grew irritated. He thought that if Gaddafi had let them grow up on the same shore, he would never have been born and his mother, her eyes rimmed with kohl, would have gone off in a mud-coloured jeep through the desert oil rigs and skyscrapers beside this leather-skinned Arab.
He wore a strong cologne, sandalwood and something else. Vito didn’t like it.
He must be really rich. There was a strange atmosphere in the house, perhaps because not much light filtered in. It was like some kind of mausoleum.
When they remembered the bee episode, Alí stood, spread his arms like he’d done back then, like a scarecrow in the desert.
Angelina smiled, pulled out a hand.
‘How many fingers?’
Alí smiled, too, but ruefully. He said that he had good glasses now, with varifocal lenses.
He took off his glasses, rubbed the dark circles sunken into the bones of his skull. He looked at Angelina.
‘I can no longer permit myself not to be far-sighted.’
He had affable manners, long, polite fingers. He crossed his legs absent-mindedly, one foot in its heelless copper-coloured loafer.
But his eyes were still and penetrating. They resembled the static house, without a breath of air, like a bunker.
It was lunchtime. The two women served a big common bowl of shorba. The fat woman was the first wife, the younger woman the second. She wore a rather ugl
y Western-style blue dress and a diamond ring as big as a rock. She smoked a lot of cigarettes. She seemed sadder than the veiled fatty, who had clever eyes, curious about everything. When she passed in front of her husband, she made a slight bow.
Angelina didn’t ask anything about them, just looked.
Alí said his second wife was Egyptian.
‘She doesn’t like being stuck in the house. She’d like to travel, but I am too busy.’
Angelina said she had divorced but that she didn’t have other husbands around. Alí smiled. There was a long pause.
‘Do you still read poetry?’
Alí didn’t answer right away. He nodded and said he read a lot, but only politics. He worked for the State. He was a servant of Libya. His life was dedicated to his country.
Angelina looked around the room, the floors with their hand-painted bricks, the long windows giving onto the balcony.
‘I think I might have been here before.’
Now Alí was lost in thought. Maybe he was growing tired of their visit. His eyes were like two dead insects beneath the glass of his lenses.
He insisted they try spoonfuls of a strange honey.
Angelina asked if it was his, from his hives. She thought he’d become a honey producer. Alí shook his head.
‘It’s bitter honey from Cyrenaica.’
He gave Vito a long look.
‘Do you like it?’
Vito didn’t like it.
Alí’s face hardened. He smiled. One of his molars was gold.
‘Our colonel’s ancestors died in the Italian concentration camps in Cyrenaica. Did you know that?’
He rose, said he had to be going.
Shukran. Thank you.
He saw them out.
Only later, back on the street, did Angelina remember that Italians had lived in that building. That it might have been the home of Renata, her Jewish friend from Padua.
Morning Sea Page 7