Morning Sea

by Margaret Mazzantini

  The waiter served mint tea, lifting the spout of the teapot upwards from the tiny cups with a practised, ample gesture. Angelina quizzed Namek about Alí. Their young guide looked around as if someone might arrest him at any moment. He was afraid of an ‘antenna’, a spy. A light sea breeze buffeted the deserted square. Namek knew Alí well. He was a bigwig in the Mukhabarat, Gaddafi’s secret service. Namek was familiar with Alí’s brigade. They ran at full speed through the streets, terrorizing people. They took dissidents from their houses at dawn. Every so often traitors would be displayed on television and interrogated. It was a way of intimidating people. During the adverts, the dissidents were beaten. You could see their eyes grow sadder and sadder, ever more distant. They had to confess, name names. Then they were brought to Abu Salim Prison, or else buried alive in holes beneath the sand outside the city. Namek was a Berber. Many of his relatives had been targeted. The colonel hated Berbers. They weren’t allowed to speak their language or use their alphabet. Many never returned. Tortured, forced to repeat, I’m a disgusting rat. Long live Muammar. Long live Muammar, until they went mad. Young women raped by drunken militiamen who travelled with supplies of condoms and Viagra in the pockets of their uniforms.

  Angelina rose and disappeared.

  When she came back to their table, her face looked crooked, as if she’d banged into something that had left a mark.

  Vito thought about that note in the kitchen: Break the emotional wall.

  What lay beyond that wall?

  Morning Sea

  Farid is curled up against his mother on the boat. He isn’t complaining any more. He’s dehydrated. His legs are full of ants, like the ones that used to climb up his arms and make him laugh. Now they’re inside him. Are these the footsteps of history?

  Jamila feels the weight of her son, who is departing this life. Earlier, she told him to sleep. Now, she tries to keep him awake. She tells him a story, a story about a little boy who will grow up. It’s a lie, like all stories.

  Their water supply ran out a long time ago.

  The child’s lips are rough as the wood of the boat. Jamila stares at the dark, forsaken gap between them. She bends and lets some of her own saliva pass through her son’s lips. The sea is like a mine now, closed over their heads, the house of the devil. The depths have come up to the surface. She has felt desperation, terror. Now she is simply waiting for destiny. The last face of history. Her flesh furrowed by salt spray, she looks for her destiny in a place where there’s no longer a horizon, just sea. What was once the sea of salvation has become a circle of wet fire. A black heart.

  She set aside the money for this trip, Omar’s dinars, Nonno Mussa’s euros and dollars, crumpled, sweaty paper. Like the other passengers, she handed it all over for this boat with no one at its helm. Nothing but a plastic eye and tanks of diesel fuel, almost all of them empty at this point. No one knows the sea. Only a few of them will stay afloat. They are creatures of sand.

  The young Somali man is hallucinating. He has a skin disease, bloody pustules he can’t stop scratching. He’s got a high fever and thrashes about as if possessed by an evil spirit. He’s stripped off his clothes. It’s terrible to see a naked boy trying to scramble over other bodies. The others are tired of him. They want to throw him in the water. They scream that Somalis are all pirates.

  The Somali spits in the water, yells that the sea is to blame for his illness, the white mud that floats on the waters of Mogadishu, the barrels of waste left on the sea floor by ships from the rich world. Now he waves his arms about as if he were holding a machete. That was his work, cutting down trees, burying them and burning them in the sand to make charcoal. He laughs, says everything will die, that animals no longer have trees and pasture. The charcoal is to blame. No one thinks of the future. Everyone thinks about survival nowadays and it doesn’t matter if you kill your country. The poor can’t afford to think about the future. He laughs, says they are in such a hurry to sell charcoal from their trees that they shovel it into bags before it’s done burning and sometimes the ships catch fire. He howls, scratches himself, rolls like burning charcoal. He lifts the flare launcher into the air and shoots off the last flare. This time it climbs into the sky, incredibly high, a perfect trajectory, an arc of luminous drops.

  Everyone looks at the firework display. Everyone expresses thanks for the divine manifestation. Everyone wakes from the antechamber of death. They cheer for the incendiary Somali. Someone will see them. A ship full of sailors dressed in white uniforms will come to save them, will lift them with gloved hands, give them platefuls of delicacies and miraculous ointments for the blisters on their mouths.

  Like squid around a fishing light, they sit there watching the sea in the dark.

  Farid grows lighter and lighter until he’s a child made of bamboo, of hollow wood. His legs are two swaying reeds ending in two dirty feet. Ages ago, Jamila took off his sandals. Move your toes, she told him. It was one of the last things the child did – tried to move those little feet, keep those toes alive. Now his breath smells like coal, a hoarse rattle that comes up from the depths, that seems to come from a much bigger, older body. Maybe the child has aged during the journey.

  Jamila caresses his forehead and his salt-stiff hair, pulls him to her. Farid’s eyes are half closed. Jamila looks at those moving white fissures. They seek her. He’s calm now, like when he’s about to fall asleep, the day’s last struggle as his eyelids fall.

  He’s always been a calm child, a little man.

  Jamila remembers when he would ask her permission to pee in the garden because he’d waited too long to make it to the bathroom. He’d open his legs and grab his little willy and she’d tell him to move a bit further from the house, but he was afraid of the dark, afraid to leave the circle of light made by the light bulb.

  Now and then, Omar pissed in the garden, too. Jamila scolded him. The stink would come into the house with the heat. Omar laughed, his white teeth shining through the dark. Father and son stood spraying side by side, large and small united in that manly gesture. Sometimes they would cross their sprays. Other times they’d compare the two wet holes in the sand.

  Jamila doesn’t know why she’s thinking of something so stupid.

  She has so many more important memories. Instead, she thinks of those two jets of piss in her garden, and the way she’d yell, Go further away! Further away! My flowers will stink and dry up!

  Jamila is a dying insect. Her heart is a lantern that refuses to go out. How much longer must it endure? To illuminate Farid’s night.

  One day, she hung a little leather sack round his neck, velvety soft. She chased away the ghosts, blew in all the best dreams.

  When she saw the sea, it looked big and wet, but nothing more. An easy land with no weapons. A blessing. She didn’t know it was endless, that it would holler from all sides. For days and nights its mute black face rising and falling with the waves. Her hands are puckered like uncovered roots. She clutches her son, her dried desert fruit.

  At home, Farid played with pieces of aerial, wire scraps his father no longer needed.

  In Italy, Jamila will send him to school. She has friends in the north. She’ll try to reach them. They came by sea, too, but with a smaller, faster boat. They’re doing well now. They have a laundry in a neighbourhood full of Chinese hairdressers. At the beginning, it was terrible. They slept in the park and were always on the run. She and Farid will receive better treatment. They aren’t illegals. They’re refugees, fleeing a war. They will have a temporary residence permit. They’ll request asylum. She’ll find a job and learn Italian at night school. One day, maybe, she’ll go back home. She’ll sit down and look at her life. Farid will have grown by then, with his father’s prominent rear and narrow shoulders. The same sheepish smile. He’ll be good with electricity, like Omar. He has the same long fingers like screwdrivers.

  The gazelle is on the sea. There’s no knowing how, but she’s there, stock still on the blue blade of the waves, resting re
gally as if on a dune. She turns to look at Farid, her shining ringed horns motionless.

  They are small, brave, dignified animals, with slender legs, tight muscles and a black stripe along their backs that trembles when danger is near. They’re the desert’s most magnificent ornament. Their acute hearing cuts through the silence. Their eyes are magic, with transparent corneas and celebrated shining pupils that see eagles in the sky and African painted dogs hiding in the bushes. During the dry season, when all the other animals leave the desert regions and the burnt steppes, they remain loyal to their place, and often their meat nourishes big carnivores that would otherwise die. They have a slightly odd way of running, as if they aren’t touching the sand. They leave a trail of little round footprints like coins. They’re very fast. They must be, to survive. Now and then, they stop and look back, like children do, and this curiosity can be fatal. Mauled at the neck, a gazelle never struggles, but simply allows itself to be dragged away and killed. Arab poets have eulogized them, and praised their innocent gaze as the hallmark of beauty.

  As he dies, Farid thinks of the gazelle, her eyes that come so close to his own, her mouth with its flat teeth eating from his hand in the pistachio grove.

  As Farid dies, Jamila continues holding him, continues to sing. She doesn’t want the others to notice. They’re wicked now. She saw the bodies they threw into the sea. She’s gone past life and is still here. She knows that it’s better this way, better that her heart held out. Her final fear had been that she would die before her child, allow him to fall from her arms. Allow him to feel the immense solitude of the sea. The black heart.

  Once, in the desert, she saw a fennec cub beside its dead mother, alone, surrounded by the calls of nocturnal predators as they calmly crept near.

  Her son’s neck is stretched out like a slaughtered animal’s. She looks at the amulet, which no longer moves.

  None of the passengers on this boat will ever set foot on land. They’re down to the last drop of diesel. They’ve lost their course. A ship will pass in the distance but will not stop.

  Hands grasp for the surface. Lungs burst without a sound. Bodies tumble towards the depths, sway like monkeys on lost vines. Sand creatures swollen with sea and shredded by the hunger of the depths.

  The seaside restaurant is empty.

  There’s no one but a police official absorbed in a newspaper as he consumes his single plate of cheese pasta beneath the trellis.

  The owner of the restaurant has stepped out onto the beach, a white apron over his name-bearing T-shirt. Hands on his hips, he looks at the sea.

  Vito walks along the beach.

  A dead jellyfish lies next to a plastic bag covered with tar.

  This year, the sea is a wall of jellyfish.

  That’s not why the tourists won’t come.

  Vito walks along the beach.

  He saw those overladen boats that stank like jars of mackerel. Guys from North Africa, veterans of the wars there, veterans of refugee camps, stowaways. He saw their dazed eyes, the hand-over-hand passage of children who’d survived the voyage, hypothermia sufferers with silver blankets. He saw fear of the sea and fear of land.

  He saw the strength of those wretches: I want to work. I want to work. I want to work in France, in northern Europe.

  He saw their determination and their purity. The beauty in their eyes, the white of their teeth.

  He saw the degradation, the animal-like conditions.

  Young men standing with their backs against a wall while soldiers took away their shoelaces and belts.

  He saw the race to help them, used clothes for the children, donations from poor people pissed-off because Jesus Christ always turns to them.

  He saw the overflowing camps, the fear of disease, the protesters who blocked the piers and landing places, and then started it all over again by throwing themselves into the sea at night to pull out those wretches who didn’t know how to swim.

  There’s no way of knowing who you’ll end up saving. It might be some jailbird who’ll steal your mobile phone, drink-drive in the wrong lane, rape some nurse heading home after the night shift.

  Vito has heard this kind of talk, jumbled, crude. The anger of poor people against other poor people.

  Saving your killer – perhaps that is charity. But here, no one is a saint. And the world shouldn’t need martyrs, just more equity.

  Angelina is at the window. She is waiting for her son, who’s not on his way back. It doesn’t matter. She knows that one day he will not come back. That’s life.

  She may not have been a good mother. She was like a lizard whose tail had been cut off. Vito was her new tail.

  But how can one hope?

  The TV is off. It’s an old TV; it doesn’t work well; it suffers when there’s wind or rain. They should get a new TV, a new aerial. But anyway, this is just their summer house.

  Angelina is waiting for the war to end, for the actor of a thousand faces to be captured and tried.

  She saw the NATO bombings, heard the usual There will be no civilian targets. They didn’t even spare the factory that supplied oxygen tanks to the hospital.

  She saw the tricks, Green Square full of rebels, a fake created by the television. A film set.

  She saw the warriors with their bandanas, children carrying machine guns. She stretched her hand out towards the television as if to stop them.

  Their city destroyed, the bullet-ridden walls, the holes left behind by explosions. Palm trees white with debris.

  Her mother, Santa, said, They’re shooting at us.

  We are Tripolini. We aren’t from here, and we aren’t from there. We’re stuck in the sea like those people with nowhere to land.

  They saw the rebels, regular people. Girls who did not wear the veil speaking on the radio, university students with machine guns and beach sandals.

  They saw the old Senussi flag.

  They saw child soldiers. The little loyalists, drafted for a few dinars, were killed on their knees, a bullet to the base of their skull like animals in the savannah.

  They saw a woman news reader with a veil, bearing a gun.

  They saw bare-handed mine removers dressed in shorts and sweating like farmers in their fields.

  What will happen to all of those weapons afterwards?

  She woke up with that thought in the night.

  They will move on to another war. Nerve gas and mustard gas. The colonel’s arsenal, wooden cases of machine guns, mines, rockets, all with the same surreal label: Ministry of Agriculture.

  Fields sown with mines. This is the harvest.

  Every night a new boat, human fertilizer, escapees from hunger, from war.

  It’s a late summer day of blooming caper plants and enchantment. A truce after three stormy days. The beach is a rubbish dump for pieces of wood, the remains of boats that never arrived. A war museum on the crushed stone beach. Vito picks through it, combing for bits to save.

  He goes back and forth along the beach, drags crooked boards and scraps of rugs.

  He stops to pick up a little leather pouch that looks like a jewellery bag. He has a hard time opening it because of the knots in the tightly wound cord. He sticks in a finger. Nothing except something that feels like wet wool and a few beads. He throws it into his bag with the rest.

  On the island, there is a cemetery for the unknown dead. Some good man rubbed wild mint under his nose so as not to be overcome by the smell and gathered the bodies the sea had delivered. He planted crosses. Someone else removed them, but it doesn’t matter. The poor have only one God. Every day he drowns with them and then causes wild garlic and beach poppies to grow up amongst the mounds. Vito has walked there. It’s a bare place, wind-beaten and without sorrow. The sea scours everything. No mothers come here to cry. No one brings flowers. Just little thoughts from strangers, tourists who leave a note, a toy. Vito sits down, imagines the bones below the field like the skeleton of a ship turned upside down.

  He thinks about the turtles that come
up onto the beach to lay their eggs. The island is a refuge for marine life. In a while, the eggs will hatch. Vito has seen it before, the little turtles going after the tide, running towards the sea to save themselves from death.

  At home later on, he nails his gatherings to a board. The page of a diary in Arabic. A shirtsleeve. A doll’s arm.

  It’s a job with no tangible meaning, dictated by the uncredited desperation that afflicts him.

  This is how he will spend the last days of their summer here on the island. In the shed.

  He has to decide what to do with his life, whether to waste it or to make it somehow bear fruit.

  His mother said, You have to find a place inside you and around you, a place that is right for you, at least in part.

  Vito can’t stand it when she does that. When she looks at the sea and doesn’t talk, her fists deep in the pockets of her cardigan.

  He is simply unable to make a decision. He’s thought about it but hasn’t made up his mind. Maybe he will remain a dunce. Maybe he’s not that smart. In any case, he’s slow. He needs time.

  Vito drags things, glues things. Pieces of those aborted escapes.

  He doesn’t know why he’s doing this. He’s looking for a place. He’d like to capture something. Lives that never reached their destination.

  He thinks of his mother’s eyes resting on the sea, following the lost course of the ball of wool wound round her throat. Since their trip to Tripoli she’s looked only for joy. She took up cooking – fig pies, pasta casseroles. She arranged sprigs of broom in vases. She wants there to be things for him to remember. The feeling of a house to come back to with his eyes closed, just to take a breath.