Morning Sea (5 page)

Vito doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life. He’d like to study art, something he thought of this summer and hasn’t told anyone yet. He draws well. It’s the only thing he’s always managed to do easily, naturally. Maybe because reason doesn’t come into it – all he has to do is follow his hand. Maybe because he spent so much time doodling in notebooks and on school desks instead of studying.

He looks at the remains of a boat, a flank with blue and green stripes, a star, and an Arab moon.

He hasn’t eaten a single slice of tuna this summer, not one sea bream. Just eggs and spaghetti. He doesn’t like to think about what the fish eat. He dreamt about it one night, the dark depths and a school of fish inside a human skull as if it were a cave full of fluttering sea anemones.

Until last summer he always went fishing. He’d tie a sack of mussels and scraps to a buoy. At sunrise, he’d find octopuses who had glued themselves to the bag and were trying to get inside it with their tentacles. If the octopuses were big, it would be a struggle. They’d suck onto him and he’d have to tear them off. At night, he’d go after squids with a fishing light. He’d use his fishing rod in the port, a spear in the caves. He loved wresting flesh from the sea.

This summer, there’s nothing that could make him go snorkelling. He’s spent his time on the hammock and only gone into town if he really had to. Too much sorrow. Too much chaos. But there’s still one part of the island that’s remained untouched by the world, just a few steps away from where the boats land and from the news crews.

Vito looks at the sea. One day, his mother said,
You have to find a place inside you, around you. A place that’s right for you
.

A place that resembles you, at least in part.

His mother resembles the sea, the same liquid glance, the same calm hiding a tempest inside.

She never goes down to the sea except sometimes at sunset, when the sun sliding past the horizon reddens the rocks to purple and the sky to blood, and seems truly like the last sun on earth.

Vito watched Angelina walk along the rocks, her hair unravelled by the wind, a spent cigarette in her hand. Scrambling along the cliff like a crab with the tide. It was just a passing moment, but he worried he’d never see her again.

His mother was Arab for eleven years.

She looks at the sea like the Arabs, as if she were looking at a blade, the blood already dripping.

Nonna Santa landed in Libya with the colonists in 1938. She was the seventh of nine children. Her father and her uncles made pottery. They set sail from Genoa beneath a pounding rain. The sky was filled with sodden handkerchiefs bidding farewell to the colonists of the Fourth Shore.

Nonno Antonio arrived on the last ship, the one that set sail from Sicily with sacks of seeds, vine shoots, bunches of chilli peppers. He was a thin little boy with olive skin. His hat was bigger than his face. He had never crossed the sea. He lived inland, at the foot of Mount Etna. His parents were farmers. They slept on their sacks. Antonio vomited out his soul. When they disembarked, he was deathly pale, but he perked up the second he got a whiff of the air. Mingled smells – coffee, mint, perfumed sweets. Not even the camels in the military parade stank. Vito must have heard Nonno Antonio’s story about landing in Tripoli thousands of times, about Italo Balbo in his hydroplane leading the way, about the immense tri-coloured flag spread out upon the beach and Mussolini astride his horse, the sword of Islam raised in his hand, pointing towards Italy.

His family spent a day seeing the sights of Tripoli and then they were taken to the rural villages. They found themselves face to face with kilometres of desert. Shrubs were the only vegetation. They set to work. Many of the Italians were Jewish.

They befriended the Arabs. They taught them agricultural techniques. They were poor people with other poor
people. Their foreheads bore the same furrows of land and
exertion. They cooked unleavened bread on hot stones, dry-cured their olives with salt. They dug wells, built walls to defend the cultivated land from the desert wind.

Santa and Antonio’s families ended up on neighbouring farms. They helped their parents with the farm work, saw the citrus groves grow up out of the sand, learnt Arabic. They exchanged their first kiss in Benghazi during a Berber horseshow in Il Duce’s honour.

Then war broke out. Friendly fire shot Italo Balbo down at Tobruk. A mistake, they said. English flares lit up the sky. The Italian colonists were sent back where they came from.

Antonio’s family was transported back to Italy on the cruise ship
Conte Rosso
, which British torpedoes sank when it returned to Libya.

After the war, many Italians went back to Libya on whatever boats they could find, rotten and overburdened fishing boats, Noah’s arks like today’s boats full of unfortunates. A reverse crossing of mare nostrum to regain homes, years of toil, cultivated fields. Or simply for love, like the seventeen-year-old Antonio.

He stowed away in the hold of a fishing boat from Marsala, buried like a dead fish beneath stinking nets. He disembarked, deathly pale, in Tripoli, where Santa’s family now lived because her father was one of the workers on the city’s sewer system.

The Tripolini welcomed the sea survivors like long-lost brothers. They disliked the English. The Italians were black from the sun, spoke some Arabic, drank mint tea on rugs at sunset. They had crammed themselves into the same narrow lanes. They were survivors, like them. They were clever, driven.

Then, in the 1950s, the Italians hit luck. They had children, opened restaurants, small factories, construction firms. They cultivated kilometres of sand.

Antonio was short, with hollow cheeks and pigeon-breasted from generations of malnourishment. Santa was robust. Her head brushed the ceiling. Dark, with green eyes and a double mole that seemed to move upon her face like an ant trying to climb. They were married in the cathedral. Antonio’s jacket was as long as a coat. Santa wore a short veil. Two donkeys tricked out with bells and little mirrors that reflected the miraculous light of the sunset behind the medina pulled their Arab cart beneath the light posts and palms lining the promenade beside the Red Castle.

They expanded an old candle workshop. They lit up Christian holidays and death vigils in the mosques.

Once a week, Gazel the beekeeper came in his old Ford to deliver blocks of wax, crude and rubbery and dark as tobacco but golden as resin on the inside. Santa melted the blocks of wax beneath an almost invisible flame. As it boiled, she used a sieve to filter out impurities, greasy grey pieces of beehive that floated like leftover bits of placenta. She refined it until the yellow wax became colourless and odourless, the colour of silence,
she said. Antonio prepared the mixes they used for dyeing, poured the wax into the moulds, scented it with cardamom and citrus fruit, and inserted the wicks. He tried everything, dropping rose petals into the still-wet wax, or fibrous hearts of palm. He passed a little studded roller back and forth across the wax to make patterned candles, spreading it like pasta dough, rolling the waxy sheets with his bare hands, his palms soft and numb to the heat.

They found a house in the Case Operaie quarter.

A boy came first, Vito, who died when he was just a few months old and was buried in Hammangi Cemetery.

The wax sheets hung like sore tongues in the dark, still workshop.

It was 1959, and all of a sudden oil gushed in Jebel Zelten. The ‘Box of Sand’ with nothing to export but battle scraps from the Second World War changed its wretched face. Now it was time for the war between the international oil companies.

In the meantime, Santa was pregnant again. She prayed in the Church of San Francesco. Every day at dawn, she pulled her most beautiful candle from the pocket of her work apron and lit it below the feet of the saint.

Angelina presented herself feet first. In Italy, she would have been born by caesarean. In Tripoli, she was born at home with a midwife whose arms were tinted with henna to the elbow. The midwife inserted a hand and performed the manoeuvre.

Angelina went to the Suore Bianche Nursery School, then to Roma Elementary School. Every morning she crossed the railway bridge. She ate fresh seeds in the souk, breathed in the burning-hot pepper smell of
filfil
. She raced on her bike to Piazza della Ghiacciaia, went swimming at the beach with the sulphur pools, waited for a glimpse of the Flying Angels, acrobats on motorcycles. Tripoli was simply her city. The songs of the muezzin punctuated her days. She knew she was foreign.
Taliana
. Her origins were something extra, an additional resource. One day, she might leave to go to university, but then she would come back. Her life was here, between the Arch of Marcus Aurelius and the mulberry tree, beneath the light that touched the ground and burnt with the red of the desert and the jubilant moula-moula birds.

Then came the Six Day War and pogroms against the Jews – dead bodies, burnt houses, the butcher slaughtered in front of his meat display.

Next came a fateful September day, a curfew, the city wrapped in a pall of subterfuge, suspended in silence.

Everyone thought King Idris had died.

He wasn’t in the city. He was in Turkey for medical care. The old Senussi king had shown scarce commitment to the Arab cause. He was ceremonious with foreigners and had allowed the Americans to build a huge base for control of the Mediterranean. But he was praised and respected. Thin, inoffensive, with a long wizard’s beard, he leant on his twisted stick.

In the candle workshop, Antonio sat glued to the radio.

He heard about the coup and its leader, a young man from the desert, handsome as an actor, seductive as a martyr.

Charismatic like his idol, Nasser of Egypt.

No bloodshed, only green flags. The people’s revolution, they said. Even though there were very few of them, the Bedouin from Sirte and his twelve apostles, all very young.

It was the first day of the hunting season. Gazel the beekeeper had gone off after antelopes.

Angelina happened across his son, Alí, at Sciara Mizran. He was excited. There was a celebration in the streets. Huge tanks rolled along, peaceful, like big toys. They mixed in with the crowd and ran together to the sea, to the raft across from the castle. They swam for ages, an infinite swim. The water was so clear it was as if the bottom were a carpet and they were floating suspended on high, light as flying fish.

They stayed by the sea until sunset, their bodies close, their bathing suits drying on their bodies. They talked about the future. Alí always wanted to talk about the future. He was not much older than she, but that September afternoon, he already seemed like a man.

It started with the Jews.

The very Jews who had lived freely in Tripoli under Fascism, serving as colonial traders, drinking tea under tulle gazebos, dancing in private clubs – all despite the racial laws promulgated in Rome.

One day, Renata and Fiamma, Angelina’s classmates, were not there for roll call.

The headmistress came. The teacher went out to the hall to cry.

Angelina looked at the map of Italy on the wall and at the palm trees outside the window. She looked at the two empty desks. She was eleven years old. It was the start of her first year of middle school. Her breasts were two swollen buttons. She wore white sandals and had started wearing perfume two months earlier.

Angelina did not know that she wouldn’t finish the school year either. Soon, the school would close; the desks would be tossed in a heap, the alphabet and crucifix pulled from the wall.

She wouldn’t see things like this again. The sea beyond the medina, the little mermaid fountain, the covered market, the Gaby Cinema. If she’d had a camera, it would have made sense to take pictures, like a tourist. Of her house. Of Sicilian
arancini
on a tray. Of the old men who played dominoes under the mulberry tree. Of her friend Alí dripping with sea, hands on hips, swimming mask on, snorkel clenched in his so-white teeth.

Angelina did not know that the young Gaddafi would banish even the dead from Hammangi Cemetery, that Italy would transport back thousands and thousands of soldiers who had died in Libya.

That her father and mother, their friends from the Oliveti Village, from Sciara Derna and Sciara Puccini, from Case Operaie – the people who had built the roads, the buildings, the drainage pits for the sewage system, the people who had turned the desert into a fruit bowl – would be the ones to pay for the misdeeds of the cruel and overreaching colonialism of Giolitti’s liberal Italy and of the Fascist Fourth Shore.

The wax, an odourless dough the colour of silence, slides onto the ground and covers the floor of the emporium. The door hangs off its hinges. A stray cat from the port, dirty with fish, lets out a husky meow.

Santa and Antonio watch the sea, their daughter between them.

The palm trees on Corso Sicilia wave and bend to one side. The ghibli will be here soon, bearing grey dust that leaves sand in your mouth, in your hair, in your fingers. They won’t be there any more. Saying goodbye to your own life is easy. It’s a leaden dawn. They’re alive. That’s what matters.