Morning Sea (7 page)

Then Alí came back. One early summer afternoon, she saw him in the Italian gelateria Polo Nord. He was licking his ice cream, his eyes in their thick glasses fixed on a book.

‘What are you reading?’

It was a collection of poetry by Ibn Hazm. He read her one.
I wish I could split myself in two with a knife, so that you could come inside and be enclosed within my chest . . .

Beneath the cloth of his trousers, he touched the oyster knife he always carried. Alí was almost thirteen. There was a light fuzz beneath the sweat on his upper lip. Angelina looked at him, blushed. Alí was different. He’d never been shy and now he was, almost trembling, like the asphodel blooming at their backs. Everything was aquiver with a soft orange light that bore a suffering of its own within, as if some world behind them were retreating to another place.

It was childhood retreating before a new season of intimacy and shame. At the time, Angelina knew too little to interpret the sense of loss, the tragedy. It started raining. They ran off to their own houses. Angelina stopped to rest beneath the rubber tree.

She liked the rain in Tripoli. It was violent, sudden, like her emotions. Angelina let it soak her, her white sandals, her bare legs, her curly hair that was fairer at the ends. She could feel something inside, Alí’s hand snatching her away from herself to introduce her into his Arab heart like in the poem.

The day they left, Alí ran to the white arch in front of Angelina’s house. He waited for her a long time under the sun. Angelina was wearing her coat. He’d never seen her hair tied back so tight. Her father and mother were also wearing unseasonably heavy clothes. They’d put on everything they could. A form of protection. The weather had been interrupted; the seasons ahead were a jumble, confused like their layers of clothing. Alí thought they would sweat during their journey.

He would never again come with his father to deliver blocks of crude wax to the Italian candle workshop. His father wouldn’t stay to drink the freshly squeezed juice of Sicilian oranges with Antonio or to play dominoes beneath the fig branches. He wouldn’t wait again for Angelina’s legs to come leaping down the stairs, for her pointed face, her cruel green eyes. When she emerged from the shadows, from the smell of wax and cardamom, one leg appearing through the crack in the door, she’d look at him as if he were a cockroach that only sheer laziness kept her from crushing. Alí didn’t go into the candle workshop, just leant against the dusty body of the Ford, pretending to read.

Neither wanted to submit to the other.

When finally they’d start playing, it was already too late, already time for Alí and his father to go. They’d been stupid. He’d leave with an uncontainable wistfulness, a shout of injustice. They played together like no one else, as if they were one mouth singing, a single leg jumping. They were attuned to each other like birds on a single route. The same thoughts, the same movements.

The day Angelina left, Alí did enter the workshop. The door was half closed, everything flung about. The workshop with its spent and marshy aftertaste was like a desecrated church, the stiff wax stuck to the table, the cedar boxes tossed around higgledy-piggledy, the wax sheets hanging from the long wire, tattered like flags of a dead kingdom, like the flags of King Idris. A cat sat on the spent burners cleaning its tummy fur, paws open, tail in the air. Another drank from the stone water basin.

The family came out through the door, silent, compliant.

Santa and Antonio bid farewell to the beekeeper’s son, kissed his cheeks.

The green door of the candle workshop hung unattended behind them. They looked like three different people. Three pallid masks lacking any expression connecting them to the life Alí had seen them live until that day. It was as if someone had killed them during the night, then made them again from wax, poured them into moulds of themselves. There was a certain resemblance, but they were no longer themselves. They were like stuffed birds, even their eyes were glassy and full of death.

They didn’t seem to have the same feelings as before.

Angelina looked older. She was taller and shapelier in her dark wool coat buttoned to the neck. She moved stiffly, like a mechanical doll, as if someone had given her precise instructions.

She behaved exactly like a deportee, someone condemned to death for an unspeakable sin.

She looked like she was guilty of something. So did her parents.

Alí wanted to melt into warm tears in her arms. He trembled feverishly. He hadn’t slept. He’d waited for her in the sun, beneath the rubber tree they’d scratched together so many times.

Angelina was rigid. She extended a hard, adult arm.

‘Goodbye, Alí. Good luck.’

It was her mother who pushed them to kiss each other. She was the one who pushed her against him like a stone.

Alí gathered up his courage and thrust his gift into her arms.

It was a cushion, used but very elegant, made of dark red satin with a gold border. On top, he’d put some merguez, the dark little sausages she liked so much.

It was strange to see sausages on a satin pillow. Some kind of declaration of love.

Since he couldn’t rip his heart out of his chest and give it to her, he’d made do with sausages. Angelina looked at them without moving a muscle.

Alí studied her from behind his glasses with his stupid face that would have liked to tell her all his plans. In a few years he’d be of legal age. He’d go to Italy, like his cousin Mohamed. They could get married. Because this was his father and mother’s pillow, the bride and groom’s pillow.

‘It’s very precious.’

It didn’t seem so precious. The satin was old and worn, the fringe dark with age.

Angelina gave him a photograph, the best one she had, taken by the school photographer. She was in profile, looking out of a big glass window, bathed in a bleached light that made her look enigmatic. Alí stood looking at the photo with his diffident smile. What were a few years to a boy who could withstand an attack by hundreds of bees?

Angelina put the sausages in her pocket and the cushion inside her coat.

She looked like a little girl pregnant with an Arab cushion.

It kept her company during the long wait for the security check. A disabled boy was forced to get out of his wheelchair and was left hobbling around on his stumps like the lizards the Tuaregs roast in the desert.

Angelina was sucking on the fringe of Alí’s cushion, squeezing it between her chattering teeth. The soldiers yelled at her to open her coat. They snatched away the cushion, gutted it with their bayonets. Who knew what they thought they’d find in a sweaty, saliva-damp pillow a scared girl had been sucking? Money, jewels, packets of drugs – who knew?

Small grey feathers filled the sea. The feathers travelled on the wind all the way to the castle where she and Alí liked to swim. There was a white grouper hiding somewhere in the fine, veil-like seaweed near the sandy bottom. Angelina waved to the fish from the ship, to the majestic palms of Corso Sicilia, to the Red Castle.

Angelina knows what it means to start over.

To turn and see nothing but the sea.

Your roots swallowed up by the sea, for no acceptable reason.

Angelina learnt to live with human irrationality. The mere appearance of the image of the dictator in his turban and sunglasses turned her into something alien, strange. What kind of face was that? That hair like inky spiders.

Angelina had been Arab for eleven years.

Adolescence was round the corner. It was a passage. A blow to the stomach.

There’s something about the place where one is born. Not everyone knows it. The ones who know it are those who are torn away by force.

An umbilical cord buried in the sand.

A sorrow that pulls from below and makes you hate the things you do afterwards.

You have lost your bearings, the star that followed you and that you followed in the radiance of those nights that were never entirely black.

For a time, Angelina no longer knew who she was. Someone gave her a label: Tripolina. A Tripolina from Tripoli.

They were all Tripolini, generations of rags tossed back from Libya to the place they’d come from.

Without anything any more, assigned to refugee camps in Campania, Puglia, places up north. Queuing up in front of the lavatories, toilet paper in hand. Slippers in the mud. Pasta in plastic trays. A television on a folding chair. A campsite full of pretend holidaymakers. A transit zone where life stood still.

Older refugees were incapable of thinking about starting over.

Angelina and her parents were lucky. They were sent to a seaside inn.

A basement dining room with greenish walls. Sandwiches in bags. A mud-coloured cube of jam. Angelina’s father folds his napkin into his plastic napkin holder. They are not paying guests. The waiter hollers at them to hurry. At night, she and her mother walk like two ghosts towards the shared bathroom.

Where was that inn? Some second-rate tourist destination, lifeless, with half-finished houses, a place where Mafiosi waited out their exile.

Santa ironing their clothes with a travel iron on the bed.

Antonio looking out onto the cement ramp of a garage. Cars going endlessly round the same curve.

His thin arms like broken wings in his short-sleeved shirt with its ironed-in pleats.

A row of lemons on the windowsill, their vitamin supply.

Angelina remembers the playground in the treeless park outside, the metal seesaw that wouldn’t go up, pathetic with its two little seats. Angelina bent and straightened her legs like a frog. She needed another child on the other end.

She needed sand in her eyes, her hair. Where was the Gambrinus Café, the open-air cinema, the parties at Circolo Italia? Where were all their friends?

No one greeted them. They knew no one.

The smell of an incinerator, of burning rubber. They went to bed with that smell. It seeped into their room. Their stock of perfumed candles ran out. They bought factory-made citronella candles. Santa said,
It’s not real wax. It’s full of junk
.

Her father said,
It’s temporary.

Then the State assigned them housing, Sicily at last. It was like the day of rebirth.

A black box. Windows that looked out onto a wall. In a port area, on the outskirts.

Her parents never got used to it. They sat in front of the television, eating sardines from the can. They didn’t recognize anything, and no one recognized them.

Mute as statues made of sand.

Her father going out to find work. Angelina remembers her mother’s gesture as she stood behind him, dusting off his shoulder, remembers the way Antonio turned.
What is it?Am I dirty?

Santa accompanying him to the door. She stays there looking at the dark stairwell, at the stairs leading up. She breathes in the odours of the other lives inhabiting that crater, their sauces, their basements.

She’s like a wary mouse waiting for the right moment to go out.

There were no human figures in that new life, only shouting and vulgarity, and no one had any need of them.

Tripoli was full of beggars, old Berbers in filthy djellabas with missing buttons. There were black people, too, crippled, mutilated, escapees from some massacre or another. Santa wouldn’t let them into the candle workshop, but she always gave them something: old clothes, a candle for the night.

Now Angelina and her parents are the poor ones. Poor white people, displaced, with the same discredited eyes as anyone who has lost.

They only raise their eyes from the ground when they need to seek confirmation of their existence in the other human bodies moving along the street.

It was the 1970s; the world around them was self-­absorbed. No one cared about their diaspora. They were the dirty tail of a colonial history no one wanted to dig up.

That was the real exile, the moral solitude.

Antonio has his little black plastic pouch full of documents, made the worse for wear by queues and his hands that sweat when he speaks. He shows the paper that documents his status as a repatriated person.

The faces behind the windows look at him askance, ill at ease.

Why did you come back? To steal work from other Italians, from real Italians born and bred here? To move ahead of them on the unemployment lists?

When you came down to it, they’d asked for it. What did it matter that they were the children of peasants deported to Libya by propaganda, propelled by hunger?

Gaddafi reclaimed what was his. Italy was the guilty party, and they were leftovers from that guilt. A lesser species of unfortunates.

In the beginning, there was a committee. They kept in touch with the other exiled Italians. But then they stopped seeking anyone out. Everything unravelled.

They were alone, like monkeys burnt by boiling oil. Silently tending their wounds and sighing.