Jamila tells her son that he has to keep his eyes on a point on the horizon to keep from feeling seasick.
Farid rummages in the bottom of the bit of sky where the sun melts the horizon.
Black diesel smoke from the engine blows into his face. His mother holds him tight. He seeks that contact, her smell. But Jamila is permeated with diesel, the smell of this journey, the smell of their hope.
Farid’s eyes hurt. His legs hurt. The sea is crosswise now, the boat leaning entirely to one side. They can’t move from the spaces they have been assigned, each in their own holes among the bodies. A little girl whimpers. Two men yell in a dialect Farid doesn’t know. The heat is suffocating. The sun burns sores on their lips. His mother rations the water. She gives him smaller and smaller sips, not even enough to clean his tongue. They do their business in a common bucket that gets emptied into the sea. Animals? It’s beyond that. Animals aren’t as afraid of death as they are. The sea is a world unto itself, a world within the world, with its own laws, its own strength. It expands. It rises. The boat is like the shell of a dead scarab beetle, the kind Farid used to find in the desert, killed by the ghibli. Farid feels the sun inside his head. It won’t go away, not even when he closes his eyes. He thinks of the wild caper leaves his mother would chew and put on his forehead when he was ill. He thinks of the man who sells prickly pears, his quick, magic gesture when he peeled them.
Jamila crumbles a sesame stick into Farid’s mouth, but his throat is a wall of sand.
The sea is a mountain that rises. Farid is scared of those watery dunes. The engine toils like a dying camel.
At night, it’s cold. The temperature goes down with the water. The water becomes black paper. It lets off mist that lingers and makes them damp. Farid is shivering. He’s wrapped now in his mother’s veil, and he’s cold beneath the slippery, damp cloth. The hateful wind whips at him. Farid clings to his mother’s bones, trying to find the heat of her bosom. She is shivering, too, like a basket of nervous snakes. It’s been a long while since she let him near her breasts. You’re a big boy. Now she pushes him there, where some of the day’s warmth has remained, like on the rocks in the desert. In the end, it’s a blessing they have to huddle so close together, a blessing like the wind and sea. Farid sleeps. He thinks about the big palm leaves where he always took shelter when it started to rain. One day, Aghib, the old man who sits in the sun sewing Berber shoes for tourists, told him that everything that had happened in their country was the fault of oil, that if it weren’t for the black sea beneath the desert, no dictator would want to dictate laws and no foreigners would come to defend them with their cruise missiles. Old Aghib pointed at him, his calloused finger riddled with needle holes. Oil is the devil’s shit. Don’t trust things that seem like blessings. It’s worse than a monkey trap. Whenever something is a blessing for the rich, it’s bad luck for the poor.
That didn’t stop Farid from trusting the gazelle that brought her muzzle all the way to his doorstep to eat from his hands.
It’s dark, and the moon is gone. The man filling the engine with diesel uses his lighter to see. He staggers, then swears as the damp sea air douses the flame. Farid’s mother’s arms are not so strong now. They give way, like the boat, like wheels in the desert.
Farid waits for sunrise. He waits for Italy, where women go around with their heads uncovered and there’s an infinity of channels on television. They will step off the boat into the lights. Someone will take pictures, give them toys, Coca-Cola, pizza.
Rashid, Grandfather Mussa’s father, had already made this journey at the beginning of the last century, when the Italians burnt villages and chased the Bedouins from the oases and closed them in pens, packed in like goats. Rashid was light-hearted. He played the tabla and gathered resin from rubber trees. His brothers died during the deportation, and he was put onto a ship and sent into exile on a chain of islands with the name Tremiti. No one heard from him again. No one ever knew anything about his death or his new life.
Farid looks at the sea.
Grandfather Mussa told Farid about his father’s voyage.
A sandstorm rose; a wind of grey powder swept the coast, as if the desert were rebelling against that cruel exodus. The Bedouins boarding the boats wore dirty tunics, their faces hollowed by months of starvation, the sorrow-filled and vacant eyes of a herd pushed into nothingness.
Once, Mussa, as an adult, travelled all the way to the port his father left from, in a Toyota that belonged to some desert archaeologists, a group of kids from Bologna. They slept together in the old Tuareg camps, visited the Garamante necropolis and the white labyrinths of Ghadames.
From the Gulf of Sirte, Mussa looked at the sea that had swallowed up his father. He thought about setting sail, going to find Rashid in Italy and presenting himself, tall and elegant, with his English bone glasses and his white djellaba. He dreamt of picking up his old father in his arms and bringing him back to his desert on a camel.
The rust of homesickness scratched Mussa’s teeth like sand.
But all that blue scared him. It was as if a hand were pulling him backwards by the neck. The ancient terror of the sea.
But he did have time to see a group of half-naked tourists on the beach. They were drinking lime juice and eating blackberries from a basket made of woven leaves.
He came back with his story, which became more risqué over time, the women more naked and inviting, like virgins of paradise.
Farid looks at the sea and thinks of paradise.
His grandfather told him that the women there are more beautiful, the food tastier, and all the colours brighter, because Allah is the painter of the dawn.
Farid thinks of the picture hanging in the dining room of his father, Omar. The photographer retouched it with markers, made the lips redder, the gaze more intense.
Farid’s father doesn’t look anything like the legendary Omar Mukhtar. He doesn’t have any political ideas. He’s shy and has weak nerves.
Farid looks at the sea.
Tears leave his eyes and slowly meander through the tiny, salt-whitened hairs on his face.
The Colour of Silence
Vito scrambles over sea cliffs, descends into sandy coves. He’s left the village behind him, the noise of a radio, a woman hollering in dialect. Now it’s just wind and waves leaping high against the rocks, extending their paws like angry beasts, foaming, retreating. Vito likes the stormy sea. When he was a little boy, he’d jump in and let it slap him around. His mother, Angelina, back on the beach, would yell herself hoarse. She looked tiny as she stood there waving her arms like a marionette. She was such a little thing, with her dress flapping around her legs. The sea was stronger. Take a running start, ride the fast wave, slide as if on soap, be swallowed up by it, bang against the angry throat of the vortex. He’d roll, sand and big rocks tumbling him about on the murky bottom and leaving him dizzy. Sea in his nose, his belly, waves sucking him backwards, scaring him.
Real joy always contains some fear.
These were his best memories – his bathing suit full of sand, his eyes wounded and red, his hair like seaweed. Becoming a weightless rag, trembling with happiness and fear, lips blue, fingers numb. He’d come out for a little while, running, and throw himself down upon the warm sand, trembling and shivering like a mullet in its death throes. Then he’d dive back in, his brain devoid of thought, feeling more fish than human. So what if he didn’t make it back? That would be that. What was waiting for him back onshore, anyway? His angry mother, smoking. His grandmother’s octopus stew. His summer homework, nasty stuff, because there’s nothing worse than books and notebooks in the summer. And he always gets bad grades, an eternal debt of credits to make up.
One time when Angelina was trying to get him out of the water, she stepped on a sea urchin and lost her sunglasses. That time, she slapped him silly. Pulled him out of the water by his hair, banged him around like an octopus. That was the time he’d most hated her, the time he’d felt she loved him more than
anything. That night, she let him sleep in her bed, in the crumpled white sheets, with her, her smell, her movements. His mother had separated from his father. At night, she’d stand in front of the door, beneath the palm tree, and smoke, an arm across her belly, the cigarette packet clutched in her hand. She’d talk to herself, moving her lips in silence. Her hair plastered to her forehead, making funny faces. She looked like a monkey ready to leap.
Now Vito is grown. They live outside Catania and come to the island only in the summer and sometimes at Easter. These are the last days of the holidays. His mother has to get back for the start of the school year. Vito has finished school. He’s done with the hassle of lies and copying off other kids, waking up at seven in the morning with bad breath. He passed the school-leaving exam. It took tutors, it took prodding, but he passed. He did a good job. The examiners liked him. He presented a history paper on the Tripolini, the Italians that Gaddafi banished from Tripoli in 1970. Vito’s research started with General Graziani, the butcher who led Mussolini’s troops in Libya, and ended with his own mother.
He talked about mal d’afrique, the nostalgia that turns sticky, like tar, and about the trip they took together, back in time. To Libya.
It was a total liberation. The next day, he took the biggest dump ever. He went out to celebrate in a club and kissed a girl. Too bad that afterwards she told him she’d made a mistake. Vito managed all the same to explore her mouth, and swelled up and trembled like when he was a kid in the waves.
Now Vito looks at the sea. He’s barefoot. He has prehensile feet, calloused like a sailor’s. It always happens at the end of the summer. His feet are ready to stay, to live bare on the cliffs and rocks.
It’s been a mindless summer, truly vacant. He slept late, swam infrequently. He’d go down to the sea in a daze. He read a few books in the cave as crabs climbed and retreated.
Today, he’s wearing a T-shirt and trousers. It’s windy.
Vito looks at the debris, pieces of boats and other remnants vomited up onto the beach that looks like a maritime rubbish dump.
There’s a war across the sea.
It’s been a tragic summer for the island. The same old tragedy, more this year.
Vito hasn’t gone into town very often. He’s seen the immigrant detention centre. It’s bursting at the seams and stinks like a zoo. He’s seen queues of the poor souls lined up outside the camp kitchen and the plastic toilet booths. He’s seen the fields at night, sown with silver blankets. He saw Tindara, their neighbour, scream and almost die of fright when a Tunisian slipped into her house to steal. He saw kids he knew when he was little, kids he doesn’t say hello to any more, making cauldrons of couscous for the Arab lunch of the wretches.
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.
Morning Sea Page 3
