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.
Vito looks at the sea, which is beginning to calm, to withdraw. It seems angry about this retreat. It pounds indolently on the cliffs, disorderly, its strength diminished. Last night’s storm left the water murky. You can’t see the bottom. Vito thinks of a club at dawn, the dirty carpet, the smell of smoke and sweat, the crushed sofas, the brimming ashtrays, the cigarette butts and broken glasses on the ground. He thinks of his eighteenth birthday party.
His friends got drunk, popped pills. He saw them dancing, out of it, swaying back and forth practically without moving, like a bunch of sick seaweed. Their feet glued to the ground, feverish.
None of them knows what they will make of their lives, apart from the ones whose parents own a business; a space would be made for them in a sales point.
Vito doesn’t know what to do with his life, either.
Until recently, he hadn’t even thought about it. He was laid-back. His thoughts were: go out, come up with the money to go out, the money for petrol or for beer and a kebab, pull one over on his mother, get someone to dictate the homework to him over the phone, get a ride on Saturday from someone with a licence so he could go out to eat in Catania, go window-shopping in Corso Italia, movies, the black prostitutes in Via di Prima.
His eighteenth year brought bad luck. All of a sudden, he started to think.
There, in that club that reminded him of a rubbish dump for youth, for whole lives, he started to think. It struck him as sad that there weren’t any old people, just kids. He thought of his nonna Santa, with her dark clothes and white hair, her hands that were always clean, always soaking along with the vegetables. A crazy thought. At home, he never talked with anyone, and now, all of a sudden, he would have liked to have his grandmother there with him alongside the deaf DJ.
A girl was crying in a corner, so full of alcohol she couldn’t stand. She had heavy legs, high heels. Her make-up, blacker than her hair, formed two highways as it marched down her cheeks. And he started running down those black lanes. How many times had his friends passed other cars on the highway, engine racing round the curves, the tarmac moving so quickly you couldn’t see, eyes red dots in the dark.
They could have crashed a hundred times. Ended up in the newspaper. One more car peeled open on the evening news like a can of tuna, their faces from their identity cards displayed below.
He pictured his hairless face on his identity card. The one he got when he was sixteen. His hair in a crest, that stupid expression. He still looked like a little kid.
He should take a new picture in the photo booth and get a new identity card. He was an adult now. He could leave home. He could go to jail.
No one went near the girl in the mottled dark of the club, and it didn’t pass his mind to do so, either. She was uninviting. She didn’t even seem sad. She was like a black fountain with no other reason to be except to sit there and cry. She didn’t invoke pity. You had the feeling you could take her, pull her by a shoulder, and chuck her out of the club. With no change in expression, she would stop to cry beneath an oleander tree. She was one of those girls who’d go back home like that, to smear eyeliner onto the pillow from black, salty, bitter cheeks. Then take a shower, put on a maxipad, go to school, start moving once more, like seaweed. And then, when they happen across a couch in a club again, they start crying, just like that, with no reason, because they haven’t ever stopped, because it’s their way of communicating or of isolating themselves or of attracting attention. It doesn’t really matter which. Like the other girl, the thin one who laughs. She just comes into a club and starts laughing. Maybe it’s only because she has white teeth that glow phosphorescent in the play of light. Everyone dances. No one cares. Behaviours that travel, that pass from body to body. Attempts at life. Repeat as best you can the things you know how to do. Put emotions on display like a violent hailstorm. As if they aren’t yours. You’re just trying them on, dancing along to them with everyone else. You are just the face where the hail falls, where the strobe lights briefly linger.
Then, he doesn’t remember how, he tongue-kissed that sweaty doughball. He sucked up that warm, swampy mess.
Vito looks at the blind, grainy horizon and at the beach, a dump of vomited objects. Now the sea looks like a pan lid, silver like a coin.
Back and forth across that stretch of sea, that’s his family’s history.
Angelina told him about their banishment, the guns pointed at them, how they were pushed along from behind. Their Arab life snatched away from them, the beach with the sulphur pools, the mulberry tree at Sciara Derna, the Roma Elementary School, their lifelong friends.
All swept away one stormy morning.
A shattered life. That’s his mother’s story.
His mother knows what it means to face the sea from the other direction.
Like migratory birds.
Angelina told him birds know to leave their eggs in safe places. Our eggs were broken. Torn apart. Our houses stuffed inside a suitcase. We were snatched from our shell to run, to flee.
Behind them, a burning clothesline. Shirts, underpants in flames. Soldiers with red caps among the eucalyptus plants, shouting, Rumi!, Italians, and spitting.
Angelina remembers one of them, the one who knocked over the barrel of boiling wax with his crossbar. Dark-complexioned but with blue eyes and hair so blond it almost looked like he’d dyed it. The son of a rape.
She didn’t know anything about that violence. That came later, when she learnt about the rapes, when she saw the photographs of unmarked graves in the sand and of rows of hanging Bedouins.
Angelina was eleven in 1970. It was the start of her first year of middle school.
People shouting, lines outside the ministries and the consulate. Authorization to leave the country. A certificate of propertylessness. Everyone running with no clear destination, clinging to the walls like lizards, gathering news that changed each day. No one went into the medina any more. All the stores were shuttered. And there were two ugly men, one with wet purple lips, the other darker. Their Alfa Romeo drove slowly in the Italian areas, beneath houses and shops that in a short time would be expropriated.
Angelina remembers the night of the cholera vaccines. Clinging to her mother’s dressing gown, to her candle-pale face. The colour of silence, for real.
Why did they give them that mandatory vaccine that came from Italy? What was the reason? They gave it to them without changing the syringe. Thank goodness there were no consequences.
When she told that story to her son, she showed him the exact place on her arm where the needle went in.
Vito took notes for his school-leaving research paper.
‘I can’t include everything, Ma.’
‘Then why are you asking me so many questions?’
That night, Angelina learnt about war. She lost every boundary inhabited by trust. The feeling of emptiness, of plunder. If you took one wrong step, if you looked where you weren’t supposed to, if your legs faltered even a bit. Beyond the line was the abyss. Uniformed Arabs scrutinizing your trembling.
Santa held her close, wrung her hand. Angelina’s heart was beating like a drum. She was scared of that uncontrollable noise. It was so loud it seemed everyone could hear it. It wasn’t a heart any more. It was a hammer pounding like the copper beaters in the market. The night around them was a black fire. Everything she had experienced as friendly and unspoken had turned into an ambush. The walls of prickly pears, the spires of the minarets. She thought about the massacre of Sciara Sciat. They’d just studied it at school. Italian bersaglieri, young as could be, plunged into the hubris of colonial conquest. They’d advanced quietly through the silent white city, calm as a manger scene. Tripoli had fallen effortlessly. The Arabs, it seemed, had been subdued and had retreated into the desert. The Turks were the real enemy. Then they heard sounds, mysterious as bird calls, and saw turbaned shadows, sure-footed as scorpions in the dark. An open front. No cover. The labyrinth of the oasis settlements on one side, the hot breath of the Sahara on the other. Some of the bersaglieri sought refuge in the little Rebab Cemetery. Six hundred of them died, their throats slit, tortured and crucified like rag dolls. It was an October evening in 1911.
The Italian reprisals were terrible. The inhabitants of the Mechiya Oasis were dragged from their mud huts, the oasis villages torched. Thousands of summary executions. The survivors were exiled to the Tremiti Islands, to Ustica, to Ponza.
Now that hatred had sprung back to life.
That hatred was the revolution of the Bedouin from Sirte, whose body beneath his uniform bore scars from the mines of the colonial wars.
All around the city bonfires burnt European books by blasphemous writers, imperialist and corrupt.
Taliani murderers! Taliani out!
Angelina bared her arm for the vaccine. She didn’t dare breathe. One drop of blood came out, one stupid drop of blood.
They left their house, the beds, the candle workshop. Antonio left the keys to the VW Bug in the glove compartment. He wanted to throw them in the sand but changed his mind. On holidays, that car had taken them to the archaeological site at Leptis Magna, where they ate sandwiches in front of the Medusa’s head and went swimming.
They walked to the port. They waited for hours. They were searched and treated like criminals.
Angelina’s Arab friends scratched their faces in sorrow, in the way customary to funerals. The kids she played with on the stone stretch in front of the candle workshop, hopscotch and grandmother’s footsteps.
Ma sha’ Allah. May God protect you.
Vito looks at the sea.
Angelina told him about the cushion she’d clutched as if it were a doll. An amaranth satin cushion with golden embroidery, a gift from her friend Alí, the thin boy, tall for his age, with his straight, shiny hair so black it was almost blue, parted on one side. When they went swimming, he’d take off his glasses and wrap them in his T-shirt. She’d wave her fingers in front of his eyes. How many fingers do you see? From a distance, Alí could hardly see and so always got it wrong. He’d get a
ngry. He was a touchy kid. But he’d pretend it didn’t matter. He’d plunge into the water, swim like a fish, hugging the bottom for so long she’d worry he was dead. She’d start looking for his head in the water, hoping he’d surface. Suddenly, Alí would emerge from the immobile sea. He’d push off with his feet from the bottom and jump out like a dolphin’s spray.
The son of Gazel the beekeeper came with his father to the candle workshop, crouched on the ragged black seat of the red Ford with the wax and cages of hens and baskets of grapes. Alí always wore a striped cloth baseball cap and glasses with thick lenses, always carried a book in his hand.
Once they brought her to see the beehives, their first outing together. Angelina hopped into the Ford. They drove alongside the old Roman ruins as far as a Berber village. Alí gave Angelina a big metallic coverall and netting to cover her face, but he took off his glasses and his shirt and stood bare-chested, motionless, his arms spread wide like a Tuareg scarecrow, and let the bees cover him. The bees buzzed but had no apparent effect on Alí. There were so many of them that they formed a noisy pelt with every whisper of wind. Alí’s eyes were immobile, fixed on her. They looked like the eyes of an animal invaded by smaller animals. They were haunted and incredibly sad. Or maybe he was just concentrating. Angelina opened a hand. How many fingers do you see? Alí couldn’t speak, couldn’t laugh. His mouth looked like a wound that had been pasted on. She continued to raise and lower her fingers. Now how many? It bothered her that he was so much better than her at everything, that he had such a stock of obstinate courage. Alí answered, Six, and guessed right. Maybe fear improved his vision. But a bee flew into his mouth and stung him in the throat. Angelina saw his dark, sad eyes redden and swell, become desperate. He seemed to be asking her for help with his entire being. He couldn’t cough, couldn’t move. But his throat was swelling up. He began to pant, to let out strange gasps as if about to lose consciousness. The bees were angry. Their buzzing grew louder and louder. Even if only half that colony of bees had decided to sting him, Alí would have died on the spot. He fell to his knees. Angelina backed away in terror.
Morning Sea Page 4
