Authors: Margaret Mazzantini
Farid looks at the sea, clear and smooth like a pale blue earthenware tile. He looks for fish, their backs. The first bits of their new life. Jamila kisses him and fiddles with his hair.
How long will the trip last?
Not long. Just enough time for a lullaby
.
Jamila starts singing with her nightingale voice, whistling and imitating the sound of the zukra. Her voice lowers to the sea. Then she falls asleep. Her slender head like a gazelle’s, like a big sister’s. Farid finds a space amid all the bodies and looks back. The coast isn’t there any more, nothing but the sea, rising and falling. He remembers his house, the swing, the majolica tiles round the well with their rust- and emerald-coloured drawings. He thinks of the gazelle. She came and went as she wished. Always at sunset. She had started to eat from his hand. He’d pluck dates and pistachios and serve them to the animal, his open palm a plate. He thinks of the sound and then of the smell of the gazelle’s mouth. There were spots on the inside, on her tongue. She smelled of wadi, of a recent flow of water through the dust. The best muzzle on earth, apart from his mother’s. That last day, he’d hugged her. He hadn’t even known he wouldn’t see her again, her burnt beige coat that lit up at sunset. Her fur smelled like a rug, the same smell Farid smelled in the desert when he pitched the tent with Grandfather Mussa and they slept on the prayer mat.
He doesn’t mind leaving the past. He’s a child. He’s too young to have any real sense of time. What he knows and what awaits him are all in the same hand.
First, he’s excited; then he’s scared; then he’s tired; then nothing more. He threw up. Now there’s nothing left. The sun follows them like a ravenous tongue, dripping on their heads, suffocating heat, sweat.
The sea is monotonous. There’s never anything new. Looking at it is a mistake; it’s like looking at a headless animal with an infinity of shaking humps, blue flesh spraying foam from its submerged mouth. Farid looks for that head that never surfaces, just comes close and then disappears.
He wonders about the face of the sea. What does it look like?
One of the Somali men fired at the waves a while ago to test a flare. It didn’t work. The flares are rotten, like the boat. The young man drank too much with his friends. They burnt their stomachs and their brains. Now they’re punching each other.
Everyone is pale, grey as a rag. All of them have thrown up. The vomit flows along the worn wood floor with the heaving of the sea.
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.
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.