Morning Sea (12 page)

He saw their determination and their purity. The beauty in their eyes, the white of their teeth.

He saw the degradation, the animal-like conditions.

Young men standing with their backs against a wall while soldiers took away their shoelaces and belts.

He saw the race to help them, used clothes for the children, donations from poor people pissed-off because Jesus Christ always turns to them.

He saw the overflowing camps, the fear of disease, the protesters who blocked the piers and landing places, and then started it all over again by throwing themselves into the sea at night to pull out those wretches who didn’t know how to swim.

There’s no way of knowing who you’ll end up saving. It might be some jailbird who’ll steal your mobile phone, drink-drive in the wrong lane, rape some nurse heading home after the night shift.

Vito has heard this kind of talk, jumbled, crude. The anger of poor people against other poor people.

Saving your killer – perhaps that is charity. But here, no one is a saint. And the world shouldn’t need martyrs, just more equity.

Angelina is at the window. She is waiting for her son, who’s not on his way back. It doesn’t matter. She knows that one day he will not come back. That’s life.

She may not have been a good mother. She was like a lizard whose tail had been cut off. Vito was her new tail.

But how can one hope?

The TV is off. It’s an old TV; it doesn’t work well; it suffers when there’s wind or rain. They should get a new TV, a new aerial. But anyway, this is just their summer house.

Angelina is waiting for the war to end, for the actor of a thousand faces to be captured and tried.

She saw the NATO bombings, heard the usual
There will be no civilian targets
. They didn’t even spare the factory that supplied oxygen tanks to the hospital.

She saw the tricks, Green Square full of rebels, a fake created by the television. A film set.

She saw the warriors with their bandanas, children carrying machine guns. She stretched her hand out towards the television as if to stop them.

Their city destroyed, the bullet-ridden walls, the holes left behind by explosions. Palm trees white with debris.

Her mother, Santa, said,
They’re shooting at us
.

We are Tripolini. We aren’t from here, and we aren’t from there. We’re stuck in the sea like those people with nowhere to land
.

They saw the rebels, regular people. Girls who did not wear the veil speaking on the radio, university students with machine guns and beach sandals.

They saw the old Senussi flag.

They saw child soldiers. The little loyalists, drafted for a few dinars, were killed on their knees, a bullet to the base of their skull like animals in the savannah.

They saw a woman news reader with a veil, bearing a gun.

They saw bare-handed mine removers dressed in shorts and sweating like farmers in their fields.

What will happen to all of those weapons afterwards?

She woke up with that thought in the night.

They will move on to another war. Nerve gas and mustard gas. The colonel’s arsenal, wooden cases of machine guns, mines, rockets, all with the same surreal label:
Ministry of Agriculture
.

Fields sown with mines. This is the harvest.

Every night a new boat, human fertilizer, escapees from hunger, from war.

It’s a late summer day of blooming caper plants and enchantment. A truce after three stormy days. The beach is a rubbish dump for pieces of wood, the remains of boats that never arrived. A war museum on the crushed stone beach. Vito picks through it, combing for bits to save.

He goes back and forth along the beach, drags crooked boards and scraps of rugs.

He stops to pick up a little leather pouch that looks like a jewellery bag. He has a hard time opening it because of the knots in the tightly wound cord. He sticks in a finger. Nothing except something that feels like wet wool and a few beads. He throws it into his bag with the rest.

On the island, there is a cemetery for the unknown dead. Some good man rubbed wild mint under his nose so as not to be overcome by the smell and gathered the bodies the sea had delivered. He planted crosses. Someone else removed them, but it doesn’t matter. The poor have only one God. Every day he drowns with them and then causes wild garlic and beach poppies to grow up amongst the mounds. Vito has walked there. It’s a bare place, wind-beaten and without sorrow. The sea scours everything. No mothers come here to cry. No one brings flowers. Just little thoughts from strangers, tourists who leave a note, a toy. Vito sits down, imagines the bones below the field like the skeleton of a ship turned upside down.

He thinks about the turtles that come up onto the beach to lay their eggs. The island is a refuge for marine life. In a while, the eggs will hatch. Vito has seen it before, the little turtles going after the tide, running towards the sea to save themselves from death.

At home later on, he nails his gatherings to a board. The page of a diary in Arabic. A shirtsleeve. A doll’s arm.

It’s a job with no tangible meaning, dictated by the uncredited desperation that afflicts him.

This is how he will spend the last days of their summer here on the island. In the shed.

He has to decide what to do with his life, whether to waste it or to make it somehow bear fruit.

His mother said,
You have to find a place inside you and around you, a place that is right for you, at least in part.

Vito can’t stand it when she does that. When she looks at the sea and doesn’t talk, her fists deep in the pockets of her cardigan.

He is simply unable to make a decision. He’s thought about it but hasn’t made up his mind. Maybe he will remain a dunce. Maybe he’s not that smart. In any case, he’s slow. He needs time.

Vito drags things, glues things. Pieces of those aborted escapes.

He doesn’t know why he’s doing this. He’s looking for a place. He’d like to capture something. Lives that never reached their destination.

He thinks of his mother’s eyes resting on the sea, following the lost course of the ball of wool wound round her throat. Since their trip to Tripoli she’s looked only for joy. She took up cooking – fig pies, pasta casseroles. She arranged sprigs of broom in vases. She wants there to be things for him to remember. The feeling of a house to come back to with his eyes closed, just to take a breath.

Angelina comes in, asks why he didn’t come for lunch. She looks at the immense panel of sea remains, bits of wood nailed on, scraps of denim stuck on with glue.

She looks at the motionless explosion.

‘Have you taken up art?’

Vito shrugs. His hands are black. There’s glue in his hair. He leans against the wall near the case of old bottles, rubs his eyes with his wrists, kicks the dust.

He won’t let his mother near. He keeps her at a distance, in the shadows. He speaks to himself.

‘I stopped a shipwreck.’

Vito has gathered memory. Of a blue gas tank, a shoe.

Someone will need this someday. Someday, a black Italian man will want to look back at the sea of his ancestors and find something. A trace of their passage. Like a suspension bridge.

Angelina cannot look at her son. It is beyond her. It would be like looking at him when he’s making love.

She goes to the big blue panel.

She touches those poor encrusted things, marine relics washed by salt. A shipwreck sculpted in their tool shed. It’s striking. It’s like an intact archaeological site. A world saved.

Angelina looks at the sea her son has recreated, the things he chose from the beach, from history. An interior space in the undertow of the world.

She looks at the leather pouch nailed in the centre.

She knows it’s a charm, the kind mothers in the Sahara prepare at night beneath the watchful eyes of the stars and put round their children’s necks to ward away the evil eyes of death.

She rubs her nose against it like an animal. She hears the sound of the sea, so similar to the sound of blood.

Then it happened.

What month was it? October, always October. The month of their banishment. The month of her birthday. Angelina had thought she might not make it to that birthday alive. One of those thoughts that worms its way in and nibbles away at you. She had made a sort of will, put her affairs in order, bank statements and settled bills out in plain sight.

Vito was gone. That may have been what did it. The feeling of death.
I’ve raised him. Now I can go
. There was nothing to be done about the mistakes she’d made, so many of them, and yet not so many at all when you lined them up at night, while you emptied a drawer and tidied up the disaster. The photos from Africa and the rest – old bus tickets, an envelope with medical exams, the writing of a certain man who had believed he loved you for a certain time.

She also wrote a long letter to Vito.
My love
, it began.
My son
, it began. One of those nighttime letters that don’t go anywhere, that dig deep as the street sweepers pass by beneath the house. That go too far. Where it’s not right to go.

A mother has to stay one step behind.

That night, she smoked a poisonous number of cigarettes. In the morning, she threw away the packet along with the letter. A vehement gesture.

She cleaned the refrigerator. She got rid of every unworthy thing. Old notes, a packet of condoms that had not been used by their expiry date and that she had held on to as a symbol of sexual love, of possibilities. Ridiculous. Like so many ridiculous things. Her thoughts, above all. Like a broom scratching over the patio.

She planted perennials in the flowerpots. The house was clean. For him, if he came back. She lay down on the bed, her feet bare. To see what her cadaver would be like. And she waited a long time.

She thought only of Vito, of Vito beside her.

She went to the window.

It was her birthday. She was alive. Naturally, it had been nothing but anxiety.

Vito called from London. She could hear the ruckus of the Italian café where he worked.

‘Happy birthday, Mum.’

Half an hour later, he called again.

‘Did you hear the news, Mum? They killed him.’

Angelina felt the blows. An entire machine gun’s worth.

‘Who? Who did they kill?’

She thought of Vito in London, of the attacks, the Underground, the crowded square in front of the Tate Gallery where he spent his Sundays.

‘Gaddafi. They killed Gaddafi.’

‘Oh.’

She fell onto a carpet of flower petals, light, immortal.

That was the October crime.

She didn’t go online to see the mob and the bloody rat’s flight into a hole in the cement. She knows how dictators end their days. Flesh dragged along like an eraser. Senseless posthumous rage. No joy, just a macabre trophy that soils the living.

Memory is chalk on bloody pavements.

We’re free. Hurrah, hurrah.