Morning Sea (9 page)

One day, Vito will leave her. The two of them have lived alone. If there was a light on in the house, it was her, no one else. The books propped open on the couch. Like an eternal student. She’s shrunk since she turned fifty. He’s the one who tells her to stand up straight, not to slouch. He’s the one who tells her not to smoke.

She just shakes her head and says Falcone and Borsellino smoked, too, and that’s not what killed them.

She’s always saying things like that, absurd things that carry on speaking in the silence.

That illustrate her worldview, bitter but alive.

One day, he will leave her. She doesn’t seem to be afraid of that day. If anything, she’d like him to go and study abroad.

She doesn’t like Italy any more. But she goes on teaching Italian to middle-school kids without ever taking sick leave, not even for a day.

Her former students come to see her, hug her, drown atop her. She makes coffee for them and looks at them, all grown up.

When he was little, Vito would get seasick when they were crossing to the island. He’d go greenish. Angelina would hold his forehead with one of her hands, which were always cool to the touch. She’d tell him to find a still spot on the horizon and keep his eyes on it.

If he thinks about it, Vito can feel that discomfort all over again, his stomach heaving and dumping itself out like a plastic bag tossed around by the undertow. He can still feel that cool hand supporting him and pointing out the distant spot to look at.

He looks for a still spot on the horizon.

Something that will help him get through the despair that rises now out of nowhere in the morning. He opens his eyes and his first thought is, Why should I get out of bed?

Vito looks at the sea. As if he were casting a net to land and bring something back. He thinks about his mother. She’s had breast cancer. She had an operation and came back home as if nothing had happened. Her face never changed. Vito wasn’t kind. He was rude. He grabbed the packet of cigarettes away from her and tore it up. Angelina bit his hand.

Who does she think she is?

Then Angelina’s sea closed.

She married, a Norman Sicilian, blond and freckled, an expert in civil law who defended hookers and juvenile delinquents from the blighted San Berillo neighbourhood. Angelina got a job as a substitute teacher. Vito was born. Angelina separated from Vito’s father. Now her ex-husband helps Catania’s wealthy to divorce well.

Then one day, out of nowhere, the ban was lifted. They could go back to Tripoli if they wanted to on a plain old tourist visa.

The Day of Revenge, 7 October, which commemorated the banishment of the Italian assassins by the colonel’s Jamahiriya, was transformed overnight into the Day of Friendship. Gaddafi was now a friend of Berlusconi and of Italy. He came to visit with his Amazon Guard and his satin slippers. Champagne in the Bedouins’ tent. No one said another thing about terrorism, exploded planes. His had been the first Arab government to condemn the attack on the World Trade Center. The actor of a thousand faces was now after a new role as mediator in the Mediterranean. Angelina laughed.
He’s hoping for the Nobel Peace Prize
.

Nonna Santa, cleaning broccoli, whispers,
History is a millipede with every foot pulling in a different direction, and our body is in the middle.

By then Nonno Antonio had already died without ever seeing Tripoli again. But he’d dreamt it, dreamt a white wall and the café in Corso Sicilia where he used to play pool. He’d ordered a cup of mint tea, the pretend kind from the supermarket.

‘Mum, I want to go.’

It was Vito who dragged her back to Tripoli.

He was sick of hearing that broken story.

So Angelina and her mother travelled back with Vito, who’d never been.

Beforehand, he took a tour with Google Earth, saw Tripoli thanks to his mouse.

Angelina wouldn’t come near the computer.

She went around with that expression for days, hunched into her shoulders, absent, paralysed by her thoughts.

She was anxious, caged in. She put things in her handbag and took them back out. She talked about nothing but what weather they would find and the intestinal antibacterial they’d better bring along in case they got the runs.

She’d waited for this moment for who knew how long, and now that it was here she seemed uninterested, cursory, like a person who finally has to go through a small but necessary operation she’s put off many times. Yes, it was the same agitated calm as when she went to the hospital to get the lump in her breast removed and sat on the stretcher fully clothed, not making up her mind to change, to put on her hospital gown, until the very last minute.

That very same almost autistic determination, that habit of fighting against herself, of never choosing a new wall to scale.

In the end, she shuffled off in her slippers as if she were headed to the beach for a day.

Nonna Santa was like a little girl on Saint Agatha’s Day in her white dress and new orthopaedic shoes.

They flew on Libyan Airlines.

Nonna looked out of the dirty window and studied what she saw.

It was the first time they’d seen
that
sea from the air. Without the flavour, the foam spray, the anguish. With­out the fear they’d drown.

It was a strange interlude within that pressurized cabin as it crossed the sea of their lives without moving.

The first thing they saw from above were the fields the Italians had created in the desert around Tripoli, a geometry of tidy pieces. A docile pattern. That was the best bequest, the work of thousands of arms. Citrus and olive groves, rows of agave planted as bulwarks against the mobile horizon of dunes.

They had no baggage and yet it was as if they didn’t want to leave the airport. They closed themselves in the toilets. Nonna had a swollen bladder. Vito’s mother rinsed her face, and when they came out, she had wet spots on her T-shirt and her hair was glued to her temples.

Vito noticed she’d grown old. The thought pained him. Later, she’d go back to being young, but in that moment, he saw what she would become.

The air of that sea, those cities unfurling themselves along the Arab coast, flat, caressed by the wind going in and out. Needle-like minarets, buildings surrounded by majestic palm trees. Vito was happy to be on holiday. They took a taxi. The country’s oil wealth was tangible. Tarmac roads with multiple lanes sliced through the desert. Sparkling Toyotas drove arrogantly, making U-turns and nonchalantly cutting through roundabouts in the wrong direction.

The taxi stopped along the seaside promenade.

Nonna Santa straightened her neck, made a dizzy face, stretched like a grey bird. Her daughter helped her up from the sweaty car seat.

The two of them looked like they’d just stepped off a spaceship. The first steps they took were weightless, as if they feared setting down their feet.

Angelina lit a cigarette and put on her dark glasses. Her eyes darted here and there, taking everything in as quickly as a pickpocketing. Then she began moving forwards. Like a mine remover in the desert.

Her motionless eyes sought to catch everything ­possible in her visual field. Violently they brought all the changes into focus to avoid being wounded too much.

New buildings surrounding the old medina. Dusty old roads that had been paved over. The conference centre had not changed. Nostrils stretched wide as they breathed in Tripoli’s smell. Sniffing after that eaten-up time as if checking for a gas leak. And it really did seem like something might explode. Angelina turned towards the sea.

The sand . . . where is the sand?

Their beach near the castle was no longer there. The promenade was an immense car park.

All of a sudden, she burst out laughing, like a crazy lady.

A cat rubbed up against her. A wary and absent creature, just like her, with flea-bitten ears and reddish fur. It tickled her leg. It was one of those soft cats, maybe in heat, that turn over and let you touch them. It lay there on the ground, four legs in the air, rubbing against the tarmac. Angelina bent over to pet its white belly. The cat purred. Angelina picked up the animal and kissed it on the nose as if it were a baby fresh from its bath. She didn’t seem to want to leave the cat. Vito smiled. He liked animals, too, but there was something odd about his mother’s sudden passion for the stray, as if she’d come all the way to Tripoli to find this sick and wounded cat. When she stood up, though, Angelina looked like something had healed her. She pushed her sunglasses back on her head and looked at the city with naked eyes. Then she looked at Santa.

Mum, do you remember all those cats when we left?

Nonna walked the entire length of Corso Sicilia without saying a word, unsteady on her feet. She sat on the pavement under a palm tree and Vito thought, There she is sitting at the end of her life. She took a deep breath. A hard, satisfied breath like a blade slicing in and reaching a vital organ.

Many of the buildings in the city centre were intact, though smaller and dirtier than they remembered. Others had literally been erased, submerged by layers of architecture, of lives. The old Jewish cemetery had disappeared, buried by extravagant, accordion-shaped skyscrapers set upon cement stilts.

Let’s get an ice cream. A lemonade.

His mother took his grandmother’s gnarled hand, and it was like looking forty years back in time, when Nonna would have been the one dragging little Angelina towards the cathedral, towards the Italian gelateria Polo Nord.

The streets were a jumble of cars, bikes, street vendors. But they moved in a tight pattern. The two women were happier now. Two gun dogs looking for the scent, the right trace of blood. Their heads raised, they blocked out the noises of the city, the new bank buildings and conference centres. They were looking for their city, closed up too long. They scrambled through the narrow lanes and passageways of an interior topography. The stores had remained pretty drab, old mannequins in out-of-date clothes. In the market, beside the camel-hair bags, they saw piles of fake Louis Vuittons. The colonel’s image graced every corner.

A year earlier, Vito had travelled to New York with his father. An all-male trip, the two of them and Vito’s father’s new son, who, unlike Vito, was fat and always wanting to eat and drink and suck on something. But he played the violin in a pretty miraculous way. They’d slept in a room with three beds with a view of the Hudson. One of those short and constantly excited holidays, always taking pictures of things before actually seeing them.

Vito wanted to go to Ground Zero. It was what interested him most. Like everyone, he remembered exactly where he was on that September day. He was alone with Nonna. His mother had a meeting at school. His parents had just separated. He thought it was the end of the world. He waited by the window for the plane that would crash into their building.

At Ground Zero, he stayed watching the immense black space of the construction site. There were hordes of tourists glued to the security fences, taking pictures and talking.

Vito didn’t reach for his mobile phone, didn’t even make the gesture. He had imagined this crater in the city, but seeing it was different.

It really was the end of the world. Everything had been cleaned up. Years had passed. And yet it was all right here in this immense, empty black space.

Vito had seen the stories on TV, the people trying to recognize a flying body from a still frame. A man eternally frozen, head down in mid-air.

His father’s kid wouldn’t shut up. OK, he was his brother, but only half. He lived with another mother, and they had a lot more money.

He felt incredibly alone.

Like that day when his parents were the two towers that fell.

He suppressed his bad mood. They went to Central Park, walked round the lake. He couldn’t shake the image of the big burnt lake a few blocks away. That night when they went to eat at Joe Allen, he didn’t want to play superheroes on the table with his brother. His father got angry with him, and he got angry back. He spent the entire night looking out at the skyline with the two towers chopped out, the laptop glued to his knees. Once upon a time, he’d had a family. Now, he had only uncertainty and the money his father gave him every now and then, to buy an iPod or some clothes. He fantasized about breaking the glass that reached down to the street and jumping out, but it was probably shatterproof.

In Tripoli, he realized that the sensation had stuck with him, the burnt stink of his Ground Zero. Because out of nowhere, as he looked down an alley that smelled of coffee and pungent spices, which may have reminded him of the multiethnic stink of New York, he noticed a sense of panic that came and went. Just like cigarette smoke dissipating after someone blows it out.

Tripoli was their zero level, their memory razed to the ground, liquefied.

His father said Angelina was still a deportee. A person waiting for return. And that the marriage itself had been a sentence of internal exile.