Morning Sea by Margaret Mazzantini Read Free Book Online

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