Morning Sea by Margaret Mazzantini Read Free Book Online Page A

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 angry. 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