Morning Sea by Margaret Mazzantini Read Free Book Online Page B

red Ford with the wax and cages of hens and baskets of grapes. Alí always wore a striped cloth baseball cap and glasses with thick lenses, always carried a book in his hand.
    Once they brought her to see the beehives, their first outing together. Angelina hopped into the Ford. They drove alongside the old Roman ruins as far as a Berber village. Alí gave Angelina a big metallic coverall and netting to cover her face, but he took off his glasses and his shirt and stood bare-chested, motionless, his arms spread wide like a Tuareg scarecrow, and let the bees cover him. The bees buzzed but had no apparent effect on Alí. There were so many of them that they formed a noisy pelt with every whisper of wind. Alí’s eyes were immobile, fixed on her. They looked like the eyes of an animal invaded by smaller animals. They were haunted and incredibly sad. Or maybe he was just concentrating. Angelina opened a hand. How many fingers do you see? Alí couldn’t speak, couldn’t laugh. His mouth looked like a wound that had been pasted on. She continued to raise and lower her fingers. Now how many? It bothered her that he was so much better than her at everything, that he had such a stock of obstinate courage. Alí answered, Six , and guessed right. Maybe fear improved his vision. But a bee flew into his mouth and stung him in the throat. Angelina saw his dark, sad eyes redden and swell, become desperate. He seemed to be asking her for help with his entire being. He couldn’t cough, couldn’t move. But his throat was swelling up. He began to pant, to let out strange gasps as if about to lose consciousness. The bees were angry. Their buzzing grew louder and louder. Even if only half that colony of bees had decided to sting him, Alí would have died on the spot. He fell to his knees. Angelina backed away in terror.
     
    Alí’s father saved him by grabbing a hose and blasting him with a violent jet of water. The bees fell like shorn fur and formed a wet, hissing cloud on the sand. Alí was carried into the house and immersed in a soup of Yemenite herbs and ammonia powder.
    He had a high fever. He was delirious.
    He reappeared a week later.
    He studied at the madrasa, where they wrote in notebooks but also on boards. Angelina went to wait for him outside, but he wouldn’t look at her.
    Angelina was sad. She had gone over that scene a thousand times in her mind. She was the one who’d provoked him. She’d made faces at him. She was jealous of his courage, of the way he could stand still like a marabout. She wouldn’t have lasted even a second. At night, she felt a stinger in her throat. She developed a nervous cough that scratched her tonsils whenever she thought of the danger they’d risked. She dreamt of Alí twisting and turning and dying on the sand, devoured by the bees. She dreamt of that thin body swollen with poison and bleeding from the stings.
     
    Then Alí came back. One early summer afternoon, she saw him in the Italian gelateria Polo Nord. He was licking his ice cream, his eyes in their thick glasses fixed on a book.
    ‘What are you reading?’
    It was a collection of poetry by Ibn Hazm. He read her one. I wish I could split myself in two with a knife, so that you could come inside and be enclosed within my chest . . .
    Beneath the cloth of his trousers, he touched the oyster knife he always carried. Alí was almost thirteen. There was a light fuzz beneath the sweat on his upper lip. Angelina looked at him, blushed. Alí was different. He’d never been shy and now he was, almost trembling, like the asphodel blooming at their backs. Everything was aquiver with a soft orange light that bore a suffering of its own within, as if some world behind them were retreating to another place.
    It was childhood retreating before a new season of intimacy and shame. At the time, Angelina knew too little to interpret the sense of loss, the tragedy. It started raining. They ran off to their own houses. Angelina stopped to rest