Authors: Margaret Mazzantini
Santa gave up fighting. Somewhere inside, she started to feel guilty. To seem guilty. She couldn’t get rid of that feeling of being lost, of diminishment. People deprived of themselves lose their boundaries. Put their back up against the wall and they’ll confess to a murder they didn’t commit. They certainly had not killed the Bedouins in the concentration camps. They had done nothing but work, make Libya beautiful, dig sewers and wells. They had poured and refined kilometres of wax blessed by bishops and imams.
Antonio had always been frail, his clothes hanging off him as if from a wooden silhouette. Now Santa seemed even frailer than he. She repeated things inside her silence. She thought about the dead baby alone in the Christian cemetery in Tripoli. They hadn’t had time to take him with them, hadn’t had the money for a bribe. She shook her head like a bird pecking from a branch that’s too far away. She lost forty-five pounds in weight.
Angelina remembers a glimpse she caught of her mother’s chest one day as Santa washed her underarms in the little sink beside the washing machine. Those imposing breasts reduced to empty sacks with little purplish tips.
They waited. For the repatriation compensation.
They talked of nothing but that compensation, which would put them back on their feet.
And their questions, repeated again and again. Why hadn’t Aldo Moro accepted Gaddafi’s invitation? Why had Italy underestimated the situation? There was a parliamentary crisis at the time, of course, but why should that have kept them from thinking about the Italians from Libya? People with first and last names and faces and their own beloved dead buried in cemeteries, all those children killed in the gastroenteritis epidemic.
Was this the way to repay the sacrifice of so many mothers?
It wasn’t just about the money. They wanted to have back a name, a place. The compensation was for their dignity. The salty toil, the blood that had been shed.
So they could lift their chins and say,
Our country compensated us. We are victims of history
.
Years passed with that vain struggle. Because words lose their meaning if they are repeated too many times. Thoughts become a lethal gas.
It was the time of Red terrorism, Fascist terrorism, secret services.
The story of their exodus fell to tatters like a kite broken by a wind that blows too strong.
They had been reduced to the odd photograph, a little committee, pointless commemoration ceremonies. Already they had become a big banqueting hall of homesick refugees eating couscous in Brianza, in the Veneto.
Santa has trouble moving one of her arms. A pain nailed into her bones.
She sees a health service psychiatrist, who writes her a prescription so she won’t suffocate when she lies down at night. It’s as if a hand is pressing on her sternum. Lead on her chest. All those coffins carried back by the Italian fighter jets and her little creature left in that desecrated place.
She can’t come to terms with her anguish that those remains, remains of herself, of her uterus, were abandoned to that cemetery, where the graves left behind might have been desecrated out of religious vandalism or in order to steal a small coral necklace.
She dreams of little bits of beehive floating in wax.
Antonio’s eyes looked like someone had smeared ointment over them.
He found work in the packing room of a factory that made office furniture. Then he moved to accounts. He was scrupulous. He checked his calculations late into the night until they came out right, a man obsessed.
After an injustice, you either go crazy or you hide.
Angelina remembers her church clothes from Christian charity. They smelled like other children, other closets. At first, she liked those packages her mother brought home, the skirts and coats matted by other little girls.
She’d smell the wool, flowing with other little lives like hers.
A stuffy smell of mothballs, of leftovers.
But soon enough, disgust set in. Like those black tides full of industrial waste in front of the buildings. She’d have preferred a rag from the market as long as it smelled of plastic, of new.
She was used to freedom, to endless warm weather, to the park with its majestic palms and large stone water basins, to the deep and inebriating smell of the souk, of roasted nuts, of fritters, of an infinite variety of coffee fragrances.
She stood out as rebellious, dishevelled. Her mother tried to make her like other girls, Italian girls born in Italy. Angelina looked around her. She, too, would have liked to have something or someone to resemble.
She looked for a fixed point in the sky. Perhaps an Arab star had followed her.
Outside her classroom windows, she no longer saw palm trees and colourful birds, just grey walls and cranes on construction sites for housing projects.
No one came near her at school. They all knew each other already. They looked at her bare legs. Angelina wore sandals until Christmas. Her feet were never cold.
No one knew anything about Tripoli. Even the teachers looked upon her as a foreigner from far away.
Her classmates called her the African.
You smell like a camel
, they said. The school was in an outlying neighbourhood of cheapened people who knew no way to approach others except poorly. Like different species in the savannah. The same circular walk of hyenas sliding, full of fear, towards their hunger. Angelina tried to adapt. She was excluded as a matter of course, without any real malice.
She made her alienation into an adventure.
She made things up, told stories about lions, children torn to pieces, baleful Tuaregs. Tripoli was a fearsome place and she had survived thanks to countless clever ploys. The stories earned her a bit of respect.
It was language that divided them. She didn’t know Sicilian dialect, only the ornate Italian they taught at the Italian school in Tripoli.
She walked home alone. The stretch of road was truly long amongst all the cement and the stinking second-rate sea. Not a single whiff of asphodel or carob, not one friendly soul.
She thought about Alí. His heart. The oyster knife he carried in his pocket. One day, he’d join her. He’d marry her. They would go back to Tripoli. She could, if she married an Arab. Alí would be rich – he was smart and brave. He was thirteen years old and he’d already saved a nice little bundle of dinars. They’d buy the candle workshop. Her mother, standing before the doughy mixture the colour of silence, would start singing again. Her father would twist candles again for Ramadan and for Christmas.
That was her one thought: how to bring her life back to that point.
The point where it had been interrupted.
It would mean uniting two bits of land, two bits of time.
The sea lay in the middle.
She lay split figs over her eyes to remember the flavour, sweet and lumpy. The seeds tinged all she saw with red. She was looking for the heart of the world she’d left behind.
Every time she went into the water she swam towards the open sea.
As she grew, she brought books with her to the black mineral beach.
She spent hours in the sea. She swam until she reached silence, where nothing and no one could get to her. She remembered how Alí swam, like a drowning seagull.
She looked back towards the beach, the industrial city without a sunset. It looked like a drawing of death, of the world after the end of the world. No voice, just billowing smokestacks.
She dived towards the depths, passing fearlessly through stands of slimy funereal seaweed like buried arms. Her long blue flippers bore orange flame decorations. She thought she would swim to Tripoli. She’d end up half fish, half woman, like the mermaid in the legend. She’d linger near the city of carob trees and whitewashed walls and sing her secret song.
Vito looks at the sea, the island’s beautiful sea, turquoise like in Africa. He looks at the coast with its mossy green inlets. They remind him of armrests on a big green velvet armchair set beside the water where a giant sits and surveys the horizon as he organizes the world and its movements.
Vito has thought more than once about the giant who organizes the world. He has wondered whether the giant is made of people, lots of people piled atop one another. And whether he’ll be one of those tiny but fundamental people.
That’s what a boy is supposed to want, to participate in the organization of the world. He’s always been a fugitive, at school and elsewhere, a fugitive from any type of learning.
He lowers his head. He’s ashamed of this sudden burst of ambition. He won’t accomplish anything either good or remarkable. It’s more likely his life will pass without notice. The sun flickers on the swampy, hot horizon. Vito feels the weight of his destiny moving slackly ahead of him in that swamp. He should seize it, shouldn’t he? Take a leap. But how do you know which destiny awaits you? No one had an envelope with the answer to give you.
Why doesn’t he jump into the sea for a swim?
This year he doesn’t feel like it.
His mother has told him about her endless swims as a teenager. The sea was the only friendly place, the only place with a familiar taste and smell.
She says the sea saved her. It could have killed her, because more than once she swam until dark, unsparing of herself, and then had to swim back to shore through the black sea, her body shaking with hypothermia, shivering so hard ten blankets wouldn’t stop it.
But without the sea she really wouldn’t have known where to go to digest all that emptiness.
Vito looks at the sea.
His mother doesn’t even get wet any more. Now and then she’ll float a bit. Then she comes back out in her one-piece bathing suit, her towel round her waist.
That’s all she does, floats like a dead person looking at the sky. She says she thinks and feels the surface stretching beneath her. She says it’s a good feeling.
She adapted to the new world. She went to high school, made love for the first time. She got an IUD coil and forgot about Alí and her Arab childhood. It was the end of the 1970s. She wore the shabby uniform of that turbulent time: a loose sweater, black clogs, a macramé bag full of books, the woman symbol on her forehead. During the student demonstrations, her hands clenched into fists, she shouted like mad, her face that of a banished monkey’s. At last, her rage found its audience in an entire generation of kids.
She couldn’t stand her parents’ exile any more, the constant stream of memories of Tripoli. The world was moving on, and she would do her part to make it better. There were social injustices, workplace fatalities, massacres of innocents the world over. Her family’s wound was not the only one.
She created a wall for herself.
She could no longer stand the smell of their household, choking on nostalgia. Defeated people ceaselessly lamenting what had been snatched away. Her father clipped every article on Libya, on the story of their downfall.
They had relatives in Catania whom they’d visit a couple of times a year. Angelina made friends with her cousins. Santa and Antonio smiled and ate their lemon cassata, but they were like two deportees. They sat side by side and went through the motion of talking about other things, but they weren’t really interested, and they ended up silent, her mother with her handbag in her lap, her father fiddling with the ten-lira coins in his pocket. They couldn’t wait to leave.
They wanted to go back to their exile, where they were free to complain, to wallow in eternal sorrow.
Angelina began to flee, to slam the door.
She studied, too. She knew the true story of Italian colonialism now. Her family had been deported, exported, along with the Roman colonies, the Fascist eagles, the flames of a dying empire.
Antonio was a moderate. He voted for La Malfa’s Republicans.
But there had been an antecedent. They had left more behind them than fine-grained sand and infinitely pure landscapes of dunes and oases.
There had been kangaroo courts, planes that landed in the desert and killed Libyans in bunches after hasty trials. Once,
Avanti!
printed a picture of a Christmas tree, Bedouins hanging from its branches instead of ornaments and garlands.
Vito looks at the sea.
His mother once told him that beneath every Western civilization lay a festering wound of collective guilt.
His mother isn’t fond of people who protest their innocence.
She’s one of those people who wants to assume responsibility for things. Vito thinks it’s a form of presumptuousness.
Angelina says she’s not innocent. She says that no people that has colonized another is innocent.
She says she doesn’t want to swim any more in a sea where boats full of migrants sink.
There’s nothing worse than an old revolutionary. She’s always planting bombs in your thoughts.
There’s nothing worse than having an unconventional mother. A mother who resembles no other mother, who wears beach sandals everywhere, whose handbag has nothing in it, cigarettes, house keys, ten euros, a mobile phone she never uses. A handbag without miracles. Like her life.