Read Online Morning Sea by Margaret Mazzantini - Free Book Online

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