Read Online Morning Sea by Margaret Mazzantini - Free Book Online Page A

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