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

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