Morning Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

about what the fish eat. He dreamt about it one night, the dark depths and a school of fish inside a human skull as if it were a cave full of fluttering sea anemones.
    Until last summer he always went fishing. He’d tie a sack of mussels and scraps to a buoy. At sunrise, he’d find octopuses who had glued themselves to the bag and were trying to get inside it with their tentacles. If the octopuses were big, it would be a struggle. They’d suck onto him and he’d have to tear them off. At night, he’d go after squids with a fishing light. He’d use his fishing rod in the port, a spear in the caves. He loved wresting flesh from the sea.
    This summer, there’s nothing that could make him go snorkelling. He’s spent his time on the hammock and only gone into town if he really had to. Too much sorrow. Too much chaos. But there’s still one part of the island that’s remained untouched by the world, just a few steps away from where the boats land and from the news crews.
     
    Vito looks at the sea. One day, his mother said, You have to find a place inside you, around you. A place that’s right for you .
    A place that resembles you, at least in part.
    His mother resembles the sea, the same liquid glance, the same calm hiding a tempest inside.
    She never goes down to the sea except sometimes at sunset, when the sun sliding past the horizon reddens the rocks to purple and the sky to blood, and seems truly like the last sun on earth.
    Vito watched Angelina walk along the rocks, her hair unravelled by the wind, a spent cigarette in her hand. Scrambling along the cliff like a crab with the tide. It was just a passing moment, but he worried he’d never see her again.
    His mother was Arab for eleven years.
    She looks at the sea like the Arabs, as if she were looking at a blade, the blood already dripping.
     
    Nonna Santa landed in Libya with the colonists in 1938. She was the seventh of nine children. Her father and her uncles made pottery. They set sail from Genoa beneath a pounding rain. The sky was filled with sodden handkerchiefs bidding farewell to the colonists of the Fourth Shore.
    Nonno Antonio arrived on the last ship, the one that set sail from Sicily with sacks of seeds, vine shoots, bunches of chilli peppers. He was a thin little boy with olive skin. His hat was bigger than his face. He had never crossed the sea. He lived inland, at the foot of Mount Etna. His parents were farmers. They slept on their sacks. Antonio vomited out his soul. When they disembarked, he was deathly pale, but he perked up the second he got a whiff of the air. Mingled smells – coffee, mint, perfumed sweets. Not even the camels in the military parade stank. Vito must have heard Nonno Antonio’s story about landing in Tripoli thousands of times, about Italo Balbo in his hydroplane leading the way, about the immense tri-coloured flag spread out upon the beach and Mussolini astride his horse, the sword of Islam raised in his hand, pointing towards Italy.
    His family spent a day seeing the sights of Tripoli and then they were taken to the rural villages. They found themselves face to face with kilometres of desert. Shrubs were the only vegetation. They set to work. Many of the Italians were Jewish.
    They befriended the Arabs. They taught them agricultural techniques. They were poor people with other poor people. Their foreheads bore the same furrows of land and exertion. They cooked unleavened bread on hot stones, dry-cured their olives with salt. They dug wells, built walls to defend the cultivated land from the desert wind.
    Santa and Antonio’s families ended up on neighbouring farms. They helped their parents with the farm work, saw the citrus groves grow up out of the sand, learnt Arabic. They exchanged their first kiss in Benghazi during a Berber horseshow in Il Duce’s honour.
    Then war broke out. Friendly fire shot Italo Balbo down at Tobruk. A mistake, they said. English flares lit up the sky. The Italian colonists were sent back