Free Human Cargo by Caroline Moorehead Page A

of potatoes, as Nene would later tell visitors when he showed them the holes in the table on his terrace. The noise these hailstones made on the plastic terrace roof was so loud that the Sciortinos were obliged to raise the volume on their television, so it was some time before they heard the cries coming from the beach. At first, Nene thought these shouts were all part of the game show that he and Vera usually watched on a Saturday night. Nene is an actor, a singer of Sicilian folk songs, a ruddy-faced friendly man in his mid-thirties; when he is not traveling around Sicily talking to conferences and seminars about the need to preserve the Sicilian language and popularculture, he and Vera put on theatrical sketches for schoolchildren in the Greek temples at Agrigento and Selinunte.
    As the cries and shouts continued, Nene got up and went to the window that looks out of their sitting room directly onto the long sandy beach at Realmonte, not far from Agrigento, on Sicily’s southern coast. Peering out into the utter darkness, he could make out only the white crests of the waves breaking over the sand. But then he saw some people running along the water’s edge. How absurd, he said to Vera, to go swimming on a night like this. The hail was still crashing down, and there was also lightning and thunder. But then more people came running; now Nene saw that they were gathering in a circle just in front of La Playa, a new bar on Capo Rossello, where on summer evenings foreign tourists come to dance to a small band. This being a Saturday in the middle of September, the dance floor was crowded, and when he and Vera put on their rubber boots and found an umbrella and trudged through the wet sand, they discovered the dancers standing at the water’s edge, in the pouring rain, pulling from the sea a number of gasping, sodden, half-naked young Africans, their clothes hanging in rags about them, their teeth chattering from the cold. As it happened, one of the members of the band spoke some English, and when the strangers had stopped panting and shaking and were able to speak, they explained in that language that they were asylum seekers and that their boat had struck the rock that juts out above the reef just offshore, not a hundred meters from La Playa. There were, said the young Africans, gesticulating frantically toward the sea, still many others on board, and the boat was sinking. They had reached the shore because they were swimmers. They didn’t think anyone else on board could swim. Some said they had sisters and brothers on the boat; one said that his wife was there.
    The onlookers peering into the darkness could see nothing, though by now the hail was no longer crashing down, as Nene explains when he talks about the long night of the
naufragio
, the shipwreck. On that night, Saturday, September 14, 2002, a boat carrying 150 Liberian asylum seekers,
extracomunitari
, went down off Realmonte’spopular beach. As Nene says, the night’s weather was catastrophic, a freak storm the likes of which he had not experienced in all his twelve years in his beach house, and the unfortunate Liberians were
disgraziati
, uniquely afflicted, to have chanced to try to come ashore that very night.
    When the dancers at last understood what had happened, when the terrified Liberians had told them, again and again, the story of what had befallen them and it had been translated into Italian, the police were called. Soon the beach was covered in police cars, and carabinieri and marines arrived from the Guardia Costiera stationed not far away at Porto Empedocle. The fishing boats pulled up on Realmonte’s beach were too small to make any headway against the surf, and when a lot of calls had been made over the walkie-talkies and the mobile phones, it was found that there wasn’t a working rubber dinghy with a big enough outboard along the whole of the Sicilian coastline. By now, it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. A powerful searchlight was