Free Morning Sea by Margaret Mazzantini

oases.
    There had been kangaroo courts, planes that landed in the desert and killed Libyans in bunches after hasty trials. Once, Avanti! printed a picture of a Christmas tree, Bedouins hanging from its branches instead of ornaments and garlands.
    Vito looks at the sea.
    His mother once told him that beneath every Western civilization lay a festering wound of collective guilt.
    His mother isn’t fond of people who protest their innocence.
    She’s one of those people who wants to assume responsibility for things. Vito thinks it’s a form of presumptuousness.
    Angelina says she’s not innocent. She says that no people that has colonized another is innocent.
    She says she doesn’t want to swim any more in a sea where boats full of migrants sink.
    There’s nothing worse than an old revolutionary. She’s always planting bombs in your thoughts.
    There’s nothing worse than having an unconventional mother. A mother who resembles no other mother, who wears beach sandals everywhere, whose handbag has nothing in it, cigarettes, house keys, ten euros, a mobile phone she never uses. A handbag without miracles. Like her life.
    One day, Vito will leave her. The two of them have lived alone. If there was a light on in the house, it was her, no one else. The books propped open on the couch. Like an eternal student. She’s shrunk since she turned fifty. He’s the one who tells her to stand up straight, not to slouch. He’s the one who tells her not to smoke.
    She just shakes her head and says Falcone and Borsellino smoked, too, and that’s not what killed them.
    She’s always saying things like that, absurd things that carry on speaking in the silence.
    That illustrate her worldview, bitter but alive.
    One day, he will leave her. She doesn’t seem to be afraid of that day. If anything, she’d like him to go and study abroad.
    She doesn’t like Italy any more. But she goes on teaching Italian to middle-school kids without ever taking sick leave, not even for a day.
    Her former students come to see her, hug her, drown atop her. She makes coffee for them and looks at them, all grown up.
    When he was little, Vito would get seasick when they were crossing to the island. He’d go greenish. Angelina would hold his forehead with one of her hands, which were always cool to the touch. She’d tell him to find a still spot on the horizon and keep his eyes on it.
    If he thinks about it, Vito can feel that discomfort all over again, his stomach heaving and dumping itself out like a plastic bag tossed around by the undertow. He can still feel that cool hand supporting him and pointing out the distant spot to look at.
    He looks for a still spot on the horizon.
    Something that will help him get through the despair that rises now out of nowhere in the morning. He opens his eyes and his first thought is, Why should I get out of bed?
    Vito looks at the sea. As if he were casting a net to land and bring something back. He thinks about his mother. She’s had breast cancer. She had an operation and came back home as if nothing had happened. Her face never changed. Vito wasn’t kind. He was rude. He grabbed the packet of cigarettes away from her and tore it up. Angelina bit his hand.
    Who does she think she is?
     
    Then Angelina’s sea closed.
    She married, a Norman Sicilian, blond and freckled, an expert in civil law who defended hookers and juvenile delinquents from the blighted San Berillo neighbourhood. Angelina got a job as a substitute teacher. Vito was born. Angelina separated from Vito’s father. Now her ex-husband helps Catania’s wealthy to divorce well.
    Then one day, out of nowhere, the ban was lifted. They could go back to Tripoli if they wanted to on a plain old tourist visa.
    The Day of Revenge, 7 October, which commemorated the banishment of the Italian assassins by the colonel’s Jamahiriya, was transformed overnight into the Day of Friendship. Gaddafi was now a friend of Berlusconi and of Italy. He came to visit with his