Free Morning Sea by Margaret Mazzantini Page B

spaceship. The first steps they took were weightless, as if they feared setting down their feet.
     
    Angelina lit a cigarette and put on her dark glasses. Her eyes darted here and there, taking everything in as quickly as a pickpocketing. Then she began moving forwards. Like a mine remover in the desert.
    Her motionless eyes sought to catch everything ­possible in her visual field. Violently they brought all the changes into focus to avoid being wounded too much.
    New buildings surrounding the old medina. Dusty old roads that had been paved over. The conference centre had not changed. Nostrils stretched wide as they breathed in Tripoli’s smell. Sniffing after that eaten-up time as if checking for a gas leak. And it really did seem like something might explode. Angelina turned towards the sea.
    The sand . . . where is the sand?
    Their beach near the castle was no longer there. The promenade was an immense car park.
    All of a sudden, she burst out laughing, like a crazy lady.
    A cat rubbed up against her. A wary and absent creature, just like her, with flea-bitten ears and reddish fur. It tickled her leg. It was one of those soft cats, maybe in heat, that turn over and let you touch them. It lay there on the ground, four legs in the air, rubbing against the tarmac. Angelina bent over to pet its white belly. The cat purred. Angelina picked up the animal and kissed it on the nose as if it were a baby fresh from its bath. She didn’t seem to want to leave the cat. Vito smiled. He liked animals, too, but there was something odd about his mother’s sudden passion for the stray, as if she’d come all the way to Tripoli to find this sick and wounded cat. When she stood up, though, Angelina looked like something had healed her. She pushed her sunglasses back on her head and looked at the city with naked eyes. Then she looked at Santa.
    Mum, do you remember all those cats when we left?
     
    Nonna walked the entire length of Corso Sicilia without saying a word, unsteady on her feet. She sat on the pavement under a palm tree and Vito thought, There she is sitting at the end of her life. She took a deep breath. A hard, satisfied breath like a blade slicing in and reaching a vital organ.
    Many of the buildings in the city centre were intact, though smaller and dirtier than they remembered. Others had literally been erased, submerged by layers of architecture, of lives. The old Jewish cemetery had disappeared, buried by extravagant, accordion-shaped skyscrapers set upon cement stilts.
     
    Let’s get an ice cream. A lemonade.
    His mother took his grandmother’s gnarled hand, and it was like looking forty years back in time, when Nonna would have been the one dragging little Angelina towards the cathedral, towards the Italian gelateria Polo Nord.
    The streets were a jumble of cars, bikes, street vendors. But they moved in a tight pattern. The two women were happier now. Two gun dogs looking for the scent, the right trace of blood. Their heads raised, they blocked out the noises of the city, the new bank buildings and conference centres. They were looking for their city, closed up too long. They scrambled through the narrow lanes and passageways of an interior topography. The stores had remained pretty drab, old mannequins in out-of-date clothes. In the market, beside the camel-hair bags, they saw piles of fake Louis Vuittons. The colonel’s image graced every corner.
     
    A year earlier, Vito had travelled to New York with his father. An all-male trip, the two of them and Vito’s father’s new son, who, unlike Vito, was fat and always wanting to eat and drink and suck on something. But he played the violin in a pretty miraculous way. They’d slept in a room with three beds with a view of the Hudson. One of those short and constantly excited holidays, always taking pictures of things before actually seeing them.
    Vito wanted to go to Ground Zero. It was what interested him most. Like everyone, he remembered exactly where he was