Morning Sea by Margaret Mazzantini

must it endure? To illuminate Farid’s night.
    One day, she hung a little leather sack round his neck, velvety soft. She chased away the ghosts, blew in all the best dreams.
    When she saw the sea, it looked big and wet, but nothing more. An easy land with no weapons. A blessing. She didn’t know it was endless, that it would holler from all sides. For days and nights its mute black face rising and falling with the waves. Her hands are puckered like uncovered roots. She clutches her son, her dried desert fruit.
     
    At home, Farid played with pieces of aerial, wire scraps his father no longer needed.
    In Italy, Jamila will send him to school. She has friends in the north. She’ll try to reach them. They came by sea, too, but with a smaller, faster boat. They’re doing well now. They have a laundry in a neighbourhood full of Chinese hairdressers. At the beginning, it was terrible. They slept in the park and were always on the run. She and Farid will receive better treatment. They aren’t illegals. They’re refugees, fleeing a war. They will have a temporary residence permit. They’ll request asylum. She’ll find a job and learn Italian at night school. One day, maybe, she’ll go back home. She’ll sit down and look at her life. Farid will have grown by then, with his father’s prominent rear and narrow shoulders. The same sheepish smile. He’ll be good with electricity, like Omar. He has the same long fingers like screwdrivers.
     
    The gazelle is on the sea. There’s no knowing how, but she’s there, stock still on the blue blade of the waves, resting regally as if on a dune. She turns to look at Farid, her shining ringed horns motionless.
    They are small, brave, dignified animals, with slender legs, tight muscles and a black stripe along their backs that trembles when danger is near. They’re the desert’s most magnificent ornament. Their acute hearing cuts through the silence. Their eyes are magic, with transparent corneas and celebrated shining pupils that see eagles in the sky and African painted dogs hiding in the bushes. During the dry season, when all the other animals leave the desert regions and the burnt steppes, they remain loyal to their place, and often their meat nourishes big carnivores that would otherwise die. They have a slightly odd way of running, as if they aren’t touching the sand. They leave a trail of little round footprints like coins. They’re very fast. They must be, to survive. Now and then, they stop and look back, like children do, and this curiosity can be fatal. Mauled at the neck, a gazelle never struggles, but simply allows itself to be dragged away and killed. Arab poets have eulogized them, and praised their innocent gaze as the hallmark of beauty.
     
    As he dies, Farid thinks of the gazelle, her eyes that come so close to his own, her mouth with its flat teeth eating from his hand in the pistachio grove.
     
    As Farid dies, Jamila continues holding him, continues to sing. She doesn’t want the others to notice. They’re wicked now. She saw the bodies they threw into the sea. She’s gone past life and is still here. She knows that it’s better this way, better that her heart held out. Her final fear had been that she would die before her child, allow him to fall from her arms. Allow him to feel the immense solitude of the sea. The black heart.
     
    Once, in the desert, she saw a fennec cub beside its dead mother, alone, surrounded by the calls of nocturnal predators as they calmly crept near.
    Her son’s neck is stretched out like a slaughtered animal’s. She looks at the amulet, which no longer moves.
    None of the passengers on this boat will ever set foot on land. They’re down to the last drop of diesel. They’ve lost their course. A ship will pass in the distance but will not stop.
     
    Hands grasp for the surface. Lungs burst without a sound. Bodies tumble towards the depths, sway like monkeys on lost vines. Sand creatures swollen with sea and shredded by the