Morning Sea Read Online Free Page A

Morning Sea
Book: Morning Sea Read Online Free
Author: Margaret Mazzantini
Pages:
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water onto the sand. I thought you might be thirsty . Everyone thanks him. Jamila grabs a boiling-hot bottle of water and slips it into her bag.
     
    Farid looks at the sea for the first time in his life. He touches it with his feet, gathers it up in his hands. He drinks it and spits it out.
    He thinks it’s big, but not big like the desert. It ends where the sky begins, just beyond that horizontal blue line.
    He had thought you could walk on it like pirate ships. Instead, it’s wet and sucks you under. The waves move back and forth like the clothes on his mother’s clothesline; if he runs away, they come after him.
    The pregnant woman lifts her dress to step into the water but ends up wet to the neck. She opens a thin mouthful of too-big teeth. She looks like a camel that’s scared of a fire.
    Everyone climbs, pushes, scrambles aboard.
    The boat sinks lower and lower.
    Two boys from Malawi, quicker on the uptake than the others, walk with bare feet like sailors. They check out the inside of the boat, open the tanks held tight with bungee cords in the stern, stick in their noses to make sure the tanks really hold diesel fuel. The fat man yells that they are damned sons of bitches, ifriqiyyun , slaves who’ve escaped from the oasis ghettos. He programmes their route on the GPS and leaps off the boat, getting wet up to his belt. His hand thumps the side of the boat. Good luck, sons of bitches .
     
    Farid looks at the sea, clear and smooth like a pale blue earthenware tile. He looks for fish, their backs. The first bits of their new life. Jamila kisses him and fiddles with his hair. How long will the trip last?
    Not long. Just enough time for a lullaby .
    Jamila starts singing with her nightingale voice, whistling and imitating the sound of the zukra. Her voice lowers to the sea. Then she falls asleep. Her slender head like a gazelle’s, like a big sister’s. Farid finds a space amid all the bodies and looks back. The coast isn’t there any more, nothing but the sea, rising and falling. He ­remembers his house, the swing, the majolica tiles round the well with their rust- and emerald-coloured drawings. He thinks of the gazelle. She came and went as she wished. Always at sunset. She had started to eat from his hand. He’d pluck dates and pistachios and serve them to the animal, his open palm a plate. He thinks of the sound and then of the smell of the gazelle’s mouth. There were spots on the inside, on her tongue. She smelled of wadi, of a recent flow of water through the dust. The best muzzle on earth, apart from his mother’s. That last day, he’d hugged her. He hadn’t even known he wouldn’t see her again, her burnt beige coat that lit up at sunset. Her fur smelled like a rug, the same smell Farid smelled in the desert when he pitched the tent with Grandfather Mussa and they slept on the prayer mat.
    He doesn’t mind leaving the past. He’s a child. He’s too young to have any real sense of time. What he knows and what awaits him are all in the same hand.
    First, he’s excited; then he’s scared; then he’s tired; then nothing more. He threw up. Now there’s nothing left. The sun follows them like a ravenous tongue, dripping on their heads, suffocating heat, sweat.
     
    The sea is monotonous. There’s never anything new. Looking at it is a mistake; it’s like looking at a headless animal with an infinity of shaking humps, blue flesh spraying foam from its submerged mouth. Farid looks for that head that never surfaces, just comes close and then disappears.
    He wonders about the face of the sea. What does it look like?
    One of the Somali men fired at the waves a while ago to test a flare. It didn’t work. The flares are rotten, like the boat. The young man drank too much with his friends. They burnt their stomachs and their brains. Now they’re punching each other.
    Everyone is pale, grey as a rag. All of them have thrown up. The vomit flows along the worn wood floor with the heaving of the
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