Primitive and lovely, the island is mostly unspoiled by foreign tourists (except for the stray German here and there and the Italians from up north who come to lounge and tan and eat mounds of pasta with bottarga, the pungent tuna roe). Favignana is paradise for most people. But Angelo Tornabene was not most people. Angelo Tornabene hated the small island on which he had spent his entire life. He couldn't wait to escape. He didn't care that the great tuna hunt was described and revered as far back as The Odyssey or that the tufa could be linked to the building of the great pyramids. He couldn't get away fast enough from the foul-smelling fish; the bland, monotonous rock; and the tourists from the north who came for the weekends and the summer and bicycled around the maze from one bar ingresso to another. Angelo wanted to escape. Anywhere. Anywhere that wasn't this goddamn island. He didn't care about the great Roman naval battle with the Carthaginians. He didn't care at all about the past. Favignana was only about history. It was about things that no longer existed. Dead things. Dead stone, dead fish, dead people. Angelo wanted to live.

It's why he'd spent the last three days talking to the sailors on the huge ship. They were from South Africa. He didn't know where exactly. He'd never heard of the city whose name they kept repeating, but he understood the word "Africa" and knew they weren't Arab and knew they weren't black, so he decided they must come from the white part, which he knew was south, and all he really cared about was where they were going, which was far, far away from here. The Africans were waiting for the tuna to come in so they could load up on fresh fish for the next leg of the journey; they were excited that the wait was almost over, that it was almost time to leave. The sailors heard the cheering and they ran to look, to see the bloody spectacle, as Angelo knew they would.