Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  “Our sand is black,” she remembers saying to Zandonà. “Like oil, and even the sea’s black.” They were stuck in a dune, she couldn’t remember the name of the place, or maybe it didn’t have one. Zandonà had maneuvered badly. Sometimes he forgot he was driving an armored vehicle instead of a car. She should have reprimanded him, but instead she took the blame. He needed to know she would defend him to his superiors. He needed to trust her. She had to win his trust, his and that of the whole platoon. She wasn’t angry or worried. She let the sand run through her fingers. Yellow, almost white. Incredibly fine, like talcum powder. Sand, as far as the eye could see. No buildings. No sign of human life. No shrubs. Or animals or birds or insects buzzing in the thin, dry air. In the absolute silence, only the rumble of the approaching Quick Reaction Force, coming to get them. There was something oppressive about that lunar landscape, that virginal, piercing, absolute beauty. But only now, as she breathes the salty air of the Tyrrhenian, does she realize what it was. The sea, the sea was missing. It was a landscape besieged by the horizon, devoid of exits, of entrances. Of future.

  A dark silhouette in a tracksuit, a phantom in a wool cap and sunglasses, whizzes past her while she rests on the wall. For a second his iPod exhales its ethereal music in her direction. It’s the voice of Thom Yorke singing “Everything in Its Right Place.” She recognizes it because First Lieutenant Russo used to listen to Kid A in Afghanistan. He’s the one who taught her to appreciate Radiohead. Their music opens a crack in your mind, he’d say, an empty space where your thoughts can hide. A guy who wears dark glasses on a cloudy, gray winter day, not even a sliver of sun, is no less strange than one who spends Christmas Eve at the Bellavista Hotel. It might even be the same guy. Manuela has the feeling he’s noticed her. Legs whirling, the phantom races past the Tahiti and grows smaller and smaller, a blue exclamation point on a shore edged with foam.

  * * *

  Teodora Gogean is late. She never bothers to ring the doorbell, she usually just honks three times. Vanessa says she’s an uneducated hick, civilization hasn’t made it to her country yet, she didn’t even know what a doorbell was before immigrating to Italy. Manuela never argues with her sister about these things, partly because Vanessa doesn’t have anything against Romanians, just against Teodora. Manuela descends the stairs cautiously, one step at a time: first her crutches, then her broken foot, then the other one. Distances lengthen, space swells around her, even time is distorted. She’s like a child again, she’s returned to her past. Or she’s getting a taste of her future, of old age.

  The restaurant at the Bellavista Hotel is open, and she catches a glimpse of the cook’s Egyptian face in the square of the kitchen window. But the curtains in the dining room are all drawn. Strange, because the sea view is the restaurant’s main attraction; people go there precisely to watch the waves. The corner table is taken. By one person. Even though the curtain obscures his features, it’s the same man as the night before, the runner on the beach. A tourist, clearly. But who would come here on vacation at the end of December?

  Ladispoli has a bad reputation. Unjust, but reputation is like honor: determined by others and almost impossible to correct. People, places, and races are judged, who knows by whom, and forever. A stupid saying, which pains Manuela but was repeated every time she had to say where she was from, crowns Ladispoli as the ugliest city on the Lazio coast. A clump of apartment houses, each one different, shot up quickly in the sixties and seventies, next to—almost on top of—the tiny Art Nouveau village on the waterfront, built without respect or elegance, renovated, improved with balconies and verandas, but stubbornly ugly just the same. A labyrinth of asphalt, cars, and cement. Manuela would grow indignant, take offense. Arguments would start, from which it could at least be deduced that there was something of a contest for first place. Aside from a fair number of towns south of the Tiber, the strongest contender was Civitavecchia. But the ferries for Sardinia leave from there, whereas Ladispoli doesn’t even have a port, it doesn’t have anything but artichokes and the sea. Still, the guest at the Bellavista Hotel has decided to spend his vacation right here in Ladispoli. And he’s dining alone in the restaurant, a bottle of sparkling water and a middle-aged waiter who stutters for company.

  Teodora hugs her tight for a long time. She pats Manuela awkwardly on the shoulders—the only way she knows to express how happy she is to see her. Teodora is a rough, introverted woman, completely incapable of expressing her emotions—if she even has any, which remains to be seen. Manuela fears she is like her. “Isn’t Alessia coming at least?” Teodora asks as she grinds the gears, mostly to have something to say, because she already knows that Vanessa would never give Traian the satisfaction of seeing his little niece on Christmas Day. Revenge is best served cold, after it’s ceased to matter, when it won’t make anyone happy, a belated, futile revenge that gets served up anyway. “Alessia’s going with my mother to my cousin Pietro’s for lunch,” Manuela explains. “She likes to play with Jonathan. They’re in the same class at school. But thanks for inviting her.” Teodora shrugs her shoulders. She’ll never manage to put this family back together.

  It’s not far to her house. Tiberio Paris and Cinzia Colella never made peace with each other even after the divorce, but they continued to live less than half a mile apart—she in the rectangle of Art Deco villas and he in the new neighborhood behind the roundabout. They walked the same streets, shopped the same stands in the market, drank their coffee at the same café, but when, every now and then, they happened to run into each other, one would always cross the street.

  “How’s it going?” Teodora asks. “It’s hard,” Manuela admits. “I’m not used to having nothing to do, I get bored.” “Traian wanted to be there last night, to welcome you”—Teodora changes the subject right away. “We had a fight, and he’s still in a huff.” “Why didn’t you let him come?” Manuela scolds her. “I would have liked that.” Teodora prefers not to explain: she doesn’t want to accuse her husband’s ex-wife of preventing her son from welcoming his sister. Manuela wouldn’t understand their futile, rotten war. She’s happy to see that Traian has hung a flag from his window.

  “Why don’t you come stay here?” Teodora says as she helps her take off her heavy jacket. “At your mother’s you have to camp out, you’re like a guest, Alessia had to give up her room for you, you’re all cramped, and besides, five women in one house is too many. But there’s space here, I can set you up in the laundry room, you’d have your own place. If you wanted to be alone, all you’d have to do is close the door. We wouldn’t bother you.” “I know, thank you,” Manuela says, “but I’m not staying long, after the holidays I’ll head back up north, I’m only on medical leave until January twelfth.” “You look amazing with short hair,” Teodora comments, “you look like Demi Moore.” “They shaved my head for the surgery,” Manuela responds dispassionately. “Afterward I didn’t want to let it grow back. It would have seemed like a betrayal, like I was forgetting. I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “You just did,” Teodora says. “And I understand. But you’ll forget anyway. Surviving isn’t a sin. The dead are dead. You have to bury them. But the living don’t have to keep watch over their tombs.”

  Teodora hastens to light the red candles, to make the table more Christmassy. A large, wooden baptismal cross stands prominently on the sideboard. “Now what will you do, join the police?” she asks, without turning around. “Why would I join the police?” Manuela replies, surprised. “Don’t the military get special treatment on the entrance exam?” Teodora wonders. To her, the only reason to join the military is that it’s a shortcut to a permanent government job. “What does that have to do with anything?” Manuela asks. “I thought you’d be wanting to leave the army by now,” Teodora says. “It’s better to be a police officer than a soldier, right? You’re still defending your country. Patriotism. It’s the same idea.” “Being in the army is completely different,” Manuela says, blushing because Teodora’s words reveal cl
early what all her relatives think, though they don’t have the courage to say it. Maybe her superiors think the same: she’s no longer fit to be a soldier.

  “But you’re needed more here,” Teodora says. “I’m sorry, but who cares about Afghanistan? It’s so far away. Italy has more serious problems, the economic crisis that’s dragging us down, the Chinese, illegal immigrants, we’re being invaded, you’ll see, no one goes out after dark anymore, it’s like there’s a curfew around here. And then there’s the Mafia, the Camorra, there’s a war going on right here at home, you don’t have to go looking for one ten thousand miles away.” “Two thousand eight hundred miles,” Manuela specifies. “Only a little farther away than Iceland, but Iceland’s in Europe, so it seems closer; geography isn’t math.” “Okay, if you say so, you went to school, I don’t know this stuff,” Teodora admits, “but ten thousand or two thousand eight hundred, it’s the same thing: you’d do more good as a police officer in Italy, Manuela.”

  Tiberio Paris would always say that Teodora talked too much, and worse, she talked without thinking, that she was as rough as pumice and as sharp as a razor. He would say it was a lack of education, or her Communist education, or something like that. But Manuela, with her military training, had always appreciated her frankness. She shrugs her shoulders and smiles. But she doesn’t respond. In any case, Teodora will never understand what that feather in her cap means to her.

  Last year Manuela celebrated Christmas under a heated tensile structure as sand whirled in the wind and settled on the tent, on their camouflage uniforms, on their skin, in a kind of rough embrace. One long table for nearly two hundred people, including a Regional Command West general from Herat, a Task Force South colonel from Farah, the commanders of the Tenth Alpini Regiment and the neighboring ANA brigade, a representative of the American Provincial Reconstruction Team, and a cable TV reporter. The captain suggested she sit with her men, so she was at the opposite end of the mess hall, far from the lights that lit up the scene like a movie set. The head cook, a corporal, had done his best to make them feel at home. The smell of garlic, tomato, and chilies tickled her nostrils. But there wasn’t any wine, or coffee even, because supplies arrived in fits and starts. “Not for me, I’m a vegetarian,” Jodice said, removing a dead fly from his mouth. He placed it on Zandonà’s spaghetti, and he, distracted, ate it while the other soldiers brayed with laughter. They’d arrived a few days before. All Manuela had seen of Afghanistan was an airport, the road that heads into town, a few mountains sprinkled with snow, and the perimeter of the base. She hardly knew these two guys, and still called them by their last names. It had been a happy, even juvenile Christmas dinner there at the edge of the world, together with her tribe. With her desire to make a difference. She sat thinking about it in Teodora’s little living room; it was the most wonderful Christmas of her life. There’d never be another one like it. Maybe that’s what it means to have your future behind you.

  Teodora sets a steaming soup tureen on the table and the pungent odor of liver, kidneys, and pork fat wafts up from it. But there’s no sign of Traian. “It’s ready!” she shouts. “It’s always the same thing—I have to call him a hundred times, one of these days I’m going to throw that computer out the window!” Manuela catches her father’s meek gaze. His photograph in its silver frame is prominently displayed in the little glass cupboard in the living room. His light eyes, dazzled by the flash in city hall the day of his wedding to Teodora, seem happy. But his hair has already thinned, all that remain are two grayish strands on each side of his head, and he’s grown flabby; he certainly doesn’t look like someone who’s beaten cancer. Looking at his picture now, Manuela realizes he was already seriously ill on his wedding day. Teodora, on the other hand, now seems younger than ever. With her teased hair and shapeless, knee-length blue skirt, she looks like a middle-aged peasant in the photo. But in the years since, she has shed the weight of time. Manuela called her from the base on her thirty-seventh birthday. “Happy birthday, Teodora!” she shouted. “You remembered!” Teodora exclaimed, surprised. Her voice came and went, nibbled by the interference, deformed by the distance. Then the connection went dead.

  Teodora was a nurse at the Passo Oscuro hospital. She had gotten to know Manuela’s father while adjusting his catheter, bringing him his medications, and serving him his lunch on a tray. Manuela had never understood what she saw in that depressed, emaciated man, ugly with unhappiness, bald from chemo, whose only love was the electrical plant and who had lately developed a passion for windsurfing. It never even crossed her mind that her father, ill and anguished by the approach of death, would lose his head for that rough nurse, or that he could so carelessly and so remorselessly destroy his own life and that of his family for a love that was already all but terminal. As soon as he finished his chemo and regained his strength, he stuffed his shirts in a suitcase and moved in with Teodora. Manuela hadn’t seen him leave. When she and Vanessa came home from school, their father was gone. He didn’t even have the courage to tell them, their mother had had to do it. Then Traian was born, and in the end Tiberio had married Teodora in city hall. Neither Manuela nor Vanessa was there.

  Her mother never forgave Teodora. She’s a social climber, she says, ruthless and greedy like everyone else from Eastern Europe who had poured into Ladispoli, in wave after wave, paying exorbitant rents for the second homes that Romans had left empty when they’d started vacationing in Sardinia or Sharm. First the Poles, then the Russians, the Albanians, and, finally, the Ukrainians and Romanians. They’d ruined the housing market. Ruined the atmosphere. Even ruined the families. Cinzia would say that Teodora got herself pregnant with a terminal cancer patient’s child in order to get the dying man’s money. She went around blabbing to everyone that before his second round of chemo Teodora had him freeze his sperm. They tried four times, but his sperm had grown weak, and in the end they had to do IVF. Manuela was sorry her mother told people these sad, private things, even though she knew they were true. But if Teodora expected a Central Electric employee to have some kind of fortune, she was wrong. After his death, all they found in his bank account were debts. Teodora had fleeced him, her mother noted bitterly, she didn’t even leave him enough money for a decent funeral. Her mother was the one who had to foot the bill. And she had paid for his cremation, too.

  Manuela’s mother was hurt when she told her she wanted to have lunch with Teodora and Traian on Christmas Day. She couldn’t explain it, but she had made her peace with her father while in Afghanistan. She had despised him, had kept him from getting close to her, from being part of the important events in her life. She hadn’t invited him to the swearing-in ceremony, he never even saw her in uniform. But distance had softened her anger, had made her grudge insignificant: far from her usual routine and all that was familiar to her, she had had to come to terms with who she was, and found that she hardly recognized herself. Finally, lying on her cot in the desert, thousands of miles from home, mulling over her past, she asked herself why she hated him so much. It felt as if she understood everything. And everything was very simple. In the few years he had lived with Teodora, something had happened to the Tiberio Paris she had known—that eternally grumpy, anxious, unhappy man. Her father was now content. As stars burned like flaming confetti in the tar-colored sky, and RPGs exploded against the protective walls of the base, she told herself that her private war against her father and his new family had to end. Wars are never won. Victory consists in achieving your objective. And she had achieved hers.

  Traian’s room smells like sneakers. His soccer gear is scattered all over the place, a jersey hanging from the window, cleats under the bed, shin guards on the armchair. A poster of Gigi Buffon, the national team goalie, is tacked to the closet door. The walls are covered with Serie A pennants, red, yellow, black, and blue. All that’s visible of Traian is a tuft of hair sticking up from behind his computer monitor. Black hair, long and straight. They look alike, Manuela and Traian. She feels somehow responsible for this
extra brother, whom she met the day of her father’s funeral. A snot-nosed brat with a Giants cap pulled down over his eyes, amused by the confusion and unable to understand why in the world he was in a strange church, listening to a Catholic priest, looking at a dark wood coffin adorned with two flower wreaths whose ribbons bore the exact same message: FROM YOUR WIFE. Traian was four years old, and Manuela had been granted a twenty-four-hour leave. She wore her uniform so that at least on this day of last respects, Tiberio Paris would know who his daughter had become. During the service, Manuela kept turning around to look at Traian. And he looked at her, mesmerized. When she stuck out her tongue at him, he burst out laughing. Teodora reached over and slapped him.

  Manuela goes over to the desk, circles behind it, and puts her hands over his eyes. When Traian gets up to hug her, she realizes he’s taller than she is now. At least four inches taller than last year. Pimply cheeks, a man’s voice, and Paris eyes, the color of blue flax. “I wanted to come see you in the hospital,” her brother apologizes, “but Mamma wouldn’t let me.” “It was far away, and besides, it was complicated having visitors,” she says, “so it’s probably just as well, Traian.” “No,” he insists, “I thought about you all the time.” Manuela is his idol. She is both pleased and not at the same time. She never did anything to encourage him. She doesn’t consider herself a role model, and her brother’s devotion confounds her. She ruffles his hair. “Come on, come to dinner, don’t make your mother wait, she made blood sausages.” As Traian puts his computer to sleep, she glimpses his desktop photo, it’s one she’d e-mailed him from Afghanistan. She’s happy he liked it. It’s of a girl his age, staring sternly, willfully, at the soldier taking her picture. She seems to be asking him what he’s doing there, in her village, and yet also to be waiting, almost expecting something. Disappointment and innocence mingle with each other in that gaze, and when Lorenzo—who had taken the photo in Qal’a-i-Shakhrak during an inspection of the school they were building—showed it to her, she had recognized something familiar in it. When the screen goes blank Manuela is suddenly relieved, though she can’t explain why.