Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  But it wasn’t the fear of death, that would come later. It was like a time lag, a displacement: a sense of total remove from what I was doing, and even from my own self. The feeling that I’d already passed by, that I was moving about not in reality but in a dream. In a dream no one hears your voice, your actions make no impact, and their consequences are unpredictable. Words don’t mean what they should. Distributing medicine, toys, and notebooks to people whose houses had been bombed by planes or who had shot at us a month before seemed hypocritical to me. Our checkpoints—controlling a deserted intersection in the middle of nowhere, rummaging through some poor shepherd’s pickup, commandeering empty gas cans, accusing him of transporting them in order to resupply drug traffickers, while entire caravans of jeeps loaded with arms and drugs slipped past behind our backs, on mysterious mountain tracks—seemed like a pointless act of theater, like trying to empty the ocean with a leaky pail. I didn’t have the courage to talk about it with anyone.

  “Our real enemy is time,” I dared to say one evening to First Lieutenant Russo: a skinny, lightweight man with a mustache who didn’t roll his r’s—I’d singled him out as the most intelligent of the officers—in love with Afghanistan and with his work. “We have to bring home results immediately, back home every member of the coalition faces elections, internal arguments, operational and human costs, and every piece of bad news cancels out a hundred positive developments and shortens the time we have. It never makes the news when we thwart an attack, but every single loss makes the public think we’re losing. But the Afghanis have all of eternity ahead of them. It’s paradoxical, but time is their most powerful weapon. And the only one we can’t fight against.”

  First Lieutenant Russo gave me a surprised look, asked me if I remembered the philosopher Zeno, and switched off his laptop. I always wondered what he was writing, but we never became close enough for me to ask. I shook my head. “They don’t teach you philosophy at tourism management school.” “Our first year of high school, we covered the Greek philosophers,” Russo said. “One of them was Zeno of Elea, which is near Salerno supposedly, and my mother’s from Salerno, so I took a liking to him. He lived during the fifth century BC, and was a disciple of Parmenides. He invented dialectics. He taught how to take apart your adversaries’ theses, reduce them to absurdity. Zeno wanted to show that the universe is made up of one unique and immutable being and that movement does not exist. He used paradoxes to do so. The most famous is the one with Achilles and the tortoise. Achilles is incredibly fast, the tortoise incredibly slow. But Achilles will never catch up with a tortoise who starts even a little ahead of him. By the time Achilles reaches the point where the tortoise started, the tortoise will have already moved farther ahead, and even if the distance is practically imperceptible, Achilles must reach the tortoise’s new point of departure, and in the meantime the tortoise will have gone even farther, and so on, until infinity. In short, Zeno said that space and time are infinite, so it’s impossible to make up the distance. Becoming and movement are absurd if examined with the tools of logic and reason.”

  I wasn’t sure I understood what First Lieutenant Russo, or Zeno of Elea, meant, or if by telling me this story he wanted to say he agreed with me—or, on the contrary, show me that I was wrong and warn me to not ask too many questions. But I didn’t want to be Achilles and chase after an objective I would never reach. I was beginning to ask myself what would happen when we were gone. “Will we leave behind solid institutions?” I asked him. “Or a sand castle? Will the country hold? Will what we’re doing be swept away? Will it be like we never even existed?” Russo smiled and spread his map out on the table. “Our duty is to extend the security bubble to twenty kilometers all around Sollum. To secure this village, and this one, and this one”—he pointed with his pencil to nearly invisible dots on the map. “That’s all.” The dots circled in red indicated where IEDs had been identified, or where—in the previous months—Italians had been attacked. The map had measles.

  * * *

  I was crumbling under contradictions and solitude. For years my relationship with my family had been halfhearted, but now I found myself anxiously awaiting the moment when I could call Ladispoli. I’d get in line for a computer, send e-mails, post silly little things on Facebook, look at my friends’ pages, study their idiotic photos snapped furtively at a party or a pub, or in the snow. I’d Skype my sister, my mother, even Traian. I’d make them tell me about themselves, in order to cling to something real, because my life wasn’t.

  Little by little, though, it was as if the thread were being cut. The important people in my life began to fade, became even more unreal than the ghosts around me. I’d call Italy once a week, then even less frequently. I discovered nostalgia. Once I was surrounding a village with my platoon while CIMIC coordinated a swap. The villagers would give us their weapons—ammunition belts, rifles, mines—and in exchange we would distribute useful items. Actually, we made the ANA soldiers distribute them: it was up to them to make contact with the population, and people were happier to receive things from their fellow countrymen. Hoes, farming equipment, sacks of seeds and rice, used clothing, shoes. You never gave anything away for free here, it was a country without compassion. A soldier picked up a pair of women’s boots. Brown leather, fake snakeskin. Identical to the ones my mother wore the day of my first communion. Those boots had walked for twenty years to reach me over there. But they didn’t reach me. The soldier gave them to an old man in exchange for a hand grenade, I never figured out what good they did him. Three months after my arrival in Afghanistan, the Italian life of Manuela Paris was already the dream of a dream.

  In March it snowed. A tentative but persistent snow, which turned to mush in the tepid midday sun, and then froze over again in the nighttime cold, creaking ominously under our boots. The whiteness erased the towers, the protection barriers, the barbed wire, the road, the ruins of the village opposite the base. The bad weather shut us up in the FOB: convoys, outreach missions, and joint operations with ANA soldiers were all suspended. “When I was in Bosnia,” Jodice told the soldiers shoveling snow to clear a path to the bunker, “a storm hit us. So much snow fell that it trapped us inside the huts. We were buried alive. We had to climb out through the chimney. My commander was so fat he got stuck. I had to go at the chimney with a pickaxe to get him out. Later they handed me the bill. For damaging military property, they said.”

  Then the rains came. The desert bloomed: a downy green coat, intangible and ephemeral, covered the sand—for a few hours. But even the rain was hostile. It gushed violently, cruelly from the sky, and when it hailed, the balls of ice that hit my head were as hard as rocks. Torrential rains lashed the tents and flooded the base. The sand turned to mud, and the mud became a dense slime, thick as cement, which clung to our boots and stuck to the ground, so it was an effort to take even a single step. The rains flooded the fields, erased all tracks, swept away the fragile village houses, swallowed up sheep, goats, trucks. We were cut off for days, not even our provisions—which arrived only from the sky—could reach us. The mess kitchen closed. We ate precooked rations, crackers, canned ravioli and sauce, and flavorless medallions of beef. “When I was in Lebanon,” Jodice told us, “I’d had it with those shitty K rations, so I ate a jellyfish. The cook and I put it in a pot and boiled it for an hour, like an octopus. Then we ate it, little bites, with sugar. It tastes good, kind of like aspic.” There was no time to comment on Jodice’s recipe; the mournful howl of the siren sounded. The FOB was under attack. We ran to get our weapons, then to the bunker or our battle positions, hurriedly but also somehow calmly. Everyone knew where to go. They’d warned us it would happen. And it did. We knew what to do. “Lebanese jellyfish aren’t edible,” I said to him after the alarm was over. “You don’t believe me, Sarge?” Jodice asked, astonished.

  The warnings became an everyday occurrence, and anxiety spread, as contagious as a cold. I slept little, alarmed at the slightest sound. An officer sneezing in the next cont
ainer was enough to make me leap to my feet. Then I didn’t sleep at all. Awake on my cot, I listened to the symphony of whistles, snorts, coughs, hisses, and snores that rose, with varying intensity, from the officers’ huts and the soldiers’ tents: everyone snored, their noses and lungs were clogged with sand. Eyes wide open in the pitch black, I tried to imagine the men hiding on the mountain facing us, in position in the cold, busying themselves with the weapons they’d learned to handle as children. I asked myself what they truly hoped for, if they hoped for anything. People here didn’t give the impression they were waiting for anything. I wondered who they were; how many they were. If they attacked us with any kind of coordination at all, we would be in trouble. One hundred twenty soldiers and one dog—with no drone support, held hostage by the weather, confined to the hangars by the rain, the helicopters hundreds of kilometers away, grounded by the storms, stuck on an isolated base in the middle of nowhere—as solitary as shipwrecked souls. The night was impenetrable, and the silence, broken only by rifle shots in the distance, was frightening.

  They attacked us for seven days in a row, raining 107 mm rockets on us: the mortar platoon leader was given authorization to respond to their fire. I saw the shells launch. They rose into the air, making an arc like a comet. The first one moved me, the second upset me, and then after a while the spectacle left me indifferent—like a habit. We were hoping to neutralize the threat. But threat was merely an abstract word used to domesticate a concept. The threat was people. Yet it all seemed tremendously normal. Every soldier tranquilly performed the necessary gestures, as if it were a drill. Myself included. But I always felt like I was dreaming. None of this was real. When, after the attack on the fourth day, it was my turn to send two teams to comb the area, I almost couldn’t believe they might actually encounter insurgents. And in fact they didn’t—even though they searched for them for hours, staying out all night.

  Captain Paggiarin congratulated Pegasus for the coolheadedness and discipline we showed in our baptism by fire. Other platoons hadn’t been so efficient. “Buy us a drink, Sarge,” said Zandonà, “we deserve it.” The beer had run out, so with the last bottle of Coke we toasted Saint Hesco Bastion, Saint Beretta, and Saint Lince. “Our sergeant doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, and doesn’t fuck, so let’s drink to Saint Manuela,” Jodice proposed. We were toasting my supposed virtue when a rocket landed near our vehicles. “Looks like God disagrees,” Jodice laughed, kissing the Padre Pio medallion he wore around his neck. “Sarge is no saint, even she has her sins.” I told him to knock it off. There was nothing to laugh at. The splinter effect of a 105 mm shell is fifty meters. In other words, the rocket just missed us. Everything faded into a dreamlike unreality. But the shells were real, as were the shards of broken glass, the flat tires, the craters in the sand.

  I started to feel afraid. An irrational fear of dying in the desert, two thousand eight hundred miles from home, without having accomplished even one of the things I’d come here to do. I wanted more time. In that suspended moment between the whistle of the rocket and the rumble of the explosion, I thought this could be the final second of my life. I looked at the yellow tents, the milky sky, the soldier closest to me—Zandonà, with his freckles and boyish face—and the moment took on a bitter sweetness, a bottomless melancholy. And the more I felt afraid, the more the wild beauty of the country pierced me, like shrapnel, deeper and deeper, entering my veins, hurting me. The more Afghanistan repulsed me, the more it tried to crush and annihilate me like an insect, the more I began to love it, this naked, essential country, in which even a nail is important.

  8

  LIVE

  It rains on December 29. Drops tap against the windows. On the deserted beach a fisherman, sitting in a folding chair under a big black umbrella, surveys his lines: the rods planted in the sand, the bait in the still water, the taut nylon slicing through the air. His soggy dog keeps him company, tail wagging happily. The stubborn loyalty of dogs. Giovanni is loyal, too, in his own way. But Manuela doesn’t know what to do with his loyalty. For her there’s no going back.

  Mattia must have gone out early: the shutters to his room stay closed all day. Manuela tossed and turned all night, restless, haunted by Ahmad Zahir’s music, Lorenzo Zandonà’s melancholy smile, the blood-soaked tampon on Diego Jodice’s pillow, Mullah Wallid’s angular, arrogant face, the call of the muezzin in the village of Bala Bayak, the taste of Mattia’s saliva, the crunch of the yellow scorpion under her rifle butt, the dripping water in a camp shower, the furious buzz of a Mongoose helicopter, the crackle of a machine gun, the crash of an antitank missile against a rock. She didn’t fall asleep until six in the morning, so not even three hours of anguished, unsound sleep. She wakes up five or six times, sweaty, trembling, even screaming once.

  She goes to the bathroom and rinses her face. Vanessa’s already there, brushing her teeth. “Did I scare you?” she asks. “Not at all,” Vanessa replies, spitting a blob of toothpaste into the sink. “You scream every night, we’re used to it by now. You sound horrifying when you scream, it’s not your regular voice. Remember The Exorcist?” “I’m sorry,” Manuela says, “I can’t help it, I can’t control it.” “It won’t last forever,” Vanessa reassures her.

  “I spotted him first, you know, the guy at the Bellavista,” she adds, elbowing her sister conspiratorially. Then she starts to gargle, her voice becoming an incomprehensible mutter. “Amazing blue eyes, great body, nice ass, too, broad shoulders, pretty hot.” She drools, spitting a rivulet of whitish water into the sink. “But I’m happy he likes you better, hon.” “He’s a wuss,” Manuela says as she sticks her face under the freezing cold water. Vanessa turns to her, surprised. Her sister’s angry response strikes her as a good sign. So it’s true what Grandma said! Vanessa had thought she was raving, but Manuela really did go out with the guy from the Bellavista, who knows how she managed to snag him, he doesn’t trust anyone. Vanessa had lain in wait for him for three days, and only managed to catch him on Christmas Eve, in the street in front of the hotel garage. She asked him to help her unload her car and carry the presents upstairs. They were heavy, she had only two hands. He kindly carried her packages, but didn’t ask her anything or offer any conversational opening. She invited him in for a coffee, but he declined. “Not today,” he said, “at any rate, now that I know where you live, we’ll see each other again.” Vanessa had the impression he liked her. Her skin tingled, his eyes twinkled—little things, but she was rarely wrong. He hadn’t sought her out, though. He went for Manuela instead. Who would ever have thought. Just for a second—the time it takes to dry her mouth and look at herself in the mirror—she envies her sister, that lunar face standing behind her. And she’s surprised, too. She’s usually the one who snags the guy.

  Manuela drags herself back to bed. She sleeps another hour. At ten she vomits in the conveniently placed tub. Mattia still isn’t back.

  * * *

  Only Vanessa’s home for lunch. Her mother’s at work, Alessia’s at a school friend’s, Grandma’s with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Manuela didn’t know her grandmother had converted. “Two years ago,” Vanessa says. “A sort of preacher came to lead the community, beard, sandals, talking like a prophet. Grandma’s crazy about him. Their church is in a garage in the industrial park, behind the Vaccina River, just past the car dealership. There must be two hundred people there. Mamma says they seem possessed, but they’re really just normal people. The fact is, Grandma’s much calmer since she started going. She goes around proselytizing and selling magazines door to door. She’s tried to convert us all.” “Has she had any luck?” Manuela asks, increasingly astounded. It’s only then that she realizes she was away a really long time, and that she’s not the only one who’s changed. Vanessa doesn’t answer.

  They unearth a block of hamburgers, fish filets, and a package of baby peas from the freezer. “Damn!” Vanessa remembers all of a sudden, “I promised Mamma we’d go grocery shopping!” They defrost the hamburgers in the microwa
ve. The block disintegrates into a pile of bovine mush, devoid of any consistency or flavor. Manuela says she ate better at the mess in Bala Bayak. Still, she doesn’t have the right to complain, because she doesn’t know how to cook. In the barracks there’s always somebody to cook for you. It’s one of the advantages of military life. While Vanessa keeps an eye on the espresso maker, Manuela spies on the Bellavista restaurant through the curtain. Mattia is having lunch at his usual table. He’s reading the paper, which he has spread out across the whole table, as if trying to fill up the space someone left. The waiter Gianni comes over, removes the cover from a dish, and waits for Mattia to comment on how wonderful the chef is. Mattia gives him a sad smile and goes back to his paper.

  * * *

  The discount supermarket, in the basement of a shopping center wedged between the Via Aurelia and the tollbooth, is the size of a city. As she loads the shopping cart with colorful, plastic-looking vegetables, frozen cod, pork from who knows where, Tunisian tuna, Greek olive oil, Belgian mustard, Czech beer, German mozzarella, and precooked gnocchi, Vanessa asks Manuela if she wants to go to a New Year’s party with her, in a former industrial area, the old gas company. It’s expensive, tickets cost fifty euros, but the music is real mellow, the best techno-dance DJs around taking turns. “No way,” Manuela says. She hasn’t gone dancing in years and it doesn’t seem like a great idea now that she’s on crutches. And besides, blasting music would rattle her nerves. Vanessa doesn’t realize what Manuela is capable of when she really loses it. She’s afraid of becoming seriously unhinged. It happened to another Alpino, a soldier named Cadin Edoardo, from her same regiment. She never met him; the story was already years old when she joined Ninth Company. Captain Paggiarin let slip that after returning from Kabul, Cadin Edoardo had done some nightmarish things and been discharged. By “nightmarish” Paggiarin meant that he tried to kill himself: he shot himself in the head with a pistol.