Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  “But you don’t even know me, and if you did, you wouldn’t like me,” Mattia observes calmly. “And I don’t know you, and if I did, maybe I wouldn’t like you. I don’t remember who said it, but whoever the genius was, I agree with him: of all the things mortal man has made, the one we must fight, flee, avoid, and avert, in every way possible, is war. There is nothing more profane, futile, wasteful, squalid, and long-lasting than war. For me Italy is a suspicious word that I associate with the rhetoric of those who want to impose their laws on me in order to pursue their own interests. I would have much rather been born French, or Swedish. At least I could have had the illusion of living in a country of rights and duties, instead of this corrupt place with its attitude of ‘I don’t give a damn.’ Furthermore, I detest soldiers, I didn’t even do my military service. When I was eighteen, it was still required, you still had to give a year of your life to Italy. But I don’t want to pass myself off as someone I’m not: I wasn’t a conscientious objector either, working for, I don’t know, Caritas; I didn’t do anything noble, like help the homeless, cook them hot meals or cure their scabies, or teach disadvantaged children. I just got a friend of my father’s to have me declared unfit for service. I imagine that in your eyes, I’m a slacker, a coward, a deserter. I’ve always tried to mind my own business and be happy, and I’ve succeeded, too. I’ve never paid much attention to the injustices of the world, to other people’s problems; my own were plenty. And the mere thought of putting on a uniform and saying ‘yes, sir,’ of obeying an order I don’t understand or don’t agree with, of shooting, killing, even if only in self-defense, goes against my conscience.”

  “I see I’ve gotten myself into a real mess,” Manuela laughs. But strangely she isn’t offended. In fact, the more he finds her life absurd or incomprehensible, the more she wants to defend it. It’s precisely when she’s faced with someone who deems her life pointless or misguided that it makes the most sense to her. “It’s cold in here,” she says. “Don’t you have heat in your room?”

  The key to room 302 is a silver-plated metal plaque, the same size as the one that holds together the bones in her knee. The elevator’s busy, the cleaning staff are moving trolleys around. So they take the stairs, their footsteps muffled by the threadbare red carpet as they climb from floor to floor without stopping, Manuela maneuvering her crutches and gazing at Mattia’s wide back, his bare neck, his ruffled hair thinning on top. His shoes are new, the leather soles still smooth, not even a scratch. There’s something helpless about that purity. He closes the door without making a sound.

  * * *

  A ray of light suddenly pierces the lowered shutters and casts a bright line on the comforter. A streetlamp has come on outside, along the promenade. Manuela, lying on the bed, her head on Mattia’s chest, has lost all sense of time, and is amazed that it’s evening already. She should go, she left the house saying she was going down to the beach for her usual walk to the Tahiti, and her mother has undoubtedly started to worry. But she doesn’t move. The walls of the room begin to emerge again confusedly from the shadows, the rectangle of the window, the bathroom door, which was left ajar, Mattia’s shoes, upside down on the mat, her crutches across the chair. Room 302 of the Bellavista Hotel is furnished with that functional impersonality common to every three-star Italian hotel. The double bed is jammed between two nightstands made of mahogany-colored plywood, Mattia’s balled-up underpants tossed on the one on the left. The mattress, a little soft, dips in the center, tumbling them into a cozy pocket and forcing them to sleep on top of each other. The walls are painted a soft blue. On the other side of the room hangs a black-and-white print of the Lazio coast in 1910, with the Palo Castle and three fishing boats on the shore. The only things on the desk are a computer, an ashtray, and yesterday’s paper. On the 1980s armchair near the bedside lamp are their clothes, removed in a hurry and tangled in a colorful heap. Manuela doesn’t see a suitcase. In the half-open closet hang a gray wool suit and a pair of jeans, as if Mattia were only staying for a few days.

  Mattia fusses with the phone, but he can’t make out the numbers. He turns on the light. Manuela was the one who had turned it off. She had begged him not to look at her. Because of the red scars that disfigure her leg. But also because of her soldierly modesty. Her habit of treating her body like an instrument, one that must be kept running efficiently, but that must also be handled with care. To be trained, protected, and, above all, used only for indispensable tasks. Mattia presses 9, reception, and orders room service, dinner at nine. Spaghetti with clams and a bottle of Fiano. “But I have to go,” Manuela protests, “I’m leaving right now.” “If you want,” Mattia says, and turns out the light.

  She doesn’t leave, and they start again. The first time it happened too fast, impassioned clutching interrupted by unpoetic words of prevention and precaution, a belated shyness because they don’t have any condoms and the pharmacy in the piazza is closed for vacation—but by then it was too late to stop, best just to trust her good luck, his prudence, or simply destiny, a collision of tongues, elbows, knees, and bones, the other’s body like a strange mechanism. “I want to be on top,” she whispers, embarrassed, because she’s too shy to tell him she can’t strain the vertebrae in her neck. But even that position is complicated because she can’t bend her knee or ankle, and in the end she clings to the headboard, one leg dangling off the bed. Too uncomfortable a position to free her mind of thoughts. The second time they go as slowly as they want. “I’m sorry, it’s hard for me to move,” she whispers, “I’m all broken and they put me back together with superglue. If I twist the wrong way I’m afraid I’ll fall to pieces. I even cracked my epistropheus.” Mattia says that epistropheus is too sweet-sounding a word to describe something awful. “I hate it, though,” she says.

  She discovered the existence of the word epistropheus at the base, one evening in spring. “Sergeant,” Puddu had asked politely, “what’s the epistropheus in the human body?” “I don’t have the faintest clue,” she had answered, barely lifting her head from the book that First Lieutenant Russo had lent her. Written by an Englishman who had traveled across Afghanistan in the 1930s. All the author was interested in was architecture, and even though he claimed to appreciate the dignity of the Afghani people, their self-confidence, their proud detachment from western culture, and their dramatic fierceness, he described them as comical, as basically ridiculous. She was having trouble getting through it. Once, back in Italy, before she deployed, she had been told she shouldn’t take part in a colonial war. Italians should be the first among the last rather than becoming the last among the first, and sharing in their colonialist disdain. A people of emigrants, peasants, and workers couldn’t ape Bush’s imperialism. Among the many objections that people raised, this was the most hurtful. Her book propped on her dinner tray at the mess hall, she was trying to carve out some space for herself, get some distance. “But you passed the NCO exam, the questions haven’t changed,” Puddu insisted. “It’s number twenty-five in the study booklet. The choices are: a vertebra, a gland, a pathology, an excess of sugar in the blood.” “I really don’t know, Owl,” she said. The correct answer, given in the back, was A: the epistropheus is a vertebra. It was a tough question, worth four points. The author of the manual explained that the human neck contains seven vertebrae: the first, the atlas or C1, supports the head; the second, the epistropheus or axis, allows the head to rotate and incline. “So it’s this one,” Zandonà said, resting his dusty fingers on the nape of her neck. He lightly touched her seven cervical vertebrae, barely perceptible beneath her T-shirt. “What the hell are you doing, are you high?” she said, brushing his hand away. “Seven, like musical notes,” Nail said lyrically. “I could play you like a piano. The epistropheus is the second note, D. You’re a symphony in D minor, Sergeant.”

  The second time she heard the word was in a hospital bed in Farah. The radiologist was showing the orthopedist an X-ray of her spinal column: there was some problem with her epistropheu
s. The doctors debated the issue out loud, sure she either wasn’t listening or wouldn’t know what they were talking about. No, not my vertebra! My leg, okay, but not my C2, please don’t let it be my C2. The thoracic, lumbar, and sacral vertebrae are important, too, but the cervical vertebrae are essential. You can’t move your legs or arms if they’re damaged. You can’t even breathe naturally. Terrified, she tried to stand up. But she couldn’t even lift a finger. Epistropheus. Correct answer, four points. “Am I paralyzed?” she screamed. The violence of her voice surprised her as much as it did the doctors. She had come out of a coma less than two days before. Epistropheus. The doctors looked at her in awe but didn’t answer. Her epistropheus had only a very minor crack, but it took three months to heal. Three months immobilized in a military hospital bed, with that word stuck in her head. She hates the word epistropheus. Some words you just can’t forgive.

  “I’ll go slowly,” Mattia whispers. He rests his fingers right on her epistropheus, as if he already knew what it was. But the feel of his fingertips on her sensitive skin is so stimulating that Manuela doesn’t mind. He caresses her, explores her gently, almost in awe, with his fingers and lips, he sucks her and tastes her inch by inch—all down her spine, her seven cervical vertebrae, her ribs, the secret architecture of her bones, the constellations of her moles, her dark downy hair. And then every fold, every cavity. The religious devotion with which he explores her reveals a true veneration of the female body. He knows what to look for, and how. He must have had a lot of women, and loved several of them passionately, but just then the idea doesn’t upset her. In fact, it means he has put his forty years to good use. Something melts inside her. It takes a few minutes for her to realize that the guttural, bestial whine echoing throughout the room is coming from her throat. Ashamed of making noise, she buries her face in the pillow.

  Afterward, as they wash off sweat and semen in the shower, Mattia says she didn’t have to stifle herself, the neighboring rooms are empty. He’s the only guest in the entire hotel today. The whole Bellavista is his. There was an agricultural machine rep here yesterday, but he’s already gone. He saw the guest book. Vacant, completely vacant. But tomorrow, unfortunately, the restaurant is throwing a New Year’s Eve party. If they want peace and quiet they’ll have to find somewhere else to go. It occurs to Manuela that they could go to Passo Oscuro, to her grandfather’s cottage. Then she bites her lip because she promised Vanessa to go there with her. And even though she hasn’t said anything yet, she has already betrayed her. While Mattia dries himself off in the bathroom, Manuela tiptoes over to his pants, which he left on the chair. She looks for his wallet, because she feels she now has the right to know who is this man whom she has allowed to know her so intimately.

  She hasn’t had a lot of experience—at least not much pleasurable experience. Before Mattia, she’d only slept with her boyfriend, Giovanni, and a dozen or so guys whose faces she can’t even remember, guys she met before she was subject to military ethics. Quick couplings—in changing cabins at the beach, in the bathroom at a club, in single beds in tiny rooms still decorated for a child, on the front seat of a car, with the gear stick jabbing into her thigh and her back pressed up against the dashboard. She recorded each one in a notebook, grading their performance. More than anything, it was a way of taking possession of the world, of exploring and subduing it, a human geography, a comparative anatomy. She remembers only one name, a last name—that of a lanky retiree from Arkansas with a baseball cap, in shorts that showed his toothpick legs, and white sneakers: one of the guys from the cruise ships. Brandishing her red umbrella, she had accompanied her group to the catacombs, but then Mr. Garret—that’s what was written on the plasticized name tag he wore on his T-shirt—started feeling sick, or at least that’s what he said, and she had accompanied him back to the ship, which was anchored at Civitavecchia. She found herself in his cabin, then in his bed. The ship was empty, even the sailors had gone ashore. Mr. Garret was at least fifty years older than her. It was to him that she owed her first multiple orgasm and the discovery of the existence of her clitoris.

  Only once did she make the mistake of going with a fellow soldier, whom she’d met during summer training in the Dolomites. A laconic Alpino with a lumberjack beard. Between orienteering training and a march with a full pack, an attraction was born. They’d done it—rather brutally—in a pine forest, in the dark, on a tent tarp. The grass, the thistles, his beard—all pricked her like nettles. The rocks grated her skin. She had scratches and bruises for days. Afterward, she was so ashamed that she never spoke to him again. She was afraid of ending up like so many other women who had lost their careers and the group’s respect, those sly, devious types she had always despised and who reflect poorly on all the other women. Some guys would record those fucks on their cell phones to show their buddies, would boast about them for months. Fortunately her lumberjack was a rugged Alpino, an honorable mountain man, old-fashioned, mute. He kept the memory of Manuela Paris’s body stretched out on the tarp, her camouflage pants rolled down to her ankles, and her timid breasts naked in the moonlight, to himself. He got assigned to another regiment and she never saw him again.

  Still, it was never like this before, not with Giovanni or Mr. Garret or the lumberjack. Some corner of her brain had always remained conscious, aware of her surroundings, her body, her secrets, her possibilities. She had never let herself go before, never given herself up to someone else—to herself—as she had with the guest at the Bellavista. But there was no wallet or ID or anything in Mattia’s pants pockets, only a two-euro coin.

  “The fax says I have to go to Rome tomorrow morning, I’ve been called in for a work meeting,” Mattia says calmly, as if searching his pockets was a completely logical thing to do. “I’ll be back around two. So don’t make any plans, I won’t either.” “I’m sorry,” Manuela mumbles. “It’s fine,” Mattia smiles. He comes closer. He’s still naked and his chest hairs glisten with water. There are teeth marks, ruddy and fresh, right on his breast. She doesn’t remember biting him. “I told you what really matters to me,” Manuela says. “Now you have to tell me.” “Right this minute, nothing matters to me except you,” Mattia responds. “Don’t lie to me,” Manuela pleads. “I can’t stand it. If you don’t want to answer, then don’t, but don’t make fun of me. It’s so disrespectful I just can’t stand it.” “I know you don’t believe me,” Mattia says, “but it’s true. You’re all I need. Wherever you are is everything for me.”

  * * *

  The waiter knocks twice but then comes in right away, without waiting for an answer. He avoids looking at them—she draped awkwardly in the curtain, he naked, indifferent, and standing casually in the center of the room—and sets the dinner tray on the nightstand. Manuela informs her mother that she’ll be having dinner out. The phone call lasts all of nine seconds, so her mother doesn’t have time to ask questions. She doesn’t want to get dressed, so she doesn’t. For years she has hidden herself, all but erased herself in her uniform. There’s something revolutionary about being naked. As for him, he must be used to it. It doesn’t even cross his mind to cover up. He’s comfortable in his skin, he’s not ashamed of others’ eyes on him, he likes himself, or he’s at least reconciled to himself. Maybe it’s his age. Maybe at forty people stop expecting to be better, stop suffering because they don’t look the way they’d like to, and simply accept themselves as they are. She may never know. She never thought she’d live to be forty. They wrap themselves up in the comforter and move the plates to the bed. While they pick at the clams, slurp down the spaghetti, and slowly empty the bottle of wine, Mattia tells her that he has never been to Afghanistan, and at this point he never will. But it’s a place that has always drawn him like a magnet.

  His father was strict and conservative. He was a surgeon, the head physician in the hospital in his hometown. Entirely devoted to his work, always absent, uninvolved in his children’s lives. He never could have imagined that his father, so committed to making money a
nd toeing the line, had once been a nut who hitchhiked all over the world. After he got married, did his residency, had kids, and made a name for himself, all that remained of his travels were a few exotic words, a few incongruous objects in the bourgeois living room of their apartment (a Kurdish amulet, a sitar, a narghile) and an encyclopedia from 1974, even though by then all he cared about was his career as a surgeon at the public hospital. He never read; he wasn’t interested in books. All he talked about were medical conferences and golf. But every once in a while, on those rare evenings he spent at home, his son would catch him flipping through that encyclopedia. It made Mattia curious, too. He picked up the first volume and couldn’t put it down. He read the whole thing, from A to Z.

  The encyclopedia was called Peoples of the Earth. Twenty or so hardcover volumes bound in white cloth. All about the habits and customs of the most bizarre peoples on earth. The Padaung in Burma, whose women elongate their necks with gold rings, the Bushmen, the Fulan, the Nuba, the Indios tribes in the Amazon, the Maori. Complete with color photographs of women whose bottom lips are deformed by disks as big as plates, of Siberians in the taiga, of Eskimos on the polar ice cap, of pygmies in the forest, of bare-breasted Polynesian women in the lagoon. But the photographs that intrigued him the most were of Afghanistan. A country closed for centuries to foreigners, who were allowed to venture there only during brief windows of time in the 1920s and 1930s and again in the 1960s and 1970s. Photographs of mountains as sharp as knives, the crests adorned with snow; thirsty hills; prehistoric-looking villages clinging to the edge of a cliff; caravans of nomads and camels crossing the desert; proud, wild warriors in boundless landscapes. But the most surprising photograph of all was of a dead goat. Its carcass, rather: decapitated, gutted, stuffed, and blown up like a balloon. Men on horseback were using it like a ball. The caption explained that this was the ancient national sport of Afghanistan, played only by noblemen. It was a violent game without rules, in which the goal was to gain possession of the carcass—or what remained of it—by the end of the game. A sport, but also a metaphor for the war that simmered constantly between rebel tribes in the highlands, among people who—finding themselves first at the crossroads of important caravan routes and then of powerful empires—were constantly invaded and conquered, trampled and beaten like that goat; yet they never let themselves be defeated. The principal characteristics of the Afghani people were a disregard for danger and a love of liberty. Mattia was young then, intolerant of everything, authority above all, and he sided with the rebels, whether they were Sandinistas or African activists like Biko. And so Afghanistan was at the top of his list of countries to visit when he had the money to travel. Those impassable, uncharted mountains would have given him the chance to forge new mountain trails, to become famous even. But then there was the war, the mujahedin against the Soviets, and he had to wait until it ended. But it never did. It was followed by the civil war among the mujahedin, then by the Taliban, then the Americans against the Taliban, then ISAF, or whatever the “coalition of the willing” was called. So he could never go. Now Afghanistan was as hard to get to as Mars. “You’ve been there. You’ve lived there, spilled your blood there, left behind a part of yourself. It’s like you’ve come from outer space. A messenger. Tell me about it. Take me to Afghanistan.”