Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  He was in a jeep with his captain, they were racing to the Kabul airport because they had to pick up some minister or undersecretary, he couldn’t remember exactly who anymore, but anyway, some important politician. But there’d been some sort of hitch and they were late. So they were flying, the wind whirling through the open window. It had been a really good tour, he felt satisfied both professionally and personally. And at a certain point the lamb appeared. A tiny ball of white wool gamboling on the edge of the road. Hey, they both thought, there must be a flock beyond that hill. They were happy, because it meant that the people who lived in the valley had returned and were going back to their lives. The whole area was mined, there were still red marks on the rocks along the road and in the surrounding fields to highlight the danger.

  The kid ran across the road without looking, hurling himself after the lamb. There wasn’t even time to brake. They were going too fast. The impact was tremendous. The jeep came to a stop a hundred yards farther on. The kid had been flung into the minefield on the side of the road. Diego and the captain looked each other in the eye and then, without asking permission, Diego ventured into the field. Step by step, trying to weigh less than a lamb, to be all but immaterial. The kid was still breathing, but he had lost consciousness and blood trickled from his ear. He had brown hair and golden skin, his feet were bare. Diego took him in his arms.

  “I didn’t see him, sir,” the driver babbled. The captain took the boy’s pulse: it was faint, but still there. He called for medics, and for twenty interminable minutes, stopped on the side of the road, next to a minefield, they waited in a primordial silence for another vehicle to arrive. The mountains all around spread a cold shadow over them. But then they had to race to the airport, because in the meantime the minister or undersecretary or whoever it was had landed, and there was no one to welcome him, and he was furious, and headquarters was bombarding them with phone calls, threatening retaliation: the driver could forget about reenlisting, and the captain would be sent to the middle of nowhere, to some barracks in Friuli, to count stones on the Carso. Neither the driver nor the captain ever found out what happened to the boy. When, that evening, they asked for news, they were assured that he’d been taken to the American hospital, that everything was fine. Neither driver nor captain were held responsible for the unfortunate accident. But the heart doesn’t let itself be fooled, and his heart said right away that the boy couldn’t possibly have survived.

  They waited on the edge of that road, and little by little the boy’s face turned to chalk, his lips drained of blood. As he told the story, the Gladiator’s eyes glistened. At the time his assignment was driver. He was the driver of that damn jeep. “It wasn’t your fault, man,” Lorenzo said, slapping him on the shoulder. “I know,” Diego replied, “but I’ll carry that boy in my heart forever. I came back to settle my debt,” he whispered. And then he started to cry. He collapsed all of a sudden, sobbing. If something is too hard, in the end it will break. Lorenzo and I, sitting at the entrance to the tent, enveloped Diego in a hug that tasted of dust. “Thank you, brothers,” he stammered, “thank you.”

  * * *

  When the helicopter lifted off and took the guys destined for Dubai away, I presented myself in the captain’s office and placed myself at the company’s disposal for the time Pegasus was off duty. Paggiarin grumbled that he intended to assign me to CIMIC duty for those ninety-six hours. I could fill out forms for First Lieutenant Russo. Among other things, Russo was overseeing the reconstruction of the girls’ school in Qal’a-i-Shakhrak. He had to check on suppliers and manpower, like a contractor. His work was nothing like mine. But I could expedite the mass of bureaucratic paper he was buried under. At that particular moment, everyone was indispensable; there was a lot to do. Patrols were going out day and night, searching one village after another. But the tumult and hostile activity were increasing: the Afghan police had suffered two attacks, and a checkpoint our combat engineers had just built had been blown up the night before. Operations were behind schedule, meetings with village chiefs turned into tea-drinking sessions, filled with smiles and enervating chats that concealed increasingly unreasonable requests and complaints that the promised electricity had not arrived, that the well water was contaminated by sewage, that the bridge had not been built, and Paggiarin, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, shuddered, trying in vain to decipher his interlocutors’ actual intentions while they fingered their prayer beads, their expressions impenetrable. He would make promises. And then when PSYOPS would call from Herat, to ask what good news regarding the Italians’ activities they should print on the flyers to be distributed to the local population, it was all he could do to keep from swearing.

  Furthermore, an assailant dressed as a police officer had killed the police superintendent of Jawza, whom the captain trusted more than all the others put together. He was his mediator, his ear, and—in practice—his best ally. He was the one who had tipped intelligence off about Mullah Wallid; he was the one who gathered reports on IEDs that were supposed to blow us up. When I reported to Paggiarin, he had just returned from paying his last respects to his unfortunate colleague. The police station was deserted, the agents had disappeared. The commissary’s body, burned and horribly lacerated, had not even been removed: it lay in a puddle of blood in front of what remained of the building. “He protected you! Shit, shit, shit!” Paggiarin started yelling in his perfect English. There weren’t any Afghanis there, only the soldiers who escorted him.

  Work languished. Hardly a quick win. Operation Reawakening was very far from reaching its objective, and they couldn’t afford to lose a single day. Failure was unthinkable. “Ninth Company will not return to Italy without extending that damn bubble to twenty kilometers by the middle of June,” Paggiarin declared. “And it will inaugurate the girls’ school at Qal’a-i-Shakhrak even if I have to make the Alpini lay the bricks themselves.” “They’re all positive signs,” I pointed out. “They attack us because they recognize our successes, because our activities have complicated things for them, because they feel defeated.” Paggiarin gave me a glazed-over look. Yet all I had done was say what he’d been repeating to me every morning for almost five months. The men called Paggiarin the Skinny Buddha because he always wore an angelic smile and he never lost his cool. But he’d lost it that morning. He’d even let slip a four-letter word. The situation had to be more complicated than he was willing to admit.

  I ran into Diego on my way back to my container. He was headed to the showers—bare chest, flip-flops, a towel over his shoulder. “You’re still here, Spaniard!” I exclaimed with surprise. “They wouldn’t let her leave,” he said quickly. He didn’t want to talk. “Risk of miscarriage, she’s not allowed to fly, she has to stay in bed. I tried trading places with Nail, but they wouldn’t let him. What was I going to do in Dubai without Imma?” “I’m sorry,” I said. Then, to cheer him up, I added, “Come on, don’t be depressed, a hundred and ten days down, only seventy left.” “It’s bad luck to count how many days till the end,” Diego said.

  Embarrassed, I studied the colored tattoos that studded his skin. A dragon. A cross. A rose. They were really big. Usually his T-shirt hid them, but some were still visible. Regulations prohibited tattoos. Captain Paggiarin hated them. For him, they were something convicts get. He didn’t allow tattooed soldiers in Ninth Company. No exceptions. I’d had to have the sword I’d had tattooed on my neck at fifteen lasered off, or else he never would have accepted me. If he’d seen Diego like this, he would have thrown him out. Paggiarin was capable of depriving himself of an excellent soldier in order to enforce his moral code. Everyone has their prejudices. I let Diego know, and I wrapped the towel around his neck to hide his tattoos, at least until he got to the showers. Paggiarin was wandering around back there, nervous and burning with rage because they’d killed the superintendent at Jawza and because he had let the soldiers see him lose control. But nothing seemed to matter to Diego anymore. “It’s clear I was supposed to stay close to
you,” he said suggestively as he headed to the showers. He turned around and smiled at me. “I’ll never leave you again, Mulan.”

  14

  LIVE

  Once it crosses the canal, the road heading north runs parallel to the sea. The city peters out gently. Apartment buildings become elegant three-story homes, campgrounds, marinas, camper van storage lots, and finally a fragile strip of ash-colored dunes hemmed in by a wooden fence. Faded signs caution that this is a protected area, a nature preserve, the Torre Flavia wetland. A sandy path runs along the ponds and disappears among the reeds. Just a few steps inside and it already feels like you’re at the end of the world, even though cars whiz by behind the marsh and Piazza della Vittoria is only a few miles away. A sign nailed to the fence informs visitors that it is prohibited to step off the walkways, trample the dunes, let dogs off their leashes, harvest sea lilies, or disturb the wild fauna. Mattia is surprised that such a place has survived the building speculation that devoured the rest of the coast, and wonders how much longer it will last. The pond is as crowded as a piazza, with hundreds, even thousands of birds: the water quivers, the reeds rustle, feathers flap, beaks emit powerful, shrill whistles, but Mattia doesn’t know birds and has no idea what species they are. They all look like ducks and herons to him. He vaguely recalls that in certain seasons they abandon their nests and fly away. Not just birds, actually. Bats, caribou, lemmings, toads, eels, even herrings migrate. Driven by a mysterious yet infallible instinct, they abandon everything, cross mountains, oceans, ice floes, entire continents, merely to reach a certain destination, reproduce, and die. Their lives revolve entirely around this movement.

  The migrating birds that dwell undisturbed among the reeds have stopped here on their eventful, exhausting journey in order to rest and regain their strength, protected and secure in this modest nature preserve. No one can riddle them with shot here. But wherever they’ve come from, and wherever they’re going, they’re just passing through. Mattia stops and stares at them lazing about in the brackish water. They’re so close, and so indifferent to Mattia and Manuela’s presence, so free of fears and suspicion, that he could almost touch them. Or throw a rock at them, or beat them with a stick. “That’s a pochard,” Manuela says, pointing to a small duck with red eyes intent on fishing tadpoles in the still waters. “It spends the winter here. And that’s a teal. You can tell by the green mark on its eyes, it looks like it’s blindfolded. That tiny one there is a sandpiper. There should be some dabchicks around, too, but they’re probably hiding, they’re really timid. The stilt plovers won’t get here until spring.” She points out the little white egret. Thin and aristocratic, it shakes its feather crest and advances on its slender black legs into the reed thicket, paying no attention to them. The birds keep preening themselves, and rooting around in the water with their beaks. Not even her voice startles them. They’re so trusting, so vulnerable, and Mattia is sorry. “Manuela,” he says, “I’m just passing through, too. But I don’t have a destination. I don’t know where I’m going.” But Manuela, hypnotized by the beautiful white egret, has already made it to the end of the walkway, and his voice doesn’t reach her.

  The sun is at its zenith, so there are only thin, shadowless silhouettes on the beach, beaten by a western wind. A few families, a couple with a dachshund, and in the water a reckless kite surfer in a wet suit who struggles with his lines, while his sail, swelled by the wind, jerks impatiently above him. Farther down, on a tongue of sand the breakwater protects in vain, the ruins of a tower seem to rise up from the sea. “That’s it,” Manuela says. “This is where I wanted to bring you.”

  The bombarded tower, broken, rent into two stumps, reminds her of the minaret at Qal’a-i-Shakhrak. That, too, was hit by a bomb, but it refused to fall, and months later it still pointed its broken finger at the sky, another piece crumbling with every windstorm. War had touched these shores, too, this beach, these dunes, this sand. “We have a glorious history, but we’re not very lucky,” Manuela says, “there’s almost nothing left. Think about it, Roman senators used to come here on vacation, Pompey’s villa was somewhere around here—Sallust’s, Murena’s, and Heliogabalus’s villas were here, too. Totila razed them all to the ground in 547. The barbarians didn’t leave even a wall standing. Then in the Middle Ages, the nobles who owned estates here built towers, castles, and fortified farmhouses. This tower was first Roman, then it became part of the coastal defense system, there was a garrison here, and cannons, until the 1800s.” “You sure know a lot,” Mattia jokes. “I’m a tour guide,” Manuela says flippantly.

  “I thought you were a sergeant!” he exclaims. “I was a tour guide in my first life,” she smiles. “After a year in the military, I was angry and disillusioned and didn’t reenlist. I found a job in Civitavecchia, at a travel agency that worked with the Mediterranean cruise lines. The qualifications for being a good tour guide, the owner told me when he hired me for a trial period, are: stamina, because you have to stand on your feet for hours, sometimes in the blazing sun; a warm presence; strong vocal cords, because you have to talk loudly; familiarity with other languages, to hold people’s attention, and to handle a group. Leadership skills, in other words. Basically, the same qualifications as an army officer. The only real difference is that ninety-five percent of tour guides are women, and it’s considered women’s work. The money’s lousy, and you’re paid by the hour, which means I didn’t earn a thing during the off season, but in exchange, the owner helped me pass the qualifying exam and get my license so I could register as an official guide. In Italy, you have to pay for a training course and to renew your license even just to be able to tell Chinese engineers who Michelangelo was. Anyway, my family couldn’t support me and I had to earn a living. Every Monday, tourists would disembark from the cruise ships at Civitavecchia and get bused to Rome. They had twelve hours to discover the capital, it was a really tight schedule: bathroom breaks, food breaks, cultural sites, one right after the other, all at a hellish, almost military pace. I had a whistle and a red umbrella to herd them along. I would escort my platoon to Saint Peter’s, the Sistine Chapel, the Roman Forum. I knew how to do it. I was born to lead people.”

  Mattia laughs. Manuela doesn’t add that she doesn’t like thinking back to that time. Those years are a gray parenthesis. She started seeing the industrial technology student, the one from the coatroom, Giovanni Bocca, who in the meantime had started studying engineering at the University of Rome. He’d go there every day, and slave over his books until late every night. On Saturdays they would go to a pub or the movies, go out dancing, or bowling, maybe; they would have sex in his parents’ bed on Wednesday nights, when they went out to play buraco. The Boccas’ bed smelled of stale foundation powder, and every now and then she’d find a tired white hair in the sheets. Giovanni liked oral sex; she preferred to have sex standing up. They compromised. As the months passed, she began to find her work depressing. The average age of the tourists—retirees from the Midwest, Saxony, Wales, Westphalia—was seventy-five. Many had trouble walking, some were in wheelchairs. Enthusiastic but ignorant—Barcelona the day before, Malta the day after—to them Rome was a stop like any other. The only things they really remembered were the spaghetti all’arrabbiata and the centurions with papier-mâché swords posing in front of the Coliseum. She prepared a little explanation in English for every monument, five minutes exactly—if she went on any longer their attention would wane, they’d start looking around with dead fish eyes, and besides, she couldn’t make them stand for too long. She would always say the same thing.

  Sometimes the ship wouldn’t set sail again until Tuesday afternoon, so she would take the tourists to the necropolis at Cerveteri. They had never even heard of the Etruscans, whom they took to be the Italian aborigines. They were disappointed when she revealed that their origins had not been determined definitively and that the most reliable theories—confirmed by DNA tests—held that the Etruscans were not native to Italy, were not the Italian redskins, but were i
n fact immigrants from the East, from Anatolia, from what today is Turkey, which the Catholic tourists associated with Ali Agca, the man who shot the pope, so in the end the Etruscans got no sympathy after all. Eventually she realized she had to give them the satisfaction of meeting a native, so when they asked her if she was Etruscan, she would say yes, all the inhabitants of Ladispoli, northern Lazio, and the Maremma had descended from the Etruscans, those native Italians, a mysterious people, who believed in esoteric rites and worshipped death. “Wow, amazing!” the tourists would exclaim, and, enraptured, they would snap her picture, without even asking her permission. Every Tuesday, when she left them by the side of their ships and watched them disappear up the escalators, pocketing the tip that the most liberal of the group would hand her with a huge smile, she would think: I can’t do this my whole life.

  So, after an infinity of catacombs, Coliseums, and Sistine Chapels, after becoming an expert in gerontology, she applied to take the entrance exam for the NCO Academy in Viterbo. She was over twenty-two now, which was the cutoff for the Modena Academy. And besides, she didn’t want to repeat that experience. She had developed a secret aversion for commissioned officers: their polished manners, their way of speaking, their privileges, their education, their degrees, their bourgeois backgrounds. They were too different from her, and she no longer wanted to become like them. Viterbo received thirty thousand applications for eighty-two spots. Having already volunteered for a year, she got one more point than the civilian applicants, but she didn’t have much hope. There was no one to put in a good word for her. Her mother didn’t know anyone, and she didn’t know how to make connections. She didn’t tell anyone she was applying. She got 73 points on the initial exams. They called her in for more tests.

  During the psycho-behavioral test, she told some truths and some lies. But she distributed them better. The book that taught you how to pass the Armed Forces exams recommended presenting yourself as eager, tolerant, altruistic, willing to take orders and advice, and counseled against showing shyness, aggressive behavior, personality problems, or difficulty with interpersonal relationships. She wasn’t afraid of failing, because she already had a job, which no one could take away from her. She replied confidently to the questions about self-esteem, and when the examiner made her draw her family, she remembered to include her mother, father, sister, brother, and herself. The first time, she’d forgotten to draw her mother, and the examiner was surprised to learn that her mother was the one who had raised her, and that she had no relations with her father. She drew herself with hair, breasts, and feet. The time before—as hesitant as a child holding a pencil for the first time—she had drawn a genderless puppet with too small a head. A small head, she later read in the book, is a symptom of obsessive self-control; feet pointing in opposite directions reveal a disconnect with reality; and a stiff, poorly proportioned figure denotes anxiety, uncertainty, and conflict about one’s sexual orientation.