Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  The police arrive, sirens blaring. Not just one squad car, but three. Everyone settles down as soon as the boys in blue arrive, in fact, they’re amazed that someone called the cops: nothing happened, just a kids’ soccer game. An uncalled penalty. But parents and kids, the referee, managers, and coaches—all are in bad shape, covered in mud, rumpled, bruised. The goalie’s father is hurting and touching his ribs; he has the unsettling feeling that they’re out of place; he comforts his son, who is sobbing and eyeing with a look of sheer terror the crazy girl with the crutches; the madman’s lips are bloody and as swollen as sausages; Traian is still clutching the umbrella like a sword, as if he might need to use it at any moment; Mattia feels an unnatural tingling at the base of his neck and a sharp pain in his trachea, and Manuela kneels to pick up her crutches, amazed they’re no longer under her arms, amazed to find herself in the middle of the soccer field, amazed that she doesn’t have the slightest idea what happened, as if a switch had been turned off. The game is called.

  “Let’s get out of here, for heaven’s sake,” Mattia says, taking Manuela under the arm. But the police have closed the gate to the field and an officer is guarding the exit. He wants to identify the adults involved in this disgraceful brawl. There will be consequences. And not only for the players. The managers of the two teams try to downplay things; the parents, furious, defend their own children by accusing the others; they don’t want to show ID, they protest, swear. “She broke three of my teeth,” the madman sputters to a police officer trying to get an explanation of how it all happened, “that tall lady with the shaved head, the one who’s trying to slink off, she’s a crazy woman, dangerous, you should arrest her, I’m pressing charges.”

  “I have to go,” Mattia says, seized by an anxiety he can’t control, “I have to go, I have to go.” But Manuela’s not listening to him because Traian, tall Traian with an adult’s body and a boy’s heart, is crying so hard he can barely breathe. “It wasn’t a penalty,” he keeps repeating, “I didn’t even touch him. We were winning, only ten minutes left on the clock, the trophy was ours.” It’s the first major disappointment of his life.

  “ID, please,” a policeman orders. Mattia pretends not to have heard and tries to go around him and slip through the gate. “ID,” the officer insists. Harshly, because headquarters radioed in about a brawl that involved racial insults that had broken out on the soccer field just as he was about to go off duty, and he and his wife have to go to dinner at his in-laws’, out in the country, almost an hour’s drive, and he has to shower first, and now he’s going to be late, fucking hell. “I don’t have any on me,” Mattia says, forcing himself to sound convincing, “I went out without thinking, I wasn’t planning on coming to the game.” “I have to identify you,” the policeman says, opening his notebook. “First name.” “Mattia,” he says quietly. “Last name.” “I can explain,” Mattia whispers, “it’s an unusual situation.”

  “Last name,” the policeman repeats, annoyed at having to waste time on this guy dressed in Armani, who flashes his fifteen-thousand-dollar, white gold Rolex and seems completely out of place on a JV soccer field. “Rubino,” Mattia concedes. “Residence.” “Bellavista Hotel on the promenade, it’s named after some Savoia queen, Margherita, I think.” “Don’t mess with me,” the policeman hisses, “I need your actual home address—street, street number, city, zip code.” “I’m serious, Bellavista Hotel,” Mattia repeats. “Listen,” Manuela cuts in, waving her Armed Forces card under the policeman’s nose, “he’s with me, my brother’s on the Real Ladis team, this man had nothing to do with this, he didn’t hit anyone, he just tried to calm people down. I was the one who beat up that guy”—she points to the man with the plastic glasses—“but he wanted to beat up my brother, a twelve-year-old boy, and I couldn’t let that happen.” “She broke three of my teeth,” the madman blabbers as he comes over, “there are witnesses, she’s a crazy woman, she should be arrested, I’m pressing charges.”

  The policeman examines Sergeant Paris’s ID. It’s the girl from Afghanistan. He saw her on TV on Christmas Day. She’s cuter in person. Eyes like a gazelle. Fresh faced, so young. “I’m sorry,” he says to her, “but I have to record the particulars of everyone present, it’s my duty.” “Take mine,” Manuela says, “I threw myself into the fight, I went a little overboard. I have trouble controlling my aggression. Mr. Rubino doesn’t have anything to do with it, really. I’ll vouch for him. If anyone should be reported, it’s me.”

  Sergeant Paris who almost died at the ends of the earth. The police officer heard from a colleague’s cousin that a soldier deployed overseas earns maybe a hundred and thirty euros a day, which, multiplied by six months, comes to almost twenty-five thousand. Not bad. Then again, it’s only fair, otherwise, who’d even go? Why else would you agree to risk your life when you’re twenty? But, money or no, Paris put her life on the line, and almost lost it. Some people deserve respect. “If the people you attacked take action,” he advises her, “Mr. Rubino’s favorable testimony will be useful, so it’s to your advantage that he be recorded as present.” “I won’t need any testimony,” Manuela says, “I made a mistake, I take responsibility for my actions.”

  On their way back to the Audi, Mattia is silent, absorbed. He doesn’t know what to make of the woman who savagely beat a defenseless man with her crutch. He doesn’t like a woman who acts like that, and yet he likes her even more than before, because he confusedly intuits that wielding that crutch like a club has something to do with what happened to her, with an endless rage that she masks and that she lulls to sleep, but that in reality is eating her up inside, and he wants to fish her out of the sea of that rage, even though he’s the person least suited to do it.

  Manuela would like to erase that whole afternoon, the game, the umbrella, the goalie’s father, the madman, the crack of teeth beneath her knuckles, her all-consuming rage. She may have ended her military career right then and there in that small-town soccer field. That idiotic JV championship may have succeeded in killing Sergeant Paris, something even ten kilos of plastic explosive failed to do. She’s ashamed of having lost control, and yet feels relieved, euphoric even, as if pounding her crutch into that limp flesh and slamming her fist against a stranger’s teeth had freed her of a weight. She would never admit it, but she liked it.

  Ignoring Traian’s jealous glances, she leans her head on Mattia’s shoulder and tells him sweetly that Rubino is quite a name, should she think of him as someone precious? Mattia asks if she can drive with her injured leg. “Because I really don’t have my license on me,” Mattia says. But Manuela can’t drive: her right foot has been too badly injured. The malleolus, the astragalus, and the calcaneum have disintegrated; the hospital counted twenty-one bone fragments. The screws and titanium plates prevent her from pressing the accelerator. The whole way to Traian’s house, they both scan the edges of the road apprehensively, hoping they won’t run into a patrol car. He goes out without his ID, like a kid, Manuela is thinking. And he really does live at the Bellavista Hotel. He doesn’t like violence, he prefers to mind his own business, but he threw himself into the fray for Traian, in other words, for me. I don’t know the first thing about him.

  * * *

  Dinner at the pizzeria on the overpass with Traian and his mother has to substitute for the candlelight dinner on the Hilton Pergola’s panoramic terrace. After all that happened, Mattia didn’t feel like driving. He promises they’ll go to Rome sooner or later. But it’s best if he doesn’t go out too much. He can’t explain, but he has to stay at the Bellavista, or at least in the area. So far he’s been lucky, but no need to tempt fate. Manuela warns him that Traian’s mother is very lively and can seem aggressive. “Look who’s talking,” he says, and Manuela smiles.

  Teodora Gogean sizes Mattia up right away. Fifteen years on the men’s ward at the hospital have made her a kind of expert. All she has to do is feel someone’s handshake. She has an aversion to sweaty palms and limp grips. Manuela’s friend is a
vigorous man. And an experienced lover. He knows how to act, can play the role of the attentive boyfriend, but Teodora knows instinctively what he’s really like. By dint of emptying urinals, inserting catheters, removing intravenous needles, she’s learned to pick up vibrations from men’s bodies, intuit their desires, anticipate their whims. She’s amazed that Manuela has hooked up with someone like him. But then again, she needs to forget.

  She can’t swallow the fact that Traian let himself be dragged into a brawl. She reminds him on a daily basis that prejudice is a wall: if you want to end up on the other side, you have to dismantle it patiently, brick by brick. It takes years to construct an image of honesty and respectability, and only an hour to destroy it. Ever since she arrived in Italy, Teodora has borne every insult in silence, and she thought she’d taught him to do the same. But Traian isn’t about to take the blame. “All I did was defend myself,” he objects, burying his fork in the cheese of his pizza then lifting it to contemplate the stretchy white strings. “In a fight I follow the Italian rules of engagement: I don’t shoot first, but if they shoot, I defend myself, that’s how it works, right, Manù?” “Not exactly,” Manuela says, “first you have to judge very carefully who you have in front of you. A peacekeeping soldier can’t follow the old binary logic of war and separate everyone into enemies or friends. Sometimes the person shooting at you is both, and you have to gauge your response accordingly. And regardless, your reaction force has to be minimal, and proportional to the offense.” Traian shakes his head, unconvinced. Manuela lectures well, but she didn’t apply minimal force with the goalie’s father, and her actions weren’t at all proportional to the offense. But he doesn’t say anything, he would never betray his sister. And besides, he’s too proud of her. She flattened them, those assholes, both of them. What a sight. Manuela is better than Lara Croft.

  “If you get mixed up in something like this again, I’ll pull you off the team and that will be the end of your playing soccer,” Teodora concludes. “It’s not his fault,” Manuela tries to placate her; she feels guilty for having set such a negative example for her brother—but they did start it. “Don’t defend him, Manuela, he’s a savage, you have no idea how hard I try to teach him some values.” Traian lets out an irritated snort. Eating dinner with adults is so boring. “Do you have children, Mattia?” Teodora asks all of a sudden. “Manuela doesn’t realize they need authority figures, you spoil them if you always let them have their way.” “No,” Mattia says, and Manuela can’t decide if that is his opinion or his answer to her question. The waiter brings them their beer and the conversation shifts. Traian asks Mattia if he’s an officer in the navy. Somehow he’s gotten this idea. There are a ton of naval officers in the area, because of the port at Civitavecchia.

  “No, I’m not in the navy,” he is quick to make clear. “Air force, then?” There are a ton of air force officers around, too, the military airport is in Vigna di Valle, behind Lake Bracciano. “Nope.” “Good thing,” Traian exclaims. “We have a big rivalry with the navy and air force.” “Who’s we?” Mattia asks, surprised. “We, the army.” Traian is getting excited. “They think we’re all southerners, from Sardinia or Naples, they hate us. But we’re the best of the Armed Forces. I’m joining the Airborne Brigade when I’m eighteen, and putting on that deep red beret. Or I’ll become a commando, or an Alpino paratrooper. I don’t really care that much about soccer, I play just to beef up. You have to be a real athlete to get into special forces.” “Mattia’s not interested in this stuff,” Manuela says, “he’s not in the military.” “And you’re going out with him anyway?!” Traian chastizes her.

  Teodora and Mattia burst out laughing, but Traian’s supercilious stare silences them. “My sister helped capture Mullah Wallid, an insurgent who was hunted for months, who was responsible for acts of terrorism that caused the deaths of lots of innocent people,” he explains proudly. “There aren’t very many women who participate in assaults, you know, very few in fact, she’s doing you a real favor going out with you if you’re just a civilian.” “I guess I’m the only one here who doesn’t know about it!” Mattia observes, turning to Manuela. She’s blushing. She doesn’t feel like talking to him about her mission operations. She can guess what his opinion would be. Mattia seems to her one of those people who donate point five percent of their taxes to the most radical humanitarian organizations they can find. “I didn’t do anything special,” she says, playing things down. “And besides, it wasn’t an assault, we’re not special forces, we don’t do assaults. We’re just Alpini.”

  “Manuela’s company was involved in Operation Goat Four,” Traian says, as if Mattia would know the mission by name. “I realize I don’t understand much about your work, I thought you went to Afghanistan to distribute medicine to children,” says Mattia, who’s starting to get some vague idea of what Manuela is really capable of, and isn’t sure he wants to know more. “Well, sure,” she comments ironically, “we distributed medicine by the truckload. But the fact is, if you want to get the medicine to the people who need it, you have to take it to them, and in order to take it to them, you need a road, and to get a truck down a road, you have to keep that road clear, and to keep it clear and safe you have to search the nearby villages, and arrest whoever is manufacturing explosive devices, and patrol the intersections, and sometimes even have a combat helicopter clear the field of hostile elements.” “So you hunt insurgents?” Mattia blurts out. “It’s hardly a secret,” Manuela says. “The restrictions on our field of action that made us appear ridiculous to our allies were lifted. And anyway, in six months, my platoon only carried out one of these operations, fifteen weeks after our arrival in the theater of operations.” “Theater?” Mattia says. “The theater of operations is where you carry out your mission,” Traian explains. Mattia reflects that the military has a peculiar way of twisting language, but he doesn’t say so.

  “It was a routine operation, just a cordon and search,” Manuela downplays, using the English phrase. “Which means?” “It means surround and capture.” “Surround and capture”: to Mattia, it’s a sinister phrase, one that ought to be avoided. Maybe headquarters thinks the same thing, which is why they prefer to use the English. In an attempt to encrypt the code and make it incomprehensible to outsiders, the army—every army—uses a private language, a monosyllabic slang stuffed with acronyms and technical terms, euphemisms, and foreign words. “Basically,” Manuela explains, “you encircle a village, search the houses, or have the Afghani soldiers search them rather, because at this point they’re capable of doing it on their own, and whoever flees is blocked by the cordon of troops. That’s what we did, and we flushed out an insurgent.” She stops. So much time has passed. She’s not even sure she’s the same person who advanced in total darkness among the partially destroyed houses of Negroamaro. “It was a bloodless operation, we didn’t fire a shot, and I was hoping we wouldn’t have to.” But as she speaks she realizes that this is how she feels now, a thought of this moment, born in the overpass pizzeria, while looking into Traian’s excited face and Mattia’s myopic eyes, wide with astonishment, because he can’t seem to reconcile his Manuela, the girl who moans in his bed at the Bellavista, with the sergeant armed with night vision goggles and an automatic rifle who searched a remote Afghani village in the dead of night. In that moment she was ready; her hands didn’t shake. “They ambushed us on the way back, and we had to defend ourselves. That was my big action in Afghanistan. There’s nothing heroic about it. I didn’t kill anyone. I never killed anyone, Traian.”

  “Whatever happened to Mullah Wallid?” Teodora joins in. “I don’t know,” Manuela responds, “it wasn’t our duty to try him, we’re guests there, our job was to offer ANA support in the capture of the wanted individual.” “If he was an insurgent he was probably tortured until he revealed who subsidized him and then shot,” Mattia theorizes. “Not necessarily,” Manuela says. “A leader is worth more alive than he is dead. He might side with the government one day, you never kn
ow. Alliances are unstable, nothing lasts. And everything has a price. I learned not to ask myself what will happen when we pull out. To live day by day, and to do the right thing at the right time. I wouldn’t have been able to survive there otherwise.”

  * * *

  That night at the Bellavista, when he turns back the comforter and slides in bed, Mattia sees her scar. Manuela’s leg, slender and white, is visible between the rumpled sheets. She was too tired to wait up for him and has already fallen asleep. Instinctively he runs his fingertips along the wound. The hard, compact flesh is the color of blood. The edges are uneven, the line wavy and wandering. Her flesh, ripped apart by the shrapnel, has been stitched back together, but along the edges the skin is rippled, and little knots have formed, rough to the touch, like rope. A transparent membrane has formed where the epidermis was destroyed, as smooth as a baby’s skin, forever fragile. A hieroglyph of pain.

  He doesn’t want to wake her, and yet he can’t keep from bringing his lips to the scar and kissing it, from her knee to her ankle, following the painful hem of flesh. He shivers at the touch of her skin, as if it held the memory of the metal that had pierced her so deeply. “What are you doing?” she murmurs, feeling around for the sheets. The room is dim, and lines of light cut across the bed. “I’m listening to you,” he says.

  16

  HOMEWORK

  “We have a problem, Sergeant Paris,” Colonel Minotto said, as soon as I—sighing with relief—crossed the threshold of the command hut. June was suffocating. It was already 86°F at seven in the morning, and might reach 122°F by noon. The sun was an incandescent brass disk that burned in a cloudless sky for weeks, the heat turned our rifles red-hot, singed our hands, and cooked the soles of our boots. The glare seared our eyes, the dry air flayed our lips. It was hard to breathe, and agony to go outside in the daytime. Inside the sealed Lince we roasted like meat on the grill. During downtime I would gasp for air on my cot, or drag myself to the shower, where the refreshing water would make me shriek with delight, but it lasted only a second; after only a few steps toward my bunk I’d be drenched in sweat again. The tents and containers were cremation ovens, so hot that the day before, my thermometer exploded. The wind had kicked up—an obsessive, furious wind that the Afghanis call the sad-u-bist ruz, the 120-days wind. It had raged for five days and the weather report warned us that this was only a brief reprieve. It was sandstorm season in the Persian Gulf. The sad-u-bist ruz would calm down at night, but then it would pick up again, worse than before. It was like a tornado, but instead of forming a spiral turbine, it moved at ground level, like the hellish breath of a dragon. The earth had turned to dust; the sand inflamed our eyelids and scorched our lungs.