Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  If you cut the seed ball open with a knife, a milky white juice oozes out, which turns brown with contact with the air. It’s sticky, as thick as cream, and the smell goes to your head. The soldiers would talk about it when they thought the officers and NCOs couldn’t hear them. The peasants began the harvest in mid-April. Men, old people, and children moved through the fields, each with a knife in hand and a container hung around his neck. The soldiers could see, and they wondered how it worked. How that dark paste was transformed into opium and heroin. And where they refined the drug. But that one of them could think of buying it, or taking it, or smuggling it into Italy seemed impossible to me. We’d been living side by side for months, in such close quarters that we even knew how many times someone went to the shitter. Curcio had a brother who smoked heroin and had ended up in rehab, but you can’t suspect someone because of a relative. Nevertheless, I promised myself I would send him on patrol as soon as possible so I could inspect his kit.

  Then I remembered that one torrid night in May, Lorenzo told me about the time he’d overdosed on opium oil. It was so hot I couldn’t fall asleep. Neither could he. We were sitting in the sand. I could see the whites of his eyes gleaming in the dark. We’d never been this close before. We were playing a sort of game of truth or dare, telling each other the very worst things we’d ever done. The moments we were most ashamed about, and which all the same we couldn’t truly regret. I had told him about Mrs. Ferraris. I was still in middle school and was hanging out with the gang from the new apartment buildings. When spring came, it was as if the cage I’d felt trapped in all year opened. Instead of going to school, I’d pedal my bike along the shore, my textbooks in the basket and the wind in my hair, go for swims at the Torre Flavia beach. I’d been bragging to my friends about how I’d been going swimming since the end of March, and the colder the water, the more the others respected me. I had chronic bronchitis, I could spit mucus ten feet, blowing it out my lips. I was so good at forging my mother’s signature on my excuses—Cinzia Colella, with little circles over the i’s—that not even she would have noticed the difference. On the days I skipped school, I’d wander around Ladispoli with a short, stocky kid with curly hair, whose nickname was Pitbull. He would tease the boys and make the girls fall in love with him. He made fun of the weak and timid kids in our group, calling them lice and making a show of humiliating them. Whoever caved became his groupie and slave, scorned by everyone else. I was the kind who never held back. To show I wasn’t afraid of anything, I’d cross the highway on foot, from one lane to the next, climbing over cement guardrails, indifferent to the tractor trailers that blinded me by flashing their high beams. I drank an entire liter of wine (I vomited so much afterward, it might be the reason I later stopped drinking). I stole T-shirts from a clothing store and bottles of whiskey from a roadside diner, in plain view of the security cameras and the watchmen. One morning in April, Pitbull asked me to get Vanessa’s motor scooter because he wanted to buy a cell phone. I like to think now that I didn’t realize the connection between those two things, but the fact is I did and I didn’t say anything.

  I’d already been driving my sister’s scooter for a while, on the sly. Pitbull told me to circle around the market piazza, to maintain a good speed and not to brake. We went by the post office twice. “Keep going,” Pitbull said. I saw her first. She was crossing the street right on the white stripes, her blue leather purse dangling from her shoulder. She was slowed by age and the shopping bags she carried in both hands. As we pulled up alongside her, Pitbull shouted, “Gun it!” and so I did. I didn’t even turn around, I just kept my eyes on the road in front of me. But evidently he didn’t pull hard enough—lack of experience—or the leather strap was too resistant. The fact is, the old lady clung to her purse for a few feet and then took a disastrous fall, face-first, tomatoes, zucchini, and peppers rolling across the asphalt. I slalomed among the cars and fled along the promenade while passersby shouted and rushed to help the unfortunate woman. In the rearview mirror I could see a spot of red blood on the white crossing stripes.

  After we rounded a turn, Pitbull tossed the purse and had me drop him at his brother’s garage. He said he was sorry; the old lady was dressed well and seemed rich, but she had only fifty thousand lire in her wallet. He handed me two ten-thousand-lira bills. I told him I didn’t want them. I hadn’t done it for the money. He kissed me on the mouth and I bit his lip. I didn’t do it for him, either. I revved the engine and took off. The beach clubs were closed, so I hid between the beach huts. I was afraid these were my last hours of freedom. I was afraid of going to jail. Of all the buildings rising up in the distance, the jail was the one that always terrified me. I’d look the other way when we drove by. A strange thought came to me as I sat there, teeth chattering from cold and shock. That the incident wasn’t really what it seemed. I hadn’t dragged to the ground, injured, and maybe even killed an old lady: it had been me—the other Manuela, the real Manuela, the one still waiting to be born. I’d killed her. They’d come for me now, I’d be tried and locked up in that frightening building, and the warrior Manuela would never exist. I wept, huddled in a damp changing room that smelled of mold and salt. But time passed and no one came. So I calmed down. Maybe they wouldn’t find me. They hadn’t recognized me. Maybe I could still salvage my dream. I abandoned the motor scooter at the dump and set it on fire.

  When the police came looking for the owner of the blue Free motor scooter, my sister was shocked. She hadn’t ridden her scooter that day, she’d gone to school with her boyfriend, and he picked her up at eight. But the passersby had gotten the license plate, and it was hers. The police wanted to see it. Vanessa went down to the street with them, not worried in the least. It was a misunderstanding, it would all be cleared up. But her Free wasn’t parked downstairs. They searched for it all along the promenade, in case she’d forgotten exactly where she’d parked it. But they couldn’t find it. It had been stolen. “What happened?” Vanessa inquired, suspicious now. “Mrs. Ferraris got her purse snatched, she fell and hit her head. It was your motor scooter, and now it’s a real mess, because you didn’t report it as stolen,” the officer explained. “But what does it have to do with me?” Vanessa protested. “I was at school, ask my prof, she even quizzed me in class.”

  “Is she dead?” my mother got right to the point. Knowing how insurance companies work, she was afraid she’d have to pay damages. And she didn’t have any money, her account was always in the red. She avoided looking at me, perched on the edge of the couch pretending to watch the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful. At the time I was wild about Stephanie Forrester. My mother had guessed what had happened, she had a sixth sense about the trouble I got into. But she also had a powerful sense of clan, and she never would have turned her daughter in. My mother’s concept of justice was very malleable. Mrs. Ferraris. The name sizzled in my head. I knew her; she was the principal of my elementary school. A kind old lady, always smiling. I adored her as a child. She’d give you candy if you behaved. I would have liked her to be my grandmother. My real grandmother—Leda Colella, my mother’s mother—would smack me on the head so hard I was always afraid she’d knocked the sense out of me. “She broke her nose,” the officer said. My mother gave a sigh of relief and practically kicked them out of the house, accusing them of wasting her time. “It was you,” Vanessa hissed when we were alone. “You’re a devil, Manuela, you’re out of your mind. I’m not going to start spying on you, but you have to buy me a new motor scooter.” I denied it. I swore falsely on my mother’s life, my sister’s, even my own.

  “I couldn’t admit I helped Pitbull steal Mrs. Ferraris’s purse. It was too stupid a thing to do for the person I thought I was. I never fessed up. You’re the first person I’m telling this to. I ran into Mrs. Ferraris at the market in July. She had a sort of rubber mask on her nose. I was still afraid she would recognize me, so I stopped saying hello to her.

  “When exams were over, I enrolled in tourism school and stopped ha
nging out with my friends from the new apartment buildings. I would read war comics, watch soap operas on TV, listen to my sister’s romantic confessions while I helped henna her hair, but I was never able to right myself and turn my mistake into an opportunity, like my grandfather recommended. I lost track of Pitbull, but I acted just like him. I enjoyed tormenting the new girls at school, whom I considered weak and timid. I would worm money out of them; I’d force them to pay me to leave them alone, to write my papers for me, do my homework. The superintendent called me into her office and informed me that my bullying would no longer be tolerated. I didn’t deny it that time, in fact I behaved as if I didn’t care at all. The superintendent felt threatened. She was afraid I would slit her tires with a box cutter, and from then on she would park two blocks away from school. I was solitary, arrogant. I was about to lose myself, Lorenzo. But I didn’t. If I hadn’t broken Mrs. Ferraris’s nose when I was thirteen, I might not be who I am today.”

  “I was fifteen,” Lorenzo whispered, “I’ll never forget. We smoked this enormous pipe for half an hour—opium oil, a clear, harmless-looking liquid, it didn’t seem to do anything. Then all of a sudden I was flat on the floor. It was the most awful and most beautiful thing that had ever happened to me. I was dead for half an hour. Cold, frozen, completely numb. My friends wanted to dump me at the emergency room and disappear. I could hear them talking, I was totally conscious, in fact, my mind was a thousand times more expansive than before. I could hear and see everything. I could make out ants’ footsteps, hear the electric current crackling in the wires, and see what my friends were doing behind my back. But I couldn’t move. It was like I was suspended over my body, hovering a few feet above it, weightless. I moved through the air, drifting; I climbed the walls like a shadow, floated beneath the lamp like a cloud of smoke. Every barrier between my body, my mind, and the world had crumbled. I was both myself and everything. It was a beautiful feeling, Manuela, one of complete freedom. I would do anything to get it back, but I’ve never been able to. That’s when I understood what death is. Maybe that’s how it’ll be when we’re dead.”

  But so what, what did it mean? He smoked opium when he was fifteen. Adolescence is a time of experimentation, challenges, mistakes. I’d changed, maybe he had, too. I didn’t report him. I couldn’t and didn’t want to believe that Nail was involved in something like that. In spite of everything, he was a good soldier. And when he had to, he, too, picked up his rifle and fired.

  It could have been Schirru, though, an amiable slacker who had been counting the days till his departure ever since he arrived, and once I heard him theorize about the supremacy of black Afghan. Hashish, in other words. I could inspect his gear, maybe announce a bug extermination or a hygiene check as an excuse. But then I’d have to get the clinic involved. And explain everything to the military police, and that didn’t seem right. The other Alpini considered him a dead dog, and hoped they wouldn’t end up in the same squad as him. Even Venier shunned him. They had ostracized him, which already said it all.

  The next day when Ghaznavi hurried to the meeting with the Ghor province chief of police, who had come to Sollum for a briefing at headquarters, I didn’t let him out of my sight for an instant. Ghaznavi didn’t even deign to look at the soldiers. He passed them, walking beside Captain Paggiarin, translating in a low voice for the police chief. But the soldiers—all of them—kept their eyes glued on him. I had the feeling they shared some secret, and I shuddered. My eyes sought out Lorenzo. My little brother, my epigone. He was in the piazza, tinkering with a flooded Lince motor. Sand had corroded the gears. I read no malice in those clear eyes of his. Just curiosity. As if he merely wanted to understand what that bright, agitated little man was mumbling, his eyes fixed on his dusty shoes.

  Forgive me if I doubted you, Nail. If you are right, if death is like ODing on opium, you’re floating outside your body somewhere right now, maybe you’re close by, drifting like smoke, weightless, painless—free.

  * * *

  A few days after my conversation with Colonel Minotto, Ghaznavi, on his way from the infirmary, surprised me as I sat at the door to the hut, staring intently at the stars. Millions of them, emerging from the immenseness, nameless constellations in a darkness so complete, so pure, it was like a swath of velvet studded with incandescent embers. The Milky Way looked like the frothy wake of a ship. I’d always thought that only the sun and the moon lit up the sky. But that’s not true. In Afghanistan even the stars give off light, they can cast shadows. There were times, when all was quiet, not even a motor mumbling along the distant road, that the silence was so thick I could hear the sand rustle and the dunes crumble. Ghaznavi hesitated a second, then asked me if I knew what the Milky Way was. “It’s our galaxy, it’s where we are,” I answered coldly. “To us,” Ghaznavi smiled, “it’s the stardust that Mohammed’s horse Buraq kicked up when he crossed the sky on his way to Paradise.” I was afraid of being spied on, of someone noticing that we were talking, so I ignored him. Ghaznavi moved on, disappointed. His worn-out moccasins sank silently into the sand.

  At dawn I was in the watchtower, binoculars aimed at the mountain that overlooked the base. An intelligence report had indicated suspicious movement up there. Nearby, Ghaznavi was on his knees praying, his forehead pressed to his dusty rug. From a distance came the call of the muezzin, carried on the wind. The first light of day sketched the empty contours of the hills, and I had the feeling that this was the instant of creation, that the world was yet to be born. Sand and sky, peaks and valleys all seemed to be awaiting something. An unspoken, infinite potential. As if all was yet to begin. That was freedom.

  When I came down from the tower, I ran into Ghaznavi putting on his shoes and rolling up his rug. I couldn’t avoid him. “Perhaps you will be able to achieve what it is you desire,” he said with a smile. “This is what I wish for you. Sergeant Paris appreciates the voice of beauty, even though she doesn’t want anyone to know. But it is nothing to be ashamed of, it is a gift to be able to comprehend the poetry of the world. And Sergeant Paris has received that gift, even though she hasn’t realized it yet. But it is due neither to her merit nor to her fault. Unless something has been decided since the beginning of time, it cannot occur. The essential things are determined by destiny. To deny this is to limit the universe. Destiny can turn stones into water, and stars into dust.”

  I waved my hand in greeting and quickened my step. I didn’t tell him that the beauty of his country had swallowed me up, or that I thought I now knew how to listen to the voice of the sand, the sky, and the wind, nor did I ask him what he meant. I never spoke to him again. It grieves me now, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

  * * *

  Karim Ghaznavi—I learned in an article that Stefano sent me—was the last to be identified, because no relative had come forward to claim his remains. Which is why he was originally counted among the anonymous civilian victims. Besides, Ghaznavi probably wasn’t even his real name. To protect themselves and their families, the interpreters chose new names, known only to us inside the base. Not even their relatives always knew what they did. Only one extreme left-wing newspaper spoke of Ghaznavi. The other papers dedicated not a single line to him. Their accounts of Afghanistan were abstract narratives, situated in a country without people; a tragedy performed only by stock characters: savage Taliban fighters, oppressed and abused women, shahid—incorrectly called kamikaze—devoted to martyrdom, and nameless victims of bombings and other attacks. They were the incarnation of principles attributed to them by those who wrote about them, or who watched the tragedy from the audience—not actual individuals. They were a mass, they were numbers—and no one feels sorry for numbers. If anything, those numbers, which were constantly increasing—the count of civilian victims had tripled in recent years—were a source of embarrassment and horror.

  The person who wrote the article that mentioned Ghaznavi expressed a harsh, critical judgment of the mission and reflected bitterly on the fate of the interp
reter and—more generally—the Afghani people. These reflections hurt and offended me, even though I shared them to a certain extent. But the author transformed Ghaznavi into an anonymous symbol of the massacre: he’d never seen him. Only I could have written about that man, who was an individual with a past and a life story, with good qualities and bad, memories and dreams, like Lorenzo, like Diego, like Nicola Russo. But no one asked me, and after that meeting with Colonel Minotto, I ripped the pages where I’d written about him out of my diary and burned them, fearing that someone might read them and blame me for being kind to a man accused of a crime. I’m sure Ghaznavi would have forgiven me, because he, too, had known the bitterness of reducing to ashes words that were essential to him.

  Now the Professor exists only in a few scattered images in my head. The last one catches him a few seconds before the end. On June 8, Ghaznavi was working for Ninth Company headquarters, as always. Impeccable, sweaty, tired, with his dusty yellow moccasins and sad eyes. At the moment of the explosion he was standing next to First Lieutenant Russo, translating for him words that could have been essential or inconsequential, which now no one will ever know.