Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  “Are you thinking of moving here?” Vanessa tosses out as she empties her wineglass with a studied indifference. Manuela’s eyes sink into her lobster cannoli, she’d like to bury herself in them. Yet that question—which she never would have dared to pose—makes her heart race. She begins to fear she has forgotten every safeguard, every strategy, that she’s gone too far with him. So far that she wouldn’t know how to turn back. “I could live here,” Mattia replies. “I’m sure I could live here happily.”

  An hour and a half later, when even the peach soufflé with star anise and violets is nothing more than a pink shadow on their plates, Alessia starts getting restless and Cinzia, relieved, takes her to see the swimming pool. “I made a terrible impression on her,” Mattia observes. “Mamma really doted on Giovanni,” Vanessa says. “Manuela was supposed to marry him, I don’t know if she told you, Mamma wanted to see her married off, my mother and I don’t have any luck with men, we fall for the ones who can’t be trusted, but Manuela had this good kid, studious, serious, Mamma hoped she’d have a solid marriage, it’s better for soldiers not to divorce, they’re traditionalists, they still worry about those things, Mamma was really counting on it, and she still hasn’t accepted the fact that they broke up.” Manuela blushes with embarrassment, but Mattia doesn’t ask her about Giovanni. He’s very sure of himself. Or maybe he just doesn’t care. He smiles at her, relaxed, satisfied, calm, and all of a sudden Manuela suspects that he’s playing a part. That his excessive intimacy with Alessia, the idyll in the Garden of Eden, the official lunch with the family, that nonsense about street names, the conversation, the declaration of love for Ladispoli—that it’s all an act. Theater. Once the show is over and the curtain drops, the stage will be empty. Mattia has no intention of living in Ladispoli. He took the risk of meeting her mother because he knows he won’t have to see her again. She had offered him her confused heart and he accepted it, but he could just as easily throw it away tomorrow without even realizing it. A rage that she can neither repress nor control rises up inside her.

  Mattia is telling Vanessa, in his usual smug, slightly forced voice, that mothers usually like him. They find him reassuring, think he’s the ideal boyfriend. He’s sorry he’s disappointed so many of them. Evidently their mother is more shrewd. She’s right to suspect him, he can’t be trusted, just like the men Vanessa and Cinzia like. As he speaks, he gazes too attentively at Vanessa, and his blue eyes, the pupils encircled by contact lenses, gleam maliciously. For a second, Manuela has the impression she has unmasked him, and she hates him for it. She clenches her fists and crumbles her grissini onto the tablecloth. She needs air. She stands up so suddenly that the diligent waiter doesn’t have time to move her chair aside. It falls over loudly. “I’m going out to the terrace to smoke,” she informs him curtly. She intentionally bangs her crutches on the marble.

  Vanessa watches her leave, and when the glass door closes again, she bends over him, so close that her hair tickles his nose. She tells him that when Manuela went off to war—because that’s what it was—it became her job to defend her. “How?” Mattia asks. He tries to catch the waiter’s attention by raising his arm, because he’s afraid of Vanessa’s confidences. He doesn’t want to talk about Manuela with her. He doesn’t want to talk about Manuela with anyone. It’s all too new and fragile to sustain other people’s opinions. “I thought about my sister at least five times a day,” Vanessa explains, “I’d mentally review her gestures, her smile, the memories we share, the things she had said to me, her gait, her reserve, her determination, her idealism, her innocence. It was my way of enveloping her with my aura, because at the time I was convinced I had developed significant spiritual powers. Positive powers, I mean, like I could emanate goodness. In short, I watched over her in order to save and protect whatever of Manuela needed to be saved and protected. I kept her alive and true to herself. I knew that terrible things could happen over there, things that could change her, but I was trying to hold on to her real personality so I could give it back to her whole when she came home. But Manuela, the Manuela I tried to protect, still hasn’t come back.”

  Mattia doesn’t know what to say. He’s not sure he has quite understood what Vanessa means, but he doesn’t believe in these things anyway. No one can protect someone else, you can’t even protect yourself. No one preserved the best things in him. When the waiter comes to ask if they would like bitters, limoncello, grappa, herbal tea, Mattia tells him just to bring the check. Vanessa presses her hand in his. “Manuela still isn’t well,” she says, “I don’t know if you really understand how sick she is.” “Yes, I do,” Mattia says. “Listen to me,” Vanessa says, almost threateningly. “If you hurt her, I swear I’ll come find you, wherever you are, and I’ll make you regret it.”

  Mattia looks distractedly at the bill, without even checking the math. Vanessa is surprised when, despite the not insignificant sum, he pays in cash instead of with a credit card. The bills are new, smooth, intact. Mattia slips the money into the leather folder. “The last thing in the world I want,” he says almost sadly, “is to hurt Manuela.”

  * * *

  The Posta Vecchia restrooms smell of lavender. Enormous mirrors over the sinks. Stacks of pure white towels, the size of handkerchiefs. The four white doors are all ajar. No one’s there. Manuela fights the annoying but irresistible urge to cry. She doesn’t know what exactly she blames Mattia for. For having deceived her, or for simply having involved her. Because it’s as if she’s been under anesthesia all these months. Her indifference was her protection. And now it’s like she’s walking through hostile terrain without a bulletproof vest, exposed to every shot. It’s too much. She locks herself in the last stall, out of old habit, looking for a little privacy. In the barracks she learned how to control her bladder and pee without making a sound. You have to aim the jet at the porcelain, avoiding the pool of water. Years ago, she had been proud of her ability. It made her invisible, and therefore invulnerable. The liquid slides silently into the toilet. She can still do it. It seems she has forgotten everything about military life. All that’s left is this pathetic habit.

  She reaches for the toilet paper, but there’s none left. She swears, angry at not having noticed earlier. She hops toward her purse dangling on a hook, opens it, rummages around, but doesn’t have any tissues. She’s about to open the door and grab a strip from the next stall, when she senses a presence. A woman approaches in high heels, closes the door, the rustle of a skirt. Ever since Manuela came home, she’d been washing herself constantly. Hands, face, body. She feels dirty all the time. She can’t imagine simply pulling up her jeans and leaving, as if it were nothing. The immodest dripping in the next toilet. “Fuck it,” she whispers and cleans herself Afghani style, with her left hand, the impure hand. She stares blankly at her fingers.

  The woman flushes, the water gurgles down the drain, and it takes a second before she hears the strange sound coming from the next stall. A lament, a moan almost. She hesitates, then hurriedly washes her hands, dries them on a cloth towel, throws it in the wicker basket, and, her heels ticking, goes out into the atrium. Behind the closed door, someone is crying.

  Manuela has fallen between the toilet and the plywood wall, her good knee against her chest, the other leg stretched out on the floor, her hand pressed against the door. Her heart is racing. Her fingers leave bloody prints on the white wall. She keeps her eyes stubbornly closed. She can no longer stand the sight of blood. At the hospital she would faint whenever she had to have her blood drawn. And she threw up when the nurse passed her pushing a trolley of samples to be analyzed. She almost threw up at the discount butcher counter, distraught by all those plastic-wrapped cuts of meat and the acrid smell rising from the packets. She even worried she’d get sick when Alessia scratched herself in the woods. But now it’s even worse. It’s her own blood dripping from her fingers. She hasn’t gotten her period since that night in the Gulistan gorge, more than eight months ago.

  When she consulted with Li
eutenant Ghigo, she told her it was normal. It happens to a lot of women during a tour of duty, their bodies are transformed. It’s as if the brain sends the body a message. There’s no need to inhibit menstruation with some hormonal bomb. It simply disappears: the women become soldiers, nothing more. The doctor at the military hospital told her not to worry as well. It’s a result of trauma, he explained. When you’re feeling better, your period will start up again on its own. But she’s not feeling better at all. On the contrary, she’s having a meltdown, she can’t control anything anymore, she’s a heap of broken shards. Dumbfounded, she waits for who knows what, balled up in the bathroom of the Posta Vecchia, her heart pounding, her body bleeding, and her mouth tasting of rust.

  * * *

  She wants to go home with Vanessa in the Yaris. She says goodbye to him in the restaurant parking lot, kissing him coldly on the cheek. Mattia, surprised, just stands there next to his rental car, turning the key over in his fingers. Alessia presses her nose against the back window and waves goodbye. He hesitates, as big as a bear, stunned and shaken among the cars, the sun already setting. He seems lost. When he buzzes her apartment at six to ask if she wants to go for a walk on the beach, Vanessa tells him Manuela’s not home. She went to the doctor. She wasn’t feeling well and wanted to get a prescription for those stupid drops of hers. “Did I do something wrong?” he asks her hesitantly. “How should I know?” Vanessa replies. “Please tell her to call me when she gets back.”

  * * *

  She doesn’t call. She locks herself in her room, turns on the stereo, and after a long time, puts on a CD: This Is Resurrection, by Krysantemia, an Italian death metal group she discovered before deployment, which she took to Bala Bayak. The doleful voice of the singer and the obsessive torment of the drums helped her ease the tension. Serene Nicola Russo, who loved the rarefied melodies of Radiohead, had never been able to fathom how she could love that brutal, oppressive music, those strangled, cavernous voices that sounded like a pig being slaughtered, those lyrics that spoke of death, autopsies, insanity, cannibalism, and blood. The malicious names of her favorite groups were scary enough on their own: Amputation, Vader, Hades, Sadist, Deicide, Cryptopsy, Necrodeath. But that corrosive, blatant violence was useful. It was like it absorbed the no less brutal violence of the world and made it bearable.

  As the notes of “Hope in Torment” hammer her ears, she surfs the Internet—the Ministry of Defense website, for news from the theater of operations: a hospital was inaugurated in Shindand yesterday, the other day an attack on the Eighth Alpini Regiment was thwarted; an English-language Afghani newspaper site: a teacher in the province of Uruzgan was killed, the brother of a police officer hung, a checkpoint on the road to Gereshk destroyed. A Belgian filmmaker who shot a documentary on kites declared he didn’t have any problems at all in Kabul, except from the Americans when he picked up his equipment at the airport. Then she goes on Facebook, to Angelica Scianna’s page. Her profile still says “Single.” Angelica had posted a photo of herself in officer’s uniform standing next to a Mangusta helicopter. In some ways they look alike, both slender, as if they want the smallest surface areas possible exposed to the enemy. Angelica is pretty, strong, and free. Her twin sister. Manuela wanted to be like her, but Angelica had left her behind. She has two gold stars on her epaulet. She’s in Afghanistan. Lieutenant Scianna’s last post is about a return flight through the mountains during a snowstorm. White above, white below, white everywhere, snow on her windshield, almost out of fuel, emergency landing impossible, hostile region, fear of an ambush, low flying, adverse weather conditions, I did it, I’m still here! Enthusiastic comments, a shower of smiley-face emoticons. She would like to write something, but you can’t revive nostalgia. She’s lost her. As she hesitates, fingers hovering on the keyboard, it occurs to her that no, she wouldn’t want to be in her place. She wouldn’t want to fly a combat helicopter. She wouldn’t want to see Afghanistan from the sky, to consider the hills and streets and villages below her as threats and targets. But she’s disappointed in herself for thinking such a thing, a thought that does not belong to Manuela Paris. She hates herself for having conceived it.

  She rummages in her duffel and dumps the contents out on the floor. Her bags were sent to her from Afghanistan when her regiment rotated out. They followed her to the hospital and then home, but this is the first time she’s opened them. The mere sight of her duffel nauseates her. Things tumble out higgledy-piggledy, giving off the stale smell of dust. There’s the white-and-black kaffiyeh and the scarves she covered her hair with when she met with the village elders. Her prepaid Banana phone cards for calling Italy. The postcards she’d received from her cousin Claudio on vacation in Sharm, and the black-and-white ones of the Herat Citadel and the Jam minaret she’d bought from the son of the beggar woman who looked like her mother and who came to Sollum one cold day in January. The beggar woman’s name resurfaces intact from the past: Fatimeh. Her tattered diary. T-shirts, socks, a wad of dirty laundry. Fine pinkish yellow sand from the Farah desert falls from the pages of her diary, her clothes, and postcards, and filters onto the tile floor. A little bag of glass beads. She bought them for Vanessa, but forgot to give them to her. A pile of blue shards, once an elegant blown glass bottle that didn’t survive the turbulence of the C-130. And a blue-green rug, rolled up and wrapped in a dirty rag. All that remains of six months of her life. A few smelly objects ruined by the journey. Nothing came back whole. Nothing survived. Neither things nor ideas—no hopes or dreams or memories. Not even herself.

  19

  HOMEWORK

  I can’t find anything to blame myself for. I respected military ethics, or maybe just ethics in general. So did Diego. Still, I felt uncomfortable eating dinner with him in the mess tent. The thought of his son haunted him. Lots of thoughts haunted him. I couldn’t understand him. He was my friend, but I couldn’t understand him. Once when we were digging into a breakfast covered in stubborn desert flies, he asked me if I wanted to have children. I told him no. He didn’t believe me. “Don’t you wonder what your child would look like? When you hold him in your arms and you ask yourself, will I be able to raise him? How can I teach him things I don’t know?” I was quick to explain that I didn’t think about it at all, I didn’t feel cut out to be a mother.

  “What sort of logic is that?” Diego interrupted me. “You’re not born feeling cut out to be a mother or a father, you just do it. It happens. Imma and I, before I deployed, during those last three months of training, we never saw each other, and we only made love once. By the laws of probability it should have been fine. But it happened anyway. Now, when I think about it, I wish I’d never left the barracks. I wish I’d been more careful. I’m only twenty-six and I have a family to support.” I tried to convince him that he’d be a terrific father. “I know,” he answered, “I love my son already, more than anything. But I could have had a career. I’m the best, and you know it, and instead I took myself out of the running all by myself. I’ll never have the heart to leave them for another tour of duty.” “You’ve done plenty of them already,” I said, trying to downplay things. “You should be happy about that. Bosnia, Lebanon, Kosovo, you’ve been all over the place. They’ve gone to your head, all those tours of yours.” He told me I couldn’t understand. “You only really grow up when you have a child. You realize you’re mortal.”

  Time started moving more quickly. Paggiarin informed me that we had twelve hours to get ready: Lambda squad would leave on Saturday for the COP in Khurd, on the edge of the security bubble. It was the last week of May, twenty-five days till we went home, and Reawakening’s objective still hadn’t been reached. And I knew it.

  Just like its name said—khurd means “little”—the outpost was a hole, a stone pit protected by sandbags, not much more than a trench, dug during the night with a pick and shovel, carved into the top of a barren hill on the edge of the desert. When I saw it, it seemed anachronistic; it reminded me of the trenches on the Carso. I had studied
WWI defensive fortifications at Viterbo, never imagining I’d have to man one. But the Ninth had built several outposts like this one, laid out in a star shape around Sollum. Every time a section of land was cleared and secured, they’d build another one, farther out. The COPs were five kilometers from the base the first month, nine the second month, then thirteen. Khurd was at eighteen. The whole company was supposed to take turns, either in platoons or in teams of twenty or so, spending nine consecutive days at the COP, keeping watch on the mountains and the road below. There were Afghani soldiers there, too, separated from the Alpini by a wall. They communicated by shouting, in terrible English.

  Sometimes nothing happened there, and the only event worthy of note was the arrival of provisions, tossed from an airplane, so the team’s shift seemed like a survival course or a meditative retreat. The men came back sunburned, or battered by boredom, cold, or heat, and whether they’d seen God or minded their own business, they were happy to return to the Spartan civilization of the FOB. Other times they shot at you, from a hole just like ours, dug with a pickaxe on the opposite hill, a heap of white rocks gleaming in the sun. Light weapons, machine-gun fire, antitank rockets, even mortar fire. My Gamma team was lucky. Only flies bothered it.

  When I got there, all was calm. Once I’d coordinated the rotations, Spina asked me if I wanted to go back to Sollum with Gamma. He could stay with Lambda. Khurd hadn’t been designed for a woman. There wasn’t enough space to carve out separate quarters. He also told me that time never seemed to pass there. Keeping watch for an hour frayed your nerves more than a whole day driving around in a Lince because—for the first time in all those months—you knew those weren’t just ghosts in front of you. The rebels’ position was less than a kilometer away; the only thing that separated us was a gravel riverbed, which ran dry in the hot season. We could almost see them with the naked eye. The soldiers, on their cots, waited their turn to keep watch, and then time became an endless circle again. “I’ll stay,” I said. A commander who does not share the cold, the heat, the lousy food, the boredom, and the danger with her men isn’t a good leader. Spina laughed and said he knew it, he’d already had them put up a dividing curtain for me.