Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  The whole time mother and son waited in the infirmary, they didn’t utter a single word; didn’t answer even one of Manuela’s questions. As if they wanted to keep their contact to a minimum. Maybe they just didn’t understand her. Every now and then the woman coughed, hiding her mouth with a rust-colored rag. Manuela noted with disgust that she was spitting up blood.

  When Lieutenant Ghigo finally returned, Manuela left. As she was heading out of the infirmary, she felt a hard slap on her arm, and—surprised—she turned. The woman was whispering something to her. She pronounced the word two or three times, but Manuela didn’t understand, because she’d only been there a few weeks, she’d only left the FOB once, and that word wasn’t part of her meager vocabulary. The village patrols and the children’s insistent requests would teach her that the word meant “pen.” She must have asked for her son, because she, like ninety percent of Afghani women, was illiterate. When she opened her mouth, Manuela saw that she was missing three teeth. Her gums were inflamed, like those of an eighty-year-old. But she knew now that that worn-out old woman, devastated by tuberculosis, was her age. The boy said something to her in a reproachful tone, and Fatimeh lowered her head, bit her lip, and fell silent.

  Lieutenant Ghigo told her that the baby girl was very ill: she had a temperature of 102°F and had lost almost half her body weight. Visceral leishmaniasis. An infectious disease transmitted by sand flies that swarm on excrement. It destroys the internal organs, attacks the spleen, liver, and bone marrow, causes anemia and terrible hemorrhaging. It’s the disease of the world’s poor. She saved her just in time, one more day and there would have been nothing she could do. Ghigo said bitterly that Fatimeh never would have brought her to the FOB if she weren’t at death’s door. A child’s life is worth less than a dog’s. The hardness of these people is inconceivable. “But she brought her,” Manuela said. “Between the life of her child and the contempt of the community, she chose the life of her child, and that’s what matters. Fatimeh is a brave woman.”

  Fatimeh came back three more times to get the antimonials for her daughter’s treatment—but she refused to let herself be seen by the doctor. Manuela would see her walking in the dust, her head lowered. She avoided looking up. But twice Manuela intercepted her lively, intelligent eyes. Twice she smiled at her and twice Fatimeh gave her a half nod before quickly lowering her head again. Then she disappeared. Her relatives had not appreciated the fact that she had turned to the kafiri. Manuela would never have known any more of the baby girl’s fate had not the youngest of the interpreters, Shamshuddin, told Ghigo that the little one had made it. She was already feeling better seven days later, even her belly was returning to its normal size. He had seen her in a basket, watched over by her brothers in front of their house. If it could be called a house. Fatimeh had nine children. She was a widow, her husband was killed in an air raid last year, in May, her brothers were refugees in Pakistan, and she earned her bread by begging, but she couldn’t survive without her son’s cart of tchotchkes. A twelve-year-old boy, already the head of the family. Fatimeh’s son—Amir, Ahmad, or whatever his name was—stayed at his mother’s side while they waited for the doctor, while the doctor examined his sister, and then while the medicine was being administered. Protecting her, but also keeping an eye on her. When Manuela invited him to eat the good Korean fish that tasted like chicken, he proudly refused, lifting his chin. And he looked at her as he did so. And, looking her in the face, he blew himself up.

  Because he was looking at her. His eyes, bright green like his mother’s, his thick hair, his gaunt face and his adult expression. She recognized him. She was so surprised by the fact that that boy happened to be in a village miles from his own, that she stopped. “Nicola!” she had exclaimed merrily. “It’s Fatimeh’s son.” And at the same time her blood ran cold, because how had Amir or Ahmad or whatever his name was gotten to Qal’a-i-Shakhrak, who had brought him, and most of all, why? “Nicola!” Amir had recognized her, too, he quickened his pace and stepped in among the soldiers. “Nicola!” she cried. Amir kept turning around to look at her, and he was looking at her right in that instant. The instant in which the roar erased him. The roar. The flash of light. And then the buzzing. The helicopter blades whirling, whirling, whirling.

  * * *

  She calls Mattia on his cell, but it’s off and a recording repeats that the person you have called is not available at the moment. She calls the Bellavista and asks to be connected to room 302. The concierge knows her by now, he has been spying on them, he has seen her come out of his room at seven in the morning, and spend three days in there, he knows that Manuela Paris is having an affair with his guest. But after letting it ring for a minute, the concierge comes back on the line and reports that room 302 is not answering. Manuela goes out onto the balcony. She sees the dirty yellow shadow of the hotel atrium, but she can’t see the concierge, or even the reception desk, hidden by the overhanging roof. She is dizzy. Nauseated. The light of a television filters through Mattia’s shutters. The roar. The flash of light. The helicopter blades. Amir’s green eyes. Inexpressive, cold, without a flicker of gratitude—not even when, during that interminable wait at the FOB, she had offered to buy all his faded postcards. Postcards that showed a green and orderly Afghanistan that no longer existed and that in any case that boy had never known. He had tucked the money under the gray rags that covered him and that had once been a man’s overcoat. The same overcoat he had on that day in June, to hide his explosive vest. A boy who had never been a boy, and who instead had proven to be worth more than a man because—unlike many others who for fear or inexperience didn’t manage to activate the device and got themselves arrested, in a market, in front of a barracks, or at a police block—he hadn’t made a single mistake; he had accomplished his mission. Caused as much damage as possible. A good suicide bomb kills on average six people, and Amir had taken out six and a half, even though only three were kafiri. Two were Afghani, so they don’t count, and the sixth was himself. But his gesture had enormous resonance, it created a sense of vulnerability and made the Italians tremble with fear. Amir, raised in hatred, already killed by poverty, humiliation, and frustration, was not afraid to die, and in fact, in dying had killed the foreign occupants and their lackeys, had assured respectability and assistance and a future for his marginalized, despised family. But Manuela is alive. Alive in every fiber of her body.

  She needs to hear Mattia’s easygoing voice, he who knows nothing of the roar, the flash, the sickly sweet smell of blood. She needs his rough tongue. The hairs above his lips. His back. The raised little circle from the smallpox vaccine on his shoulder. His faded, rumpled hair, his myopic eyes. His cold feet and light hands. The transparent drip of semen on the slot of his foreskin. Near him, in bed with him, she is the same Manuela as always, but also different, new. She has to see him, now, right away.

  She throws a clothespin at his shutters. The dull thud sounds like a shot and makes her jump. The light goes out in Mattia’s room. Mattia, Mattia, it’s me, Manuela, what are you doing? I know you’re there, turn on the light. Nothing happens. She stands there for an hour staring at the dark window, distraught. The hotel is a skeleton, white as snow, the façade illuminated by the blue neon sign. She’s going to need twenty drops in order to fall asleep. So that had been the act of divergence: that encounter with the son of the woman who had the same exhausted, proud expression as her own mother. Or more precisely, that thought. Because—for a fraction of a second—before asking herself what Amir was doing there and why, before realizing that he shouldn’t be there and shouting “Nicola!” she had been happy to see him again. That woman who had reminded her of her own mother had disappeared, and as weeks, then months, passed, she worried about her, wondered if she was gravely ill, perhaps already dead. But she was wrong. She had thought that Fatimeh’s son’s presence at Qal’a-i-Shakhrak was a message, that Fatimeh was still alive, and hadn’t forgotten, because it was a day of festivity and reconciliation. She felt infin
ite compassion for Fatimeh and her son, a pity born not from distance or condescending compassion, but from solidarity, from a kind of recognition. Manuela had stopped, and rummaged in her pockets; she had to give that boy something. Not alms, even if masked by the purchase of a pile of faded postcards. She had something for Fatimeh’s son. She’d been carrying it around for months. A pen. But she was holding her automatic rifle, and was hindered by her bulletproof vest, and she couldn’t find it in the too many pockets of her jacket. And when she finally extracted it, she realized that Amir had moved past her, had insinuated himself among her friends, while continuing to turn and look back, keeping an eye on her, and only then did she call out to the lieutenant.

  To search your pockets for a lowly pen that would cost fifty cents in an Italian supermarket. An instant stolen from the bare economy of duty. That negligible gesture had been enough to alter the chain of connected events—get out of the Lince, accompany the lieutenant to the front of the school where they were supposed to wait for the local authorities—to deviate them from their trajectory and thus dislodge the logic of the intersection. She owed her life to that infinitesimal delay, imperceptible on any watch, to an impulse, the recognition of a common humanity. Diego had kept walking, flanking First Lieutenant Russo and Ghaznavi, protecting them, and Lorenzo had followed, his video camera in his hand, but she had remained behind. One step, two, four, five—not more than ten. Enough to project her into a different, unpredictable reality where she fulfilled something that could be called her destiny.

  * * *

  That night she cries—for all the dead, and for herself, too, for her guilt over still being here, which nothing and no one can ever remedy, and for the shameful joy of being alive. She soaks her pillow, so much that she hurls the cold, wet blob onto the floor. She cries without stopping, till her eyelids are too swollen to open. Sealed shut, as if she were never going to see anything other than the soft, dense darkness pierced by a flash of light. Then she tumbles into the cold shadows, and awakens at eleven, befuddled.

  Only her grandmother is home, curled up in her chair, with a woolen cap on her head, wearing three sweaters, and a blanket over her knees, because by now neither wool nor the radiator nor the space heater she sits in front of can warm her. “Don’t listen to people who complain about being ill or blind,” she had said to Manuela back when she still deigned to speak with the impure. “The worst thing about growing old is the cold. You can’t get warm, you’re like a rotten log that won’t burn.” But now Grandma Leda doesn’t even talk about the cold, and she doesn’t have regrets about the past. The VCR plays her prophet’s sermons about Jehovah’s Judgment Day, when he will sweep the evil from the earth. Her world has been reduced to a voice. But it’s clearly enough for her, because she sits there without moving, a faraway smile on her lips.

  Mattia has gone out. She waits anxiously for him, but also happily, because she absolutely has to explain to him her selfish behavior the other day. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes. There are misunderstandings. But she can’t allow doubts and fears to ruin their lives. It’s such a miracle that they have found each other. You have something I have been searching for. I don’t know what, but I don’t want to lose it. She calls him three times, but his cell is always off. She goes over to the Bellavista, leaves a note for him. Direct, unequivocal, because that’s the way she is, and he has accepted her. Don’t make a sergeant wait. Soldiers have no patience. And besides, it’s not possible to be patient and in love at the same time.

  She takes up guard duty on the balcony, so she can intercept the Audi as soon as it appears on the promenade. She stands for hours in the cold, without ever letting her mind wander, but then again, she’s used to it. The Audi does not return. At two she eats a salad with no dressing with her grandmother, who only drinks a cup of milky coffee. “Assembly is today. Can you take me to the Kingdom Hall?” she asks her, unusually sweet since she needs a favor. “I can’t, Grandma, I’m waiting for someone,” she replies, “I’m sorry, forgive me.” “Are you engaged?” she asks, curious now, turning off the TV. She doesn’t hear well, and after a while the racket confuses her. “No,” Manuela replies, “but I’m going out with someone.” “What does that mean, going out? I go out, too, but I’m as lonely as a dog, and if Jehovah weren’t here I would be the loneliest person on earth. But I’m old, I’m like the moon at dawn, I only have a little while longer to live.” “Going out means I see him, spend time with him,” Manuela explains, embarrassed. “Do you sleep with him?” Grandma wants to know.

  “Yes,” Manuela admits, surprised by her grandmother’s frankness. She has never talked to her about these kinds of things; it never would have occurred to her. But perhaps old age is also—or above all—freedom. Freedom from habits, from shame, from taboos, from everything. If she could only accept it. “Sex is the most important thing,” Grandma declares. “If you’re not happy with a man even in bed, it’s not worth it. Believe me, it’s not worth it.”

  “Thanks, Grandma, I’ll keep that in mind.” She feels the same way. The loneliness of the heart is something even friends can satisfy. But the loneliness of a body that no one knows how to touch, listen to, understand, is absolute, and of all the bodies that there are in this world—all made in the same way, in the end, all furnished with the same organs, identically arranged—there might be only one that completes us, without which life loses its taste. She missed Mattia’s breath last night. Missed the sag of the mattress, the obstacle of limbs between the sheets, the pressure of her shoulder against his. When she had opened her eyes on January 6, the first thing she had seen was his hair on the pillow, an ashen smudge falling across his forehead, a tuft holding on in a spot where the rest had already fallen out. Then and there she had been struck by the proof that Mattia was too old—and that he would only get older, and if they stayed together, with time, the difference in age, which seemed insignificant now, would only grow more pronounced, and would push them apart. Yet now the memory of that thinning, faded hair torments her, because it seems she missed an opportunity; they can’t waste time blaming each other for misunderstandings and throwing their respective shortcomings in each other’s face. His thinning hair and her scar only testify to the fact that they met each other late, late for both of them, they both lived for too long not knowing about each other, and so now they have to make up for all that lost time. And she longs to tell him so.

  “You’ve gotten prettier,” Grandma observes, scrutinizing her through her thick lenses. Her eyes look huge, two grayish globes in which a malicious light flickers. “You almost look like a woman.” “I’m still the same, I think you need new glasses.” Manuela laughs. But it makes her happy that Mattia has changed her.

  At four she sends him a text, telling him that she’ll wait for him at her grandfather’s cottage. Then she takes a shower, washes her hair, applies clear nail polish, uses Vanessa’s cosmetics to make herself up, puts on a pair of her sister’s jeans—covered in sparkles and artfully ripped at the knees like a contemporary painting—calls a cab, and goes to Passo Oscuro. She waits for him on Vanessa and Youssef’s mattress, reading the book on veteran rehabilitation that Colonel Minotto gave her. It’s interesting, all things considered. The smell of smoke from their New Year’s Eve candles still lingers in the air. The smell of their bodies, too. She sinks her mouth into the pillow. It smells of Mattia. When it grows dark, she goes out to the veranda to wait for him. It’s cold, but she doesn’t flinch. At eight Mattia’s cell is still off. At eleven she calls a taxi and goes home.

  The concierge at the Bellavista doesn’t know what to say. Mr. Rubino has not checked out of his room. The chambermaid who made his bed didn’t notice anything unusual this morning, his things were still in their usual place. Her message is still there, folded in quarters, in pigeonhole 302. “Would you like it back?” the concierge asks her. Manuela rips it up and throws it in the trash.

  At three the vibration of her cell phone, which she had left on under her pillow,
yanks her out of a deep yet calm sleep in which shards of everyday life float. Maybe she was dreaming. A message. I’m at the cottage, came in through the window. You left. Your imprint on the bed, your perfume on the sheets. I will come to you in your dreams.

  She calls him. He answers on the first ring. They talk until dawn, whispering, pausing whenever a train goes by because the rumble is so close it overpowers their voices. They talk about everything and nothing, about important things and foolish ones. About trips they’ve taken—she a commuter on the Belluno–Rome train, he once went all the way to the Caucasus to climb Mount Elbrus. About Sailor Moon, the warrior of love and justice. About Vittorio Paris’s chickens, Diego Jodice junior’s baptism, John Huston’s Bible at Palo Castle. Mattia tells her how much he likes the knots of her spinal column, the relief of her shoulder blades, her protruding bones, the brown fuzz against her white skin, the red scar that he will never tire of running his fingers along, like an open vein, a path of blood that leads him to the very center of her. They talk about her titanium plate, about Amir’s pen. Mattia says that she is in every part of him. They utter words both indecent and tender. Then Manuela tells him not to worry if they don’t get to see each other tomorrow. She has to catch an early plane, she’s going to Turin. She has to get some tests done for her doctor’s visit. She’ll be away one day, two at the most. She’ll be home by Thursday evening at the latest.

  “Come back soon,” Mattia says, only then realizing to his horror that his battery symbol is flashing. LOW BATTERY appears on his screen. “Without you I can’t—” But his battery dies and Manuela doesn’t hear the rest of the sentence.

  21

  LIVE