Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  Maybe I’ve shown you what a good student I was. Maybe not, and if so, I’m sorry. If you give me another chance, I’ll try again. I haven’t been able to figure out what you blame me for, and why you’re avoiding me, but I’d rather not ask. If you want to tell me, you will. I’m always here, I’m writing facing the balcony, I’m looking at your windows, even though you’re not home today. The car that took you away had Italian Army plates. Wherever you are, I wouldn’t have been able to go with you, and this thought gives me the strength to carry on. I owed a lot to Lara, and it seemed unfair to leave her just because I had looked a killer in the face.

  But in a sense my new circumstances forced me, at least for a while, to behave—that is, to behave the way society holds that one must in order to be considered respectable and therefore credible. It’s hypocritical, of course. But still, I left her. I promised her the separation wasn’t definitive, because I really believed I would be free again after the trial. But I would understand if she found someone else in the meantime and wished her all the best. And I would keep checking her eyes, as I had done for years. Lara responded sadly that she preferred to wait for me. I was the only sighted man who knew how to see her with his hands and not just with his dick. So, for two months, even though I didn’t want to, I conformed to my new role. No women, no daring mountaineering. I lived a normal life, I came home early. Denise understood: “Thank God for Calogero,” she said. “Someday I’ll put flowers on his grave, he turned you into a responsible person.”

  One night my cell rang at midnight. I was already asleep, and I awoke with a start. My first thought was that something must have happened to Denise’s mother. She’d suffered from multiple sclerosis for years, and sometimes she’d have an attack and need to be hospitalized. But it was a man’s voice. He asked if he were speaking with the doctor; he said my name. I’m used to phone calls from clients at all hours of the day and night, so I said yes. The voice said something laughingly. I didn’t understand. He spoke in heavy dialect. A southern dialect, which might as well be Chinese to me. “Excuse me,” I said, “what is it you want?” The voice repeated it, in the same joking tone, but slower this time. Some of the words were clear. He was telling me I was already dead. At that moment I assumed he was joking or that it didn’t have anything to do with me. But his voice was so sinister that when I hung up I felt a chill in my bones, and my heart was in my throat.

  I went out to the street just as I was, in my underwear and bare feet. The echo of those absurd words hounded me and their true meaning was becoming clearer inside of me. I even understood the ones I hadn’t grasped earlier: there’s no escaping, Doctor, we’ve found you, you don’t go very fast on that bike of yours, something like that. The man who was supposed to be protecting us was dozing in the dark car, his head against the window. “They know who I am, they have my phone number,” I told him. We drank a coffee on the porch. It was the end of June, in three days I was supposed to take Denise and Marco to Imerovigli, help them open up the house, and then come back to Italy, before joining them on August 1. The officer asked me if it was hard to become an ophthalmologist. An eye seemed to him like a difficult thing to treat, so small, so strange. “It’s a muscle, just like any other,” I answered. Like the heart. But with less blood. I was an impressionable med student. The smell of blood made me sick. But the eye doesn’t smell even when it’s diseased. Of all the branches of medicine, ophthalmology is the cleanest. If he wanted, I could show him the DVDs of my operations. I kept them, so I could show them at conferences. I would have liked to show them to you, Manuela, because you would have seen that my hands don’t shake when I make an incision with a microscalpel, and that I, too, know how to hit an almost invisible target without even looking. I smiled when you told me how much you love your rifle and how much it hurts being separated from it, and you thought I was making fun of you. But I understood how you feel. My hand feels empty without a scalpel.

  The next day they advised me to stay on Santorini all summer. I canceled all my appointments and left my associate in charge of the office. Sun, sea, beach, moussaka, swimming pool, motorboat—not a care in the world. Italy was very far away. I didn’t let Calogero the gynecologist or Marco the murderer disembark at Santorini. We were alone—Denise, Marco, and me. I taught my Marco to swim. It was the last thing I did for him. We came home on September 15, for the start of school. On September 16 my car caught on fire right in the center of the city. It was parked outside my office. I was using high-frequency ultrasound to bombard a particularly hard, advanced-stage cataract. The girls from the hair salon across the street rang my bell to let me know. The flames reached the second floor.

  Everything spun out of control pretty quickly. They informed me that they had to raise my level of protection: I was in clear and present danger, and was no longer safe in my hometown. A change of domicile was necessary. In other words, we had to leave. But everything I had was there. My whole life, within a radius of a few miles. My parents, my brother, my house, the hospital, my practice, the mountains, my clients, Marco’s school, Denise’s mother, my friends—everything. “We’re sorry,” they said. For my own good, for that of my partner and my son, we had to leave. Naturally I would receive all the assistance I required. House, work, social reintegration, I needn’t worry about any of it, a situation suited to my existing way of life and my profession would be found, a job was guaranteed. We packed in silence. Denise wept, incredulous. Marco followed me around mutely, putting all his toys in bags: little cars, monster robots, soccer ball, puzzles, stuffed dogs. As we loaded the car, Soraya escaped from her basket and, even though we searched everywhere, we couldn’t find her. For months I made them hang up posters with her picture on the lampposts, outside shopping centers, in the piazza, but she never turned up. Maybe she died of hunger in the woods; she was an aristocratic cat, not used to hunting for food. Or maybe she got run over by a truck on one of the narrow lanes that cut through the industrial park. She was the first victim of the earthquake that brought my whole life tumbling down.

  Before closing the front door, I turned on the alarm. It was evening, the house stood out like a pink cake against the darkness of the trees. It had never looked so beautiful. I hadn’t even finished paying off the mortgage. My son was in my arms. Sleepy, Marco asked me when we could come back. Soon, I told him. There was a plaque next to the gate, Marco designed it, it said MY HOME. It pierced my heart. I didn’t know where we were going, or for how long. Everything was unfolding above and beyond my will. I watched the house in the rearview mirror until it disappeared in the hedges around the curve. I haven’t seen it since.

  BELLAVISTA HOTEL, JANUARY 9

  I tried moving to America. I contacted the institute that had asked me to come on board with them, but they replied that it would take time. I’d have to wait until I don’t know what meeting, where the budget would be approved, and only then would they know the extent of available funds, and regardless I had to present my research project, and submit my findings to a scientific commission for evaluation. If I submitted the material before the end of the year, and they decided to fund my project, they would offer me a contract: I would be able to leave the following September. But it was hard to gather all the necessary paperwork and to write my research proposal. I couldn’t concentrate, and besides, September seemed so far away. By then, I thought, the protective measures will have been lifted, we will have returned home, and we wouldn’t want to leave again to go to America.

  We spent nine months in a northern city similar to our own, a twin city of sorts—but it wasn’t the same. It, too, had a cathedral with a bell tower, a piazza with porticos and cafés, a pedestrian center, bike paths, a hospital, hills. It even had mountains—although in that part of Italy the Mediterranean breeze melted the snow early and the peaks were under ten thousand feet. Few forests, no fir trees. Olive trees climbed up the precipices. We rented a villa that was vaguely reminiscent of our old place. But the people spoke with a different accent, I h
ad few patients, we didn’t know anyone, we didn’t have any friends and didn’t want to make new ones, we lived suspended, uprooted, like refugees awaiting asylum. We had to believe this was provisional in order to bear having been torn away like that, in order to imagine that we would return to our lives soon. To imagine the future, in other words.

  We spent a lot of time alone in that unfamiliar house, surprised by strange noises, assaulted by unknown odors. One night, it was almost spring, I suggested again to Denise that we have another child. Marco was nearly seven by then, we had to get a move on. Maybe I already sensed that only my family would be able to protect me. Denise said that she would stop taking the pill as soon as she finished that month’s supply. She wasn’t stingy, but she was convinced that we Westerners have forgotten the art of frugality, and was determined not to waste anything. This was her way of showing respect for those who have nothing, even if we can’t do anything for them. I often laughed at her obsession, but now it strikes me as noble. I have done away with everything that is superfluous, at times even with what is necessary.

  I’ll only tell you the bare minimum about the trial. Recalling those moments makes me uncontrollably angry. I think you can understand that. I testified behind opaque, bulletproof glass. As I sat in that uncomfortable chair repeating what I had already said so many times that by now it was like a monotonous lullaby and—for me—devoid of nearly all reality, I realized I no longer existed. All they could see of me on the other side of the glass was my silhouette. My face was erased. My voice distorted. I had become a shadow. It was only when my mouth went dry and I had to drink a glass of water that I understood what that voice had meant on the phone that night. I really was dead. I coughed, took a deep breath, as if preparing to dive under water. I said what I had to say, and then went outside, said hello to my man, the one taking care of me, and told him that as far as I was concerned, that was it. I didn’t want to know anything more about any of it. He said he understood, but nevertheless he thanked me, this country needed people like me. I told him I didn’t consider myself a role model. “I’m a terrible partner, an unscrupulous doctor, a cowardly father, you really don’t know me.” He smiled. A few months later he called to tell me the verdict. That kid Marco had been sentenced to life in prison. I confess I didn’t feel a thing, not even relief.

  It was June. I remember because we were counting down the days until the end of the school year. We already had our tickets for Greece. We had decided to spend the entire summer in Imerovigli. Before, I never would have been able to stand being in one place for three whole months, no matter how beautiful. I never would have been able to stand being away from my work for so long, abandoning my patients, giving up my experiments and operations. A surgeon is like a pianist. He has to keep his hands in shape. He has to keep studying, learning, operating. But like I said, I was changing. I was no longer what I once was. I was like a snake after molting. I’d shed my old skin, but I hadn’t yet grown a new one. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I hadn’t had an affair in months. I didn’t go to the annual ophthalmology conference—neither the national one in Italy nor the international one in Paris. I hadn’t even made a new video to add to my collection—no daring operations, no experimental research, no scientific publications.

  I had become a provincial ophthalmologist. To build up a clientele in my new city, I worked on credit. My patients paid in installments, or not at all. Before, my patients had been city council members, notaries’ wives, businessmen’s daughters. My new patients were immigrants who had entered the country with veils on their heads, speaking not a word of Italian, who blushed when I told them to look me in the eyes; or they were chatty retirees with advanced-stage cataracts in both eyes; or they were gypsies I treated for free and who paid me back by playing the accordion under my window. I examined them because I didn’t want to lose touch with my work, I wanted to stay in shape, even if it meant using decades-old instruments. By this point Imerovigli seemed like the only link to our previous life.

  I hadn’t earned much that year, and the money I’d been promised to cover my lost income never arrived. Denise never complained. We didn’t have a babysitter anymore, so she would pick up Marco from school herself. On June 8, when she arrived at the gate, the porter told her that Marco had left with his uncle. Denise was very surprised, because my brother had never come to visit us; he was buried in red tape all the time, ever since he’d been given an important post at a local sanitation company, and had phoned us maybe three times since we’d moved. Maybe she didn’t want to worry or maybe she was just lying to herself. The fact is that when Denise came back home, she wasn’t all that upset. I was alone in the yard, raking leaves, and obviously neither my brother or Marco had come home. They had taken him away.

  I barely remember a thing from those terrible twelve hours. Denise did nothing but cry, curled up next to the phone, pleading, practically begging it to ring. Every now and then she would glance at me with pure hatred, saying I had killed Marco. I understood how she felt: she blamed me and I deserved it. I was so devastated I couldn’t even cry. We weren’t alone, obviously the people who had been handling my case those past few months and the one I called my man arrived a few hours later. I can’t tell you his name and I don’t want to give him any old name. In a certain sense, he represented my fate, and fate is anonymous, impersonal, it simply unfolds. Besides, I don’t know anything about him. In that moment, it was like he didn’t exist. My sense of guilt tore at my soul. I couldn’t think about anything other than my son’s smile when we played soccer together in the yard or worked on a jigsaw puzzle together on the living room table. An extraordinary child. And they had stolen him from me. I couldn’t imagine a more inhuman punishment.

  I rambled. I remember saying to my man that I was recanting, to let them know immediately. I wanted to take it all back. It’s too late, Denise screamed, it’s too late. I couldn’t bring myself even to look at her. I remember thinking that I’d kill myself if Marco were found dead in some ditch. A man who didn’t know how to protect his own child doesn’t deserve to live.

  Marco called from the neighborhood café at about one in the morning. He’s always been an intelligent, mature child, and he had memorized my and Denise’s cell phone numbers. But he called me. It meant the world to me. Denise never forgave me for that. He was okay. They hadn’t touched a single hair on his head. Later, he had to tell the police everything. He did so without hesitating, serious, precise, choosing the right words. A nice, fat man had picked him up from school, saying he was one of Papà’s climbing buddies. Marco had believed him, even though it seemed a little strange because he didn’t have the physique of a mountain climber. But since he would have gone anywhere with a friend of Papà’s, and the fat man said he had to take him to his papà, he got in the car. There were two other men in the backseat, and they made him sit between them. They got on the highway and then got off, they took him to an empty house in the countryside, to wait for Papà, they said. The house was run-down and abandoned and there wasn’t anything to do and he got really bored and then at a certain point he fell asleep. Finally they got back in the car, took the highway again, and then they left him at the café, with Mrs. Lucia.

  When I saw him, that skinny little blond boy sitting on a stool at the counter, I melted like a popsicle. “Why are you crying, Papà,” he said with surprise, “everything’s okay.”

  But it wasn’t okay at all. Our trip to Greece was canceled. We left that night. We spent two weeks in an empty extended-stay hotel in a muggy plain, a hellish, mosquito-infested landscape. All we brought with us was some underwear and a change of clothes, they’d send the rest later. We couldn’t tell anyone back home, or call our families to say where we were. It was a delicate moment, or so they told us. Delicate! I made furious phone calls. I insisted I wanted to take it all back. I was tired, our life was slipping through my fingers, and I had to grab it while there was still time. And I couldn’t let anything happen to Marco. No principle
, no matter how noble, could compete with him. “I take it all back, I’m out,” I kept saying.

  My man kindly explained that it wasn’t a good idea. If I pulled out, I would lose my right to get into the special witness protection program, whereas now I could submit my request, and there was a good chance it would be accepted. And even if I pulled out now I wouldn’t be safe. Those people never forget, and sooner or later they would find me. “But this way we will continue to protect you. Legal witnesses have certain rights, and they must be defended. It’s a pact. You do your best to obey the rules, and we’ll do our best to hold up our end. All you have to do is sign the papers and behave accordingly. If, on the other hand, you choose to turn your back on all this and something happens to you, who will take care of your son?” It wasn’t a threat, of course, just the truth. But in practice nothing changed. I was forced to keep running on this crazy treadmill, like a hamster.

  We were on edge in that empty hotel. We argued over the smallest things. The mosquitoes, the heat, the isolation. We couldn’t do anything, we couldn’t even go outside. Marco and I played soccer in the half-empty rooms. I’d signed him up for soccer in our second city, he was in the youth league and really liked it. He’d even made some new friends already; it’s easier for kids. And here I was, taking everything away from him again. We’re like gypsies, Denise would say every now and then. There are happy gypsies, too, I would say, reminding her of an old song. After all, I told myself, I have the two of them. What else do I need, really? The rest is superfluous.