Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  * * *

  That afternoon, Teodora wants to go to the movies, to see a comedy, to have a few laughs. At the Parco Leonardo multiplex: twenty-four theaters, plenty of parking, shops, an ultramodern place that doesn’t seem to belong in Fiumicino. Manuela doesn’t feel up to being with all those people yet, she might have a panic attack. She says so, bluntly, and Teodora apologizes with the same bluntness for not having thought of that, and hastens to say that of course she’ll skip it. It’s a stupid movie, anyway. But Manuela knows that Teodora wants to go to remember her husband, because that was one of his stubborn habits, the only pleasure he allowed himself. Manuela’s father went to the movies only once a year, always on Christmas Day. And Teodora shouldn’t have to give that up because, six months after the attack, the daughter of the father of her son still can’t handle a crowd. It’s not fair. Manuela begs, insists, and in the end Teodora heads off on her own, in her fake fur coat, her hair freshly coiffed, to see a comedy she won’t even enjoy, but that her husband would have liked. It’s the only way she has of letting him know that she loved him, that she still misses him.

  Manuela stays and plays video games with Traian. He lets her choose the game, like a challenger in a duel who lets his opponent choose the weapon. Dubious, she studies the covers, on which square-jawed supermen, armed to the teeth, roar. The titles are all menacing: Assassin’s Rage, Battlefield, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Medal of Honor. Her brother collects the most brutal shoot-’em-ups, in which he plays the hero who exterminates one human being after another, mowing them down with machine guns, blasting them apart with missiles, crushing them under a tank. Most are set in Iraq or Afghanistan. The protagonist is either a new recruit or a marine. Manuela worries that all the violence is having a negative impact on him. Traian worships weapons. Teodora says he surfs violent extremists’ websites, and ordered an AK-47 on the Internet once. Luckily it was a scam, and in the end he just lost some money. “Traian,” Manuela says, “I heard you flunked, that you’re repeating freshman year.” “The teacher and I didn’t get along,” he mopes. “This year’s better, mostly.” “Are you doing your homework?” she asks, regretting it right away because she thinks she sounds like his mother. “Can you come see the tournament finals?” Traian asks, slipping a DVD out of its case. “I’m not a sub anymore, I sent the regular fullback to the bench, we’re going to win the cup, and if I score I’m going to dedicate my goal to you.” In the end he chooses the game: Sniper. Manuela reminds herself that she should tell Teodora to keep an eye on him. Every time she sees him, she finds him more deeply immersed in virtual realities, more indifferent to what’s going on around him. But she never does, because she recognizes herself in that willful, wayward boy.

  At twelve she was a toothpick with constantly scraped knees, long, wild hair, bangs that hid her eyes, filthy fingernails, a frayed T-shirt, and dirty socks. She, too, lived two lives. In the first, she was the daughter of a working woman separated from—or rather, abandoned by—her husband: a rude girl who reluctantly attended junior high. She used to wonder why in the world she had to waste time writing out equations and learning geometry when—just like the ordinary Japanese girl in the cartoon who discovered she was really the warrior Sailor Moon—she might discover she was a captain, leading her men on heroic missions. During class she would fly away, doodling spaceships and whirling knives in her notebook, hidden behind the scoliotic spine of the kid in front of her. No one knew what was racing through her head. She didn’t confide her fantasies and dreams to anyone, not even her grandfather, who would have respected them. Instead, as the years went by, the more important they became to her, the more she disguised or hid them from others. She was afraid they would laugh at or belittle them. That’s how it always was, at home and at school. If you wanted something, other people would make fun of you ruthlessly, spoil your dreams any way they could. Her mother did it so she would learn to stand on her own; everyone else just to be mean. People who don’t dream are envious of those who do.

  Her Italian teacher would call her mother in three times a year. “Manuela’s lazy; she could do a lot better—she’s quick, intelligent, but she doesn’t apply herself. Try and encourage her. It’s clear she doesn’t get enough stimulation at home.” Cinzia wasn’t one of those mothers who will defend her children against all comers, no matter what. She would accept the teacher’s rebukes and go home feeling mortified, somehow to blame for her younger daughter’s disappointing academic performance, even if she couldn’t have said why. She was working herself to death in order to give Vanessa and Manuela a decent life, and she was succeeding. She had denied them nothing, except, perhaps, her presence: she was never home. Then it would all turn into a big argument around the kitchen table, as dinner got cold; Cinzia tried exhortations and encouragements, but Manuela would snort and barely listen, because she didn’t care at all. This was only her outer life; she was really somewhere else.

  In her other life, her imaginary life—the only one that really mattered—she wandered through space and time, through the galaxy and geography, the future and the past: she killed enemy aliens in order to restore Silver Millennium’s reign, rode horseback with Napoleon in the Russian steppes, fought with a bayonet in the Libyan desert, or followed Alexander the Great across battlefields, conquering the world. Sometimes, while her teacher was explaining grammar, she was off in Babylon as it burned, and as buildings collapsed in flames, she would flee on the back of an elephant laden with gold and jewels pilfered from the vanquished.

  And when she wasn’t lost in fantastic battles, she’d be on the beach, even in wintertime, with the kids from the new apartment blocks. They were an unruly, anarchic gang. They’d go explore the abandoned Nazi bunkers along the coast, now littered with porn magazines and used condoms, or peel around on their older siblings’ motor scooters, or swim in the surf when the beach clubs were flying the red flag. They had it in for everyone—the people who lived in the villas, the pretty boys at high school, the Russians who sold Soviet junk at the flea market, the blacks who picked artichokes, the Macedonians who grazed sheep for the Sardinians. Out of spite, they’d scratch the sides of cars with rusty nails. They’d choose new cars with powerful motors that belonged to Romans who came to eat at the restaurants along the beach. Manuela was an artist of incision, her marks looked like scars on the metal. They’d steal melons from the co-op fields and smash them on the highway, hurling them from the overpass. Then they’d flee on their bikes, disappearing into the spiderweb of dirt roads that used to cover the countryside. She wasn’t the only girl in the gang, but she wasn’t one of the ones who just followed the boys. She didn’t take orders from anybody. She’d talk back to her mother, or ignore her, as if her mother’s very existence constituted some kind of punishment. She dreamed of being free, strong, independent: adolescence was a prison.

  * * *

  Manuela battles Traian in Sniper, Battlefield, Medal of Honor. She beats him every time. He takes it badly, but refuses to give up. Every time GAME OVER blinks on the screen he requests a rematch, loses again, insists, then flies into a rage. She is unmoved. The only thing she can teach him is to learn how to lose. Only at the end—when, exhausted and incredulous, he asks for a truce—does she explain that there was a soldier at the base who did nothing during downtime but play video games. He had beaten all his comrades, and so finally he challenged his platoon leader. She couldn’t let herself be defeated by one of her men, could she? So she learned to play. And she beat him. Traian says she can wish him a merry Christmas, even see him while they talk, because he still has Skype even if he doesn’t use it anymore.

  For the months his sister was in Afghanistan, their Skype calls were the highlights of his days. But when Manuela was in Italy, he didn’t hear from her much. She came home on leave only twice a year. Sometimes she’d spend an afternoon with him. Just her, because Vanessa always had something else to do—or at least that’s what Manuela would say. As if he cared. He didn’t give a damn about
Vanessa. Nor she about him, for that matter. Manuela would have him climb on the back of her motorcycle, a crazy Honda Fireblade she’d bought on installment as soon as she got her first paycheck, and they’d go for a ride. Manuela had taken on the role of teacher or mentor or something. Maybe she learned it in the army. Whatever, she took care of him. Manuela had been the one to take him to the Roman Ship Museum in Fiumicino, and to Rome, to see Trajan’s Forum. She showed him the hundred-and-twenty-five-foot-high marble column whose spiral friezes recount Trajan’s exploits, and explained that the ashes of the emperor who bore his name (or rather the other way around) were once kept there, in a golden urn. One Sunday last year, in Rome, they ran into a soldier from her company. He wasn’t in uniform, but he saluted her anyway. It made an impression on Traian that this burly, iron-pumping guy was afraid of his sister, a twig he could have snapped with one hand.

  But once she left for Bala Bayak, he heard from her more often. To him she seemed like the protagonist in one of his shoot-’em-ups—a tough marine under evil Afghan fire. He always had trouble getting through to her, but when he finally did, he never knew what to say, because he was afraid that talking about stupid things like school, grades, exams, and homework would bore someone who’s in a place where airplanes sow missiles, enemies sow explosive traps, and people are ripped to shreds every day. But Manuela was interested in those stupid things, or pretended to be, and he was happy she found the time to talk with him. He didn’t know that time was the only thing she had plenty of. Traian would brag about his military sister. At school he’d show his classmates and teachers photos of her on his cell. Manuela manning the gun on a Lince, Manuela in uniform surrounded by dozens of ragged children in front of a ruin riddled with bullet holes, Manuela, helmet on, gun raised. And since she’d been blown up, and was all over the news, his classmates had stopped calling him “Romanian.”

  “Thanks,” Manuela says, “it’s a nice idea, but they’re in a different time zone, they’re three and a half hours ahead, Christmas is already over. And besides, the Spaniard’s not there anymore.” “Well, call the other guys then,” Traian insists. “It’s night now, they’ll be in the mess hall,” she says. “And besides, I don’t know anyone anymore, my regiment came home in mid-June.” She was supposed to come home with them. Instead she returned early, on a stretcher, drugged with sedatives.

  She remembers every interminable moment of the journey out. The roar of the C-130 engines, deafening despite her earplugs. The Siberian cold—there was no heat—the uncomfortable seat, which meant she had to huddle against the wall, the jolting of the plane, which upset her stomach, though she, unlike the guy next to her, had managed not to vomit. The embarrassment over the bathroom—there was only one, makeshift, surrounded by a curtain; the men peed in bottles but the few women, after trying to hold it, finally resigned themselves to clinging to the cloth and squatting. The emotion of that slow, blind, nocturnal flight, unable to see anything because the only window was nowhere near her, but aware she was flying over a mysterious and unknown continent. The exit from the rear hatch, feeling her way in a darkness so impenetrable it was like she’d gone blind, going from blackness and noise into the rarefied silence of the desert at the Herat Airport runway. Afghanistan revealed itself to her only three days later, when all the procedures were complete, the last exams passed, when she got her new International Security and Assistance Force ID, and her company finally received authorization to be transported out to their destination. The helicopter flew over a mustard-yellow plateau, tinted pink by the first light and hemmed in by impassable, solitary, smoke-colored mountains that seemed to float on the horizon. A sight that took her breath away. The trip back is a black hole. Maybe that’s why she sometimes feels like she’s still there.

  “When are you going back to Afghanistan?” Traian asks her. “I don’t know,” Manuela shrugs, feigning indifference. “It depends on how my doctor’s appointments go. You can’t have a gimp private, let alone a gimp sergeant.” “Why isn’t the war over?” Traian asks. “Why haven’t we won yet?” Manuela hesitates. She’s about to say that according to the latest ICOS data—the International Council on Security and Development—the Taliban controls eighty percent of the territory. But data has to be interpreted. You have to consider that the international coalition’s fewer than seventy thousand soldiers are scattered over a territory the size of Germany with a population of thirty million, and if you bear in mind this overwhelming and unfavorable statistical reality, the situation suddenly looks very different. In short, the situation on the ground is far too complex to be captured by numbers. But Traian’s only twelve, he wouldn’t understand these subtleties. So she only says that it takes time, the transition isn’t complete, and besides, it’s not a war, so there can’t be a victory. Traian studies her, disappointed. Apart from her pale skin and the white line that runs across her skull from temple to nape, his sister doesn’t seem so sick. But she doesn’t seem to be the proud, self-assured woman who said goodbye to him last year either. Maybe they turned her brain inside out over there. “Why did he do it?” he asks.

  Traian had downloaded every article about the attack—in truth not that many, and concentrated in the three days after it happened, before the story disappeared and wasn’t talked about anymore. People talked about the war in Afghanistan only when someone died—if it bleeds, it leads, is the golden rule of journalism—and since another soldier died a month later, the story of her attack was no longer interesting. Traian had queried the major search engines: the name “Manuela Paris” got 160,000 hits. He saved all the pages that provided some new information—most merely repeated what was written by the agency that first broke the news. He read them all, without finding the answer to the only question he would have asked if he’d had the chance. What do they have against you? What makes them lay those traps in order to kill you? What’s so wrong with digging a well, repairing a street, or building a school? Or even arresting a murderer? What’s wrong with that? Then he downloaded everything onto a pen drive and put it in a light blue envelope.

  Manuela had no desire to read the newspapers, and, apart from her report to her superiors and her testimony for the state attorney’s investigation, she didn’t want to know anything more about the attack. It was as if it had happened to another person. Someone she had known, whose misfortune she pitied, someone she stood in solidarity with, but still couldn’t quite bring into focus. She didn’t remember anything about that morning, and she had said as much to the man who questioned her. She didn’t remember her last journey to Qal’a-i-Shakhrak. Not the village or the school, not the dilapidated houses, not even the ruined minaret that he mentioned more than once. All she remembered was the noise. A rumble that seemed to erupt from the center of the earth, from deep down inside her.

  The psychiatrist at the hospital where she was being treated said that her strategy of avoidance—as it was called in psychiatric jargon—was keeping her from working through the trauma; a symptom of PTSD, essentially, which she had to strive to overcome if she didn’t want it to become chronic and cripple her forever. He was even making her write about her military experience and the trauma: her homework, as he called it. Manuela was supposed to work on it over the holidays and turn it in to him in January. When he had spoken to her about it, she couldn’t help but smile. But he had cautioned her not to underestimate the assignment. Despite the childish, scholastic term, her homework was serious, perhaps the only therapy that could really help her. The only way she would be able to distance herself from the pain was to talk about it. Otherwise it would grow, spreading like a weed, extending its roots in the dark, until it destroyed her. Manuela had promised to take it seriously. She had bought a notebook, but she still hadn’t written a single line in it. She kept telling herself it was only because she wasn’t used to writing anymore. The only things she still wrote by hand were coordinates, code names, temperatures. To write about yourself you have to think, and she didn’t want to think.

&
nbsp; “There’re some photos of you, too,” Traian says, inserting the pen drive in his computer. “I don’t know who gave them to the newspapers, we didn’t give them anything because we couldn’t ask your permission, and maybe you wouldn’t have agreed—do you want to see them?” “What photos?” Manuela starts. Her hands tingle, her heart races, and there’s that sensation again, of a sharp nail boring into the nape of her neck. “There’s one of you with an old Afghani woman, you’re standing close together, talking.” “It must have been retouched,” Manuela says. “Women don’t go out there, they’re invisible, in six months I must have seen two at most. And they certainly don’t let themselves be photographed. Neither do old people, they think you’re trying to steal their souls.” “You came out good,” Traian insists, clicking on the thumbnail of the photo. The envelope the pen drive was in is on his desk. In his neat, childish handwriting he had written SERGEANT PARIS in felt-tip pen.

  The photo is of Manuela and an Afghani woman with a shriveled face and skin wrinkled like a rotting leaf standing in front of what seems to be a grayish metal cage—prefabricated modules filled with sand and inert material that form Sollum’s impenetrable protective barrier. The woman is wearing a dark men’s overcoat, and the scarf wrapped around her head and neck leaves only her eyes, nose, and mouth uncovered. She and Manuela, slightly out of focus, are looking at the photographer, both of them surprised, almost annoyed, at having their picture taken.

  The image resurfaces from somewhere infinitely far away. Manuela had forgotten that face, the reason the woman came to the base, the incredibly brief instant of contact that the photographer froze in time. But the photo sparks the memory of the memory. And the vivid, indelible impression that woman—the first and only Afghani woman she had the chance to meet—had made on her. She can’t remember her name, though she’s certain she knew it once. The soldiers cruelly called her Skunk. All Afghanis stink, they’d say, from the lowliest shepherd to the highest-ranking general. Irritated, she had pointed out that after only a few weeks in the desert, they stunk, too. That woman’s proud bearing, the dignity of her callused feet and angular face, the vertical furrows at the corners of her mouth, her wild, mute desperation, reminded Manuela of her mother at a precise moment in her life: the day she was laid off from the fish factory. It was the summer of 1996. The economy was stagnant, unemployment was rising, financial pressures were suffocating them, and then the company outsourced its mackerel operations to Tunisia. Manuela was thirteen, Vanessa sixteen. Their future had been decided by the company manager, who had never set foot inside the factory, had never met the women who worked there, had probably never even eaten a mackerel in his life. You never see it in restaurants. Mackerel is the fish of the poor.