Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  Vanessa says that she won’t go either, then. She has a better idea, in fact. “Let’s eat dinner at home, that way we’ll make Mamma and Alessia happy, and then ring in the New Year at Passo Oscuro. Mamma doesn’t know, but I stole a set of keys—I go there with Youssef. He lives with his cousin, but we can’t see each other at their house because Youssef has a wife in Morocco, I don’t know if I told you.” “Vanessa, no!” Manuela exclaims, but her sister just shrugs. “We never knew where to do it, the car is gross, I’m not some slut he picked up on the Aurelia. Grandpa’s cottage is all run-down, it’s falling to pieces, the roof leaks, but with a little imagination it can be quite charming, and it’s only a hundred feet from the sea. We bring a boom box and dance to our favorite music, just the two of us.”

  “I thought you wanted to go out with Lapo on New Year’s,” Manuela says. “I couldn’t care less about New Year’s!” Vanessa blurts out. “I don’t believe in holidays, for me it’s like any other night. I want to be with you. You’re important to me.” Surprised, Manuela stops the cart in the middle of the aisle. Under the harsh neon lights, her hair an unnatural color, her skirt too short, her shoes too tall, Vanessa looks fragile and lost. She’s never said anything like that to Manuela before.

  “When I first heard about the attack,” she says, tossing a huge bag of paprika potato chips into the cart, “because I was the one who opened the door when the guys from the army showed up, I thought: Now what do I do? I don’t want to live without Manuela. We grew up together, she’s the only person who really knows me. And she’s the only one who knows the good things about me. I never even told her I love her, because it’s embarrassing to say stuff like that, and you think there’ll always be time, but saying later is like saying never, and all of a sudden, boom, it’s all over. We die so quickly, we’re like leaves dangling from a branch. When you were over there my heart would stop every time the doorbell rang because I was afraid it was about you. When it happened, the army guy said to me, he was so polite, you could tell he’d been trained, he said, ‘I need to speak with Miss Vanessa Paris, I have an urgent, confidential communication.’ ‘That’s me,’ I said. He told me it would be best if I sat down. So I knew. I was holding my cell phone and I threw it against the wall, it shattered in so many pieces I had to buy a new one, and I started crying like a crazy person. I was sobbing so hard, I couldn’t breathe, I was suffocating. ‘Sergeant Paris requested that you be the person to contact in case of an accident.’ He explained it was up to me to tell the other members of the family. But I couldn’t bring myself to call Mamma. ‘My mother’s at work,’ I told him, and so he says, ‘Can’t you call her office and tell her to come home right away?’ ‘Office?’ I said. ‘What office, she doesn’t work in an office, we can’t call the roadside diner, my poor mother’s making coffee for the truck drivers, she’ll have a heart attack, this is going to kill her.’ So I called that fucking gypsy woman. ‘You tell her, Teodora,’ I said, ‘you’re probably glad, one less Paris to deal with.’ I was screaming, I bet I sounded like I’d lost my mind, ‘You tell my mother that her daughter, her youngest daughter, is dying.’” “I’m sorry,” Manuela mumbles. “I’m sorry I put your name on the form, but I didn’t want some stranger to tell her, I’m sorry.”

  Every time Manuela left the FOB she thought: If something happens to me, how will they tell my mother? She knew the procedure, the protocol. She knew the words, the formulas, but it was the miserable, banal everydayness into which those words would erupt that she found so devastating. Ironclad inside the Lince, ironclad in her uniform, helmet, and body armor, automatic rifle in her hands, she’d be thinking about the rest stop on the Rome–Civitavecchia highway two thousand eight hundred miles away. Morning in Afghanistan was dawn for Cinzia Colella. The lights of the rest stop dispelled the darkness of the asphalt. The pull-off would still be filled with tractor trailers, dripping with the night’s humidity, and the first truck drivers, sleepy, with prickly beards and bloodshot eyes, would be at the counter, and her mother would already be at work, in her white uniform and her cap with the company’s red logo. Manuela dead, disemboweled, decapitated, butchered in the desert, and her mother at work, an ordinary day, flattened by the news while the coffee machine oozed black drops into little espresso cups, and speechless customers watched that shriveled-up shadow of a woman who had once been attractive weep desperately, that middle-aged woman who just a minute before had been joking with them and accepting their crude compliments delivered in a rough Italian with Lithuanian or Slavic or Turkish mixed in, and who was now devastated, destroyed, crushed. Manuela knew she was her mother’s shot at redemption, the good daughter, the accomplished daughter, the daughter who had lifted herself out of poverty and ignorance, whose success made her own wasted youth packaging frozen filets in a fish factory, made the millions of cups of coffee prepared on the side of the highway, the truck drivers’ compliments, the loneliness all worthwhile. Manuela couldn’t die without killing her mother as well.

  She could almost see her after receiving news of Sergeant Paris’s death, fallen in the line of duty. It was such a horrible thought, and so obviously possible, that she crossed her fingers and hoped that, if something did happen to her, it would at least be on a Sunday, when her mother was home. Then she remembered that for her mother, just like for herself, there were no Sundays, only shifts. So she wished that nothing would happen to her. And the more time passed, the closer she got to leaving Afghanistan, the more she gave in to the presumptuous certainty that she would survive.

  “You think you’re the only two people in this world? So rude! Let me by, you jerks.” Their shopping cart is blocking the way. A woman complains; she’s in a hurry, or thinks she is. She tries to wedge past them, and the wheels of her cart catch Manuela’s crutch and yank it out of her hand. It crashes into the shelf, knocking over cans of hazelnuts and packets of toasted almonds and pistachios. “Bitch!” Vanessa yells. “It was to save your lazy ass and protect your shit life that my sister got her leg blown up!” Her eyes glisten and a tear trickles down her cheek, tracing a pale path in the thick layer of rouge. She kneels, picks up Manuela’s crutch, and hands it to her. “You know I prayed?” she says with a smile. “God, did I pray, honey!”

  Manuela doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t believe her, but she can’t let her sister know. “I swear,” Vanessa insists, “when you were in a coma in the hospital in Farah. In Our Lady of the Rosary Church, under those weird paintings you like so much. They look to me like the artist was on ecstasy, but you always said they spoke to the heart more than Raphael’s paintings did, being so simple and colorful, so I went there thinking of you. I did the via crucis—Mary and Elizabeth, the shepherds, the temple—I prayed for you under every station of the cross, then I kneeled at the high altar, I gazed at Christ in the Last Supper, and I’d say, ‘Jesus, you came back from the dead, you made your friend Lazarus come back from the dead, make her come back, too.’ And then I’d start all over again. I’d do the whole church until the parish volunteers locked up the place and threw me out.” To prove it was all true, Vanessa crosses her fingers, kisses them, and presses them to her lips. The same gesture from when she was a little girl.

  Manuela pushes the cart down the detergent aisle. Vanessa quickly grabs bottles of soap, laundry detergent, and softener, without letting herself be distracted by the “3 for the price of 2” offers or the throng of carts at the cash register. She doesn’t care at all that she’s talking so loudly everyone can hear her. Only Manuela exists right now, Manuela and the interminable anguish of those damned days; her sister doesn’t even know about them but they made Vanessa realize that she didn’t want to live without her. That—damn it—she loves her. “But you didn’t get better, nothing happened. You didn’t wake up. Finally I went to the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” she confesses, her voice cracking. “It’s not like I converted, but I can’t deny what happened. The day after I went to the Kingdom Hall, which is like their church, God heard me. Becau
se Jehovah is supposed to be God, I don’t know if I told you. Jehovah is the name of God. If you say God, just God, it’s like you’re saying engineer or lawyer or doctor, a generic title, but God told us his name, which is Jehovah. It’s written in the Bible, I can’t remember where. If you need to call someone, you have to call them by name, or else they won’t answer you—maybe that’s why when I prayed before he didn’t hear me. Then I called him by name and he answered me, see? So I made my peace with God. I respect him, I believe in him. I’m convinced he exists now. I’m convinced it was God who stopped that shrapnel.”

  “I don’t think God has anything to do with it,” Manuela says, admiring the cashier’s ability to type in bar codes at such a phenomenal rate. A girl Manuela’s age, with nails like claws, purple lips, and a curious star-shaped cut on her cheek. Why does a girl like that settle for such a monotonous, unrewarding job? Ever since she was little she knew she’d leave home one day, and come back only when she could offer herself, her mother, and Vanessa a different life. A real life, one worth living. The cash register vomits out a mile-long receipt. Forty-three items purchased. A total of 4,570 points on their card. They need another five thousand and something in order to get the reward, a set of pans. Vanessa doesn’t have enough cash. Manuela takes out her ATM card. When the cashier lifts her head to hand her the card reader, Manuela recognizes her. It’s Samantha, an old classmate. Manuela gave her that scar on her cheek years ago, back when she was a thug. An act of revenge. Samantha had offended her so she sliced her face with barbed wire. Back then Manuela believed it was up to her to mete out justice on her own. She didn’t have any allies, and it seemed as if the whole world were against her. After that incident, she was reported to city services for being “psychologically disturbed” and “difficult.” They sent a social worker, but her mother refused to open the door. So after a while they left her alone. Samantha deserved it, but she’s sorry you can still see the star-shaped scar on her cheek. Samantha doesn’t recognize Manuela, though, she’s changed too much. And besides, she never looks at the customers. She moves them through one after another, all she cares about is finishing her shift and going home.

  “It was pure chance,” Manuela explains as she fills humongous plastic bags with meat, fish, cheese, vegetables. “The technical term, in ballistics, is divergence. I was supposed to be in a certain point, at the intersection of a series of lines, a point determined by a logical, mathematical chain of actions, decisions, movements, gestures. But by pure chance, I wasn’t there. I was ten paces back, even though I shouldn’t have been, and the explosion blew me apart, but not completely. I’m alive because of that divergence.”

  “I can take you there, to the Kingdom Hall, if you want, the meetings are open to the public, first they sing, then they explain the Bible, then they pray,” Vanessa says, ignoring her sister’s meditation on ballistics. “It makes you feel at peace. Their God, Jehovah I mean, is omnipotent but he’s human, too, I don’t know if I’m explaining this well.” The glass doors open and they are expelled from the supermarket. The smell of tar and carbon monoxide rises from the asphalt. Vanessa wedges her pear-shaped cart into the last cart in the line, and the little device on the handle returns her coin. Vanessa automatically drops the coin in the empty can that the pregnant gypsy girl with a newborn in her arms holds; she’s begging next to the row of shopping carts. The girl has stationed herself at the point of convergence. Excellent choice. “You have to hear them pray,” Vanessa insists. “You have to read their magazine, it’s really simple and easy to understand, it explains all sorts of things. The most important is that God knows you, God knows your needs, God cares about you.”

  Manuela isn’t much of a help; her hands are busy holding her crutches. Vanessa staggers under the weight of the shopping bags, but she’s used to it. No one has ever helped her. It doesn’t even occur to her that someone might. “God isn’t some abstract force,” she says, “but a person, with a personality and feelings, there are things he loves and things he doesn’t. The other important thing is that Jehovah is happy. That’s what Timothy writes, I don’t remember where, because it’s not like I’ve read the entire Bible. But I’m touched by the idea of a happy God, what can I say. I got chills when I read it, because I understood that the difference between God and us is just that, happiness. Only God can be happy. I don’t know if I’m explaining this well. I have the magazines at home, all this year’s issues, I hide them in my underwear drawer because Mamma doesn’t know about this thing with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I don’t know if I told you. Chance has nothing to do with it, you’ll see. It means something that you were saved. It’s a message.”

  I’m alive because the 120-day winds quieted down and there wasn’t a sandstorm and the helicopter was able to land, Manuela wants to say. And because the surgeon at Role 2, the American camp hospital at Farah, didn’t have too many wounded in action that day, and so he wasn’t tired and his hands were steady and he removed the shrapnel before it sliced my brain. But she can’t find the courage to tell Vanessa. Vanessa doesn’t know a thing about probability computations and divergence theories. That’s all soldier talk. Ravings caused by nostalgia, solitude, and fear. Nonsense invented during night guard duty, at the outpost on the hill, buried in a trench, watching burning fireballs sweep across the sky; they looked like tracers, rockets, or searchlights, but they were actually stars. Gigantic stars. Meteors, planets, celestial bodies dressed in fire, crisscrossing the horizon and sinking into a sea of darkness.

  During those 167 Afghani days, Manuela received word of the accidental death of an army engineers sergeant attached to the Alpini at a nearby base, crushed by a Buffalo during a maneuver, and of the death of a major, whose heart burst during a visit to an outpost near Badghis, in the north, perhaps because of the harsh February cold. There was a blizzard that day, and the helicopters couldn’t take off; he might have survived if they’d been able to get him to the FOB. And of the wounding of an Alpino from a different regiment, shot in the head at close range by an Afghani police officer shouting “Allahu Akbar”: the bullet had merely grazed his scalp. Then there were 321 attacks without casualties and fifteen thwarted attempts. Explosive devices, sown along the very road she had to travel. Traps waiting for her. That hadn’t exploded. Or that were detected in time. Reported by a peasant eager to collaborate in hopes of peace, or identified and neutralized by their jammer. Death didn’t obey any rules. She knew it was absurd, her survival completely random. So she became convinced that every event was the result of a convergence of facts, an intersection of all the other infinite events scattered through time and space, distant and independent, yet somehow strung together like pearls on a necklace.

  Every day each one of them performed a series of insignificant acts and irrelevant movements, what might be called the simple business of living. All without knowing that each one of those acts and movements was converging toward a center, a sort of black hole that swallows and annuls matter. That center is the focal point into which everything inescapably falls. It has nothing to do with probability computations. It’s a point, a lightning flash, the climax of a lifetime, its end and perhaps its significance. Irrelevant, insignificant acts and movements performed a split second earlier or later can cause the divergence, prevent from happening what has been determined by logic and mathematics. A divergence of this kind must have occurred at Qal’a-i-Shakhrak, because, of the five of them who got out of the Lince, only she was spared. The others found themselves at the point of intersection—but not her. She must have carried out some insignificant act, some irrelevant movement that allowed her to deviate from the trajectory pointing to her death, and saved her. But that morning had been erased from her memory, leaving behind a crater no less deep than the one the plastic explosive made in the sand at Qal’a-i-Shakhrak.

  * * *

  Manuela finds a letter for her in the mailbox. No stamp, so it wasn’t mailed. Written on hotel stationery—there’s a stylized drawing of the Bell
avista on the top left, with the address, phone number, and three stars. Only three. Manuela thought it had more. In the envelope there’s a photograph Mattia took on his cell. The light is milky and the image blurry, but it’s clearly of her—a close-up. Mattia hadn’t yet cocooned her in his scarf. The water sparkles all around her, encircling her in a kind of halo. It’s not easy to photograph a person. Everybody takes pictures, but in order for them to really say something about the subject, the person taking them has to know how to see beyond the subject’s features and momentary smiles. He has to convey something of his own gaze. To capture the unique light that that person, and only that person, emits. To love, perhaps. Mattia’s Manuela is wild, but not hidden. She offers him her bare face, her protruding ears, her nose red with cold, her lips folded into the beginning of a smile, her eyes glistening and wide with curiosity and trust. An ingenuous but determined Manuela, never before seen, even by herself. It’s a pity to lose a man who looked at her like that.

  On the back of the photo is written in black ink: “If every day were December 28, I would ask you to come up to my room. The things that have never been last forever. Don’t look back.” He didn’t even sign it.

  She slips the photograph into the book that Colonel Minotto recommended she read, a manual on the psychophysical rebirth of the veteran, published by some American university. She gave up on it after the first chapter. Either because medical-psychological English is difficult, or because she doesn’t like thinking of herself as a veteran when she’s not even twenty-eight. She’s too tired to think, or to do much of anything. She doesn’t even know if Mattia’s sibylline and hypocritical note has wounded or consoled her. Or what it really means. All she wants is to relive those few hours on the paddleboat, which are already fading, clouded by infinite distance. To feel that hypnotic rocking of the waves again and the heat of his body against her own, that dawning intimacy, timid yet brazen, the foolish way her heart leaped after such a long time. She dilutes her drops in a glass and falls asleep right away. The next morning her mother doesn’t have the heart to tell Manuela she didn’t sleep a wink because her daughter’s anguished cries kept her up all night. No one in the house was able to sleep, in fact. Alessia climbed into Vanessa’s bed, weeping. Even Grandma woke up. And when her daughter asks her, Cinzia lies and gives her a tired smile. “No, Manu, I didn’t hear you screaming last night.”