Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  10

  LIVE

  On December 30, the roadside diner is unusually quiet. Every now and then someone comes in for a newspaper or cigarettes, but for most of the morning, Cinzia doesn’t have a lot to do. She heats up a few sandwiches on the grill, and between customers she enjoys the company of her daughter who—for mysterious reasons she prefers not to ask about—insisted on coming to work with her. The persistent smell of mortadella, coffee, and disinfectant wafts through the vast space. The radio plays the latest hits. Tomorrow’s the last day of the year, the DJ keeps insisting, how are you going to celebrate? And don’t forget to wear something red, something old, and something new. Manuela wandered among the shelves, perused the stuffed animals, maps, and outdated CDs on sale for a few euros, then flipped through the books heaped in a metal basket. Then she moved a bar stool behind the counter and for hours has simply been staring hungrily at the cars zooming by. Her mother is afraid she’s bored, but Manuela reassures her: the only thing she wants to do is sit right here.

  The customers are in a hurry, they keep turning around to check on their cars through the window; they talk about insignificant things or important things, all without noticing Manuela or her mother. “I warned him, but he wouldn’t listen,” a woman says to her son. “There’s not much snow, but the lifts are open,” a kid says to his friend. “I barely even saw my Christmas bonus.” “He went to Germany, makes three times as much, but the Germans are awful and the weather’s miserable, so now he wants to come home.” Lives light up for an instant—voices, people—and then the place is deserted again. The customers look at Cinzia Colella without actually seeing her. For them, she simply doesn’t exist. Maybe because she’s over fifty, or maybe because she’s a waitress. She’s simply an efficient machine, one of the restaurant’s appendages. This discovery both offends and moves Manuela. Her mother exists only for her.

  Her co-workers turn out to be nice. The other woman who works the counter—a redhead, thirty years old, with ample breasts that must make the truckers happy—keeps discreetly to herself. But Manuela isn’t here to discuss the meaning of the universe. She wants to make up for her absence in the past in some way—and for her absences in the future. Because she wants to go back to Afghanistan. She wants to see that damn school. To start patrolling that endless road again. So, in a way, she has come to take her leave. “Teach me to make coffee,” she says all of a sudden. Cinzia is surprised but agrees. She explains how to bang the cylinder on the edge of the base once, to loosen the wet grounds so they drop into the trash. To use your wrist to turn it. It’s simple, a child could probably do it. Nothing like the things Manuela does. Here the biggest danger is being held up by a drug addict or yelled at by a drunkard. But that’s never happened to her. Besides, there are video cameras. Apart from that, her life has been reduced to just a few actions and even fewer words, always the same. Make coffee, heat up sandwiches on the grill, tear the receipt in such a way that the customer can’t get served twice, say good morning, say goodbye. The biggest challenges are slicing lemons for tonic water and pouring a beer—it can’t have too much head, which her customers don’t like, or too little, which her boss doesn’t like. The proportions have to be just right. She doesn’t have anything else to teach her daughter.

  But Manuela seems to be enjoying herself, and wants to make coffee for the gas station attendant who comes inside to soak up a bit of warmth. “It’s good,” he assures her. It took her less than ten minutes to learn. Her mother says she shouldn’t spend too much time behind the counter, people might recognize her, it’s better if she doesn’t let herself be seen with her. “Why?” Manuela asks with surprise. “It’s not very heroic,” Cinzia responds confusedly. What she means is that she doesn’t look like the mother of a hero, that she’s worried she might diminish her daughter’s glory. But she doesn’t know how to explain. The words get all tangled up inside her. When the redhead disappears into the bathroom, Manuela bends over her mother, who is intent on working the coffee machine, puts her arms around her waist, and kisses her neck. Cinzia starts, frightened. When Manuela was little and her mother would bend down to kiss her, she’d make herself into a ball, offering the smallest possible surface area. Manuela was so tall, dry, and closed that Cinzia would jokingly compare her to the artichokes that thrive in Ladispoli’s volcanic soil: hard, compact, and closed up. She would remind her daughter, who was allergic to her outbursts of affection, that Ladispoli artichokes are famous because they’re sweet and don’t have any thorns. But Manuela still wouldn’t let herself be kissed. “I must be a different species,” she would say. So Cinzia realizes that something’s about to happen, and an oppressive sadness washes over her. Her daughter is the only precious thing in her miserly life. Incongruous in this world of cheap goods. So determined and so intransigent. So rare. But how can you keep a daughter from following her own path?

  * * *

  Manuela calls the Bellavista and asks to be connected to room 302. Mattia never gave her his cell phone number. “I’m sorry,” the concierge says listlessly, and slightly annoyed, “but there’s no one in room 302.” Yes, there is, Manuela, who is on her balcony, is about to say, I can see the light on in his room. But she’s not quick enough, he has already hung up. She dials the number again, and lets it ring twenty times. By the third ring, she gets the impression the concierge has unplugged the phone.

  The lobby of the Bellavista is as big as the waiting room at a train station, an empty space where two red armchairs, one on each side of the entrance, float as if lost, as if begging to be remembered. A runner, also red, covers the slightly yellowed marble floor and then ventures up the stairs, stopping on the landing in front of four identical doors. The ballroom, perhaps, or dining hall, or conference center. Manuela had never set foot in the Bellavista before, and it strikes her as a cold, pretentious place. Mattia has been living there for more than ten days. He must be lonely, as lost as one of those armchairs. There’s no one at the reception desk. The keys to every room dangle on the wooden rack. Every room but 302. In the little box for 302 is a piece of paper, folded in half. Legal-size paper, a fax, maybe. So Mattia isn’t in hiding, someone knows he’s here. Office managers, bosses, suppliers—that’s who faxes you. Perhaps he’s merely in Ladispoli for work. Manuela leans over, reaches for the fax, but isn’t able to grab it. She wants to read it, right away, as if it might hold the key to Mattia’s bizarre behavior. But she stops herself from taking it, because that would be like stealing. Honesty. Honesty above all.

  She rings the bell and the concierge emerges from the office in the back. His face conveys the same listless boredom as his voice. “Please tell Mattia in room 302 that Manuela Paris is here.” She uses the same decisive voice she would when giving orders to her soldiers, and the concierge, even though he wants to object, decides to pick up the phone. She hears Mattia’s voice. “Yes?” “Miss Paris is here,” the concierge says, eyeing her with ill-concealed disapproval. Manuela doesn’t lower her gaze. “He says he’ll come down,” the concierge announces as he hangs up the phone.

  Manuela paces the length of the lobby two or three times. Brochures for local tourist attractions, car rentals, and train schedules for Rome are scattered on the glass table. There’s also an Italian guidebook in English. Mattia doesn’t come down and Manuela flips through it distractedly. She turns to the chapter on Rome, the one that gets consulted the most. She reads that the Vatican Museums are closed on Sundays, except for the last Sunday of the month, when they are free. Official taxis are white and have an illuminated sign on the roof. A subway ticket is only good for one ride. Before being deployed, she had bought a guidebook on Afghanistan from the same publisher, to see what it said about the region where the Tenth Alpini Regiment would be operational. It was a few years old, but there weren’t any more recent ones. She’d read it on the bus to the airport, forcing herself to concentrate while Ninth Company sang and made a racket as if they were going on a school field trip. She read the introducti
on on the flight to Dubai, until she fell asleep. She started up again in the crowded hangar where they waited thirteen hours for the cargo plane that was to take them to Herat, amid a confusion of voices and baggage, and then kept reading as the C-130 maneuvered on the runway while the roar of its four engines made the walls shake. She read in darkness during the flight, using her headlamp, but eventually she had to stop because the old cargo plane tossed terribly and the words danced before her eyes.

  The first pages were color photographs of the country’s most spectacular sites: the great Buddha of Bamiyan, the bird market at Kabul, the sharp peak of Mir Samir, the rocky spires that tower over the lapis lazuli lake of Band-e Amir. Herat—the seat of the Italian command—was described as Afghanistan’s artistic capital. The guidebook dwelled extensively on the country’s complicated history, but it also provided practical advice about tourist attractions, hotels, and restaurants. There was a section on shopping. And phrases in Dari and Pashto in the back. Do you accept travelers’ checks? Where may I find a room, please? Thank you, you’re welcome, good night. Manuela was stunned to learn that in the 1970s Afghanistan was a tourist destination. Hippies came by motorcycle or bus, or hitchhiked, and lingered before heading to the Himalayas or India, charmed by the friendliness of the people, for whom guests are sacred, the beauty of the gardens, and the sweet slowness of life in the tea salons. But that was all before she was born.

  Yet some people thought it was possible to travel again there. The guidebook said that after the Taliban were expelled, the war ended and the situation, though still evolving, had stabilized. It suggested trekking itineraries through the enchanting Hindu Kush mountains, visits to archaeological sites, museums, mosques, citadels, villages. Reliable local travel agencies organized unforgettable excursions through this largely uncontaminated country: tourism was sure to become an asset to the country and a great spur for further development. The guidebook didn’t say that the infrastructure was almost nonexistent, that there were no roads other than the Ring Road, that you couldn’t take a single step off the existing tracks without the risk of losing one or both legs on a mine. That there are more mines than people in Afghanistan, as many mines as stones: and worse, the mines are gray and made to look like stones, so as to blend in with the landscape. That a mine costs fifty cents and can weigh as little as four ounces—three slices of mortadella—and can cause shock waves that travel at twenty thousand feet a second. Or that a mine remains active years after the person who made it is dead. That a minefield is cleared two inches at a time, by mine clearers wearing suits that weigh sixty-five pounds, and that no matter how good the mine clearer is, he can’t clear more than thirty square feet a day, so that, optimistically speaking, to clear all the mines in Afghanistan—even if they could all be found, which is impossible because most of the minefield maps have been destroyed—would take three thousand years. It didn’t say there were parts of the Ring Road where even troops in armored tanks wouldn’t travel, or that there were roadblocks every ten miles—manned if not by policemen, by Afghan National Army soldiers, by one of the forty nations that made up the international coalition, then by soldiers without a uniform, from some shadow army, who would cut your throat and feed you to the dogs. That the taxis, jingle trucks, and buses traveled only in convoys in an attempt to discourage bandits. Or that in the outlying cities no one dared poke his head outside after sunset, and no one knew if they’d wake up the next morning. That the villages, many of which were still abandoned, were made of mud, rubble, and dried animal dung that crumbled in the wind. That the museums had been sacked, the statues disfigured by bazookas, vandalized, or stolen and sold secretly to collectors from the very same countries that had sent their soldiers to rebuild the place. That, in truth, the only museum a foreigner really had to see was the mine museum at the Kabul airport.

  She hadn’t been there, but First Lieutenant Russo had, and he told her about it once, while they were trading food and medicine for weapons with the inhabitants of a village. He said that there were dozens of models on display, of every shape and size—butterfly mines for children, cylindrical mines for tanks, rock-shaped mines for men—between nine and twenty centimeters in diameter, each with an explanation of how it worked and where it was from. And he kept reading Made in Italy Made in Italy Made in Italy. And even if we, as opposed to, say, the United States and a few other countries, have signed the Ottawa Convention banning antipersonnel mines, and have stopped producing them, seeing Made in Italy on those mines in the museum made his stomach turn: he didn’t sleep for days. Manuela turned over the unexploded mine that a little boy had traded in for a packet of aspirin: a TS-50, Made in Italy.

  The province of Farah, where the Tenth Alpini Regiment was to be deployed, wasn’t even mentioned in the guidebook. At first she interpreted this absence as a sign that there weren’t any monuments or tourist attractions there. But when she landed at the FOB, the thought struck her that there might be another reason. The province couldn’t be in a guidebook because it was considered out of control. “A key area” in military lingo. A war zone. “We’ll sit at the bar,” Mattia says to the concierge, making Manuela jump. “It’s closed,” the concierge informs him. “I know,” Mattia says, “that’s okay.”

  Mattia steers her through the glass door. The room is dark but he doesn’t turn on the light. There are a dozen or so couches and chairs around low tables. Mattia sits in the corner chair, where he can keep an eye on the door. He slips a piece of paper into his pocket. Manuela recognizes it—the fax. She catches a glimpse of the number it was sent from in a corner, but can only make out 06, so Rome. There’s a chessboard and a deck of cards on the table. The dust is so thick she could write in it with her finger. He doesn’t want me to go up to his room. No intimacy. He’s keeping me at a distance. The heat is off and it’s cold. Manuela doesn’t even take off her gloves. In the thick shadows, she observes that he’s nervous, he crosses his legs, wiggles his foot, keeps touching his hair. He wasn’t expecting her and seems thrown off. He didn’t have time to prepare his next move or organize his defense. Military tactics. Strategy. Daring. Impetus. An attack works well only if it’s a surprise. Only if your enemy isn’t expecting you. You can’t defend yourself from something you’re not expecting. He’s not my enemy. Still, I want to conquer him.

  “I’m sorry about what happened at the lake, Manuela,” he says without looking at her. “I made a mistake and I apologize.” He stares at the photographs on the wall above them: the Etruscan necropolis at Vacuna, the gold-plated silver fibula in the shape of a cicada, exhumed from a tomb at Piane di Vaccina, a young Ostrogoth woman who died in the fifth century. As if that barbarian object were somehow more reassuring than she. He almost seems afraid. Only now does Manuela realize that the local archaeological treasures are mortuary trousseaus, and there’s something unsettling in the discovery that the art of her homeland is linked to the journey to the other world. For the Etruscans, as well as for the barbarians, life is something we merely pass through; death is everything. One thousand five hundred years of so-called civilization at Ladispoli have left behind a ruined watchtower, a prince’s impregnable fort, and fields of artichokes—nothing more. But she is still alive.

  “I’m waiting,” Manuela says, using that same decisive tone that had worked with the concierge. “For what?” Mattia asks, surprised. “For you to tell me something; you choose. Why we kissed. Why you wrote me that idiotic note. Why you won’t take phone calls.” “Too many things,” Mattia says, forcing a smile. “Choose one.” “Why you don’t want to see me anymore,” Manuela says.

  “Because I can’t get into a relationship with you,” Mattia says, “and I realized that you’re not the kind of girl I can be with for a day or a week. But that’s all I have.” Manuela counts thirteen days until the twelfth. Not many, but not so few. If her doctors’ visits on January 12 don’t go well, she will hurl herself into the sea and drown—the Tyrrhenian is unsparing in the winter. She doesn’t want a life o
utside of the army. It’d be the same as dying; it’s better to actually kill herself. To believe—like the Etruscans, like the barbarians, like the Taliban—that life is something we merely pass through, that death is everything. She would ask to be buried in her uniform, they can’t take that away from her. In the hospital, she’d often thought angrily that it would have been better to die with the others. At least she would have had the funeral chapel at Camp Arena in Herat, the honor guard, her comrades’ heartfelt tears, the flag-draped coffin with her feathered cap resting on top, the state funeral, the red carpet, the military band, the president of the republic comforting her mother, the posthumous promotion, and everyone’s respect, forever. Maybe they really would have erected a monument in her honor on the promenade at Ladispoli, and a hundred years from now the inhabitants of her city would remember her, thinking her no less worthy because she gave her life for a cause they didn’t understand. She doesn’t want to go back to being just Manuela Paris on January 12. There’s nothing behind that name—an ordinary woman, without a future, or with one she already rejected, years ago: as a tour guide, the wife of an office worker, the discontented mother of children fed on her regrets. She doesn’t want that kind of life. Thirteen days before she finds out if she is alive or dead, Sergeant Paris or no one. It’s not worth giving up something for nothing.

  “It’s not like I want to marry you, Mattia,” she says. “I’m just passing through, my work comes before everything else. The army, Italy, my Alpini, my family. Those are the things that matter to me, in that order. I don’t know what you do and I don’t really care. I don’t know if you chose it or simply stumbled upon it. For me, work isn’t something I do to fill my day or to earn a salary. It’s a part of me. In fact, it’s the truest part of me.”