They rush to get dressed because Vanessa is late, her class at the gym starts at ten, and Manuela wants to go with her, to exercise on the treadmill. The doctor had told her not to interrupt her rehab regimen for any reason, but yesterday she didn’t take a single step. In fact, she twisted her ankle rolling around in bed with Mattia, and now the pain is worse. “I have to ask you to go to that party in Rome tonight, at the Gas Works,” Manuela says as Vanessa’s car, a banged-up Yaris that’s missing a headlight and smells of vanilla, pulls onto the Aurelia. “Why?” Vanessa asks, surprised. She looks at Manuela and almost hits a truck. “Because I want to go to Passo Oscuro with him. I’m sorry.”
* * *
Manuela walks on the treadmill for almost an hour, her eyes fixed on the mirror in front of her. It occurs to her that she talked to Mattia a lot about her ideas, but not about her friends; she didn’t even mention them. And yet in the end, that’s all she has left from Afghanistan. Everything else has scattered, like dust in the wind. She didn’t dare mention them to Mattia, afraid of saying their names out loud, there in room 302 of the Bellavista Hotel. Afraid for them, and for herself. Is this what cowardice is? She has never been a coward. Is it possible to lose yourself so completely that you can no longer recognize yourself?
While she marches on the treadmill—as if she needs to get somewhere, though in reality she’s only trying to put some distance between herself and her friends, to leave them behind, to forget about them—on the other side of the glass wall Vanessa is teaching salsa and bachata to her troops. Her students’ outlines skip along in the mirror. Eighteen women, all rather pudgy, and three men who aren’t so young anymore move gracelessly across the polished parquet floor. Vanessa watches them, keeps them in check, corrects them, a smile on her lips but unsparing in her words: in her own way, her sister is a platoon leader, too. She makes herself respected. Or rather, she expects her students to respect her work, and the art of dance. She doesn’t presume to transform them into an actual dance troupe, but she would be disrespecting herself if she let their mistakes slide. They understand, and take it seriously. Those awkward, clumsy recruits, eager to make a good impression, remind Manuela of Pegasus during their final days of joint training, their final exercises before deployment. Thirty-six soldiers, they, too, eager to make a good impression, yet strangely awkward, wearing their desert camo in the green fields of the Dolomites. She’s in the lead, climbing tortuous paths, her rifle strap cutting into her neck, and she’s thinking, not yet, I’m still not worthy of the brown feather in my cap, as the old-timers would say, but I will be soon. She’s incredibly nostalgic for the enthusiasm of those final days in Italy—and for the Manuela Paris who was preparing to deploy, unaware of all that would come. But she wouldn’t want to turn back. She looks at the numbers on the treadmill display and forces herself to evaluate them objectively. Unfortunately, they’re discouraging. She has walked two point three kilometers. She has to stop. The pain in her leg is unbearable.
* * *
The Parco Leonardo shopping center is nothing like how Teodora Gogean described it. To Manuela it just seems like a giant brick-and-glass box. The Paris sisters wander past shop windows. To make up for taking over her grandfather’s cottage, Manuela plans on buying Vanessa a spectacular outfit for New Year’s Eve. They haven’t gone shopping together in ages. And there are more stores here than in all of Ladispoli. In the end they enter the funkiest one: the window features mannequins in black leather bustiers, latex boots, and red garters. They make their way to the dressing room with a slew of outfits under their arms. Manuela assumed she would only have to help her sister choose, but as Vanessa gets undressed she begs Manuela to give her the satisfaction just once, just for tonight, of dressing like a woman.
Manuela notices the difference only when Vanessa takes off her T-shirt. They both used to be the same size, 34 AA. It didn’t matter to her in the least—in fact, as far as sports and her future military career were concerned, a big chest would only have been a nuisance, a handicap, a source of problems. But those adolescent buds, which always seemed on the point of blossoming and yet never did, were a trial for Vanessa. Hereditary bad luck, she complained, Paris women have bogus genes: they have anemia, microcytosis, are likely to pass on cystic fibrosis, and, worst of all, are as flat as the seabed at Ladispoli. But now Vanessa shows off perfectly sculpted, magnificent breasts.
“I got them redone,” she says gleefully. “My thirtieth birthday present to myself. Do you like them?” “They must have cost you a fortune,” Manuela says, sizing them up. “You’re always complaining you don’t have any money.” “You can’t put a price on feeling good,” Vanessa laughs. “And they’ll last forever. Just think, I’ll be a toothless old bag and I’ll still have tits that turn heads. Why don’t you get yours done, too? You know you can choose the size, even the shape? Champagne flute, pear, torpedo, you can even have an F cup if you want, and you can make your nipples bigger or smaller, too. I opted for something modest, 36C.” Manuela observes that for something modest, they’re pretty attention-grabbing.
Manuela takes off her jeans, bumping into her sister in the too-narrow cubicle. She has always hated dressing rooms, the stagnant smell of other people’s underarms, the suffocating heat, cloudy mirrors, and cruel overhead lighting that accentuates your blemishes. She has never liked going shopping. Naked, Vanessa is a dancer, lean with sculpted muscles, while Manuela is a pasty anchovy, with those horrendous bloodred scars that disfigure her leg. “They’ll be gone in a few years,” Vanessa says, seeing how discouraged she is. She shows Manuela her cesarean scar, a line like on a musical stave that runs above her pubic hair, where her tan line is. “In the hospital, the first time I saw it, while they were changing my dressing, it was so gross, I nearly had a heart attack. I swore I’d never wear a bikini again. But it faded. And I didn’t even have plastic surgery. But maybe you can get it for free in the military, so you could make yours go away even sooner.” “He wants to do it with the lights on,” Manuela murmurs, “but he’ll faint if he sees my scars.” If I understand anything about men, Vanessa thinks, as soon as Mattia sees them, he’ll want to protect her, save her, and will fall madly in love with her. But she doesn’t say anything. She’s not sure she approves of their affair. She wiggles into a little black sheath cut high on her thigh and contorts herself to see the price tag. She doesn’t want Manuela to spend a fortune on a stupid dress, who gives a shit about New Year’s anyway.
But her sister rips off the price tag and hides it. “It’s a gift, Vanè,” she says, “I’ve got some money set aside, I got paid well in Afghanistan. And now I’ll get disability, too.” “You try this one on,” Vanessa says, handing her a red evening gown, satin, strapless, narrow at the waist, 1950s style. To wear with elbow-length gloves, like Rita Hayworth. Manuela hesitates, protests, but in the end, laughing like it’s a game, she puts on the gloves and even the dress. “I look ridiculous,” she observes cruelly, “I look like an artichoke all dressed up for carnival.”
She peers at the girl in the red dress in the mirror without recognizing herself. I’d never have the balls to wear it, she thinks, it’s not me. But she doesn’t say anything, because a faraway voice suddenly echoes in her head. “I fantasize at night, Sergeant.” The first thing you forget about a person is his voice. It’s impossible to remember. It simply fades away, evaporates, like all things without form or consistency, like water, like music. But now the voice is here, in the dressing room of a clothing store at the Parco Leonardo shopping center. It’s the voice of Lorenzo Zandonà, that gentle singsong voice, a melody of sweet s’s and c’s and z’s that soften his words. There are dialects and cadences that sting, exasperate, or snarl, and others that soothe and subdue. The Venetian accent caresses. “The most hellish thing about Afghanistan isn’t the insurgents or even the IEDs,” Lorenzo was saying, “it’s being without a woman for six months. I’m twenty-one, I’m used to doing it every day, you know. I’m going crazy, I’ve worn my hand out
. I can’t show you the pictures I brought with me because you’d have to reprimand me. But I’ve rubbed myself on top of them so often, they don’t do anything for me anymore, they might as well be pictures of a priest’s ass. I’m not a pig, Sergeant, I’m a romantic, I need poetry. Do you know what my Afghani poem is?” “Don’t tell me, Nail, or I’ll have to reprimand you for real.” “I’m going to tell you anyway, I want to tell you, because you’re like a sister to me, or a brother really, I have a brother so I know what that means. If you’re truly my brother you can’t get offended. So this is my poem. There’s this Manuela Paris who’s the singer in a smoky bar—I’m the piano player and I give her the rhythm—she moves onstage with these gloves up to her elbows, she’s wearing red lipstick and a bright red dress, her shoulders are bare. Manuela Paris’s collarbones stick out like violin strings, she’s so hot she makes my blood boil.” “You’re out of line, Zandonà!” she interrupted, slapping him on the face. “You disappoint me. You sound like a typical misogynist: I’m a woman, so for you I’m just a sex object. But I’m not a stereotype, and I won’t let you offend me.” “But I’m not trying to be offensive, this is something pure,” Lorenzo protested as he massaged his jaw—she’d hit him hard. “You’re my commanding officer, I’d obey you even if you ordered me to drive the Lince over water. We’re friends, brothers, epigones, and always will be. I have a girlfriend back in Mel, I love her even though she’s probably already cheating on me; my heart belongs to her. But during these miserable Afghani nights, you take away my fear of dying, you make me happy, Sergeant, and I’ll be grateful to you forever for that.”
Corporal Zandonà, not even twenty-one years old. For a second, like a hallucinatory flash, the red dress in the mirror becomes Lorenzo’s blood, which oozes onto her face. He’s on top of her—and inside her. The violence of the explosion hurled him on top of her. Flesh in flesh. His blood is hot, viscous, it gushes, spurts, trickles. His voice comes from somewhere impossibly far away, and follows her down into the void where she is vanishing. “Manuela,” he babbles, terrified, “Manuela, am I hurt?” She faints, falling to her knees, sliding into Vanessa’s lap as if she were an inanimate object.
They lay her out on the floor of the shop and hover over her. “Is anyone a doctor here?” the manager asks hastily, annoyed that this unfortunate incident had to happen in her shop right when it’s most crowded. No, there’s no doctor, no one steps forward. Manuela isn’t coming to. Her face is the color of death. Vanessa tries to shoo the customers away: “Get back, she can’t breathe,” she protests. She calls her name, shakes her by the shoulder, “Manuela, Manuela, honey.” Manuela doesn’t respond. The shop girls press her, should they call an ambulance? The customers stare wide-eyed at the lifeless girl in the evening gown. So young. One of them notices Manuela’s crutches leaning against the dressing room wall. What a relief, a sign that she’s sick. These things don’t happen to healthy people. Vanessa lifts Manuela’s head and brings a cup of sugar water to her lips. The liquid wets her clenched mouth and drips down her chin and throat. Vanessa dries Manuela’s face with her fingers. Manuela opens her eyes. She’s not in Qal’a-i-Shakhrak. She’s in a dress shop, under a strip of neon, surrounded by female faces and perfume.
“Everything’s okay, I had a flashback,” she tries to explain to Vanessa. “When a memory suddenly seizes me, I see the whole scene again and it’s too much, my brain disconnects. Fainting is my defense mechanism, I’m fine.” Vanessa is kneeling over her, caressing her forehead, it’s hard to say if her expression is one of fear or pity. “Please, don’t tell anyone it happened again,” Manuela whispers.
She gets dressed quickly, climbing into her jeans and lacing up her boot by herself. She leans on her crutches and makes her way to the counter with dignity, the salesgirls stepping aside as if she has some contagious disease that might ruin their New Year’s Eve. She buys the black dress and a clutch for Vanessa, the elbow-length gloves, and even the red satin dress. She spends three hundred and eighty-one euros without batting an eye. And tonight she’s going to wear that red dress. For Mattia. But also for herself, and for Lorenzo. As if he could see her, wherever he is. Brother. Epigone. My boy.
* * *
Vittorio Paris built the house himself, on Sundays, brick by brick. He had bought a hectare of land, a small plot wedged between the railway and the beach at Passo Oscuro. At the time the coast consisted of wild dunes, rows of eucalyptus trees planted to combat malaria, and only a few inhabitants, who lived in reed and wood huts, fishing and poaching, as if in a bygone era. It was an uncultivated plot, buried in briars, with nothing but a chicken coop and a boat shed. He pulled down the chicken coop and moved it to the far end of the field; the boat shed he enlarged and transformed bit by bit into an actual house: a wall, a window, a bathroom, a guest room. He planted two tamarisks in front of the veranda and hung a swing on the umbrella pine, in case his granddaughters wanted to come keep him company. He never would have asked them, though. He didn’t expect affection or respect: if someone wanted to bestow some on him, he accepted, but without feeling any obligation to return it. For forty years he lived alone, separate from everything, in that little beach cottage, which, as Passo Oscuro grew into a modest beach town and then a Roman suburb, became quite valuable.
With time he became more cantankerous, or maybe his character was distilled. Vittorio considered everyone but himself an enemy. He hid his pension under his mattress, near a WWII rifle, which he’d never registered or returned, and kept in perfect working order. He did his exercises on the veranda every morning, and walked regularly on the beach for hours, to keep his body working perfectly, too. He washed his hair with olive oil, because, he said, shampoos contain carcinogens. He didn’t use soap. He lived on the meager vegetables from his small, sandy garden, a few fish, telline, the birds that he caught with a line, net, or gun, and the eggs his two hens laid like clockwork. He didn’t buy anything and didn’t ask for anything. He was divorced from his age and from Italy. He’d never wanted a television, but he kept up with what was happening in the world by listening to the radio news religiously. He lived alone, with his hens, Pina and Nina, his memories of the war, his friends who had fallen in the Libyan desert or the Apennine forests, and his wife, who died when she was thirty. He cursed everyone who came near him, and trusted no one, not even his only son.
Yet Manuela was always glad to go see him. She wasn’t afraid of him, and was happy when her mother would drop her in the garden in front of his little house—which to her was as welcoming as a palace—on a Saturday afternoon. She had fun with that strange and intractable old man. She liked hoeing the soil, fertilizing the plants, picking tomatoes, feeding the hens, watering the garden, exercising on the veranda, inhaling the scent of sage and rosemary, listening to his horrifying stories of war and resistance. Manuela had only happy memories of those tiny rooms with low ceilings, linoleum floors, and paper-thin walls that trembled in the wind. Which is why she spends New Year’s Eve there with Mattia. She hungers nostalgically for new happy memories.
They get takeout at Ladispoli’s finest gourmet market. All ready to eat, because the Paris family stopped paying the utility bill, so the gas had been cut off. Vanessa told her there’s no electricity anymore either, but that she’ll find a cardboard box with a good supply of candles. There’s also a gas heater, which Vanessa brought there to warm the place up when she started going there with Youssef, though they’ve left no trace of their trysts. Apart from the sand and dust, which makes its way through the cracks around the windows, which don’t close properly, the house is clean. But empty. Even the furniture is gone. Vittorio’s rickety furniture, remnants from every house he’d ever lived in—the master bed, the sideboard, the couch—is no longer there. Teodora Gogean got rid of it without asking his granddaughters if they wanted to keep anything. She didn’t want to store it in her house, so she sold it to a used-furniture dealer. A gesture that Cinzia and Vanessa considered an affront to the family’s memory of t
he deceased, and which earned the family less than a hundred euros. The illegal sale of that furniture, which they considered pretty much theft, was the pretext for the lawsuit Cinzia and Vanessa brought against that woman. Manuela notes that the furniture has left a lighter mark on the walls, almost like the negative of what once was. But she’s not sorry or regretful. Like Teodora, she’s not sentimental. She doesn’t believe that the creaking bed or the couch coated in chicken shit held the memory of their owner. She is the final keeper of Vittorio Paris’s life and legacy. And as long as she remembers him, her grandfather is still alive.
“I should have carried you over the threshold,” Mattia says. “People used to do that, I think. A man wasn’t supposed to let his bride step on the floor on their wedding night. Superstition, I guess. To bring prosperity and good luck to the house and the couple.” “But we’ve already slept together,” Manuela laughs, “and besides, I don’t believe in those things.”
They spread a red synthetic tablecloth on the floor and set it with paper plates and plastic cups and forks—but with attentiveness and care, as if they were made of porcelain, silver, and crystal. What’s more, they’re both dressed as if they were going to dinner at the Posta Vecchia restaurant, the five-star relais near Palo Castle, where Manuela has never set foot. She’s wearing the red dress. But she’s ditched Vanessa’s shoes, with their six-inch heels: too risky for her knee—so under her evening gown she has on her orthopedic shoe and the same old army boot. The movie-star dress made quite an impression, though, if not quite the way she had imagined. Mattia liked it, but he also revealed that the erotic fantasy she aroused in him was quite another. Completely the opposite. He wants to make love to her when she’s wearing her Alpino uniform. “That’s such pornographic trash!” Manuela says with surprise. He’s like one of those pigs who gets turned on dressing like a Nazi or watching women in French maid’s outfits … Mattia blushes, protesting weakly. “Never,” she tells him. “A uniform isn’t a disguise or a costume: it’s a way of being. It’s my life.”
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