Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  18

  LIVE

  Palo Castle juts out into the sea. Compact, graceful, with round towers, orderly crenellations, windows neatly spaced along the façade, and a grand marble doorway: it looks like a child’s happy dream. The freshly cut grass at the entrance is still damp with frost. Manuela doesn’t ask Mattia what he did to get them to open the gate or what story he’d told the custodian. They’re here, on a clear January morning, and in the end, that’s all that matters. She’s never been here before, she never even thought about being able to come, except on her wedding day. Yet now she’s walking on the gravel drive, one step behind Mattia, who is telling Alessia a story—clearly a funny story, because Alessia is laughing. Manuela feels vaguely guilty that Alessia is here today, on Epiphany, and not in Piazza Navona, choosing a figurine for the nativity scene and awaiting the arrival of the Befana, as Manuela had promised. But Alessia has forgotten about that. Manuela is surprised to find herself thinking that this could become the new family tradition someday, Epiphany at Palo Castle. She regrets it immediately. The future does not exist.

  The door is wide open, and movers are unloading crates from a white truck parked along the drive. The company name is stamped on all the crates. The castle has been rented. “They’re holding a convention here after the holiday, but I don’t know what it’s about,” Mattia says.

  Manuela follows him through a series of rooms furnished with immense stone fireplaces topped with deer heads. Their footsteps are silent, muffled by the carpets. It’s odd to be strolling through Palo Castle with Mattia. She’d come here only in her dreams. In her wedding dress, carrying a bouquet of roses, wearing white shoes, and a veil. A traditional, conventional wedding, because at the time she believed that, in spite of everything, she wanted to be a traditional, conventional girl. She and Giovanni had sent an e-mail to the owners, requesting information. It seemed phenomenally expensive. But after studying the estimate line by line and doing the math, Giovanni decided they could swing it after all: when she got back from Afghanistan they wouldn’t have to scrimp and save, she’d be making a heck of a lot of money. She’d gotten insulted. They’d argued.

  “You don’t deploy in country for the money, only an idiot could think that a person would risk her life for a few thousand dollars, life isn’t bought and sold,” she had said bitterly. “Are you calling me an idiot?” Giovanni objected, incredulous. “Yes.” “That’s it. You can’t talk to me like that, take it back.” “Take it back? You’re the one who should apologize,” she shouted. “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to apologize for, but okay, I apologize,” Giovanni tried meekly to calm her down. But his servile submissiveness irritated her even more. “Let’s have the reception at the Miraggio in Fregene,” Giovanni suggested, “it’s really fancy, there’s even a pool.” But it was too late. Something had broken between them. Manuela suddenly felt she was seeing her boyfriend for the first time. A weak, indecisive creature, a spineless slug who made a show of giving in so he could fling her choices and mistakes back in her face, that way he could feel sorry for himself and be absolved. Sharing her life with someone like him would be a kind of suicide. Giovanni had never understood her, and with time he’d understand her less and less. But it’s not like she could blame him. Everyone has their strengths. You can’t make a car out of paper, a pot out of wood, or a parachute out of lead. She left him two days later, without even bothering to tell him. She simply changed her Facebook profile. She wrote “Single,” and he knew it was over.

  Alessia admires the glass lanterns hung from slanted poles on either side of the door, but she likes the wooden model of a sailing ship on top of a cabinet best. Manuela steps aside to let a couch pass. “Are you the owner?” a man of about thirty addresses Mattia. “We’re having a problem with the electrical system, could you please tell us where the meters are?” “I’m sorry,” Mattia smiles, “but none of this belongs to me. I’m only here on behalf of the owner, the Marquis.” The electrician looks at him doubtfully. “The Marquis of Carabas?” Alessia whispers excitedly. “Of course,” Mattia replies with a wink. Manuela is astonished that he takes that stupid game so seriously. He never takes anything seriously; it always seems like he’s passing lightly over things, not wanting to leave a trace.

  They head outside. Away from the castle, the vegetation becomes thicker, the tangle of shrubbery denser. This whole area must have been covered with woods like this once. Marshes, impenetrable branches, solitude. Fragments of ancient walls emerge from the grass. Manuela remembers confusedly that the ruins of a Roman villa are around here somewhere, but she wouldn’t know how to find them. When she was in her second year of tourism school, she had been tested on the castle’s history. The twenty-eight girls, ignorant about everything else, were well prepared when it came to local attractions: they assumed these were the only things they would need to know. Manuela wanted to write an essay on the castle’s owners, whom she found immensely fascinating: Felice Della Rovere Orsini and Leo X, the Medici pope. The noblewoman had purchased it at the beginning of the sixteenth century for nine thousand ducati, and the young pope would lodge here, along with his entourage, while hunting in the woods of Palo. He was a pope, but also a keen hunter, and his unusual, almost transgressive skills with a lance and musket had sparked her admiration for that man of the cloth, who was not supposed to hunt or kill. At fifteen, Manuela imagined that she, too, was skilled in a field theoretically prohibited to her—she already saw herself as a soldier—and the self-assurance with which the pope gratified his passions for hunting and fighting encouraged her to cultivate her own. But her professor had pointed out that both were too eccentric to be the subject of a thesis for a professional school aimed at producing tour guides and secretaries for travel agencies. The first was the daughter of a pope, and the second a homosexual who, with his scandalous behavior, had helped undermine the Church’s authority and contributed to the success of the Lutheran Reformation. Manuela was disappointed, offended almost, by the revelation. She promptly forgot about them, cobbling together a scant two pages on the garrison installed in the castle to protect the borders of the Papal States in the eighteenth century. Zouaves. Mercenaries. Warriors without a history. She got a lousy grade. Warriors without a history. Like her.

  “No, no, no,” Mattia is saying, “you can’t take a picture of the Cat, absolutely not, he’s on a secret mission, you don’t want to betray him, do you? Nobody can know he’s here.” He tries to grab Alessia, but she wriggles free and runs and hides behind a scaly oak tree. She’s having fun pointing her cell at him and snaps another photo. But by now he’s crouched down, so all she gets is bark and bushes. “Be a good girl and erase it,” Mattia says, dropping his playful tone. Alessia laughs, waving the hand that holds the cell phone, but keeps her distance. She pulls up the image on the display. Mattia came out good, she thinks he’s handsome, with his rock star hair and blue eyes, she doesn’t want to erase it. She sticks out her tongue at him. She doesn’t buy his cat story. Who does he think she is? She’s a big girl, she’ll be eight in October. There’s no one else amid the ancient trees. The silence is broken only by the screech of seagulls, the obstinate call of a blackbird, and Alessia’s wicked laughter. Mattia’s anxiety does not escape Manuela. Why doesn’t he want his picture taken? She would like to have a photo of them together. Photographs preserve memories when nothing else is left.

  “This forest is just like the one in Limbo,” Alessia says. “Let’s play?” “I don’t know what that game is,” Mattia responds, “I’m old, I’m still stuck on hide-and-seek. And besides, I’m not going to play with you anymore if you don’t give me that phone.” Alessia explains that it’s a new video game, her friend Ginevra’s brother has it: there’s a boy looking for his little sister, she disappeared in the woods, got lost. The player who controls the console is the boy. He meets men and monsters in the forest, and they all try to kill him. “I don’t understand what the point of the game is,” Manuela says. “To find the little gi
rl,” Alessia explains, “but I’ve never gotten to the end, they always kill me first, but it’s still fun. It’s better with PlayStation, but it works with real players, too, too bad there’s only three of us. I’ll be the boy, Manuela, you’re the men, and Mattia, you’re the monsters. You have to knock me down so I’m flat on the grass.” “It sounds pretty violent, I don’t like it,” Manuela objects. “But I don’t really die,” Alessia says. “In this game, you don’t die just once, you die all the time. You go to Limbo and then you come back to life. So you get back up and start over again, right from where you left off.”

  “Interesting,” Mattia says, forcing himself to cover up his bad mood. “I’m in. What monster am I?” “First you’re a spider, then you’re a worm.” Alessia is getting more and more excited. “When you’re the worm you have to slither on the ground. Manuela throws pinecones at me. If you hit me I die. But let’s say I escape and you chase me, you have to kill me before I make it to that tree over there, you have to trick me, jump on me from behind, lay traps, if you catch me you win and I’ll let you erase the photo.” Mattia pleads silently with Manuela, begs her collaboration. Alessia laughs. The man from the Bellavista is in her power. Now he’ll do whatever she tells him to. He’ll play the monster, get dirty crawling on the ground. “I’ll count to ten,” she says, “and then I’ll start to run.”

  When Alessia gets to seven, Manuela drags Mattia behind a hedge and kisses him. “Come on, don’t be mad at her, it’s just a photo.” Alessia’s footsteps fade in the opposite direction. They chase her, showering her with pinecones, which they deliberately aim at a bush. “You go after her,” Manuela says, “I can’t run, but I don’t feel like telling her that.” For a few seconds, all she can hear is the rustle of the wind in the trees. A spider arpeggios on the silk threads of his web: perfect and empty, it sparkles in the light. Everything is suspended, simple, neat. Every religion represents Paradise as a garden. “Do you realize you’ve brought me to Paradise on Earth?” she whispers with a laugh. Mattia says he’d gladly bring her there again right now, but they have to wait till they get back to the hotel. Even though it would be wonderful to make love here, among the spiders and pine needles. But he wants to erase that photograph. It’s really important. He straightens his hair and runs after the little girl, grumbling. Manuela hears Alessia’s little scream that confirms she’s been killed, she’s in Limbo now. Mattia returns to the hedge. They hear Alessia get up and start running again. Mattia assumed she was just joking about the Earthly Paradise. But it’s true. Her grandfather once told her that in the 1960s some American movie people came to Palo Castle. Hundreds of them, it was like an encampment. At the time, Vittorio’s moving company had put him on disability because the war was still raging in his head and every once in a while his brain went all topsy-turvy. So when he heard that the producers were looking for manual laborers, he showed up, and they took him. He worked as a chauffeur for about ten days. But he wasn’t driving around American actors or the director or the fabulous diva whose sexual exploits he fantasized about, just some dreadful Roman from Cinecittà. He’d drive him there every morning and then he’d roam about on set, poking around among the props and cameras, while no one paid him any mind. The guy was a snake trainer. Which meant that every morning Vittorio had a green, ten-foot-long snake as thick as a ship’s cable in his van. In the floodlit park, an actor and an actress would move about half-naked. Chilled, they would put on overcoats whenever they could and drink hard liquor. The actor was always drunk. The director—a bearded American who looked a little like Noah—wasn’t afraid of the snake. He claimed to secrete an odor that charmed the animals. The snake, however, was not of the same opinion; once, it wrapped its coils around him, and the snake trainer had to step in to save the director’s skin. After the Americans left, Vittorio found out that the film was The Bible, the actors Adam and Eve, and the Palo Castle grounds the Garden of Eden. Manuela had never seen that old film, not even on TV, but people from Ladispoli still talk about it.

  “Worm, you have to hit me,” Alessia yells, and Mattia crawls out of his hiding place, firing a handful of pinecones at her. Alessia zigzags across the grass, rejoicing at having escaped. She’s laughing, shouting, having fun. But her cell phone has fallen out of her pocket. Mattia prudently sheds his worm identity, snatches it, and then lies down on the grass again. He shows Manuela the photo. Alessia caught him smiling, looking good-natured, disheveled, and alert. But also evasive, catlike. “Erase it for me,” he says. “Why?” “Let’s keep the memory of today just for us, as if we were alone here, just you and me.” Manuela erases the photo. “Now it’s the men in the caves’ turn,” Alessia shouts. “Manu, come get me!!! If you don’t send me to Limbo, I win.” “I’m coming,” Manuela yells. “I’m coming.”

  But she goes on hiding behind the hedge, holding her breath. Immobile, patient, the spider is still lying in wait. She hears Alessia running, panting, climbing over trunks, charging through bushes. When Alessia runs past without seeing her, Manuela gets up, and in so doing, destroys the spiderweb. The spider sinks into the leaves. “Don’t catch me, Aunt Manu! Don’t catch me! I win, I win!” She spots him there on the grass. Mattia doesn’t move. His big body supine, his eyes to the sky, his arms crossed, hair rumpled, smiling, undoubtedly more serene than she has ever seen him. They don’t make the most convincing Adam and Eve. She does feel she has been expelled from the Garden of Eden, but this park isn’t it. It’s the uniform, the company, the fraternity. And she doesn’t know how to reconcile Mattia with all that. She drops to the grass next to him. The tall trees sway in the wind, dark green against a lapis lazuli sky. At times winter on the Tyrrhenian can be limpid and crystalline, supernatural almost. “I made it to the end and I found the little girl,” Alessia’s voice startles them. “I won. But you two are stuck in Limbo.” Mattia takes her hand, he doesn’t want to get up, neither does she. “I think something’s happened to me,” Mattia says. “Did you get bit by a spider?” Manuela misunderstands. “I’ve found myself in you,” he says, his fingers wrapping around her wrist. He can’t explain it. But it’s as if Manuela were his reflection in a pool of water.

  * * *

  Vanessa and Cinzia join them at the Posta Vecchia restaurant. Mattia has reserved a table. They’re seated in front of the large window, framed by flowing red drapes. The sea in the window looks like a painting. There are only American and Japanese tourists, and the five of them, dressed as they are, seem like intruders. But the waiters pretend not to notice and treat them, like all the others, with professional kindness. “I don’t want to steal Manuela away from you,” Mattia says to her mother, extending his hand, “but I thought you might feel better if you met me.” “You’re too kind, you shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble,” Cinzia says, intimidated by the sumptuous dining room and the insistent presence of waiters in white livery. “What are you doing? This will ruin you,” Vanessa whispers in his ear, “it’s not worth it, we don’t know the difference between a trattoria and a Michelin two-star.” “Neither do I,” Mattia replies, “but I’ve been eating at the Bellavista for almost three weeks, and I felt like something different.”

  It’s not true, of course. You can see that from how he decodes the menu, which is incomprehensible, might as well be written in a foreign language as far as the Paris family is concerned (what are Jerusalem artichokes, sea truffles?), from how he chooses the bottle of wine from hundreds of labels in a leather-bound book that looks like a reliquary, from how he smells and tastes it, clicking his tongue, and by the tone he uses when he speaks to the waiter. He orders for everyone: fried zucchini flowers with caviar, raw weever with annurca apple purée, cannoli stuffed with lobster and artichoke tartare, roasted shellfish on a bed of toasted fennel, licorice, and ginger. Self-assured, easy, he shows that he doesn’t take the place or the occasion too seriously. Cinzia doesn’t know what to say, so she doesn’t say anything, to avoid making a bad impression. Even though he’s a tad too old, Mr. Rubino is di
stinguished, polite, and clearly rich: in short, he has class. She can’t understand what he could possibly have in common with a soldier like Manuela, but she begins to hope that this unlikely relationship of theirs is the prelude to Manuela’s farewell to arms—for which she is ready to forgive his difference in age and bless him forever.

  The Parises are not very talkative, so Mattia ventures an odd soliloquy on city street names. He says he liked Ladispoli instantly. Oh, not for its monuments or even for the sea. But for the names. He’s had to pass through Rome pretty often lately, for work. And he’s struck every time by the harshness of the place-names. Il Muro Torto—the Twisted Wall; Via dei Due Macelli—the Street of Two Slaughterhouses; Via delle Fratte—the Street of Thickets; Via dei Cessati Spiriti—the Street of Dead Spirits; Via della Femmina Morta—the Street of the Dead Woman; Via del Fosso di Tor Pagnotta—the Street of the Pagnotta Tower Ditch; Tor Sanguigna—Bloody Tower; Borgata Finocchio—the Fag Neighborhood … In the city where he was born, the streets are named after, for example, Italy’s founding fathers, Cavour, Garibaldi, Mazzini, or scientists, philosophers, battles. Then he realized that the secret of Rome is disenchantment. The lack of rhetoric. Romans, oppressed by the nearness of power, have a crude fondness for truth. They don’t embellish reality, the flaws of which they know well; instead they serve it up and take it as it comes. Apparently the people of Lazio are the same. A city where the streets are called Via dell’Infernaccio—Real Hell Street; Via dell’Anatra—Duck Street; Via delle Folaghe—Coot Street; Via della Caduta delle Cavalle—the Street Where Mares Fall; has a simple, straightforward soul, and he feels at home in Ladispoli.