Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  I didn’t even want to talk to you, Manuela. I was happy just watching you from my balcony. The soldier girl with a crew cut, a child’s smile, an athlete’s body, and crutches. A hard girl, but also a fragile one: enthusiastic and disappointed, scared and courageous. I never tired of watching you. But I avoided meeting you, believe me. It was you who came to me, who looked for me, who flushed me out. I tried to defend myself. I hadn’t yet realized that in behaving like that, all I was doing was drawing you in, because you’ve been trained to attack, and the more I defended myself, the more I retreated, the more you pursued me, hunted me, cornered me; you weren’t going to let me go until you’d captured me. Cordon and search … you’re a soldier, I suppose it’s your nature. You have a unique beauty that wounded me deeply. I felt your pain, in your body and in your eyes, before I even spoke to you. I realized right away that you were dangerous for me. Because you were my shadow.

  My life—if you could call it a life—is strange. But I’m not dead either. Not anymore. It’s as if I’m suspended, in limbo. I know that the word has become a cliché, even a child like Alessia knows it. But to me, before, it was a medical term. The corneal limbus is the border of the sclera, the white of the eye. I used it all the time. But I would like to restore the word to its former grandeur. It means “margin,” “edge,” “brink.” One of my most vivid memories of school is of my Italian teacher trying to explain to a bunch of sixteen-year-olds who were for all intents and purposes pagan, how Dante had imagined Hell, with Limbo as the antechamber, where those who will be excluded from grace for all of eternity, even if they are without sin, end up. Words like grace, sin, even Hell meant and still mean nothing to me. Yet today the Supreme Poet’s melancholy when he encounters those spirits, innocent yet deprived of happiness, touches me deeply, and the verse he devotes to them seems to me the most devastating he ever wrote: “we are lost … we who without hope live in desire.” So, I truly am in Limbo, but I’m hoping it looks more like the forest in Alessia’s game, where you don’t die just once.

  I have a fake ID, but it’s not very convincing, it gives an invented address, and would raise suspicions if it were ever checked, which is why I didn’t want to show it to the police officer at the soccer field. Forgive me for not explaining this to you, and for not helping you when you might have needed me. I’m still waiting for my new papers, along with the new identity they’re going to give me, and for them to release the funds I need to embark on some activity somewhere. I want to work, I can’t live like this, on a miserable assistance check, like a retiree. Before Christmas I let my man know that I wanted to live in Ladispoli. The afternoon I arrived, I took a walk on the beach. You weren’t back yet. The black, volcanic sand, still warm from the sun, reminded me of the sand on Santorini. And the smell of rotting seaweed and the pitiful reddish brown shells the tide throws onto the shore reminded me of my city on the Adriatic. Mattia Rubino doesn’t have a past, but he does have a memory. And it’s memories of my former self that help anchor me. Necessary memories, but also useless ones—the things I’ve seen, the books I’ve read, objects, smells, words, the faces of people I’ve met. You can’t live without memories, as you well know. Otherwise life would lose its meaning. Even freedom is worthless without limits. I don’t know what to do with my liberty other than sacrifice it to you. Your city was familiar to me. You—you were familiar to me.

  After our trip to Bracciano, I called my man back and asked to be transferred. Mattia Rubino is as vulnerable as a child, but he’s also strong, and my selfishness died in the parking lot of that restaurant. I’m just a man, Manuela, but I am a man. I didn’t want to touch you. To touch you was to carve a mark on your skin, like a curse, and you already have your scar. Precisely because you were already irrationally dear to me, I had to lose you—and right away, before I became something for you.

  I got a fax, summoning me to Rome. You saw it. They told me that they were short of staff over the holidays, so they couldn’t process my request, and besides, the entire third floor of the Bellavista had been reserved for me until February. The financial agreement was satisfactory to both parties, and couldn’t be renegotiated now. As the days passed, I blessed the Christmas holidays. They gave me twenty days of life. They gave me you.

  If I stay in Italy I won’t be a doctor anymore. Maybe I’ll go back to school, study to become a vet, specializing in feline care. Or maybe I’ll simply become an assistant in a shelter for stray cats. I really don’t know what will become of me. The protective measures expire in a few months, and I don’t know if they will be renewed. I’m almost out of money. I’m not telling you this because I feel sorry for myself—like you, I hate people who feel sorry for themselves—but so that you know that soon I really will have nothing. Don’t feel bad about all the money I spent over the holidays, the only riches you truly possess are the ones you spend. I don’t know if I will be able to stay in Ladispoli, if this is the place I am fated for. I don’t know if you are the person fated for me. I would like to think so.

  Vanessa told me that you torture yourself about what it means that your life was spared. She explained to me your theory of divergence. We saw each other today; I spent the day with her, while you were in Turin.

  Don’t get the wrong idea, we just talked. Your sister is my sister, I’m as fond of her as you are. I only wanted to talk about you, it comforted me to hear your name spoken out loud. I like to think that the divergence, as you call it, was me. Because I was waiting for you, at the end of your dark night. That all the trivial, random acts of your life were leading you to me. I can’t save you and you can’t save me. All we can do is put ourselves back together again, and be something together.

  The fact is that I love you. Reason tells me that, precisely because of this, I have to give you up, get myself transferred as soon as the office reopens. The only way I could condemn you to becoming no one’s shadow would be if I didn’t love you. A few minutes ago you accused me of lacking substance. It’s true. Everything passes right through me and is lost. I’m as porous and inconsistent as a jellyfish. I’ve always been a reasonable person, and I will make an effort to be reasonable with you. You’re a reasonable person, too. But now that you’re not in the apartment across the way, now that I can’t see your thin figure behind the curtains, I can’t help but tell myself that Mattia Rubino is not a reasonable man. Why should he be? He was only born a few months ago, the world is new to him. He is young, innocent, unaware. He hasn’t had time to be disillusioned yet. He is curious and impatient. He believes in the future. He is free.

  If you returned to the barracks, I’d follow you north. And if you left for another tour of duty, I’d wait for you at home, sighing like a wife. I’d even go with you, if the army allowed a civilian doctor to accompany you. If you didn’t want to hang up your uniform, I would accept that. And if you’re not going to be a soldier anymore, I would follow you wherever you wanted to live—in Afghanistan even, or at the ends of the earth. I didn’t do anything special, like you always say about yourself. Someone said that the very essence of virtue is ordinariness. You would say that I merely did my duty, but I don’t really know what that word means. The only duty I recognize is to be human. True to my nature, in other words, to that which distinguishes me from a cat, a bird, a rifle, or a murderer. What I did restored me to myself, and made me the man I am. And Mattia Rubino is not unworthy of Manuela Paris. Your dark room troubles me. I’m like you: I don’t like to wait, I’m not patient. I keep going out on the balcony and my shadow appears on the railing. The sight of it cheers me. You are my shadow. I am your reflection. Come home soon.

  23

  LIVE

  Manuela stays in Ladispoli. To avoid more family tension, she gives Alessia her room back and goes to stay with Traian and Teodora. She insists on helping with the rent. She sets two goals for herself, and is determined to accomplish them both in the shortest time possible. Quick win. To get better and to get back together with Mattia. One seems pointless withou
t the other.

  She updates her Facebook profile, changing her status from “Single” to “Engaged.” She embellishes her page with the latest photos, the ones that Alessia took on the terrace of the Palo Castle, even though she’s not sure Mattia knows how to use Facebook, and might be too old to even know what it is; but on the off chance that he’s searching the Internet for her, he’ll be able to see what she’s up to and will know that she thinks of herself as tied to him. She never turns off her phone and charges it every night, convinced that sooner or later, as soon as his situation stabilizes, Mattia will call her. He said not to look for him, but he didn’t say he wouldn’t look for her.

  She memorized Vanessa’s funny little speech on the name of God, which now seems to her to hold a simple truth, elementary and therefore genuine. If you don’t know someone’s name, you can’t call out to him, and he won’t be able to hear you. And until she knows Mattia’s name—his new name, his permanent name—she can’t call out to him, and he can’t respond.

  As for the rest, she focuses on rebuilding herself, with the same determination with which she would have rebuilt a broken bridge or a demolished house. She’s no longer so convinced there’s no such thing as a soul. Her body, mind, energy, and will must all regain the equilibrium they lost. If any one element is broken, the others suffer as well. She also focuses on the things she’d been neglecting all along. She goes to a psychotherapist a dozen times, one who specializes in PTSD. She joins Master Mario’s Vedic association, intent on completing the seven steps of transcendental meditation. Maybe she really was wrong. Maybe she is—as Ghaznavi had said—a spiritual person. She learns to contemplate the void and to expand her mind. In a specialty bookshop in Rome she buys a dozen little books by Afghanis who lived in Herat during the Timurid dynasty, in the Middle Ages, or at least before the discovery of America, all members of the Naqshbandi brotherhood. The books collect parables of Sufi wisdom and fragments of Dervish illumination. Parables and fragments that invite the reader to a greater awareness and urge him to let go, to accept suffering and love, and to seek union with the divine: at the end of his spiritual journey, the apprentice mystic discovers that God is none other than himself. Manuela is amazed to learn that the Naqshbandi practiced breath control and awareness exercises that are very similar to those of her Vedic master. The dizzying connection enthralls her.

  But then she abandons her psychotherapy, meditation, and Sufi mystics, in order to start in on the homework the psychiatrist at the military hospital had assigned her in vain months before: in other words, she starts writing. For the psychiatrist initially—she plans on turning in her homework in July, at her checkup. But as the pages fill, she forgets her original intent and ends up writing for herself, and, especially, for Mattia: she believes he’ll read those pages sooner or later. She would even be willing to turn them into a book, to publish them—in order to reach him.

  She throws away her notebook and turns on her computer. She creates a new folder called “Homework” and tries to tell the story of Sergeant Paris in Afghanistan. One hundred and sixty-seven days. From her arrival in Sollum until her departure for the inauguration of the school in Qal’a-i-Shakhrak. It turns out to be a more labor-intensive task than she’d expected. More difficult than marching under the sun, patrolling a road, or reprimanding a soldier. It’s almost like an orienteering test. She has to unlearn everything she knows, or thinks she knows. To admit disappointments she’d forgotten about, memories she embellished or selectively edited, emotions she forbade herself to feel. To tear words from the silence, and to find new ones. She rereads her diary from Bala Bayak and discovers that she and Sergeant Paris are now separated by a nearly insuperable distance. The sergeant doesn’t comment on anything. She records times, dates, coordinates, temperatures, wind intensity, volume of fire, assignments, ammunition consumption, names, ranks, and facts; she obeys orders and ensures that they are obeyed by others. She is satisfied when an objective is achieved. The Manuela Paris who writes in Teodora Gogeon’s ironing room, on the other hand, believes that facts and objectives mean almost nothing: behind the names and ranks are people she thought she knew but who are vanishing with each new day. And you can’t say an objective has been achieved if the cost of gaining it is too high. She tries to fix on the page her epigones’ words, gestures, even their secrets. At least what remains of them all these months later. Lorenzo’s music. Diego’s anxiety. Nicola’s philosophizing about Zeno. It’s too little. Almost nothing. And what remains of Manuela Paris?

  She tries to see herself from a distance, to sight herself as in a rifle. As the weeks go by, she realizes that writing is like advancing in the dark with night vision or thermal imaging goggles. They reveal what’s hidden in the night, in the dark of the past. Looking through her virtual goggles—writing—she can see the heat left by Lorenzo, and Diego, and Nicola, and Ghaznavi, and Fatimeh. They went on ahead, as the Alpini say, all of them, they met their deaths, and yet with her thermal goggles she senses their presence—filaments of light streaking across her black screen. Thermal goggles register the heat of a person’s body even if he’s no longer there. They signal a presence that is also an absence, as if they can see the past. All things considered, writing does the same thing. It doesn’t console or save, it doesn’t raise the dead, doesn’t recover what has been lost. But it registers the past. It records absence—filaments of light in the darkness.

  * * *

  She goes to physical therapy behind the piazza every morning, scrupulously keeping to her rehabilitation program. Every time she comes home she asks Teodora or Traian if by any chance she’s gotten any mail or if anyone has called for her. They shake their heads. They both think, though for different reasons, that she should forget about Mattia Rubino, but they never say so.

  In early February she keeps her promise and goes to see Giovanni in his new house in Civitavecchia. It is, in fact, light and airy, modern and comfortable, and she likes it. Champagne recognizes her and whines with joy, licking her hands. Giovanni acts sensibly—he really is a nice guy. The ease of their former intimacy is still there. They continue to see each other, until she finds it necessary to explain that she has no intention of getting back together with him, that the most she can offer him now is friendship—that for sure. But true friendship means reciprocity: no more secrets. Giovanni says he accepts her decision. He leaves Champagne with her when he goes skiing in the Tyrol for a week at the end of March. Manuela takes the dog to the beach and lets him off the leash. She throws a tennis ball, a toy, or a rubber bone, and Champagne scampers breathlessly after them. But one bright morning when she tries to chase after him, to run in the sand, she has to stop after three steps. Only in that moment does she truly realize that she’ll never be able to catch up with him. She can walk for miles now, limping, of course, but without too much pain. But she’ll never be able to run again.

  She keeps the discovery to herself, and doesn’t alter her rehab in the slightest. But she knows. Medicine is not an exact science, the doctor had told her: it is the science of the possible. She would need a miracle. But she has never believed in miracles. Tan and happy, Giovanni comes to get his dog, calls her two or three more times, then disappears. At the end of June she receives an invitation to his wedding in Bergen to a Norwegian engineer named Niels. She sends a gift—money for their honeymoon in the Seychelles—but she doesn’t see him again.

  Little by little, she starts going out again on Saturday nights. Vanessa has broken up with Youssef, and is seeing Lapo now. They’re not together, it’s more fluid than that. Being fluid, it assumes the shape of the container, which is appropriate given how equivocal they both are. In short, it works. It turns out that the reporter appreciates contemporary dance—or at least he’s able to get tickets for premieres when the most important companies come through Rome. If he’s bored he bears it stoically, because he’s really taken with Vanessa. He even attends the shocking performance of the Flying Ghosts, Vanessa’s old dance troupe, in a t
heater in a former soap factory. The benches are so uncomfortable that Manuela is convinced they were intentionally designed to punish the audience. The show, which is called Autopsy, only lasts an hour, but despite its brevity, Manuela finds it as entertaining as a punch in the face. It’s all about nudity and physical deformity, and most of the dancers, moving like wax figures, flaunt anomalous limbs, stiff or stunted or mutilated, and rigid bodies, marked with wounds, lesions, and amputations. In spite of all this, the performance, which is both ghostly and harmonious, is not at all depressing. The critics adore it. The program notes explain that Flying Ghosts is an upbeat company, and their wild, ritualistic dance is a critique of the commercialization of the body in today’s world; essentially, a hymn to life.

  Vanessa had left the troupe because of a fight with the choreographer after getting her breasts enlarged. The choreographer had criticized her for acting contrary to Flying Ghosts’ philosophy. Vanessa had objected that what she did was instead the apotheosis of Flying Ghosts’ philosophy: otherwise healthy, she, too, was now an altered body, there was silicon under her skin, she, too, had prostheses, like the African dancer who had lost his legs on a land mine. It’s blasphemy to compare two tits redone for vanity’s sake with a war victim’s artificial limbs, the choreographer had angrily countered. Redone out of a sense of inadequacy, redone in order to become a plastic doll, evidence of our nostalgia for perfection, and thus evidence of the imperfection of human beings, Vanessa had objected. In the end, since each was convinced of being right, Vanessa quit Flying Ghosts and gave up dancing. The other dance troupes, in comparison, seemed Jurassic to her. After the performance, Vanessa, with Lapo and Manuela trailing behind, goes to the dressing rooms to congratulate her old friends, and a little while later, without ever resolving the old argument, she rejoins the troupe.