Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  Manuela and Lapo, sitting together in the audience, anxiously watch Vanessa’s debut at the Rome Festival at Villa Medici. She dances with grace and fury, as if she had never stopped. Manuela and Lapo are both moved, but they hide it out of modesty, turning their shoulders. The next day, the photo of Vanessa, magnificently naked among the other dancers—mutilated cadavers—appears in many newspapers and in all the specialized magazines. Manuela has the feeling that Mattia will see it.

  She doesn’t find the reporter particularly unpleasant anymore, and even Stefano, the obstetrician who is as tall as a lamppost, who hangs out with Lapo’s friends when he’s in Italy, turns out to be less boring than she had remembered. One night he takes her to see a heartbreaking Iranian film in a movie theater in the center of Rome. Afterward, she finds herself sitting on the edge of the Trevi Fountain, like an ordinary tourist, talking about the Ganjabad and Gerani massacre. While Stefano licks a melting ice cream cone, she tells him about the cemetery on the hill behind Bala Bayak, the mass graves, the abandoned tombs, and the uneasiness she felt thinking that there was no one to weep over those dead. The uneasiness of traveling through those villages, because yes, she did know they’d been bombed before their arrival, and she knew about the attacks and the accusations of massacre. But she never would have doubted the official version, and at any rate she couldn’t find a link between her—their—presence there and that cemetery. The Italians respected the fifth commandment—“Thou shall not kill”—although certainly not for religious reasons. The fact that their allies had done it, maybe in order to save their lives, hadn’t bothered her much.

  When he leaves again for the Congo, Stefano, encouraged, sends her e-mails with links to subversively named sites. Manuela opens them, and finds pages that intelligence officers and insurgents probably visit, as well as curious people like herself. They introduce her to a world of outraged antagonists who talk in surprising and absurd, and not totally incorrect, ways about things she knows. She reads the articles. She endures the bloody photos of the slain children. Upending your perspective and looking at things from another point of view helps you to understand who you really are. It’s like she’s using binoculars. She wants to take in the full panorama of the stage. She doesn’t want to sit in the end zone anymore, or be the ball boy behind the goal.

  In March, the captain in charge of the public information office for her brigade contacts her to ask if she might be willing to go on TV. There’s been another casualty, and Afghanistan is once again a hot topic. All she has to do is talk about her own experience, explain in simple words what our soldiers are doing in that faraway land, because it’s important to sustain public consensus for the mission. He doesn’t say that the military budget is up for a vote and that they need a consensus to get it approved, but he doesn’t have to: Manuela already knows that.

  She tries to refuse. She tells him that she’s not any good at speaking in public, that regardless, she’s not interested in appearing, she just wants to return to active duty and be deployed in country again. But he insists. Colonel Minotto takes the trouble to call her. He is quite commanding, and she realizes that the general staff considers the young, motivated, and attractive Sergeant Paris the ideal poster child for the Armed Forces, perfect for an afternoon talk show—that this is the future they are imagining for her. She feels angry and ashamed. But then she thinks that Mattia, alone in a hotel room, might leave the TV on so the voices onscreen can keep him company, and if he sees her, maybe he’ll call. So she agrees.

  She goes to the television studio and lets them put blush on her cheeks and gloss on her lips. “No eye shadow or mascara,” she explains to the two beauticians who have arrayed an arsenal of nail polishes and colored tubes on the shelf under the mirror in the makeup room, “I’m a soldier.” The beauticians commiserate: it’s an injustice, they say, female soldiers should rebel against the limits being placed on their femininity, but she’s young and doesn’t need much in the way of touch-ups anyway, her eyes are very expressive and she’ll doubtless look good on camera—though it’s a shame about her hair. “What’s wrong with my hair?” Manuela asks. “It’s a bit too short,” one of them observes, “it shows your skull and makes your ears stick out.” Manuela feels sorry for them.

  The show—which has a celebratory, hagiographic bent—drags on for nearly two hours, but she speaks only three times. The first time to try to explain the importance of the mission’s humanitarian aim. She says that every war demands an ideal justification, which is necessary in order to gain consensus. In fact, when the world acknowledges the necessity of military action, no one dares dispute it. This may seem to be merely a way for those conducting the war to justify their actions, and in part of course it is; but in today’s world, no one in any country—neither the government nor army nor the public—could commit to a war that it did not consider just. And today only an ethical or humanitarian motivation can be understood and accepted as “just.” The host’s alarmed face makes her suspect that she has ventured into terrain too difficult for a light afternoon talk show, and her suspicion is confirmed by the fact that the hostess then interrupts her in order to show the first film clip from Farah.

  The second time she speaks it is to explain where the girls’ school at Qal’a-i-Shakhrak is, and why it’s important for the future of a country to build schools. She can’t keep herself from noting that our government spends a lot of money building schools in Afghanistan, so it seems strange to her that it doesn’t consider it important to support education in Italy as well. We build schools over there, but here we let them fall to pieces; there we support teachers, we protect them and consider them essential for the future of the country, but here teachers are humiliated and disrespected, and the education of the young is considered a waste of time. This hypocrisy is even more inexplicable if you think that over there we were also charged with reconstructing the judicial system. Among all the countries of the coalition, we were considered the most able, because of our own judicial tradition, to form a magistrate and establish tribunals, in short to ensure the working of the law. We export a model we are proud of, but which here is insulted and disregarded on a daily basis. Sometimes she thinks that’s why we went there. In that faraway, devastated country, we project the image of what we should—of what we want—to be, but which we can no longer appreciate here. Afghanistan is like a mirror, it lets us see a better image of ourselves.

  The last time is to answer the hostess’s question as to whether she considers her dead comrades heroes or martyrs. She hesitates for a second and then says she is sure that they wouldn’t have seen themselves as one or the other. They merely did their duty. Not that she can really explain what duty is. To her it’s not so much what one is bound to by religion, ethics, or law. It’s a personal debt.

  The camera scans the puzzled faces of the other guests, then the film clip shot at Jodice’s house in Marcianise starts rolling. Imma, together with Diego’s parents, who clutch his silver-framed photo to their chests, talk about their dear one, praising his sense of justice, his time as an altar boy, his faith in God, his ideals, and his willingness to sacrifice himself for others. As Antonio Jodice speaks, his voice trembling and his eyes wet with dignified tears, the camera frames Diego Jodice, Jr., who crawls across the tile floor of their modest family home. When he charges under the table, Manuela instantly recognizes the carpet from Bala Bayak. And when the red light that indicates they’re on the air comes on again, there’s no time left to explain herself better. One of the other guests is the general commander of the brigade deployed there now, and she’s not sure he understood what she wanted to say. Mattia will understand, though, and that’s enough. Sometimes, you can only write for one person, speak for one person. No comment arrives from the public information office.

  The only real result of the TV show is that, in the days that follow, 24,570 people send her Facebook friend requests. The 541 Facebook friends Manuela already has are soldiers, noncommissioned officers, or f
ormer Alpini—at most, some women from the Volunteer Training Regiment who in the years since have hidden their boots in the attic and become mothers. Her appearance on TV wins her admirers and potential new friends. Might Mattia be among them? She sets out to examine each and every profile. Mattia’s not there. Not even under a pseudonym. Most of those who want to friend her have less than pure motives. Manuela does not friend strangers, so she ignores their requests.

  * * *

  She never stops waiting for Mattia’s call, and time, rather than shattering her hope, strengthens it. She attributes the long wait not to his decision to break up with her, but to his wanting to be sure he can settle into a new life before coming back. It seems logical to her, and right, and she doesn’t blame him. She is sorry she followed orders and burned his letters. Nothing is left of him now. She can’t even remember his voice. And in April she realizes that waiting is a psychological state she’s just not suited for. To desire something too much is to lose it; it’s precisely that desire that makes you lose it. She still prefers action. And if Mattia doesn’t come back to her, then it’s up to her to go find him.

  On the Internet she gets information on all the ophthalmology conferences in the last ten years, picks out those that were held in seaside cities, records the names of all the participants, and starts looking up the Italians one by one. The search engines provide her with all kinds of information about the ophthalmologists—in addition to their scientific curriculum vitae, there are often photos, Facebook pages (she’s amazed to discover that even the fifty-year-olds have them), sometimes even a phone number. In the end, she winnows the list of possibilities down to one name: a man who nearly five years earlier had presented a paper on advances in cataract microsurgery at an international conference. He had left quite a few traces on the Internet, which now float—crystallized in an eternal present—on the most disparate websites. Scientific articles that turn out to be illegibly abstruse. Photos of a party of climbers roped together on the Polish Glacier Traverse Route on Aconcagua. A signature on a petition to close a northern city’s historic center to cars, and another to release a woman unjustly condemned to death. A photo of a marvelous Persian cat, held in his arms as he wins third prize at a cat show. The horrifying video on YouTube of a phacoemulsification: the aspiration of cataract fragments through a cannula inserted in the crystalline lens; the incision, and then the implantation of the artificial lens, rolled up like a plastic veil, with a microinjector.

  At that point Manuela abandons her search. To piece together the clues to Mattia’s past that he sowed in his letters, to follow his tracks and reconfigure the components of his life, will not give her back the man she loves, but rather an ophthalmologist who specialized in experimental cataract treatments he himself no longer identifies with and whom he himself considers dead. She discovers that that man means nothing to her—in fact, she hates him. It’s the other man—Mattia Rubino—she’s waiting for.

  * * *

  At Easter she goes on vacation to Santorini with Vanessa and Alessia. She reserved two rooms in a small hotel in Imerovigli, facing the crater’s abyss. The sheer cliffs are so arid, not a single blade of grass grows on them. The severity and violence of that landscape, devastated by an ancient yet somehow indelible explosion, has something of Afghanistan about it. But the village has become the picture of Greekness for the world’s rich, a Cycladic Capri, an Aegean Portofino. Despite the cool weather, tourists from Japan, South Africa, and New Zealand roam about in sandals and tank tops among the jewelry shops and designer boutiques that open onto the labyrinth of whitewashed streets. The houses have all been turned into luxury hotels and dream villas. She convinces herself that she has identified Mattia’s house, on the highest rise in the village, in the shadow of the church. Two floors, the lower one with a panoramic terrace that gives onto the pool of the five-star hotel below. The house is being renovated. Two listless, blond workmen are whitewashing the walls and spreading a gray cement resin on the terrace floor. They speak only Albanian and can’t answer her questions.

  Manuela confesses to Vanessa that she’s a bit disappointed. She had hoped to find him here. Hoped that he had lied to her when he said he’d sold the villa. He really loved this place, and she imagined he had been too happy here to give it up. Vanessa says she thinks it’s precisely the opposite. We never go back to the places where we’ve been happy, it’s too painful. We’re more likely to go back to where we’ve lost everything than to where we had something. Manuela thinks her sister may be right, because she would more willingly go back to Qal’a-i-Shakhrak than to Lake Bracciano. She sits on a low wall and watches the wisp of smoke rising from the nearby islet of Thirasia. The volcano is sleeping but still alive. “You have to try and see it in a positive light,” Vanessa says. “Appreciate the good you’ve had, and forget the rest. That’s what I always do, and trust me, it works. If he didn’t love you, he would already have called you, Manuela. He won’t call you because he loves you.” “He’ll call me,” Manuela says. “We have to be together, we mirror each other. I’m his shadow.”

  When she gets home, she uploads the photos of Imerovigli to Facebook. If Mattia visits her profile, he will know that she’s gone on a pilgrimage to his past, that she has seen what he has seen and loved what he has loved. She’s up to 762 friends. But Mattia Rubino is not one of them. She finds a post from Angelica Scianna, who is back from Afghanistan, an invitation to come visit her. And one Sunday in May she goes. Angelica is as blond and slim as ever. She doesn’t wear the pendant with the broken heart anymore either. So much time has passed. She still has it, though, Angelica tells her, she keeps it in the breast pocket of her uniform, but only when she flies. Talismans never grow old. She gets permission from her commander to take Manuela up with her during a helicopter training exercise. She tries to scare her with tactical maneuvers and sudden nosedives, hurling them toward the earth like a bullet, brushing mountaintops, cable car wires, and power lines strung between pylons—but Manuela enjoys it, like it’s a roller-coaster ride. But she no longer thinks that Angelica is living the life that should have been hers, the life that the psychiatrist at the Modena Academy stole from her so many years ago. She’s not envious of Angelica’s life, because she finally loves her own. She discovers that she can simply—truly—be Angelica’s friend.

  They walk on the deserted runway as the sun sinks into the Mediterranean and the light fades over the military airport. A fighter-bomber rolls docilely toward the hangar. Angelica’s hair blows across her lips. She realizes that Manuela can’t match her stride, so slows her pace. “What do you think you’ll do?” she asks. “Are you going to stay in the army?” “I don’t know,” Manuela answers honestly. “I’m thinking it over.” Angelica scrutinizes her, almost frightened by what Manuela might say. But Manuela keeps quiet and stares at the helicopter shimmering in the twilight. An object of almost artistic beauty. The light gun with rotating barrels is in place, but the rocket containers under the propellers and the props for the TOW antitank missiles are empty. “I’ve changed,” she adds after a bit. “I’m not the same person I was before, and I’ll never be the same again. But I don’t feel disabled. I haven’t lost a leg, I’ve gained one, but I don’t know if they’ll be able to understand that.”

  In June she goes back to Belluno to clear out her studio apartment. Her lease is up and she doesn’t want to renew it, not knowing if she’ll ever be back on active duty at the Tenth Alpini Regiment barracks. The place had been furnished by the owners, so there’s almost nothing of hers other than her grandfather’s military regalia, a few boxes of photographs, and her clothes. When she takes them out of the closet, they smell of mothballs.

  That afternoon she goes to Mel, to see Lorenzo’s mother. “I’ve been waiting for you, dear,” Mrs. Zandonà says familiarly, as if they already knew each other. She’s a delicate woman with copper-colored hair and diaphanous skin, shriveled by grief. But hers is not a life of regrets. She teaches music to children at the public e
lementary school, and their colorful, surreal drawings brighten the walls of her little living room. She was the one who gave Lorenzo his first guitar. Unfortunately, she hadn’t understood his music, hadn’t been able to encourage him or to keep him from doubting himself. Not that it would necessarily have changed anything.

  Manuela tells her everything she remembers about Lorenzo’s life at Bala Bayak—Ahmad Zahir, the Afghani musician he listened to, his nickname, Nail, which she had given him, the cordon and search for Mullah Wallid, his songs, even the smell of the opium poppies and the jokes about the word epigone: though they didn’t know the word’s real meaning, when they were over there they had decided that epigone meant “friend”—forever. She tells her she will never forgive herself for what happened, and that she has often thought about dying, because a commander who doesn’t know how to protect her men doesn’t deserve to live. But knowing how to bear misfortune is a sign of wisdom, and accepting it is a skill. Living means bearing responsibility. She doesn’t tell her that the last word her son spoke was mamma, even though that’s what she would like to hear, and it might even be true. Manuela was unconscious in the helicopter while Lorenzo was dying. But she doesn’t feel like inventing an exemplary death for him. Mrs. Zandonà doesn’t cry, the time for tears has passed.