Limbo (20 page)

Manuela drags herself back to bed. She sleeps another hour. At ten she vomits in the conveniently placed tub. Mattia still isn't back.

*   *   *

Only Vanessa's home for lunch. Her mother's at work, Alessia's at a school friend's, Grandma's with the Jehovah's Witnesses. Manuela didn't know her grandmother had converted. “Two years ago,” Vanessa says. “A sort of preacher came to lead the community, beard, sandals, talking like a prophet. Grandma's crazy about him. Their church is in a garage in the industrial park, behind the Vaccina River, just past the car dealership. There must be two hundred people there. Mamma says they seem possessed, but they're really just normal people. The fact is, Grandma's much calmer since she started going. She goes around proselytizing and selling magazines door to door. She's tried to convert us all.” “Has she had any luck?” Manuela asks, increasingly astounded. It's only then that she realizes she was away a really long time, and that she's not the only one who's changed. Vanessa doesn't answer.

They unearth a block of hamburgers, fish filets, and a package of baby peas from the freezer. “Damn!” Vanessa remembers all of a sudden, “I promised Mamma we'd go grocery shopping!” They defrost the hamburgers in the microwave. The block disintegrates into a pile of bovine mush, devoid of any consistency or flavor. Manuela says she ate better at the mess in Bala Bayak. Still, she doesn't have the right to complain, because she doesn't know how to cook. In the barracks there's always somebody to cook for you. It's one of the advantages of military life. While Vanessa keeps an eye on the espresso maker, Manuela spies on the Bellavista restaurant through the curtain. Mattia is having lunch at his usual table. He's reading the paper, which he has spread out across the whole table, as if trying to fill up the space someone left. The waiter Gianni comes over, removes the cover from a dish, and waits for Mattia to comment on how wonderful the chef is. Mattia gives him a sad smile and goes back to his paper.

*   *   *

The discount supermarket, in the basement of a shopping center wedged between the Via Aurelia and the tollbooth, is the size of a city. As she loads the shopping cart with colorful, plastic-looking vegetables, frozen cod, pork from who knows where, Tunisian tuna, Greek olive oil, Belgian mustard, Czech beer, German mozzarella, and precooked gnocchi, Vanessa asks Manuela if she wants to go to a New Year's party with her, in a former industrial area, the old gas company. It's expensive, tickets cost fifty euros, but the music is real mellow, the best techno-dance DJs around taking turns. “No way,” Manuela says. She hasn't gone dancing in years and it doesn't seem like a great idea now that she's on crutches. And besides, blasting music would rattle her nerves. Vanessa doesn't realize what Manuela is capable of when she really loses it. She's afraid of becoming seriously unhinged. It happened to another Alpino, a soldier named Cadin Edoardo, from her same regiment. She never met him; the story was already years old when she joined Ninth Company. Captain Paggiarin let slip that after returning from Kabul, Cadin Edoardo had done some nightmarish things and been discharged. By “nightmarish” Paggiarin meant that he tried to kill himself: he shot himself in the head with a pistol.

Vanessa says that she won't go either, then. She has a better idea, in fact. “Let's eat dinner at home, that way we'll make Mamma and Alessia happy, and then ring in the New Year at Passo Oscuro. Mamma doesn't know, but I stole a set of keys—I go there with Youssef. He lives with his cousin, but we can't see each other at their house because Youssef has a wife in Morocco, I don't know if I told you.” “Vanessa, no!” Manuela exclaims, but her sister just shrugs. “We never knew where to do it, the car is gross, I'm not some slut he picked up on the Aurelia. Grandpa's cottage is all run-down, it's falling to pieces, the roof leaks, but with a little imagination it can be quite charming, and it's only a hundred feet from the sea. We bring a boom box and dance to our favorite music, just the two of us.”

“I thought you wanted to go out with Lapo on New Year's,” Manuela says. “I couldn't care less about New Year's!” Vanessa blurts out. “I don't believe in holidays, for me it's like any other night. I want to be with you. You're important to me.” Surprised, Manuela stops the cart in the middle of the aisle. Under the harsh neon lights, her hair an unnatural color, her skirt too short, her shoes too tall, Vanessa looks fragile and lost. She's never said anything like that to Manuela before.

“When I first heard about the attack,” she says, tossing a huge bag of paprika potato chips into the cart, “because I was the one who opened the door when the guys from the army showed up, I thought: Now what do I do? I don't want to live without Manuela. We grew up together, she's the only person who really knows me. And she's the only one who knows the good things about me. I never even told her I love her, because it's embarrassing to say stuff like that, and you think there'll always be time, but saying later is like saying never, and all of a sudden, boom, it's all over. We die so quickly, we're like leaves dangling from a branch. When you were over there my heart would stop every time the doorbell rang because I was afraid it was about you. When it happened, the army guy said to me, he was so polite, you could tell he'd been trained, he said, ‘I need to speak with Miss Vanessa Paris, I have an urgent, confidential communication.' ‘That's me,' I said. He told me it would be best if I sat down. So I knew. I was holding my cell phone and I threw it against the wall, it shattered in so many pieces I had to buy a new one, and I started crying like a crazy person. I was sobbing so hard, I couldn't breathe, I was suffocating. ‘Sergeant Paris requested that you be the person to contact in case of an accident.' He explained it was up to me to tell the other members of the family. But I couldn't bring myself to call Mamma. ‘My mother's at work,' I told him, and so he says, ‘Can't you call her office and tell her to come home right away?' ‘Office?' I said. ‘What office, she doesn't work in an office, we can't call the roadside diner, my poor mother's making coffee for the truck drivers, she'll have a heart attack, this is going to kill her.' So I called that fucking gypsy woman. ‘You tell her, Teodora,' I said, ‘you're probably glad, one less Paris to deal with.' I was screaming, I bet I sounded like I'd lost my mind, ‘You tell my mother that her daughter, her youngest daughter, is dying.'” “I'm sorry,” Manuela mumbles. “I'm sorry I put your name on the form, but I didn't want some stranger to tell her, I'm sorry.”

Every time Manuela left the FOB she thought: If something happens to me, how will they tell my mother? She knew the procedure, the protocol. She knew the words, the formulas, but it was the miserable, banal everydayness into which those words would erupt that she found so devastating. Ironclad inside the Lince, ironclad in her uniform, helmet, and body armor, automatic rifle in her hands, she'd be thinking about the rest stop on the Rome–Civitavecchia highway two thousand eight hundred miles away. Morning in Afghanistan was dawn for Cinzia Colella. The lights of the rest stop dispelled the darkness of the asphalt. The pull-off would still be filled with tractor trailers, dripping with the night's humidity, and the first truck drivers, sleepy, with prickly beards and bloodshot eyes, would be at the counter, and her mother would already be at work, in her white uniform and her cap with the company's red logo. Manuela dead, disemboweled, decapitated, butchered in the desert, and her mother at work, an ordinary day, flattened by the news while the coffee machine oozed black drops into little espresso cups, and speechless customers watched that shriveled-up shadow of a woman who had once been attractive weep desperately, that middle-aged woman who just a minute before had been joking with them and accepting their crude compliments delivered in a rough Italian with Lithuanian or Slavic or Turkish mixed in, and who was now devastated, destroyed, crushed. Manuela knew she was her mother's shot at redemption, the good daughter, the accomplished daughter, the daughter who had lifted herself out of poverty and ignorance, whose success made her own wasted youth packaging frozen filets in a fish factory, made the millions of cups of coffee prepared on the side of the highway, the truck drivers' compliments, the loneliness all worthwhile. Manuela couldn't die without killing her mother as well.

She could almost see her after receiving news of Sergeant Paris's death, fallen in the line of duty. It was such a horrible thought, and so obviously possible, that she crossed her fingers and hoped that, if something did happen to her, it would at least be on a Sunday, when her mother was home. Then she remembered that for her mother, just like for herself, there were no Sundays, only shifts. So she wished that nothing would happen to her. And the more time passed, the closer she got to leaving Afghanistan, the more she gave in to the presumptuous certainty that she would survive.

“You think you're the only two people in this world? So rude! Let me by, you jerks.” Their shopping cart is blocking the way. A woman complains; she's in a hurry, or thinks she is. She tries to wedge past them, and the wheels of her cart catch Manuela's crutch and yank it out of her hand. It crashes into the shelf, knocking over cans of hazelnuts and packets of toasted almonds and pistachios. “Bitch!” Vanessa yells. “It was to save your lazy ass and protect your shit life that my sister got her leg blown up!” Her eyes glisten and a tear trickles down her cheek, tracing a pale path in the thick layer of rouge. She kneels, picks up Manuela's crutch, and hands it to her. “You know I prayed?” she says with a smile. “God, did I pray, honey!”

Manuela doesn't know what to say. She doesn't believe her, but she can't let her sister know. “I swear,” Vanessa insists, “when you were in a coma in the hospital in Farah. In Our Lady of the Rosary Church, under those weird paintings you like so much. They look to me like the artist was on ecstasy, but you always said they spoke to the heart more than Raphael's paintings did, being so simple and colorful, so I went there thinking of you. I did the via crucis—Mary and Elizabeth, the shepherds, the temple—I prayed for you under every station of the cross, then I kneeled at the high altar, I gazed at Christ in the Last Supper, and I'd say, ‘Jesus, you came back from the dead, you made your friend Lazarus come back from the dead, make her come back, too.' And then I'd start all over again. I'd do the whole church until the parish volunteers locked up the place and threw me out.” To prove it was all true, Vanessa crosses her fingers, kisses them, and presses them to her lips. The same gesture from when she was a little girl.

Manuela pushes the cart down the detergent aisle. Vanessa quickly grabs bottles of soap, laundry detergent, and softener, without letting herself be distracted by the “3 for the price of 2” offers or the throng of carts at the cash register. She doesn't care at all that she's talking so loudly everyone can hear her. Only Manuela exists right now, Manuela and the interminable anguish of those damned days; her sister doesn't even know about them but they made Vanessa realize that she didn't want to live without her. That—damn it—she loves her. “But you didn't get better, nothing happened. You didn't wake up. Finally I went to the Jehovah's Witnesses,” she confesses, her voice cracking. “It's not like I converted, but I can't deny what happened. The day after I went to the Kingdom Hall, which is like their church, God heard me. Because Jehovah is supposed to be God, I don't know if I told you. Jehovah is the name of God. If you say God, just God, it's like you're saying engineer or lawyer or doctor, a generic title, but God told us his name, which is Jehovah. It's written in the Bible, I can't remember where. If you need to call someone, you have to call them by name, or else they won't answer you—maybe that's why when I prayed before he didn't hear me. Then I called him by name and he answered me, see? So I made my peace with God. I respect him, I believe in him. I'm convinced he exists now. I'm convinced it was God who stopped that shrapnel.”

“I don't think God has anything to do with it,” Manuela says, admiring the cashier's ability to type in bar codes at such a phenomenal rate. A girl Manuela's age, with nails like claws, purple lips, and a curious star-shaped cut on her cheek. Why does a girl like that settle for such a monotonous, unrewarding job? Ever since she was little she knew she'd leave home one day, and come back only when she could offer herself, her mother, and Vanessa a different life. A real life, one worth living. The cash register vomits out a mile-long receipt. Forty-three items purchased. A total of 4,570 points on their card. They need another five thousand and something in order to get the reward, a set of pans. Vanessa doesn't have enough cash. Manuela takes out her ATM card. When the cashier lifts her head to hand her the card reader, Manuela recognizes her. It's Samantha, an old classmate. Manuela gave her that scar on her cheek years ago, back when she was a thug. An act of revenge. Samantha had offended her so she sliced her face with barbed wire. Back then Manuela believed it was up to her to mete out justice on her own. She didn't have any allies, and it seemed as if the whole world were against her. After that incident, she was reported to city services for being “psychologically disturbed” and “difficult.” They sent a social worker, but her mother refused to open the door. So after a while they left her alone. Samantha deserved it, but she's sorry you can still see the star-shaped scar on her cheek. Samantha doesn't recognize Manuela, though, she's changed too much. And besides, she never looks at the customers. She moves them through one after another, all she cares about is finishing her shift and going home.

“It was pure chance,” Manuela explains as she fills humongous plastic bags with meat, fish, cheese, vegetables. “The technical term, in ballistics, is divergence. I was supposed to be in a certain point, at the intersection of a series of lines, a point determined by a logical, mathematical chain of actions, decisions, movements, gestures. But by pure chance, I wasn't there. I was ten paces back, even though I shouldn't have been, and the explosion blew me apart, but not completely. I'm alive because of that divergence.”