Limbo (23 page)

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Manuela calls the Bellavista and asks to be connected to room 302. Mattia never gave her his cell phone number. “I'm sorry,” the concierge says listlessly, and slightly annoyed, “but there's no one in room 302.” Yes, there is, Manuela, who is on her balcony, is about to say, I can see the light on in his room. But she's not quick enough, he has already hung up. She dials the number again, and lets it ring twenty times. By the third ring, she gets the impression the concierge has unplugged the phone.

The lobby of the Bellavista is as big as the waiting room at a train station, an empty space where two red armchairs, one on each side of the entrance, float as if lost, as if begging to be remembered. A runner, also red, covers the slightly yellowed marble floor and then ventures up the stairs, stopping on the landing in front of four identical doors. The ballroom, perhaps, or dining hall, or conference center. Manuela had never set foot in the Bellavista before, and it strikes her as a cold, pretentious place. Mattia has been living there for more than ten days. He must be lonely, as lost as one of those armchairs. There's no one at the reception desk. The keys to every room dangle on the wooden rack. Every room but 302. In the little box for 302 is a piece of paper, folded in half. Legal-size paper, a fax, maybe. So Mattia isn't in hiding, someone knows he's here. Office managers, bosses, suppliers—that's who faxes you. Perhaps he's merely in Ladispoli for work. Manuela leans over, reaches for the fax, but isn't able to grab it. She wants to read it, right away, as if it might hold the key to Mattia's bizarre behavior. But she stops herself from taking it, because that would be like stealing. Honesty. Honesty above all.

She rings the bell and the concierge emerges from the office in the back. His face conveys the same listless boredom as his voice. “Please tell Mattia in room 302 that Manuela Paris is here.” She uses the same decisive voice she would when giving orders to her soldiers, and the concierge, even though he wants to object, decides to pick up the phone. She hears Mattia's voice. “Yes?” “Miss Paris is here,” the concierge says, eyeing her with ill-concealed disapproval. Manuela doesn't lower her gaze. “He says he'll come down,” the concierge announces as he hangs up the phone.

Manuela paces the length of the lobby two or three times. Brochures for local tourist attractions, car rentals, and train schedules for Rome are scattered on the glass table. There's also an Italian guidebook in English. Mattia doesn't come down and Manuela flips through it distractedly. She turns to the chapter on Rome, the one that gets consulted the most. She reads that the Vatican Museums are closed on Sundays, except for the last Sunday of the month, when they are free. Official taxis are white and have an illuminated sign on the roof. A subway ticket is only good for one ride. Before being deployed, she had bought a guidebook on Afghanistan from the same publisher, to see what it said about the region where the Tenth Alpini Regiment would be operational. It was a few years old, but there weren't any more recent ones. She'd read it on the bus to the airport, forcing herself to concentrate while Ninth Company sang and made a racket as if they were going on a school field trip. She read the introduction on the flight to Dubai, until she fell asleep. She started up again in the crowded hangar where they waited thirteen hours for the cargo plane that was to take them to Herat, amid a confusion of voices and baggage, and then kept reading as the C-130 maneuvered on the runway while the roar of its four engines made the walls shake. She read in darkness during the flight, using her headlamp, but eventually she had to stop because the old cargo plane tossed terribly and the words danced before her eyes.

The first pages were color photographs of the country's most spectacular sites: the great Buddha of Bamiyan, the bird market at Kabul, the sharp peak of Mir Samir, the rocky spires that tower over the lapis lazuli lake of Band-e Amir. Herat—the seat of the Italian command—was described as Afghanistan's artistic capital. The guidebook dwelled extensively on the country's complicated history, but it also provided practical advice about tourist attractions, hotels, and restaurants. There was a section on shopping. And phrases in Dari and Pashto in the back. Do you accept travelers' checks? Where may I find a room, please? Thank you, you're welcome, good night. Manuela was stunned to learn that in the 1970s Afghanistan was a tourist destination. Hippies came by motorcycle or bus, or hitchhiked, and lingered before heading to the Himalayas or India, charmed by the friendliness of the people, for whom guests are sacred, the beauty of the gardens, and the sweet slowness of life in the tea salons. But that was all before she was born.

Yet some people thought it was possible to travel again there. The guidebook said that after the Taliban were expelled, the war ended and the situation, though still evolving, had stabilized. It suggested trekking itineraries through the enchanting Hindu Kush mountains, visits to archaeological sites, museums, mosques, citadels, villages. Reliable local travel agencies organized unforgettable excursions through this largely uncontaminated country: tourism was sure to become an asset to the country and a great spur for further development. The guidebook didn't say that the infrastructure was almost nonexistent, that there were no roads other than the Ring Road, that you couldn't take a single step off the existing tracks without the risk of losing one or both legs on a mine. That there are more mines than people in Afghanistan, as many mines as stones: and worse, the mines are gray and made to look like stones, so as to blend in with the landscape. That a mine costs fifty cents and can weigh as little as four ounces—three slices of mortadella—and can cause shock waves that travel at twenty thousand feet a second. Or that a mine remains active years after the person who made it is dead. That a minefield is cleared two inches at a time, by mine clearers wearing suits that weigh sixty-five pounds, and that no matter how good the mine clearer is, he can't clear more than thirty square feet a day, so that, optimistically speaking, to clear all the mines in Afghanistan—even if they could all be found, which is impossible because most of the minefield maps have been destroyed—would take three thousand years. It didn't say there were parts of the Ring Road where even troops in armored tanks wouldn't travel, or that there were roadblocks every ten miles—manned if not by policemen, by Afghan National Army soldiers, by one of the forty nations that made up the international coalition, then by soldiers without a uniform, from some shadow army, who would cut your throat and feed you to the dogs. That the taxis, jingle trucks, and buses traveled only in convoys in an attempt to discourage bandits. Or that in the outlying cities no one dared poke his head outside after sunset, and no one knew if they'd wake up the next morning. That the villages, many of which were still abandoned, were made of mud, rubble, and dried animal dung that crumbled in the wind. That the museums had been sacked, the statues disfigured by bazookas, vandalized, or stolen and sold secretly to collectors from the very same countries that had sent their soldiers to rebuild the place. That, in truth, the only museum a foreigner really had to see was the mine museum at the Kabul airport.

She hadn't been there, but First Lieutenant Russo had, and he told her about it once, while they were trading food and medicine for weapons with the inhabitants of a village. He said that there were dozens of models on display, of every shape and size—butterfly mines for children, cylindrical mines for tanks, rock-shaped mines for men—between nine and twenty centimeters in diameter, each with an explanation of how it worked and where it was from. And he kept reading Made in Italy Made in Italy Made in Italy. And even if we, as opposed to, say, the United States and a few other countries, have signed the Ottawa Convention banning antipersonnel mines, and have stopped producing them, seeing Made in Italy on those mines in the museum made his stomach turn: he didn't sleep for days. Manuela turned over the unexploded mine that a little boy had traded in for a packet of aspirin: a TS-50, Made in Italy.

The province of Farah, where the Tenth Alpini Regiment was to be deployed, wasn't even mentioned in the guidebook. At first she interpreted this absence as a sign that there weren't any monuments or tourist attractions there. But when she landed at the FOB, the thought struck her that there might be another reason. The province couldn't be in a guidebook because it was considered out of control. “A key area” in military lingo. A war zone. “We'll sit at the bar,” Mattia says to the concierge, making Manuela jump. “It's closed,” the concierge informs him. “I know,” Mattia says, “that's okay.”

Mattia steers her through the glass door. The room is dark but he doesn't turn on the light. There are a dozen or so couches and chairs around low tables. Mattia sits in the corner chair, where he can keep an eye on the door. He slips a piece of paper into his pocket. Manuela recognizes it—the fax. She catches a glimpse of the number it was sent from in a corner, but can only make out 06, so Rome. There's a chessboard and a deck of cards on the table. The dust is so thick she could write in it with her finger. He doesn't want me to go up to his room. No intimacy. He's keeping me at a distance. The heat is off and it's cold. Manuela doesn't even take off her gloves. In the thick shadows, she observes that he's nervous, he crosses his legs, wiggles his foot, keeps touching his hair. He wasn't expecting her and seems thrown off. He didn't have time to prepare his next move or organize his defense. Military tactics. Strategy. Daring. Impetus. An attack works well only if it's a surprise. Only if your enemy isn't expecting you. You can't defend yourself from something you're not expecting. He's not my enemy. Still, I want to conquer him.

“I'm sorry about what happened at the lake, Manuela,” he says without looking at her. “I made a mistake and I apologize.” He stares at the photographs on the wall above them: the Etruscan necropolis at Vacuna, the gold-plated silver fibula in the shape of a cicada, exhumed from a tomb at Piane di Vaccina, a young Ostrogoth woman who died in the fifth century. As if that barbarian object were somehow more reassuring than she. He almost seems afraid. Only now does Manuela realize that the local archaeological treasures are mortuary trousseaus, and there's something unsettling in the discovery that the art of her homeland is linked to the journey to the other world. For the Etruscans, as well as for the barbarians, life is something we merely pass through; death is everything. One thousand five hundred years of so-called civilization at Ladispoli have left behind a ruined watchtower, a prince's impregnable fort, and fields of artichokes—nothing more. But she is still alive.

“I'm waiting,” Manuela says, using that same decisive tone that had worked with the concierge. “For what?” Mattia asks, surprised. “For you to tell me something; you choose. Why we kissed. Why you wrote me that idiotic note. Why you won't take phone calls.” “Too many things,” Mattia says, forcing a smile. “Choose one.” “Why you don't want to see me anymore,” Manuela says.

“Because I can't get into a relationship with you,” Mattia says, “and I realized that you're not the kind of girl I can be with for a day or a week. But that's all I have.” Manuela counts thirteen days until the twelfth. Not many, but not so few. If her doctors' visits on January 12 don't go well, she will hurl herself into the sea and drown—the Tyrrhenian is unsparing in the winter. She doesn't want a life outside of the army. It'd be the same as dying; it's better to actually kill herself. To believe—like the Etruscans, like the barbarians, like the Taliban—that life is something we merely pass through, that death is everything. She would ask to be buried in her uniform, they can't take that away from her. In the hospital, she'd often thought angrily that it would have been better to die with the others. At least she would have had the funeral chapel at Camp Arena in Herat, the honor guard, her comrades' heartfelt tears, the flag-draped coffin with her feathered cap resting on top, the state funeral, the red carpet, the military band, the president of the republic comforting her mother, the posthumous promotion, and everyone's respect, forever. Maybe they really would have erected a monument in her honor on the promenade at Ladispoli, and a hundred years from now the inhabitants of her city would remember her, thinking her no less worthy because she gave her life for a cause they didn't understand. She doesn't want to go back to being just Manuela Paris on January 12. There's nothing behind that name—an ordinary woman, without a future, or with one she already rejected, years ago: as a tour guide, the wife of an office worker, the discontented mother of children fed on her regrets. She doesn't want that kind of life. Thirteen days before she finds out if she is alive or dead, Sergeant Paris or no one. It's not worth giving up something for nothing.

“It's not like I want to marry you, Mattia,” she says. “I'm just passing through, my work comes before everything else. The army, Italy, my Alpini, my family. Those are the things that matter to me, in that order. I don't know what you do and I don't really care. I don't know if you chose it or simply stumbled upon it. For me, work isn't something I do to fill my day or to earn a salary. It's a part of me. In fact, it's the truest part of me.”

“But you don't even know me, and if you did, you wouldn't like me,” Mattia observes calmly. “And I don't know you, and if I did, maybe I wouldn't like you. I don't remember who said it, but whoever the genius was, I agree with him: of all the things mortal man has made, the one we must fight, flee, avoid, and avert, in every way possible, is war. There is nothing more profane, futile, wasteful, squalid, and long-lasting than war. For me
Italy
is a suspicious word that I associate with the rhetoric of those who want to impose their laws on me in order to pursue their own interests. I would have much rather been born French, or Swedish. At least I could have had the illusion of living in a country of rights and duties, instead of this corrupt place with its attitude of ‘I don't give a damn.' Furthermore, I detest soldiers, I didn't even do my military service. When I was eighteen, it was still required, you still had to give a year of your life to Italy. But I don't want to pass myself off as someone I'm not: I wasn't a conscientious objector either, working for, I don't know, Caritas; I didn't do anything noble, like help the homeless, cook them hot meals or cure their scabies, or teach disadvantaged children. I just got a friend of my father's to have me declared unfit for service. I imagine that in your eyes, I'm a slacker, a coward, a deserter. I've always tried to mind my own business and be happy, and I've succeeded, too. I've never paid much attention to the injustices of the world, to other people's problems; my own were plenty. And the mere thought of putting on a uniform and saying ‘yes, sir,' of obeying an order I don't understand or don't agree with, of shooting, killing, even if only in self-defense, goes against my conscience.”