Limbo (41 page)

When the police came looking for the owner of the blue Free motor scooter, my sister was shocked. She hadn't ridden her scooter that day, she'd gone to school with her boyfriend, and he picked her up at eight. But the passersby had gotten the license plate, and it was hers. The police wanted to see it. Vanessa went down to the street with them, not worried in the least. It was a misunderstanding, it would all be cleared up. But her Free wasn't parked downstairs. They searched for it all along the promenade, in case she'd forgotten exactly where she'd parked it. But they couldn't find it. It had been stolen. “What happened?” Vanessa inquired, suspicious now. “Mrs. Ferraris got her purse snatched, she fell and hit her head. It was your motor scooter, and now it's a real mess, because you didn't report it as stolen,” the officer explained. “But what does it have to do with me?” Vanessa protested. “I was at school, ask my prof, she even quizzed me in class.”

“Is she dead?” my mother got right to the point. Knowing how insurance companies work, she was afraid she'd have to pay damages. And she didn't have any money, her account was always in the red. She avoided looking at me, perched on the edge of the couch pretending to watch the soap opera
The Bold and the Beautiful
. At the time I was wild about Stephanie Forrester. My mother had guessed what had happened, she had a sixth sense about the trouble I got into. But she also had a powerful sense of clan, and she never would have turned her daughter in. My mother's concept of justice was very malleable. Mrs. Ferraris. The name sizzled in my head. I knew her; she was the principal of my elementary school. A kind old lady, always smiling. I adored her as a child. She'd give you candy if you behaved. I would have liked her to be my grandmother. My real grandmother—Leda Colella, my mother's mother—would smack me on the head so hard I was always afraid she'd knocked the sense out of me. “She broke her nose,” the officer said. My mother gave a sigh of relief and practically kicked them out of the house, accusing them of wasting her time. “It was you,” Vanessa hissed when we were alone. “You're a devil, Manuela, you're out of your mind. I'm not going to start spying on you, but you have to buy me a new motor scooter.” I denied it. I swore falsely on my mother's life, my sister's, even my own.

“I couldn't admit I helped Pitbull steal Mrs. Ferraris's purse. It was too stupid a thing to do for the person I thought I was. I never fessed up. You're the first person I'm telling this to. I ran into Mrs. Ferraris at the market in July. She had a sort of rubber mask on her nose. I was still afraid she would recognize me, so I stopped saying hello to her.

“When exams were over, I enrolled in tourism school and stopped hanging out with my friends from the new apartment buildings. I would read war comics, watch soap operas on TV, listen to my sister's romantic confessions while I helped henna her hair, but I was never able to right myself and turn my mistake into an opportunity, like my grandfather recommended. I lost track of Pitbull, but I acted just like him. I enjoyed tormenting the new girls at school, whom I considered weak and timid. I would worm money out of them; I'd force them to pay me to leave them alone, to write my papers for me, do my homework. The superintendent called me into her office and informed me that my bullying would no longer be tolerated. I didn't deny it that time, in fact I behaved as if I didn't care at all. The superintendent felt threatened. She was afraid I would slit her tires with a box cutter, and from then on she would park two blocks away from school. I was solitary, arrogant. I was about to lose myself, Lorenzo. But I didn't. If I hadn't broken Mrs. Ferraris's nose when I was thirteen, I might not be who I am today.”

“I was fifteen,” Lorenzo whispered, “I'll never forget. We smoked this enormous pipe for half an hour—opium oil, a clear, harmless-looking liquid, it didn't seem to do anything. Then all of a sudden I was flat on the floor. It was the most awful and most beautiful thing that had ever happened to me. I was dead for half an hour. Cold, frozen, completely numb. My friends wanted to dump me at the emergency room and disappear. I could hear them talking, I was totally conscious, in fact, my mind was a thousand times more expansive than before. I could hear and see everything. I could make out ants' footsteps, hear the electric current crackling in the wires, and see what my friends were doing behind my back. But I couldn't move. It was like I was suspended over my body, hovering a few feet above it, weightless. I moved through the air, drifting; I climbed the walls like a shadow, floated beneath the lamp like a cloud of smoke. Every barrier between my body, my mind, and the world had crumbled. I was both myself and everything. It was a beautiful feeling, Manuela, one of complete freedom. I would do anything to get it back, but I've never been able to. That's when I understood what death is. Maybe that's how it'll be when we're dead.”

But so what, what did it mean? He smoked opium when he was fifteen. Adolescence is a time of experimentation, challenges, mistakes. I'd changed, maybe he had, too. I didn't report him. I couldn't and didn't want to believe that Nail was involved in something like that. In spite of everything, he was a good soldier. And when he had to, he, too, picked up his rifle and fired.

It could have been Schirru, though, an amiable slacker who had been counting the days till his departure ever since he arrived, and once I heard him theorize about the supremacy of black Afghan. Hashish, in other words. I could inspect his gear, maybe announce a bug extermination or a hygiene check as an excuse. But then I'd have to get the clinic involved. And explain everything to the military police, and that didn't seem right. The other Alpini considered him a dead dog, and hoped they wouldn't end up in the same squad as him. Even Venier shunned him. They had ostracized him, which already said it all.

The next day when Ghaznavi hurried to the meeting with the Ghor province chief of police, who had come to Sollum for a briefing at headquarters, I didn't let him out of my sight for an instant. Ghaznavi didn't even deign to look at the soldiers. He passed them, walking beside Captain Paggiarin, translating in a low voice for the police chief. But the soldiers—all of them—kept their eyes glued on him. I had the feeling they shared some secret, and I shuddered. My eyes sought out Lorenzo. My little brother, my epigone. He was in the piazza, tinkering with a flooded Lince motor. Sand had corroded the gears. I read no malice in those clear eyes of his. Just curiosity. As if he merely wanted to understand what that bright, agitated little man was mumbling, his eyes fixed on his dusty shoes.

Forgive me if I doubted you, Nail. If you are right, if death is like ODing on opium, you're floating outside your body somewhere right now, maybe you're close by, drifting like smoke, weightless, painless—free.

*   *   *

A few days after my conversation with Colonel Minotto, Ghaznavi, on his way from the infirmary, surprised me as I sat at the door to the hut, staring intently at the stars. Millions of them, emerging from the immenseness, nameless constellations in a darkness so complete, so pure, it was like a swath of velvet studded with incandescent embers. The Milky Way looked like the frothy wake of a ship. I'd always thought that only the sun and the moon lit up the sky. But that's not true. In Afghanistan even the stars give off light, they can cast shadows. There were times, when all was quiet, not even a motor mumbling along the distant road, that the silence was so thick I could hear the sand rustle and the dunes crumble. Ghaznavi hesitated a second, then asked me if I knew what the Milky Way was. “It's our galaxy, it's where we are,” I answered coldly. “To us,” Ghaznavi smiled, “it's the stardust that Mohammed's horse Buraq kicked up when he crossed the sky on his way to Paradise.” I was afraid of being spied on, of someone noticing that we were talking, so I ignored him. Ghaznavi moved on, disappointed. His worn-out moccasins sank silently into the sand.

At dawn I was in the watchtower, binoculars aimed at the mountain that overlooked the base. An intelligence report had indicated suspicious movement up there. Nearby, Ghaznavi was on his knees praying, his forehead pressed to his dusty rug. From a distance came the call of the muezzin, carried on the wind. The first light of day sketched the empty contours of the hills, and I had the feeling that this was the instant of creation, that the world was yet to be born. Sand and sky, peaks and valleys all seemed to be awaiting something. An unspoken, infinite potential. As if all was yet to begin. That was freedom.

When I came down from the tower, I ran into Ghaznavi putting on his shoes and rolling up his rug. I couldn't avoid him. “Perhaps you will be able to achieve what it is you desire,” he said with a smile. “This is what I wish for you. Sergeant Paris appreciates the voice of beauty, even though she doesn't want anyone to know. But it is nothing to be ashamed of, it is a gift to be able to comprehend the poetry of the world. And Sergeant Paris has received that gift, even though she hasn't realized it yet. But it is due neither to her merit nor to her fault. Unless something has been decided since the beginning of time, it cannot occur. The essential things are determined by destiny. To deny this is to limit the universe. Destiny can turn stones into water, and stars into dust.”

I waved my hand in greeting and quickened my step. I didn't tell him that the beauty of his country had swallowed me up, or that I thought I now knew how to listen to the voice of the sand, the sky, and the wind, nor did I ask him what he meant. I never spoke to him again. It grieves me now, but there's nothing I can do about it.

*   *   *

Karim Ghaznavi—I learned in an article that Stefano sent me—was the last to be identified, because no relative had come forward to claim his remains. Which is why he was originally counted among the anonymous civilian victims. Besides, Ghaznavi probably wasn't even his real name. To protect themselves and their families, the interpreters chose new names, known only to us inside the base. Not even their relatives always knew what they did. Only one extreme left-wing newspaper spoke of Ghaznavi. The other papers dedicated not a single line to him. Their accounts of Afghanistan were abstract narratives, situated in a country without people; a tragedy performed only by stock characters: savage Taliban fighters, oppressed and abused women,
shahid
—incorrectly called kamikaze—devoted to martyrdom, and nameless victims of bombings and other attacks. They were the incarnation of principles attributed to them by those who wrote about them, or who watched the tragedy from the audience—not actual individuals. They were a mass, they were numbers—and no one feels sorry for numbers. If anything, those numbers, which were constantly increasing—the count of civilian victims had tripled in recent years—were a source of embarrassment and horror.

The person who wrote the article that mentioned Ghaznavi expressed a harsh, critical judgment of the mission and reflected bitterly on the fate of the interpreter and—more generally—the Afghani people. These reflections hurt and offended me, even though I shared them to a certain extent. But the author transformed Ghaznavi into an anonymous symbol of the massacre: he'd never seen him. Only I could have written about that man, who was an individual with a past and a life story, with good qualities and bad, memories and dreams, like Lorenzo, like Diego, like Nicola Russo. But no one asked me, and after that meeting with Colonel Minotto, I ripped the pages where I'd written about him out of my diary and burned them, fearing that someone might read them and blame me for being kind to a man accused of a crime. I'm sure Ghaznavi would have forgiven me, because he, too, had known the bitterness of reducing to ashes words that were essential to him.

Now the Professor exists only in a few scattered images in my head. The last one catches him a few seconds before the end. On June 8, Ghaznavi was working for Ninth Company headquarters, as always. Impeccable, sweaty, tired, with his dusty yellow moccasins and sad eyes. At the moment of the explosion he was standing next to First Lieutenant Russo, translating for him words that could have been essential or inconsequential, which now no one will ever know.

17

LIVE

Transcendental meditation is the confluence of an individual intelligence and the cosmic conscience, it allows us to discover ourselves and the divine within ourselves, and permits the body to enter into a state of deep relaxation. It's easy and natural, at once universal and personal. For normal people it can improve their health, help them reconnect with the primordial energy source, and develop individual potential, but for those who suffer from nervous disorders, it can also serve as therapy. Vanessa knows a Vedic master in Cerveteri who practices transcendental meditation, and she takes Manuela and Mattia to see him. It seemed like a good idea to Mattia, and he insisted he needed it as much as Manuela did. So all three of them enter a bare room—the only thing on the wall is a photograph of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—take off their shoes, and sit on the carpet, imagining they will close their eyes, breathe deeply, enter a state of well-being, and be cured instantly, during the first session, as if by magic.

But the Vedic master, whose disappointingly normal name is Mario, as thin as a rail and of an indeterminate age, disabuses them of this notion. He congratulates Manuela for choosing to embark on the path of transcendental meditation, which is well suited to her symptoms, so much so that even some traditional doctors recommend it, though military doctors often categorically deny the existence of PTSD. But the road to enlightenment is long and complicated. There are seven steps, and only at the end will she and her friend be able to taste the first fruits of their journey. First of all, they have to join the association. Then they have to attend a group presentation in which he will elucidate the benefits of transcendental meditation and offer some initial instructions on how to actually practice it. Next they will have an individual encounter, because meditation is an experience and a wisdom that is transmitted directly, and never through a third party. At that point they can begin their sessions, which last about an hour and a half, and which must take place on four consecutive days. Only after having completed all seven steps will they be able to practice transcendental meditation.