Limbo (49 page)

Only her grandmother is home, curled up in her chair, with a woolen cap on her head, wearing three sweaters, and a blanket over her knees, because by now neither wool nor the radiator nor the space heater she sits in front of can warm her. “Don't listen to people who complain about being ill or blind,” she had said to Manuela back when she still deigned to speak with the impure. “The worst thing about growing old is the cold. You can't get warm, you're like a rotten log that won't burn.” But now Grandma Leda doesn't even talk about the cold, and she doesn't have regrets about the past. The VCR plays her prophet's sermons about Jehovah's Judgment Day, when he will sweep the evil from the earth. Her world has been reduced to a voice. But it's clearly enough for her, because she sits there without moving, a faraway smile on her lips.

Mattia has gone out. She waits anxiously for him, but also happily, because she absolutely has to explain to him her selfish behavior the other day. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes. There are misunderstandings. But she can't allow doubts and fears to ruin their lives. It's such a miracle that they have found each other. You have something I have been searching for. I don't know what, but I don't want to lose it. She calls him three times, but his cell is always off. She goes over to the Bellavista, leaves a note for him. Direct, unequivocal, because that's the way she is, and he has accepted her. Don't make a sergeant wait. Soldiers have no patience. And besides, it's not possible to be patient and in love at the same time.

She takes up guard duty on the balcony, so she can intercept the Audi as soon as it appears on the promenade. She stands for hours in the cold, without ever letting her mind wander, but then again, she's used to it. The Audi does not return. At two she eats a salad with no dressing with her grandmother, who only drinks a cup of milky coffee. “Assembly is today. Can you take me to the Kingdom Hall?” she asks her, unusually sweet since she needs a favor. “I can't, Grandma, I'm waiting for someone,” she replies, “I'm sorry, forgive me.” “Are you engaged?” she asks, curious now, turning off the TV. She doesn't hear well, and after a while the racket confuses her. “No,” Manuela replies, “but I'm going out with someone.” “What does that mean, going out? I go out, too, but I'm as lonely as a dog, and if Jehovah weren't here I would be the loneliest person on earth. But I'm old, I'm like the moon at dawn, I only have a little while longer to live.” “Going out means I see him, spend time with him,” Manuela explains, embarrassed. “Do you sleep with him?” Grandma wants to know.

“Yes,” Manuela admits, surprised by her grandmother's frankness. She has never talked to her about these kinds of things; it never would have occurred to her. But perhaps old age is also—or above all—freedom. Freedom from habits, from shame, from taboos, from everything. If she could only accept it. “Sex is the most important thing,” Grandma declares. “If you're not happy with a man even in bed, it's not worth it. Believe me, it's not worth it.”

“Thanks, Grandma, I'll keep that in mind.” She feels the same way. The loneliness of the heart is something even friends can satisfy. But the loneliness of a body that no one knows how to touch, listen to, understand, is absolute, and of all the bodies that there are in this world—all made in the same way, in the end, all furnished with the same organs, identically arranged—there might be only one that completes us, without which life loses its taste. She missed Mattia's breath last night. Missed the sag of the mattress, the obstacle of limbs between the sheets, the pressure of her shoulder against his. When she had opened her eyes on January 6, the first thing she had seen was his hair on the pillow, an ashen smudge falling across his forehead, a tuft holding on in a spot where the rest had already fallen out. Then and there she had been struck by the proof that Mattia was too old—and that he would only get older, and if they stayed together, with time, the difference in age, which seemed insignificant now, would only grow more pronounced, and would push them apart. Yet now the memory of that thinning, faded hair torments her, because it seems she missed an opportunity; they can't waste time blaming each other for misunderstandings and throwing their respective shortcomings in each other's face. His thinning hair and her scar only testify to the fact that they met each other late, late for both of them, they both lived for too long not knowing about each other, and so now they have to make up for all that lost time. And she longs to tell him so.

“You've gotten prettier,” Grandma observes, scrutinizing her through her thick lenses. Her eyes look huge, two grayish globes in which a malicious light flickers. “You almost look like a woman.” “I'm still the same, I think you need new glasses.” Manuela laughs. But it makes her happy that Mattia has changed her.

At four she sends him a text, telling him that she'll wait for him at her grandfather's cottage. Then she takes a shower, washes her hair, applies clear nail polish, uses Vanessa's cosmetics to make herself up, puts on a pair of her sister's jeans—covered in sparkles and artfully ripped at the knees like a contemporary painting—calls a cab, and goes to Passo Oscuro. She waits for him on Vanessa and Youssef's mattress, reading the book on veteran rehabilitation that Colonel Minotto gave her. It's interesting, all things considered. The smell of smoke from their New Year's Eve candles still lingers in the air. The smell of their bodies, too. She sinks her mouth into the pillow. It smells of Mattia. When it grows dark, she goes out to the veranda to wait for him. It's cold, but she doesn't flinch. At eight Mattia's cell is still off. At eleven she calls a taxi and goes home.

The concierge at the Bellavista doesn't know what to say. Mr. Rubino has not checked out of his room. The chambermaid who made his bed didn't notice anything unusual this morning, his things were still in their usual place. Her message is still there, folded in quarters, in pigeonhole 302. “Would you like it back?” the concierge asks her. Manuela rips it up and throws it in the trash.

At three the vibration of her cell phone, which she had left on under her pillow, yanks her out of a deep yet calm sleep in which shards of everyday life float. Maybe she was dreaming. A message. I'm at the cottage, came in through the window. You left. Your imprint on the bed, your perfume on the sheets. I will come to you in your dreams.

She calls him. He answers on the first ring. They talk until dawn, whispering, pausing whenever a train goes by because the rumble is so close it overpowers their voices. They talk about everything and nothing, about important things and foolish ones. About trips they've taken—she a commuter on the Belluno–Rome train, he once went all the way to the Caucasus to climb Mount Elbrus. About Sailor Moon, the warrior of love and justice. About Vittorio Paris's chickens, Diego Jodice junior's baptism, John Huston's
Bible
at Palo Castle. Mattia tells her how much he likes the knots of her spinal column, the relief of her shoulder blades, her protruding bones, the brown fuzz against her white skin, the red scar that he will never tire of running his fingers along, like an open vein, a path of blood that leads him to the very center of her. They talk about her titanium plate, about Amir's pen. Mattia says that she is in every part of him. They utter words both indecent and tender. Then Manuela tells him not to worry if they don't get to see each other tomorrow. She has to catch an early plane, she's going to Turin. She has to get some tests done for her doctor's visit. She'll be away one day, two at the most. She'll be home by Thursday evening at the latest.

“Come back soon,” Mattia says, only then realizing to his horror that his battery symbol is flashing.
LOW BATTERY
appears on his screen. “Without you I can't—” But his battery dies and Manuela doesn't hear the rest of the sentence.

21

LIVE

It's snowing in Turin. When the Alitalia ATR lands at Turin-Caselle Airport, the windows are streaked with ice. Manuela deftly maneuvers her crutches down the aisle and the sloping exit ramp, carrying her bag herself and refusing the help of the steward assigned to the disabled. She's wearing her uniform for the first time in several days, and her Norwegian cap with the eagle in the center. People turn to look at her as she crosses the arrivals hall. Tall, thin, a perfectly pressed uniform, polished boots, gold epaulets—and crutches. But no one recognizes her. When people see an injured soldier, they think: athlete with a torn meniscus. The four thousand soldiers eating dust and TNT in central Asia exist only for their families.

For forty-five minutes, as the taxi fords the traffic, dodging trucks stuck in the snow on the bypass, she chats with Mattia on her cell, giving him an up-to-the-minute report of her journey. It's always a treat to take a comfortable civilian airplane after those C-130s and Chinook helicopters. She spent nearly three months in the Turin hospital, but it seems as if she's seeing the city for the first time. The river is wide, the trams deafening and cumbersome, the avenues sketched with snow, the balconyless buildings sealed up like battlements. “Why didn't you come with me?” she asks all of a sudden. “You didn't ask me.” Turin is white, geometric, cold. The symmetry of the streets and the repetitiveness of the intersections suggest an immutable order and make her feel safe. “Would you have come?” Manuela asks in astonishment as she rummages in her pocket for her wallet. “Even if you had to sit and wait for me in the lobby all day?” “Listen, Manuela,” Mattia starts to say, “there are a lot of things I should have told you. But it was all so new, you can't start something on the end of something else, it wasn't because I lacked courage, but because I trusted you so much.” “Forty euros, do you need a receipt?” the taxi driver says, pulling up in front of the military hospital gate. “Yes, please,” Manuela says, even though she doubts they will reimburse travel expenses, and then to Mattia, “What are you trying to tell me? I don't understand.” “Good luck,” he says. “Just relax, it will all be fine.”

The hospital again. The ticking of her crutches on the opaque marble floor again. The high windows. The perpetual glare of the livid neon lights. The dark uniforms against the white walls. The guard's glass booth at the entranceway. The Dardo and Mangusta helicopter posters. The Armed Forces calendar on the glass door of the ward. The smell of disinfectant. The sadness of injured bodies moving up and down hallways. Legs, clavicles, vertebrae imprisoned in plaster casts, braces, collars. Bones compromised by accident or disease. Disharmony, imperfection, pain. It feels like months have gone by, but it's only been twenty days. “Welcome back, Sergeant,” Nurse Scilito greets her merrily. “What did Santa Claus bring you?” “Love, I think,” she says laughingly.

“Lucky you,” Scilito sighs, gesturing to the door. They've gotten her old room ready for her, but she hopes she won't need it. The last flight for Rome isn't until after nine. The medical evaluation board is waiting for her. She wants to get it over with as soon as possible. She goes in.

They test her knee and ankle function, then send her underground to the radiology department. She hangs her uniform on a hook and stiffens in front of the X-ray machine in just her underwear. She holds her breath. She's had so many X-rays! And every time the doctor holds those black sheets up against the light, revealing the crumbled imprint of her bones. The white part—which should show her kneecap, fibula, tibia, malleolus—breaks off, as if whoever drew it had lifted his pencil from the page, and fades to black: a sign that her fractures had not healed. But a myriad of dark stars dot the X-ray. Metal fragments, the shrapnel still inside her. “You can get dressed now, thank you,” says the voice of the radiologist, barricaded behind a protective wall. “Can't you tell me anything?” she asks without much hope. The radiologist has already seen. He already knows.

She goes from one building to the next, from one wing to the next. She subjects herself patiently, as docile as a lamb, to every kind of test, including an encephalon-rachis-cervical-lumbosacral MRI. She emerges from the radioactive shadows of the basement into the brightness of the surgical orthopedics ward. She goes from one specialist to another, finally ends up in the secluded neurologist's room. When she enters, he's talking on the phone with his daughter, he's in no hurry to deal with her and lets her wait, on the edge of her seat, nervous, angry with that girl, or woman, who demands her father's attention and delays the truth. They stick probes in her knee, apply electrodes to her skull and clamps to her heart. She explains to the physical therapist that she has been scrupulous about doing her rehab, and it's worked: her crutches are a habit now more than anything else, they reassure her, but she doesn't really need them, in fact she's thinking of buying herself a cane. Her foot is responding well, she can walk, though still only for short distances. Her knee is stiff, that's true. But the movement is fluid and harmonious. Her back isn't bothering her, neither are her vertebrae. She's about to tell him she made love curled up on her epistropheus, contorting herself like a snake, without breaking in two, but refrains: military ethics.

She answers the same questions over and over. She tells the truth, but not all of it. She downplays the pain—which, every time she walks on the beach, stabs at her heels so sharply it paralyzes her, forcing her to rest. She mitigates but doesn't hide certain unpleasant symptoms: muscular tone weakness, dizziness, loss of balance. Lying on the table inside the MRI capsule, she tells herself that science is a utopia and machines are of no use. They're X-raying her brain, and will be able to see the tiniest abnormalities. But they can't see the only thing that's really in there, a strange man who says his name is Mattia Rubino.

At two, Colonel Rocca, the president of the medical evaluation board, invites her to the officers' mess. A withered man with huge ears and curly lobes, piggy eyes. He has a reputation as an old-school officer who's still not used to the idea of women in the armed forces, so the invitation surprises her. There's no one in the mess because the hospital is still practically empty after the holidays. She eats a bland risotto and some overly salted braised beef that makes her thirsty all afternoon. The colonel informs her that General Ercoli will be coming up from Rome tomorrow. He's expecting her at the Pinerolo barracks at eleven. “Tomorrow?” she asks, disappointed. The last plane for Fiumicino will take off without her. And she won't sleep with Mattia tonight. “Perhaps there's been some mistake,” she tells him, “I don't think I know General Ercoli, and I'm not in the Taurinense Alpini Brigade. I'm in Julia, Tenth Regiment, from Belluno, I'm being treated here instead of Belluno on Colonel Minotto's advice.” “General Astorre assured me that you have a very high IQ,” Rocca says bitterly. “He's clearly mistaken.” Manuela nervously jabs her braised beef with her knife. Who is this Ercoli? She's never heard of him before. And what does he want from her?