Limbo (58 page)

She tries to see herself from a distance, to sight herself as in a rifle. As the weeks go by, she realizes that writing is like advancing in the dark with night vision or thermal imaging goggles. They reveal what's hidden in the night, in the dark of the past. Looking through her virtual goggles—writing—she can see the heat left by Lorenzo, and Diego, and Nicola, and Ghaznavi, and Fatimeh. They went on ahead, as the Alpini say, all of them, they met their deaths, and yet with her thermal goggles she senses their presence—filaments of light streaking across her black screen. Thermal goggles register the heat of a person's body even if he's no longer there. They signal a presence that is also an absence, as if they can see the past. All things considered, writing does the same thing. It doesn't console or save, it doesn't raise the dead, doesn't recover what has been lost. But it registers the past. It records absence—filaments of light in the darkness.

*   *   *

She goes to physical therapy behind the piazza every morning, scrupulously keeping to her rehabilitation program. Every time she comes home she asks Teodora or Traian if by any chance she's gotten any mail or if anyone has called for her. They shake their heads. They both think, though for different reasons, that she should forget about Mattia Rubino, but they never say so.

In early February she keeps her promise and goes to see Giovanni in his new house in Civitavecchia. It is, in fact, light and airy, modern and comfortable, and she likes it. Champagne recognizes her and whines with joy, licking her hands. Giovanni acts sensibly—he really is a nice guy. The ease of their former intimacy is still there. They continue to see each other, until she finds it necessary to explain that she has no intention of getting back together with him, that the most she can offer him now is friendship—that for sure. But true friendship means reciprocity: no more secrets. Giovanni says he accepts her decision. He leaves Champagne with her when he goes skiing in the Tyrol for a week at the end of March. Manuela takes the dog to the beach and lets him off the leash. She throws a tennis ball, a toy, or a rubber bone, and Champagne scampers breathlessly after them. But one bright morning when she tries to chase after him, to run in the sand, she has to stop after three steps. Only in that moment does she truly realize that she'll never be able to catch up with him. She can walk for miles now, limping, of course, but without too much pain. But she'll never be able to run again.

She keeps the discovery to herself, and doesn't alter her rehab in the slightest. But she knows. Medicine is not an exact science, the doctor had told her: it is the science of the possible. She would need a miracle. But she has never believed in miracles. Tan and happy, Giovanni comes to get his dog, calls her two or three more times, then disappears. At the end of June she receives an invitation to his wedding in Bergen to a Norwegian engineer named Niels. She sends a gift—money for their honeymoon in the Seychelles—but she doesn't see him again.

Little by little, she starts going out again on Saturday nights. Vanessa has broken up with Youssef, and is seeing Lapo now. They're not together, it's more fluid than that. Being fluid, it assumes the shape of the container, which is appropriate given how equivocal they both are. In short, it works. It turns out that the reporter appreciates contemporary dance—or at least he's able to get tickets for premieres when the most important companies come through Rome. If he's bored he bears it stoically, because he's really taken with Vanessa. He even attends the shocking performance of the Flying Ghosts, Vanessa's old dance troupe, in a theater in a former soap factory. The benches are so uncomfortable that Manuela is convinced they were intentionally designed to punish the audience. The show, which is called
Autopsy
, only lasts an hour, but despite its brevity, Manuela finds it as entertaining as a punch in the face. It's all about nudity and physical deformity, and most of the dancers, moving like wax figures, flaunt anomalous limbs, stiff or stunted or mutilated, and rigid bodies, marked with wounds, lesions, and amputations. In spite of all this, the performance, which is both ghostly and harmonious, is not at all depressing. The critics adore it. The program notes explain that Flying Ghosts is an upbeat company, and their wild, ritualistic dance is a critique of the commercialization of the body in today's world; essentially, a hymn to life.

Vanessa had left the troupe because of a fight with the choreographer after getting her breasts enlarged. The choreographer had criticized her for acting contrary to Flying Ghosts' philosophy. Vanessa had objected that what she did was instead the apotheosis of Flying Ghosts' philosophy: otherwise healthy, she, too, was now an altered body, there was silicon under her skin, she, too, had prostheses, like the African dancer who had lost his legs on a land mine. It's blasphemy to compare two tits redone for vanity's sake with a war victim's artificial limbs, the choreographer had angrily countered. Redone out of a sense of inadequacy, redone in order to become a plastic doll, evidence of our nostalgia for perfection, and thus evidence of the imperfection of human beings, Vanessa had objected. In the end, since each was convinced of being right, Vanessa quit Flying Ghosts and gave up dancing. The other dance troupes, in comparison, seemed Jurassic to her. After the performance, Vanessa, with Lapo and Manuela trailing behind, goes to the dressing rooms to congratulate her old friends, and a little while later, without ever resolving the old argument, she rejoins the troupe.

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 former 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.