Limbo (6 page)

The psychiatrist at the hospital where she was being treated said that her strategy of
avoidance
—as it was called in psychiatric jargon—was keeping her from working through the trauma; a symptom of PTSD, essentially, which she had to strive to overcome if she didn't want it to become chronic and cripple her forever. He was even making her write about her military experience and the trauma: her
homework
, as he called it. Manuela was supposed to work on it over the holidays and turn it in to him in January. When he had spoken to her about it, she couldn't help but smile. But he had cautioned her not to underestimate the assignment. Despite the childish, scholastic term, her homework was serious, perhaps the only therapy that could really help her. The only way she would be able to distance herself from the pain was to talk about it. Otherwise it would grow, spreading like a weed, extending its roots in the dark, until it destroyed her. Manuela had promised to take it seriously. She had bought a notebook, but she still hadn't written a single line in it. She kept telling herself it was only because she wasn't used to writing anymore. The only things she still wrote by hand were coordinates, code names, temperatures. To write about yourself you have to think, and she didn't want to think.

“There're some photos of you, too,” Traian says, inserting the pen drive in his computer. “I don't know who gave them to the newspapers, we didn't give them anything because we couldn't ask your permission, and maybe you wouldn't have agreed—do you want to see them?” “What photos?” Manuela starts. Her hands tingle, her heart races, and there's that sensation again, of a sharp nail boring into the nape of her neck. “There's one of you with an old Afghani woman, you're standing close together, talking.” “It must have been retouched,” Manuela says. “Women don't go out there, they're invisible, in six months I must have seen two at most. And they certainly don't let themselves be photographed. Neither do old people, they think you're trying to steal their souls.” “You came out good,” Traian insists, clicking on the thumbnail of the photo. The envelope the pen drive was in is on his desk. In his neat, childish handwriting he had written SERGEANT PARIS in felt-tip pen.

The photo is of Manuela and an Afghani woman with a shriveled face and skin wrinkled like a rotting leaf standing in front of what seems to be a grayish metal cage—prefabricated modules filled with sand and inert material that form Sollum's impenetrable protective barrier. The woman is wearing a dark men's overcoat, and the scarf wrapped around her head and neck leaves only her eyes, nose, and mouth uncovered. She and Manuela, slightly out of focus, are looking at the photographer, both of them surprised, almost annoyed, at having their picture taken.

The image resurfaces from somewhere infinitely far away. Manuela had forgotten that face, the reason the woman came to the base, the incredibly brief instant of contact that the photographer froze in time. But the photo sparks the memory of the memory. And the vivid, indelible impression that woman—the first and only Afghani woman she had the chance to meet—had made on her. She can't remember her name, though she's certain she knew it once. The soldiers cruelly called her Skunk. All Afghanis stink, they'd say, from the lowliest shepherd to the highest-ranking general. Irritated, she had pointed out that after only a few weeks in the desert, they stunk, too. That woman's proud bearing, the dignity of her callused feet and angular face, the vertical furrows at the corners of her mouth, her wild, mute desperation, reminded Manuela of her mother at a precise moment in her life: the day she was laid off from the fish factory. It was the summer of 1996. The economy was stagnant, unemployment was rising, financial pressures were suffocating them, and then the company outsourced its mackerel operations to Tunisia. Manuela was thirteen, Vanessa sixteen. Their future had been decided by the company manager, who had never set foot inside the factory, had never met the women who worked there, had probably never even eaten a mackerel in his life. You never see it in restaurants. Mackerel is the fish of the poor.

Shadows had dimmed her mother's eyes; vertical furrows were carved around her mouth—indelible. Cinzia had always dreamed her daughter would graduate from college. Manuela's junior high Italian teacher told her that her daughter was a natural student; she had a rare mastery of language and an authentic intelligence, which consists not in the ability to memorize but in the ability to make connections. She was rebellious and her grades were poor, but Mrs. Colella shouldn't give up or let herself be fooled: she just had to give her time to get to know herself, to accept who she was. She urged her not to waste her daughter's talent, to consider it her inheritance—a fortune, in other words. And not to listen to people who say there's no point in studying Greek or philosophy, that Italy isn't America and social mobility doesn't exist here. Manuela's future was in her head. Cinzia, who had only finished junior high and had started working in the factory when she was fifteen, felt proud.

After she was laid off, and the factory closed, she couldn't make ends meet. She had to swallow the humiliation of accepting a monthly check from her ex-husband. Manuela enrolled in a vocational school that specialized in commercial and tourism management, the branch at Palo Nuova, so she could get there on the Cotral bus. It was a practical degree, good for getting a job. Her mother understood, and she didn't stand in her way. Sometimes, in the morning, she would take her to class herself. But she never asked her daughter anything. In five years she didn't go talk to her teachers even once. Stooped, tense, always tired, she never smiled. In that Afghani woman who dragged her plastic flip-flops in the dust at the base, Manuela had recognized the same discontent, the same rage, the same shame at not being able to offer her children something better that had disfigured her mother's face.

“She wasn't old, Traian,” Manuela says. “I thought so, too, but it turns out she was my age: twenty-seven.” Traian doesn't seem particularly struck by this revelation. The photo of an unsightly beggar holds no interest for him. He prefers those of military vehicles, Freccia wheeled tanks, or Dardo armored battle tanks. But now he's looking for another one. “Look at this, from inside a Lince,” he insists, clicking on the last jpeg of the series, “you're talking on the radio.” Manuela looks away too late. The news had made the front page in every newspaper—local, national, and online. Headlines in big letters. Next to the photo her brother wants to show her is another one, in color: a heap of burned metal, tires, rags, boots. In the foreground a blood-soaked helmet. Manuela rips the mouse out of her brother's hand and closes the program. The taste of rust in her mouth. Traian insists she take the pen drive, a present, he really wants her to have it. He collected those articles for her, it's her story. It must be cool being famous. He wants to end up in the newspapers and on TV one day, too, wants people to recognize him on the street and say, Hey, look, there's Traian Paris. Manuela should explain to him that celebrity has no value, it doesn't mean anything, but she doesn't have the strength.

For the rest of the afternoon, until Vanessa comes to get her, as she battles Traian in Sniper, she keeps asking herself who could have taken that photo of her in the Lince. Every soldier had a camera or cell phone, they were always photographing everything. But at times like that they had other things to think about. They concentrated because a mistake or a distraction could cost them their lives. Alert, mouths dry, their stomachs in knots. It wasn't nostalgia they were feeling, wanting to be somewhere else, or to go home. Eyes fixed on the square of the windshield, all they looked at was the road, which cut across the plateau: the fresh furrow of the tires, a straight, naked sign in the yellow, naked sand, no reference points, no trees, no poles, nothing at all. They looked at that simulacrum of road that unfurled before them, exactly the same for miles and miles. Searching for obstacles, metallic glints, unnatural bumps, turned earth, abandoned vehicles, unusual swellings, spots, shadows, carrion. And now, from all those months spent in Afghanistan, only one image remains lodged in her memory. That dazzling streak of light—ignited by the sun, swept along by the wind. The cloud of dust coming toward them, which they enter as if entering fog.

*   *   *

The guest at the Bellavista dines alone in the hotel restaurant and retires to his room at nine thirty. Manuela peeps at him through the living room curtains, and keeps eyeing the hotel all evening while, sitting on the couch next to Alessia, she pretends to watch a cartoon on TV—a story of enchanted castles, witches, and talking scarecrows. It's a good movie, with great animation and surprisingly sophisticated dialogue, but she can't manage to follow the plot. Images flash like lightning in her mind and superimpose themselves on the scenes she's watching, the voices in her head blending with the characters' voices. She's sitting in her mother's tiny living room, and yet she's not. Swallowed by vertigo, she clings to the arms of the couch so as not to faint, a whirlpool grabs her by the legs and drags her under, down to the bottom of who knows what. She feels like she's falling, and her foot's numb again. Her amygdalae—the endocrine glands at the base of her brain—are to blame; her doctor explained it all to her. They create abnormal hormone levels, and the neurotransmitters that act on the hippocampus are affected as well, eroding her memory. A neurological phenomenon, perfectly understandable. Nevertheless, as she watches the movie, her foot is no longer there. And her skull is being crushed with iron tongs.

The guest at the Bellavista Hotel is watching TV, too: an intermittent azure light filters through the shutters, lowered almost to the floor. To judge from the reflections and the colors projected on the walls, it's the same movie. He doesn't go outside to smoke. He turns the light out at eleven. He doesn't suffer from insomnia.

3

HOMEWORK

The forward operating base at Bala Bayak was called Sollum. The name was in honor of a famous WWII battle, and was meant to infect us with the courage of those who had defended the front in the Libyan desert seventy years before. But the base itself reminded me, more than anything else, of a Zen garden: an open box of sand raked by truck wheels and helicopter blades, which stirred up a sandstorm during takeoffs and landings. The following conclusion appears on the first page of the diary I kept while in country. I wrote it on December 23, two hours after our arrival, sitting on my pack, still not sure where I was supposed to bunk: “Arrived at FOB. We're in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing.”

Ninth Company, Tenth Alpini Regiment was deployed on a rectangular island just under 1,000 feet long and just over 150 feet wide. The perimeter, punctuated by guard towers, was surrounded not by sea but by clouds of barbed wire and other protective barriers that obstructed the view and created the unpleasant sensation of being under siege. To the west stood a mountain, its sharp ridge a woman's profile, like Monte Circeo, but completely devoid of vegetation. Sollum's commander, Captain Paggiarin, observed with pleasure that our desert FOB reminded him of the Roman encampments beneath the walls of Masada; seen from the rock cliffs above, the camps in the sand below must have looked like squares drawn in the middle of nowhere, frighteningly vulnerable. Yet it was precisely from those encampments that the Roman legions had gone out to conquer the rebel city. I didn't know the story of Masada, and didn't say anything. But to the insurgents lying in wait atop the imposing mountain that dominated the plain, the impression our FOB gave was probably exactly what he'd described: a little fort in the middle of nowhere and—despite the vast number of high-tech weapons—frighteningly vulnerable.

The officers were quartered in small barracks that were either prefabricated or improvised as best as possible out of the ruins of a former Soviet airport, while the enlisted men were in inflatable tents, constantly besieged by the sun. They were not thrilled with their new homes. I'd hear them grumbling among themselves, but they'd go quiet whenever I came near. “I can't decide if it's more like a Boy Scout camp or a gypsy settlement,” Rizzo commented sourly. “What were you expecting, a hotel?” Pieri laughed. “So how is it that the guys from the Fifth are in Shindand while the Tenth ended up in this shithole?” Schirru muttered. A friend of his assigned to Shaft had extolled the beauty of the immense, fertile valley as well as the carpets of a certain Abdul, who was allowed a stall inside the Task Force Center base. A market was held there every Sunday. Here, nothing but dust and desert. “Clearly the Tenth has no guardian angel,” sighed a lance corporal whose name I hadn't learned yet. Even in Bala Bayak, conspiracy theories served to explain every injustice. “It was worse in Somalia,” Masera, the QRF sergeant, assured them. “But it's better in Lebanon,” Santapaola muttered. “They've even got the sea.”

I gathered up my gear and, with feigned self-confidence—it weighed fifty pounds—dragged it over to the infirmary. Housing for women is always a problem at FOBs. The officer in charge of logistics, after counting out the tents and the names on the rosters, put the three of us in the same corner of the base, in a container fifteen feet long and six feet wide. On my right, the more sheltered side, was First Lieutenant Ghigo, medical doctor. On my left, the side most exposed to dust and drafts, behind a curtain hanging from a clothesline, Corporal Giani, Quartermaster. I took the middle. I was an NCO, the link between enlisted personnel and the commissioned officers: the middle was my place, my job, and in a certain sense my mission. There were almost two hundred people at Sollum, but only three of us were women. A gunner had been replaced at the last minute because of a cavity in her molar. No one in our medical corps specialized in dentistry so they didn't let you deploy if you were in danger of getting an abscessed tooth.