Limbo (48 page)

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Sunk into the backseat of the army car, Manuela doesn't say a word the whole way home. She stares at the driver's shaved neck and sees Fatimeh. She stares at the bare banks of the Volturno, the splashes of snow, and sees Fatimeh. The three lanes of the Rome–Naples highway and sees Fatimeh. The tractor trailers and Fatimeh. The white headlights of the cars on the other side of the median strip, and Fatimeh. She closes her eyes and she sees Fatimeh. It is neither a hallucination nor a memory. It is a presence. She can even smell her—goat, sweat, hair, and something unidentifiable, maybe the soot of the fire, a pleasant mixture of ashes and wood. A silent ghost who insinuates herself between the barriers of the base and slides along the protective wall without making a sound, her dirty feet in rubber flip-flops. A bundle pressed to her chest, her eyes glued to the ground. An emaciated boy precedes her, dragging a cart piled with rosaries and postcards, Chinese sunglasses, and phone cards. Bright green eyes and thick, jet-black hair, the body of a malnourished child and the hard gaze of an adult. Manuela could not have said how old he was. Because she was a woman, Manuela had been assigned the task of asking Fatimeh what she wanted: she had refused to say a word to the soldiers on guard duty who had interrogated her.

Fatimeh didn't understand English, and Manuela knew only thirty words in Dari. Water, capture, arrest, cold, weapons, desert, village, well, dust, canal, old man, mountain, pass, mosque, street, river, prison, friend, words like that, useful for orienting yourself, for imposing order, describing a place, or expressing a need. Besides, maybe Fatimeh didn't even speak Dari. The linguistic and ethnic tangle of the province exceeded her expertise. And Ghaznavi, Shamshuddin, and the other interpreter had left Sollum on a village medical outreach mission. Manuela and Fatimeh were a few inches apart. Fatimeh stared attentively at her uniform, her helmet, the black-bordered gold bars on her shoulder. In Fatimeh's bright green eyes, lively and intelligent, Manuela read neither curiosity nor admiration nor desire to be like her, nor the vaguest aspiration for the authority and liberty she enjoyed. But no hatred or rancor or scorn either. Merely a cosmic distance. And an absolute desperation. The last thing that woman wanted to do was to ask for help, but that's what she did.

Without ever looking Manuela in the eyes, Fatimeh held out her bundle and practically forced her to take it in her arms. Manuela moved aside the filthy blanket and glimpsed the gray face of a baby girl, just a few months old, racked by fever. The woman had come in search of the doctor. But Lieutenant Ghigo was out on the medical outreach mission with her assistants. The only one in the clinic was a nurse Manuela called the Skinner—she wouldn't have let him treat a cat. She had to detain Fatimeh until Ghigo came back. She gave her back her bundle and gestured for her to follow her to the clinic. Fatimeh looked at her son, as if asking his permission. The boy merely moved his head slightly.

Fatimeh laid the baby girl on an infirmary cot and opened the blanket so that Manuela could see her belly, which was monstrously bloated. Then she collapsed into a folding chair. She looked like a heap of dirty rags. Mother and child were exhausted and starving, and Manuela sent a soldier to the kitchen to get something for them to eat. The cook—happy to have an excuse to get away from the hot stove—came carrying two plates, still hot. “Korean frozen fish,” Manuela said, stupidly, because the woman didn't understand English, “it's like chicken, some say like tuna, anyway it's tasty.” But neither the boy nor his mother touched the food, and the cook withdrew, mortified. He really did try his best, and he did a good job. He would gladly have bought goats from the shepherds to make a tomato meat stew, but after the company was decimated by dysentery, Captain Paggiarin started worrying about food poisoning and preferred to order cases of frozen and prepared foods from the TFC warehouses in Shindand.

The whole time mother and son waited in the infirmary, they didn't utter a single word; didn't answer even one of Manuela's questions. As if they wanted to keep their contact to a minimum. Maybe they just didn't understand her. Every now and then the woman coughed, hiding her mouth with a rust-colored rag. Manuela noted with disgust that she was spitting up blood.

When Lieutenant Ghigo finally returned, Manuela left. As she was heading out of the infirmary, she felt a hard slap on her arm, and—surprised—she turned. The woman was whispering something to her. She pronounced the word two or three times, but Manuela didn't understand, because she'd only been there a few weeks, she'd only left the FOB once, and that word wasn't part of her meager vocabulary. The village patrols and the children's insistent requests would teach her that the word meant “pen.” She must have asked for her son, because she, like ninety percent of Afghani women, was illiterate. When she opened her mouth, Manuela saw that she was missing three teeth. Her gums were inflamed, like those of an eighty-year-old. But she knew now that that worn-out old woman, devastated by tuberculosis, was her age. The boy said something to her in a reproachful tone, and Fatimeh lowered her head, bit her lip, and fell silent.

Lieutenant Ghigo told her that the baby girl was very ill: she had a temperature of 102°F and had lost almost half her body weight. Visceral leishmaniasis. An infectious disease transmitted by sand flies that swarm on excrement. It destroys the internal organs, attacks the spleen, liver, and bone marrow, causes anemia and terrible hemorrhaging. It's the disease of the world's poor. She saved her just in time, one more day and there would have been nothing she could do. Ghigo said bitterly that Fatimeh never would have brought her to the FOB if she weren't at death's door. A child's life is worth less than a dog's. The hardness of these people is inconceivable. “But she brought her,” Manuela said. “Between the life of her child and the contempt of the community, she chose the life of her child, and that's what matters. Fatimeh is a brave woman.”

Fatimeh came back three more times to get the antimonials for her daughter's treatment—but she refused to let herself be seen by the doctor. Manuela would see her walking in the dust, her head lowered. She avoided looking up. But twice Manuela intercepted her lively, intelligent eyes. Twice she smiled at her and twice Fatimeh gave her a half nod before quickly lowering her head again. Then she disappeared. Her relatives had not appreciated the fact that she had turned to the kafiri. Manuela would never have known any more of the baby girl's fate had not the youngest of the interpreters, Shamshuddin, told Ghigo that the little one had made it. She was already feeling better seven days later, even her belly was returning to its normal size. He had seen her in a basket, watched over by her brothers in front of their house. If it could be called a house. Fatimeh had nine children. She was a widow, her husband was killed in an air raid last year, in May, her brothers were refugees in Pakistan, and she earned her bread by begging, but she couldn't survive without her son's cart of tchotchkes. A twelve-year-old boy, already the head of the family. Fatimeh's son—Amir, Ahmad, or whatever his name was—stayed at his mother's side while they waited for the doctor, while the doctor examined his sister, and then while the medicine was being administered. Protecting her, but also keeping an eye on her. When Manuela invited him to eat the good Korean fish that tasted like chicken, he proudly refused, lifting his chin. And he looked at her as he did so. And, looking her in the face, he blew himself up.

Because he was looking at her. His eyes, bright green like his mother's, his thick hair, his gaunt face and his adult expression. She recognized him. She was so surprised by the fact that that boy happened to be in a village miles from his own, that she stopped. “Nicola!” she had exclaimed merrily. “It's Fatimeh's son.” And at the same time her blood ran cold, because how had Amir or Ahmad or whatever his name was gotten to Qal'a-i-Shakhrak, who had brought him, and most of all, why? “Nicola!” Amir had recognized her, too, he quickened his pace and stepped in among the soldiers. “Nicola!” she cried. Amir kept turning around to look at her, and he was looking at her right in that instant. The instant in which the roar erased him. The roar. The flash of light. And then the buzzing. The helicopter blades whirling, whirling, whirling.

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She calls Mattia on his cell, but it's off and a recording repeats that the person you have called is not available at the moment. She calls the Bellavista and asks to be connected to room 302. The concierge knows her by now, he has been spying on them, he has seen her come out of his room at seven in the morning, and spend three days in there, he knows that Manuela Paris is having an affair with his guest. But after letting it ring for a minute, the concierge comes back on the line and reports that room 302 is not answering. Manuela goes out onto the balcony. She sees the dirty yellow shadow of the hotel atrium, but she can't see the concierge, or even the reception desk, hidden by the overhanging roof. She is dizzy. Nauseated. The light of a television filters through Mattia's shutters. The roar. The flash of light. The helicopter blades. Amir's green eyes. Inexpressive, cold, without a flicker of gratitude—not even when, during that interminable wait at the FOB, she had offered to buy all his faded postcards. Postcards that showed a green and orderly Afghanistan that no longer existed and that in any case that boy had never known. He had tucked the money under the gray rags that covered him and that had once been a man's overcoat. The same overcoat he had on that day in June, to hide his explosive vest. A boy who had never been a boy, and who instead had proven to be worth more than a man because—unlike many others who for fear or inexperience didn't manage to activate the device and got themselves arrested, in a market, in front of a barracks, or at a police block—he hadn't made a single mistake; he had accomplished his mission. Caused as much damage as possible. A good suicide bomb kills on average six people, and Amir had taken out six and a half, even though only three were kafiri. Two were Afghani, so they don't count, and the sixth was himself. But his gesture had enormous resonance, it created a sense of vulnerability and made the Italians tremble with fear. Amir, raised in hatred, already killed by poverty, humiliation, and frustration, was not afraid to die, and in fact, in dying had killed the foreign occupants and their lackeys, had assured respectability and assistance and a future for his marginalized, despised family. But Manuela is alive. Alive in every fiber of her body.

She needs to hear Mattia's easygoing voice, he who knows nothing of the roar, the flash, the sickly sweet smell of blood. She needs his rough tongue. The hairs above his lips. His back. The raised little circle from the smallpox vaccine on his shoulder. His faded, rumpled hair, his myopic eyes. His cold feet and light hands. The transparent drip of semen on the slot of his foreskin. Near him, in bed with him, she is the same Manuela as always, but also different, new. She has to see him, now, right away.

She throws a clothespin at his shutters. The dull thud sounds like a shot and makes her jump. The light goes out in Mattia's room. Mattia, Mattia, it's me, Manuela, what are you doing? I know you're there, turn on the light. Nothing happens. She stands there for an hour staring at the dark window, distraught. The hotel is a skeleton, white as snow, the façade illuminated by the blue neon sign. She's going to need twenty drops in order to fall asleep. So that had been the act of divergence: that encounter with the son of the woman who had the same exhausted, proud expression as her own mother. Or more precisely, that thought. Because—for a fraction of a second—before asking herself what Amir was doing there and why, before realizing that he shouldn't be there and shouting “Nicola!” she had been happy to see him again. That woman who had reminded her of her own mother had disappeared, and as weeks, then months, passed, she worried about her, wondered if she was gravely ill, perhaps already dead. But she was wrong. She had thought that Fatimeh's son's presence at Qal'a-i-Shakhrak was a message, that Fatimeh was still alive, and hadn't forgotten, because it was a day of festivity and reconciliation. She felt infinite compassion for Fatimeh and her son, a pity born not from distance or condescending compassion, but from solidarity, from a kind of recognition. Manuela had stopped, and rummaged in her pockets; she had to give that boy something. Not alms, even if masked by the purchase of a pile of faded postcards. She had something for Fatimeh's son. She'd been carrying it around for months. A pen. But she was holding her automatic rifle, and was hindered by her bulletproof vest, and she couldn't find it in the too many pockets of her jacket. And when she finally extracted it, she realized that Amir had moved past her, had insinuated himself among her friends, while continuing to turn and look back, keeping an eye on her, and only then did she call out to the lieutenant.

To search your pockets for a lowly pen that would cost fifty cents in an Italian supermarket. An instant stolen from the bare economy of duty. That negligible gesture had been enough to alter the chain of connected events—get out of the Lince, accompany the lieutenant to the front of the school where they were supposed to wait for the local authorities—to deviate them from their trajectory and thus dislodge the logic of the intersection. She owed her life to that infinitesimal delay, imperceptible on any watch, to an impulse, the recognition of a common humanity. Diego had kept walking, flanking First Lieutenant Russo and Ghaznavi, protecting them, and Lorenzo had followed, his video camera in his hand, but she had remained behind. One step, two, four, five—not more than ten. Enough to project her into a different, unpredictable reality where she fulfilled something that could be called her destiny.

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That night she cries—for all the dead, and for herself, too, for her guilt over still being here, which nothing and no one can ever remedy, and for the shameful joy of being alive. She soaks her pillow, so much that she hurls the cold, wet blob onto the floor. She cries without stopping, till her eyelids are too swollen to open. Sealed shut, as if she were never going to see anything other than the soft, dense darkness pierced by a flash of light. Then she tumbles into the cold shadows, and awakens at eleven, befuddled.