Limbo (57 page)

I swore to myself that I would be strong. I don't want to inflict my life as a captive on anyone. I cocooned myself in my solitude, and being with myself is okay. I'm resourceful and I make for interesting company. I read, write, and people-watch—I study them, empathize with them even, but always from a safe distance. I find comfort in cigarettes, in cats and birds, and in lakes and mountains. Their immobility reassures me. Lightning loves the peaks, it strikes high in the mountains rather than down in the plains. But the peaks persevere. I don't know if you know what I mean. I started exercising again. I lift weights and go running every day, as you know. I keep in shape because I've decided that as soon as I have my passport and my money back, I'm going to Greenland, to climb the virgin peaks of Gunnbjørn Fjeld. It's a serious climb, but it's under twelve thousand feet, which the old me wouldn't even have considered worthy of attention. But Mattia Rubino holds that you don't get the true measure of a mountain with cartographer's tools, just as you don't get the true measure of a person by what they do or seem, but by what they are.

I didn't even want to talk to you, Manuela. I was happy just watching you from my balcony. The soldier girl with a crew cut, a child's smile, an athlete's body, and crutches. A hard girl, but also a fragile one: enthusiastic and disappointed, scared and courageous. I never tired of watching you. But I avoided meeting you, believe me. It was you who came to me, who looked for me, who flushed me out. I tried to defend myself. I hadn't yet realized that in behaving like that, all I was doing was drawing you in, because you've been trained to attack, and the more I defended myself, the more I retreated, the more you pursued me, hunted me, cornered me; you weren't going to let me go until you'd captured me. Cordon and search … you're a soldier, I suppose it's your nature. You have a unique beauty that wounded me deeply. I felt your pain, in your body and in your eyes, before I even spoke to you. I realized right away that you were dangerous for me. Because you were my shadow.

My life—if you could call it a life—is strange. But I'm not dead either. Not anymore. It's as if I'm suspended, in limbo. I know that the word has become a cliché, even a child like Alessia knows it. But to me, before, it was a medical term. The corneal limbus is the border of the sclera, the white of the eye. I used it all the time. But I would like to restore the word to its former grandeur. It means “margin,” “edge,” “brink.” One of my most vivid memories of school is of my Italian teacher trying to explain to a bunch of sixteen-year-olds who were for all intents and purposes pagan, how Dante had imagined Hell, with Limbo as the antechamber, where those who will be excluded from grace for all of eternity, even if they are without sin, end up. Words like
grace
,
sin
, even
Hell
meant and still mean nothing to me. Yet today the Supreme Poet's melancholy when he encounters those spirits, innocent yet deprived of happiness, touches me deeply, and the verse he devotes to them seems to me the most devastating he ever wrote: “we are lost … we who without hope live in desire.” So, I truly am in Limbo, but I'm hoping it looks more like the forest in Alessia's game, where you don't die just once.

I have a fake ID, but it's not very convincing, it gives an invented address, and would raise suspicions if it were ever checked, which is why I didn't want to show it to the police officer at the soccer field. Forgive me for not explaining this to you, and for not helping you when you might have needed me. I'm still waiting for my new papers, along with the new identity they're going to give me, and for them to release the funds I need to embark on some activity somewhere. I want to work, I can't live like this, on a miserable assistance check, like a retiree. Before Christmas I let my man know that I wanted to live in Ladispoli. The afternoon I arrived, I took a walk on the beach. You weren't back yet. The black, volcanic sand, still warm from the sun, reminded me of the sand on Santorini. And the smell of rotting seaweed and the pitiful reddish brown shells the tide throws onto the shore reminded me of my city on the Adriatic. Mattia Rubino doesn't have a past, but he does have a memory. And it's memories of my former self that help anchor me. Necessary memories, but also useless ones—the things I've seen, the books I've read, objects, smells, words, the faces of people I've met. You can't live without memories, as you well know. Otherwise life would lose its meaning. Even freedom is worthless without limits. I don't know what to do with my liberty other than sacrifice it to you. Your city was familiar to me. You—you were familiar to me.

After our trip to Bracciano, I called my man back and asked to be transferred. Mattia Rubino is as vulnerable as a child, but he's also strong, and my selfishness died in the parking lot of that restaurant. I'm just a man, Manuela, but I am a man. I didn't want to touch you. To touch you was to carve a mark on your skin, like a curse, and you already have your scar. Precisely because you were already irrationally dear to me, I had to lose you—and right away, before I became something for you.

I got a fax, summoning me to Rome. You saw it. They told me that they were short of staff over the holidays, so they couldn't process my request, and besides, the entire third floor of the Bellavista had been reserved for me until February. The financial agreement was satisfactory to both parties, and couldn't be renegotiated now. As the days passed, I blessed the Christmas holidays. They gave me twenty days of life. They gave me you.

If I stay in Italy I won't be a doctor anymore. Maybe I'll go back to school, study to become a vet, specializing in feline care. Or maybe I'll simply become an assistant in a shelter for stray cats. I really don't know what will become of me. The protective measures expire in a few months, and I don't know if they will be renewed. I'm almost out of money. I'm not telling you this because I feel sorry for myself—like you, I hate people who feel sorry for themselves—but so that you know that soon I really will have nothing. Don't feel bad about all the money I spent over the holidays, the only riches you truly possess are the ones you spend. I don't know if I will be able to stay in Ladispoli, if this is the place I am fated for. I don't know if you are the person fated for me. I would like to think so.

Vanessa told me that you torture yourself about what it means that your life was spared. She explained to me your theory of divergence. We saw each other today; I spent the day with her, while you were in Turin.

Don't get the wrong idea, we just talked. Your sister is my sister, I'm as fond of her as you are. I only wanted to talk about you, it comforted me to hear your name spoken out loud. I like to think that the divergence, as you call it, was me. Because I was waiting for you, at the end of your dark night. That all the trivial, random acts of your life were leading you to me. I can't save you and you can't save me. All we can do is put ourselves back together again, and be something together.

The fact is that I love you. Reason tells me that, precisely because of this, I have to give you up, get myself transferred as soon as the office reopens. The only way I could condemn you to becoming no one's shadow would be if I didn't love you. A few minutes ago you accused me of lacking substance. It's true. Everything passes right through me and is lost. I'm as porous and inconsistent as a jellyfish. I've always been a reasonable person, and I will make an effort to be reasonable with you. You're a reasonable person, too. But now that you're not in the apartment across the way, now that I can't see your thin figure behind the curtains, I can't help but tell myself that Mattia Rubino is not a reasonable man. Why should he be? He was only born a few months ago, the world is new to him. He is young, innocent, unaware. He hasn't had time to be disillusioned yet. He is curious and impatient. He believes in the future. He is free.

If you returned to the barracks, I'd follow you north. And if you left for another tour of duty, I'd wait for you at home, sighing like a wife. I'd even go with you, if the army allowed a civilian doctor to accompany you. If you didn't want to hang up your uniform, I would accept that. And if you're not going to be a soldier anymore, I would follow you wherever you wanted to live—in Afghanistan even, or at the ends of the earth. I didn't do anything special, like you always say about yourself. Someone said that the very essence of virtue is ordinariness. You would say that I merely did my duty, but I don't really know what that word means. The only duty I recognize is to be human. True to my nature, in other words, to that which distinguishes me from a cat, a bird, a rifle, or a murderer. What I did restored me to myself, and made me the man I am. And Mattia Rubino is not unworthy of Manuela Paris. Your dark room troubles me. I'm like you: I don't like to wait, I'm not patient. I keep going out on the balcony and my shadow appears on the railing. The sight of it cheers me. You are my shadow. I am your reflection. Come home soon.

23

LIVE

Manuela stays in Ladispoli. To avoid more family tension, she gives Alessia her room back and goes to stay with Traian and Teodora. She insists on helping with the rent. She sets two goals for herself, and is determined to accomplish them both in the shortest time possible. Quick win. To get better and to get back together with Mattia. One seems pointless without the other.

She updates her Facebook profile, changing her status from “Single” to “Engaged.” She embellishes her page with the latest photos, the ones that Alessia took on the terrace of the Palo Castle, even though she's not sure Mattia knows how to use Facebook, and might be too old to even know what it is; but on the off chance that he's searching the Internet for her, he'll be able to see what she's up to and will know that she thinks of herself as tied to him. She never turns off her phone and charges it every night, convinced that sooner or later, as soon as his situation stabilizes, Mattia will call her. He said not to look for him, but he didn't say he wouldn't look for her.

She memorized Vanessa's funny little speech on the name of God, which now seems to her to hold a simple truth, elementary and therefore genuine. If you don't know someone's name, you can't call out to him, and he won't be able to hear you. And until she knows Mattia's name—his new name, his permanent name—she can't call out to him, and he can't respond.

As for the rest, she focuses on rebuilding herself, with the same determination with which she would have rebuilt a broken bridge or a demolished house. She's no longer so convinced there's no such thing as a soul. Her body, mind, energy, and will must all regain the equilibrium they lost. If any one element is broken, the others suffer as well. She also focuses on the things she'd been neglecting all along. She goes to a psychotherapist a dozen times, one who specializes in PTSD. She joins Master Mario's Vedic association, intent on completing the seven steps of transcendental meditation. Maybe she really was wrong. Maybe she is—as Ghaznavi had said—a spiritual person. She learns to contemplate the void and to expand her mind. In a specialty bookshop in Rome she buys a dozen little books by Afghanis who lived in Herat during the Timurid dynasty, in the Middle Ages, or at least before the discovery of America, all members of the Naqshbandi brotherhood. The books collect parables of Sufi wisdom and fragments of Dervish illumination. Parables and fragments that invite the reader to a greater awareness and urge him to let go, to accept suffering and love, and to seek union with the divine: at the end of his spiritual journey, the apprentice mystic discovers that God is none other than himself. Manuela is amazed to learn that the Naqshbandi practiced breath control and awareness exercises that are very similar to those of her Vedic master. The dizzying connection enthralls her.

But then she abandons her psychotherapy, meditation, and Sufi mystics, in order to start in on the homework the psychiatrist at the military hospital had assigned her in vain months before: in other words, she starts writing. For the psychiatrist initially—she plans on turning in her homework in July, at her checkup. But as the pages fill, she forgets her original intent and ends up writing for herself, and, especially, for Mattia: she believes he'll read those pages sooner or later. She would even be willing to turn them into a book, to publish them—in order to reach him.

She throws away her notebook and turns on her computer. She creates a new folder called “Homework” and tries to tell the story of Sergeant Paris in Afghanistan. One hundred and sixty-seven days. From her arrival in Sollum until her departure for the inauguration of the school in Qal'a-i-Shakhrak. It turns out to be a more labor-intensive task than she'd expected. More difficult than marching under the sun, patrolling a road, or reprimanding a soldier. It's almost like an orienteering test. She has to unlearn everything she knows, or thinks she knows. To admit disappointments she'd forgotten about, memories she embellished or selectively edited, emotions she forbade herself to feel. To tear words from the silence, and to find new ones. She rereads her diary from Bala Bayak and discovers that she and Sergeant Paris are now separated by a nearly insuperable distance. The sergeant doesn't comment on anything. She records times, dates, coordinates, temperatures, wind intensity, volume of fire, assignments, ammunition consumption, names, ranks, and facts; she obeys orders and ensures that they are obeyed by others. She is satisfied when an objective is achieved. The Manuela Paris who writes in Teodora Gogeon's ironing room, on the other hand, believes that facts and objectives mean almost nothing: behind the names and ranks are people she thought she knew but who are vanishing with each new day. And you can't say an objective has been achieved if the cost of gaining it is too high. She tries to fix on the page her epigones' words, gestures, even their secrets. At least what remains of them all these months later. Lorenzo's music. Diego's anxiety. Nicola's philosophizing about Zeno. It's too little. Almost nothing. And what remains of Manuela Paris?