Limbo (14 page)

Mattia notices she's staring at the sticker and smiles. An easy smile, surprisingly innocent for a man his age. “Yeah, it's a rental,” he admits, “but it's insured. If we flip and end up in a ditch they'll pay up as if we were new, even though we're both pretty well used.” Manuela laughs and shrugs. No, she's not afraid of this man. She saves her fear for more serious things. Betrayal. Illness. Death. It had been months since a man made her laugh.

Mattia wants to talk. He talks nonstop, like someone who's been alone too long, like someone who needs to hear the sound of his own voice. He talks about cockroaches (the Bellavista hosts a whole colony, and at night they emerge from the shower drain), boots (she wears only one, on her good foot, black leather with a low heel, and he finds the asymmetry alluring), hotels. He's a world expert on hotel rooms, he could practically write a guidebook. There's one thing that's never missing: the Bible in the nightstand drawer. And one that's always missing: silence. It's incredible how irritating noises can be, even in an empty hotel. Moaning elevator cables, slamming doors, burping bathroom drains. And then the temperature. It's always either too hot or too cold. The pillow is too flat or too fluffy. And the TV remote? It's almost always some old model they stopped making ages ago. And the welcome chocolates? Mushy and melted, or as hard as rock. And the bathrobes? And the terry-cloth slippers? Is there anything sadder than a hotel shower curtain, a scrap of dull, limp plastic, which the backs and behinds of hundreds of unknown guests have rubbed up against? And the hairs in the sink? That slimy, grayish muck that clogs the drain? Bits of beards and bikini lines from who knows who. And the mirrors? Sometimes, when they fog up, words fingered who knows when reappear. Hotel rooms are a land of ghosts. You have to live with them, and sometimes it can even be pleasant. He has grown fond of the ghosts in room 302 of the Bellavista. What signs do they leave? A cigarette burn on the carpet that suddenly surfaced near the foot of the bed. The circular stain of a glass that emerged on the minibar. In the morning, when he shaves, he feels like the face of the guest who stayed in that room before him might appear in the mirror.

The car, humming softly, glides quietly up and down brown hills, between rows of bare plane trees and fields dotted with sheep, horses, and cows, and Mattia talks moodily about all sorts of strange, stupid things, and Manuela isn't sure if he's being playful or sad. But she likes his calm, deep voice. The guest at the Bellavista seems vain and pleasantly superficial. Someone who has traveled the world and knows how to enjoy life. Manuela has never met anyone like him before. Her boyfriend was studious, serious, and pedantic: at sixteen he already lived like an adult. And perhaps she, too, had stopped being young too soon. By the time they reach Lake Bracciano, she's convinced she has met a real pro, who has just been thrown out of the house by his wife who found out he had been cheating on her with his secretary. Well-off, a businessman, a lawyer, or maybe in a more creative field—an architect, a conductor, an artist, much more highbrow than the people she's used to spending time with, from the north somewhere—but his accent is too slight for her to place it. He hasn't asked her what she does, and for that alone she's already grateful to him. She doesn't want to lie to him, but she doesn't know if she would have told him the truth either. You freak a guy out when you tell him you're in the army.

The perfectly round lake sparkles silently under the faint December sun. On the distant hills, wrapped in a bluish haze, is the broken tooth of Trevignano Castle, and farther to the right, in a bay sprinkled with houses, the Anguillara fortress. Dozens of tiny white sailboats plow the waves. Manuela says she never comes here, even though it's not far from Ladispoli. Lake water is treacherous, and she hates the clumps of algae that surface here and there, stirred up by the current, those thorny tentacles that cling to your feet when you swim. She prefers the Tyrrhenian, open to the horizon. The sea is honest, it has no secrets; lakes are deceitful somehow. And this is a volcanic lake, fed by underground springs and invisible basins. It's disturbing to know that lurking beneath that idyllic blue seethes turbid molten rock that could gush up at any moment. Mattia says that's exactly why he likes lakes, and Bracciano in particular: they don't breed familiarity; they aren't what they seem. No one knows the depths of a lake.

The restaurants strung along the shore are all closed, chairs stacked in corners, piles of uncollected mail, menus written in chalk months ago. Glassed-in terraces, gazebos, verandas suspended over the deserted beach strewn with rotting ditch reeds. Paddleboats are piled up and chained together, row boats turned upside down. The only life seems to be three swans waddling across the earthy sand. “We'll have to go up into the town,” Manuela says. “Things will be open there for sure.” Mattia says he doesn't feel like shutting himself up inside a restaurant. He spends so much time between the four walls of his hotel room, he needs some open space. He suggests they take a paddleboat out and have a rustic picnic in the middle of the lake. “The boat rental places are all closed this time of year,” Manuela objects. “But there're some guys doing construction over at Pino's,” Mattia responds. “They'll rent us one for sure. I'll do the pedaling, obviously. You just have to let yourself be taken around. Let yourself go. Do you even know how?”

It's not a good idea. It's cold, and the pale sun seems about to vanish altogether. And besides, there are only a few hours of daylight left. But Manuela agrees, and half an hour later they're already a hundred yards from shore, jostled by the tiny waves the breeze stirs up. They eat their salami sandwiches moored precariously to a buoy and surrounded by the silent dance of sailboats from the Bracciano sailing school. The kids at the rudder look at them with surprise as they sail past. Mattia and Manuela drink a bottle of Cerveteri red they bought at the supermarket, which tastes slightly corked. She hardly ever drinks, but today she doesn't feel like saying no to anything. They take turns sipping right from the bottle, without wiping off each other's saliva. Planes heading to the nearby Fiumicino Airport materialize from behind the Sabatini Mountains, inscribing white lines across the sky. Just above the paddleboat, they bank and drop slowly, beginning their descent right as they fly over the lake. There's a plane a minute. At any other time, that thundering roar would have panicked her, set off the piercing pain in the back of her neck and the cramping in her stomach, but now their powerful, regular rhythm cradles her like a metronome, like the beating of a mechanical heart.

The paddleboat lurches scarily whenever either of them moves, so they climb onto the deck and sit next to each other on the damp plastic surface. Manuela hadn't thought to wear a hat, and her forehead, ears, and shaved head are cold. Mattia forgot his gloves in the car and rubs his hands together, blowing into them. He has smooth hands, with long, thin fingers. He has no idea the blisters and calluses a gun makes. When he realizes she's shaking, he takes off his scarf, wraps it around her head, and knots it under her chin. He says that from room 302 he can see everything going on inside the apartment directly opposite him. A family of women live there, women who speak loudly, shouting from one room to the next. The old woman, a plucked chicken with glasses bigger than her head, the skinny woman with the gray hair, the young woman with the platinum blond bob, and the pudgy girl always dressed in candy pink. They have normal lives, they go to work, or school, sometimes they fight; like everybody else, they don't seem particularly happy or unhappy. But then all of a sudden, on Christmas Eve, the girl with the shaved head appears. A thin girl, as slender as a shadow, as promising as a dream, such an improbable presence within those walls. A sad girl who smokes in the dark, like a criminal. He spied on her for three days, telling himself it was a shame he would never meet her, get to know her, talk to her, and at a certain point he realized he was glued to the balcony, spying on the cars that tear up and down the shore, petrified that one would stop at her gate, that this strange girl was waiting for someone to carry her off. “I'm not a girl who lets herself be carried off,” Manuela says.

But then she regrets it, because Mattia doesn't say anything else. She can't seem to find the right tone for talking to people anymore. She's always too stiff, too brusque, or too aggressive. The truth is, his words embarrassed her, because she had the feeling he wasn't just saying them, wasn't just being playful or sarcastic, but that he really was interested in her. And she doesn't know how to behave anymore. But Mattia doesn't seem that upset; in fact, he smiles. He puts his arms around her waist and brushes his fingers gently across her lips. Eyes closed, he touches her temples, her cheekbones, her forehead, as if he wants to fix the contours of her face in his mind. Or see her with his hands. At a certain point they kiss. Manuela likes to think he's the one who started it. But in truth she can't really say how it happened.

Between a Boeing from Malaysia and a creaking twin-propeller from Corsica, Mattia uses the excuse of warming his fingers to slide his hands under her sweater. Manuela, obsessed with maintaining her irreproachable conduct, pushes him away. She jumps to her feet, upsetting the boat so they nearly flip, and to keep from falling overboard they grab on to the plastic seats and each other. They burst out laughing and Mattia regains his courage. He kisses her again, and when his tongue is tired he slips his mouth and nose under her sweater as well. Just then the enormous shadow of an Airbus covers them, five hundred people who could look down into the dark mirror of Lake Bracciano and wouldn't see them. No one can see Sergeant Paris, who lets herself be touched, licked, sucked, caressed by a stranger on a paddleboat. She is invisible. There's no smoke when wind fans the flames. Reprehensible behavior. A black mark on her record. What the hell, she's on leave. And she doesn't even know if she's still in the army.

After about a dozen Alitalia ATRs and many more kisses, her nipples are numb with cold and her lips are chapped from the wind that blows toward Trevignano, which has been carrying them away from the buoy and out into the middle of the lake. The boat slaps against the waves that ripple the surface of the lake. The light is fading, the sun disappeared behind the battlements of the Orsini castle a while ago. They have to head back to shore, but they don't want to. The gentle rocking, the wind in their faces, the feeling that nothing bad can happen, have made her forget for a few minutes—or has it been hours?—the stabbing pain in her neck, the tingling in her legs, the fear. She feels good. Not a care in the world. She's no longer Manuela Paris, she's simply a mouth, a tongue, a warm body. Mattia presses his cheek in the hollow of her collarbone. As if he wanted to hide himself in her. But she doesn't want to hide. Manuela Paris is incapable of lying. You can't build anything authentic on a lie, an omission, or a compromise. Honesty above all. That's what they taught her. So it's better to put it all out in the open right from the start. Better to lose him today than tomorrow. Tomorrow might be too late. Even a spark, if it's not put out, can burn a forest down. By tomorrow I could have fallen in love with him.

“My sister says you've been at the Bellavista since the eighteenth,” she begins, looking him squarely in the eye. Blue eyes, like the petals of a flower in Afghanistan whose name she never did learn. “Didn't they tell you anything?” “About what?” Mattia asks with surprise. “About me.” Mattia admits that the waiter, Gianni Tribolato, who's really a good guy, is also quite a gossip. He was shocked that Mattia didn't know, so he revealed that the brunette with the shaved head in the house across the way was Manuela Paris, the platoon leader wounded in Afghanistan, the Italian hero of the hour. Manuela looks up suddenly. “So you know?” she asks with alarm. “Of course I know,” Mattia says, nibbling on her ear. “It's all anybody talks about. Pretty soon they'll erect a monument to you in the piazza. Ladispoli has a real obsession with war dead, I've noticed. Victory Piazza, Piazza of the Fallen … But the most heartbreaking one is in the little piazza in front of the Church of the Rosary, a plaque for the captain who was awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valor, the pilot, what's his name, Valerio Scarabellotto, who ‘fell from the sky over Malta on July 9, 1940, year eighteen of the Fascist Era.' You've probably walked past it a million times, the landscape we absorb as children is tattooed on our hearts. But the truth is, I really don't have any idea what a sergeant does.” Mattia smiles. “Is that all you're going to say?” Manuela asks. “What do you want me to say?” He laughs. “I never would have imagined that I'd kiss a sergeant one day.”

*   *   *

It's not so easy getting back to shore. Mattia pedals like a madman, going against the wind and the waves. His forehead is dripping with sweat. She lets herself be carried. She's not in a hurry. The shore comes closer. She can see it clearly now, the modern apartment buildings on the crest of the hill, the skeleton of an abandoned hotel, the bare branches of the chestnut trees, the olive trees whipped by the wind. The line of buoys. A family of loons. The coots bobbing among the reeds. The black strip of sand. The paddleboats piled under the eaves. The narrow street on which the occasional car passes, headlights already on. It's almost dark by the time they dock. They pay the construction worker triple the price, apologizing for staying out so long.

Numb with cold, they take refuge in the only open bar along the lakefront, a square hut with a slanted roof. Through the windows, darkness swallows up the shore, but the water shoots up orange reflections of sunset. Mattia puts on his sunglasses before going in, and then heads straight for the corner table, far from the bar and the other customers. “Are you famous or something?” Manuela asks, astonished. “Is there something I should know?” Mattia says there are lots of things she should know, when the right moment comes for him to tell her. “Well, the right moment is now,” Manuela observes. “We've been an item for an hour already.” “We're an item?” Mattia asks. “It seemed that way to me,” Manuela says, “but maybe I was hallucinating. That's been happening to me a lot lately.”