Limbo (3 page)

The young journalist with the blond goatee is named Lapo. He sounds happy, even euphoric. Maybe he's been drinking, or he's popped a pill, or maybe he's playacting, trying to seem cool. He asks if she's busy the day after tomorrow. He's dying to see her again. “I can't,” Vanessa hesitates, “I have to spend time with my sister, I don't want to blow her off, she's not doing so well, and besides, she moved up north a long time ago and doesn't know anyone around here anymore.” “What if I bring a friend?” Lapo asks.

When all the lights in the house are out and she knows she won't be surprised by anyone anymore, Manuela goes out onto the balcony and lights a cigarette. The balcony runs along the living room, makes a right angle, and comes to a dead end outside the kitchen. It's empty except for Alessia's little bike and a drying rack gnawed by rust. Her mother doesn't care about flowers, and Vanessa is too scattered to remember to water them. The geraniums are dying in their plastic vases, the basil is a shriveled black stump, and the jasmine has lost all its leaves. The nicotine makes her head spin. She smoked the first cigarette of her life just a few months ago, in the courtyard of the military hospital. Twenty-seven years without wanting so much as a puff, not even in school, not even in the barracks, not even at the base, where all the soldiers smoked, and now she can't live without it. What an idiot. She leans on the railing and gazes at the Bellavista Hotel. The light is out in the room on the third floor, the curtains are closed. But someone is on the balcony, in the dark. Smoking. All she can see is the glow of a cigarette—otherwise, she wouldn't even have noticed the shadowy figure in the dark, leaning against the railing, just like she is. It's a man.

The mistral blows the vague scent of aromatic tobacco her way. Manuela taps ashes into the pot and wonders what he's doing there, all alone in an empty hotel, on Christmas Eve. Maybe he, too, suffers from insomnia, and is afraid of going to bed. Afraid that images, smells, sounds, and voices he'd like to forget will reemerge from the darkness. Sounds most of all.
That
sound. At least that's how it is for her. The worst moment of the day is the last, when the light fades and she rests her head on her pillow. She feels fragile in the dark, defenseless against the nightmares—even against the memories. She hasn't been able to get to sleep naturally for the last six months. She puts off going to bed until the artificial drowsiness starts to fog her mind. But now, even with the drops, she remains stubbornly alert. So even after she puts out her cigarette in the damp potting soil and slips the butt into her pocket to avoid leaving any trace, she stays leaning against the railing, watching the man across the way; he's wearing dark clothes, with a lighter color scarf around his neck. He scans the street below—not a single car goes by. From where he stands he can see the Paris family's flag, which flaps against the balcony with every gust of wind. In the silence of Christmas Eve, all you can hear is the rustle of the flag and the sea, which hurls itself against the sand monotonously, maliciously, angrily. But as soon as he realizes that Manuela is looking at him, he starts, tosses his cigarette into the street, moves the curtain aside, and disappears into his room. He doesn't turn on the light.

2

LIVE

On Christmas morning, Manuela goes down to the beach. The doctor recommended walking every day. Cinzia wants to go with her—they haven't said two words to each other since she came home, and she suspects her daughter is avoiding her. But why? Cinzia only wants to protect her, to help her get well. She's convinced that's why the doctor sent her home, to her, that it's her job to cure her. Manuela says bluntly that she would prefer she didn't. That she wants to take advantage … “Advantage of what?” her mother asks, astounded. “Of the solitude,” Manuela replies, buttoning her jacket. “I can barely remember what it's like now.” She closes the door behind her and clambers down the stairs. A soldier's life is lived in the plural. She had zero privacy in the almost six months she was in Afghanistan. Even her underwear was in full view, swaying on the clothesline. They all had less space, and communal life was even more intense than it had been in the barracks. And yet there was something exhilarating about that brutal cohabitation. To get up at the same time, wash your face in the same clogged sink, endure the same hardships, use the same words, the same jargon, fear the same things, share the same experiences, the same daily routine, and store up the same memories is an exercise both in patience and personal growth. You become a cell in a living organism that can't survive without you but that also transcends you. It's reassuring somehow. But now, expelled from the cocoon of a collective existence she doesn't know if she'll ever return to, she feels alone in this city that once was hers but is no longer, alone with her crutches and her shadow.

In winter the beach becomes a carpet of garbage regurgitated by the waves. Old, useless stuff that roams the sea for years, tossed to and fro for thousands of miles, and then, by some whim of the currents, finally washes up on this strip of coast. Plastic bottles, polystyrene boxes, beer caps, Q-tips, diapers even. It would be a waste of energy to pick them up. Sooner or later a stormy sea will take them back again. Objects never die. She walks slowly, avoiding a flip-flop, a dried palm frond, a buoy coated in greenish fuzz. It's a short walk from the Bellavista Hotel to the Tahiti restaurant, a wooden structure with a thatched roof—dark beams, the walls covered with photos of Tahitian gardenias and dugout canoes—which the owners think looks Polynesian, or at least says “Polynesia” to the Romans who come here for fried fish on Sunday and will never make it all the way to Tahiti. When, to catch her breath, she sits on the cement wall that separates one beach club from the next and turns around to assess how far she's come, she sees her footprints, clearly visible in the sand: the tank tracks of her army boot, the smooth sole of her orthopedic shoe, and two lines of what look like crab holes. She feels like hurling her crutches into the sea.

Ladispoli's beach had always seemed beautiful to her. Not that she had anything to compare it to. She'd always spent her vacations here, because here we have the sea for free, her mother would say, it's pointless going and throwing money away somewhere else. She would tell the Alpini who had grown up in the fog and the cold of sad northern Italian cities that Ladispoli's black, ferrous sand, created when pyroclastic material erupted from the Sabatini volcanoes, is renowned for its therapeutic properties. All you have to do is hold a magnet close to it and the magnetite will separate from the green pyroxene. In the summer sun the sand turns red hot and is not only a cure for the bones, but also for the spirit: it teaches you to walk on burning coals. She'd gotten used to it, like the fakirs, which is why the burning desert sand that annoyed the other soldiers didn't bother her at all. They would complain about finding it everywhere—in their teeth as they ate, in their hair, noses, eyes, even in their anuses—but the grit of sand on her teeth and skin reminded her of the happiest days of her childhood, and gave her the feeling that the world was all one, the distance between places and continents almost an optical illusion, and that her current life was a logical continuation of the one she'd lived before. That the military Manuela was the same little girl who would play in the noonday sun, ignoring her grandmother shouting from the window that she should at least put on a hat.

Her first walk was short, but the beach goes on for miles and miles—there's a wooden footbridge now, so you can get across the canal—skirting bays born after enormous cement blocks were dumped in the water to combat beach erosion. Artificial indentations, yet gentle and comforting nevertheless, for as far as the eye can see, until salt vapors obscure the coast, enveloping it in a silvery haze. But the cement blocks didn't do much: the waves continue to eat away at the sand, and winter after winter they consume the beach so that now it's just a thin strip. When she was little, on Sundays when the sea was calm, she would toddle along the shore for hours behind her grandfather, from dawn until the sun was at its peak. Vittorio Paris would go clamming, raking little
telline
out of the sand. People from Minturno who settled here in the 1950s to seek their fortune on the shores of northern Lazio had taught him how. But the
telline
were decimated by pollution and overfishing, and he found fewer and fewer of them, until in the end he gave up.

“Our sand is black,” she remembers saying to Zandonà. “Like oil, and even the sea's black.” They were stuck in a dune, she couldn't remember the name of the place, or maybe it didn't have one. Zandonà had maneuvered badly. Sometimes he forgot he was driving an armored vehicle instead of a car. She should have reprimanded him, but instead she took the blame. He needed to know she would defend him to his superiors. He needed to trust her. She had to win his trust, his and that of the whole platoon. She wasn't angry or worried. She let the sand run through her fingers. Yellow, almost white. Incredibly fine, like talcum powder. Sand, as far as the eye could see. No buildings. No sign of human life. No shrubs. Or animals or birds or insects buzzing in the thin, dry air. In the absolute silence, only the rumble of the approaching Quick Reaction Force, coming to get them. There was something oppressive about that lunar landscape, that virginal, piercing, absolute beauty. But only now, as she breathes the salty air of the Tyrrhenian, does she realize what it was. The sea, the sea was missing. It was a landscape besieged by the horizon, devoid of exits, of entrances. Of future.

A dark silhouette in a tracksuit, a phantom in a wool cap and sunglasses, whizzes past her while she rests on the wall. For a second his iPod exhales its ethereal music in her direction. It's the voice of Thom Yorke singing “Everything in Its Right Place.” She recognizes it because First Lieutenant Russo used to listen to
Kid A
in Afghanistan. He's the one who taught her to appreciate Radiohead. Their music opens a crack in your mind, he'd say, an empty space where your thoughts can hide. A guy who wears dark glasses on a cloudy, gray winter day, not even a sliver of sun, is no less strange than one who spends Christmas Eve at the Bellavista Hotel. It might even be the same guy. Manuela has the feeling he's noticed her. Legs whirling, the phantom races past the Tahiti and grows smaller and smaller, a blue exclamation point on a shore edged with foam.

*   *   *

Teodora Gogean is late. She never bothers to ring the doorbell, she usually just honks three times. Vanessa says she's an uneducated hick, civilization hasn't made it to her country yet, she didn't even know what a doorbell was before immigrating to Italy. Manuela never argues with her sister about these things, partly because Vanessa doesn't have anything against Romanians, just against Teodora. Manuela descends the stairs cautiously, one step at a time: first her crutches, then her broken foot, then the other one. Distances lengthen, space swells around her, even time is distorted. She's like a child again, she's returned to her past. Or she's getting a taste of her future, of old age.

The restaurant at the Bellavista Hotel is open, and she catches a glimpse of the cook's Egyptian face in the square of the kitchen window. But the curtains in the dining room are all drawn. Strange, because the sea view is the restaurant's main attraction; people go there precisely to watch the waves. The corner table is taken. By one person. Even though the curtain obscures his features, it's the same man as the night before, the runner on the beach. A tourist, clearly. But who would come here on vacation at the end of December?

Ladispoli has a bad reputation. Unjust, but reputation is like honor: determined by others and almost impossible to correct. People, places, and races are judged, who knows by whom, and forever. A stupid saying, which pains Manuela but was repeated every time she had to say where she was from, crowns Ladispoli as the ugliest city on the Lazio coast. A clump of apartment houses, each one different, shot up quickly in the sixties and seventies, next to—almost on top of—the tiny Art Nouveau village on the waterfront, built without respect or elegance, renovated, improved with balconies and verandas, but stubbornly ugly just the same. A labyrinth of asphalt, cars, and cement. Manuela would grow indignant, take offense. Arguments would start, from which it could at least be deduced that there was something of a contest for first place. Aside from a fair number of towns south of the Tiber, the strongest contender was Civitavecchia. But the ferries for Sardinia leave from there, whereas Ladispoli doesn't even have a port, it doesn't have anything but artichokes and the sea. Still, the guest at the Bellavista Hotel has decided to spend his vacation right here in Ladispoli. And he's dining alone in the restaurant, a bottle of sparkling water and a middle-aged waiter who stutters for company.

Teodora hugs her tight for a long time. She pats Manuela awkwardly on the shoulders—the only way she knows to express how happy she is to see her. Teodora is a rough, introverted woman, completely incapable of expressing her emotions—if she even has any, which remains to be seen. Manuela fears she is like her. “Isn't Alessia coming at least?” Teodora asks as she grinds the gears, mostly to have something to say, because she already knows that Vanessa would never give Traian the satisfaction of seeing his little niece on Christmas Day. Revenge is best served cold, after it's ceased to matter, when it won't make anyone happy, a belated, futile revenge that gets served up anyway. “Alessia's going with my mother to my cousin Pietro's for lunch,” Manuela explains. “She likes to play with Jonathan. They're in the same class at school. But thanks for inviting her.” Teodora shrugs her shoulders. She'll never manage to put this family back together.

It's not far to her house. Tiberio Paris and Cinzia Colella never made peace with each other even after the divorce, but they continued to live less than half a mile apart—she in the rectangle of Art Deco villas and he in the new neighborhood behind the roundabout. They walked the same streets, shopped the same stands in the market, drank their coffee at the same café, but when, every now and then, they happened to run into each other, one would always cross the street.