Limbo (34 page)

“Hey, Mattia,” Manuela calls from the reception desk, “there's been a change of plans, I have to ask you a favor, we have to take my sister to Rome.” “I can't, Manuela, it's best if I don't go out,” Mattia tries to say, but she won't take no for an answer: “There's no traffic, it's only twenty-five miles, now I can introduce you, I'm counting on you, thanks, I knew you wouldn't say no, we'll wait for you here.”

“But it's personal,” Vanessa protests as she struggles with the zipper of her jacket, which is obviously too light for January. “I'm embarrassed, in front of a stranger.” “Mattia's not a stranger!” Manuela pounces. “I like him, you know, I really like him. We might stay together.” And what will he think of me—and of you—if he comes, Vanessa wonders. But who the hell cares what the guest at the Bellavista thinks, a secret agent has to be pretty ruthless. Then again, if he's shocked, so much the better. He's too old and too weird for Manuela, and she's diving in too deep. She already has enough problems, she needs stability and security, and this guy's not going to give her either. “Let's hope your friend hurries up,” she says, looking nervously at the clock above the reception desk, “it's already been fifteen hours, I don't have much time.” “Fifteen hours since what?” Manuela asks, not understanding. But just then someone calls the elevator, the red arrow lights up, and the question remains unanswered.

“Hi,” Mattia says, extending his hand to Vanessa. His hair is still wet. He puts on his most convincing smile. If he's angry over the unexpected change in plans, he doesn't show it. He knows how to adapt. Flexibility is a virtue of the strong. But Manuela has lost her flexibility; she hates changing plans now. “Hi,” Vanessa says, shaking his hand energetically, as if she's never seen him before in her life. As if she hadn't invited him home only a few days earlier. “I'm sorry to meet you under these circumstances, I'm a little out of it, I don't know how to thank you, it won't take long, I won't ruin your night.” Mattia hands his room key to the concierge and goes to get his car in the garage. “Fifteen hours since what?” Manuela asks again as they wait on the street, bathed in the lights of the Bellavista. “Since coitus,” Vanessa says. She uses the medical, bureaucratic, police term, as if the neutrality of the word might attenuate the enormity of the deed. If only. Instead it adds to it. She feels something pulsing in an undefined spot on her vulva.

“From what?” Manuela is alarmed. “Didn't you tell me Lapo was busy?” “Who ever heard from him again?” Vanessa grumbles, shrugging her shoulders. “He disappeared—he doesn't answer his phone, I sent him two texts yesterday, but he hasn't texted me back; he didn't even wish me a happy new year.” “So you didn't go to the party with him?” Manuela asks. She has the feeling she's missed something. “No, I went with Simone, Biagio, Melissa, you don't know them. It was a madhouse. We lost track of each other at some point.” “I'm totally confused,” Manuela says. “Me, too,” Vanessa says. “What's the fifteen hours about?” Manuela insists. But Mattia's Audi emerges from the garage and pulls into the middle of the road, and they have to hurry to get in so he won't block traffic—Manuela in front, Vanessa and Alessia in the back, the girl clinging to her mother, not wanting to let go for even a second. “Don't be afraid, make yourself comfortable,” Mattia says, looking at her in the rearview mirror. “I'm sorry there's no booster seat, but you can sit on my coat, besides, you're a big girl now.” “It's okay,” Vanessa says, buckling the seat belt, and thinking instantly that if a man knows child safety laws, it means he has a kid himself. And if Mattia has a child, he's not the man for Manuela. Manuela can't get herself mixed up in a situation like hers.

She'd been going out with Youssef for five months when it emerged that he had a wife and three children in Morocco. He said it was what his parents wanted, that it was a loveless marriage, he'd get a divorce if she wanted him to, but Vanessa didn't want to take on that responsibility. In the crinkled photo he'd shown her (he kept it in his wallet, behind his residence permit), his wife, a monumental woman with eyes ringed with kohl, had a kind, good-natured face. His three children—all boys, all between the ages of nine and thirteen, curly haired and relaxed—had sly smiles and looked incredibly like their father. Youssef was ready to repudiate Yasmina and move his children to Italy. But Vanessa, stunned by the disappointment and nearly prostrate with hatred for her rival, discovered she felt a certain solidarity with that fat, maternal woman who was, in a certain sense, a widow, who had raised their children by herself, albeit with the money her husband sent every month. Why should she take her husband away from her? He lived here ten months of the year already. They never spoke of it again.

Youssef had two families and divided himself between two countries, two languages, two women, two lives. He wasn't happy here or there, nor were they. Vanessa wanted to leave him, and every now and then she did, for a while. But she also wanted to have a child with him, which is why she had stopped taking the pill this summer. Youssef is a trustworthy, serious, and generous man. He loves Alessia and she's fond of him, too. He's as good as his word; when he says something, he does it. And she is sorry, really incredibly sorry, for what happened last night. Youssef didn't deserve it. Neither did she.

Manuela looks intently at the road; it's already been swallowed up by the imminent darkness, which is occasionally pierced by headlights. Every now and then she turns to Mattia and smiles, and everything—her new way of doing things, her mysterious need to touch him at every opportunity, the joy that lights up her eyes when she looks at him—makes it clear to Vanessa that her sister really is falling for the guest at the Bellavista.

At the roundabout, Mattia doesn't know which way to go, so he circles it twice. Then Vanessa shakes off her torpor and remembers to direct him toward the Aurelia, toward Rome. The night before, when she'd looked at her watch, it was three a.m. A dark place, far from the streetlights and the music, probably the parking lot because all around her all she could see were cars. Her cheek was pressed against the hood of a car, the cold metal freezing against her face, her deafened ears burning, her mind confused, a bitter taste in her mouth, her insides in turmoil. Someone was fucking her, and that realization had left her dumbfounded, because she couldn't remember leaving the Gas Works and it seemed to her that just a second before she'd been in ecstasy on the dance floor. It was like there was a black hole inside her head. “Hey!” she had yelled. “Hey, what the fuck are you doing?” But she couldn't turn around, all she could see was a hairy arm with a mermaid tattoo.

*   *   *

The first stop is the emergency room at a hospital on the outskirts of Rome. Vanessa gets out, saying she won't be long. Manuela, increasingly bewildered, opens the car door and runs after her—limping without her crutches. The Paris sisters disappear, both of them tottering down the ramp lined with dormant ambulances, their doors closed. There's not a soul in sight; it's like the hospital's abandoned. A stretcher, straps dangling and bars broken, stands forgotten at the entrance. “Who stole your front teeth?” Mattia asks Alessia, who sits petrified in the backseat, clasping her Hello Kitty doll. “No one, they fell out,” Alessia whispers, scared. “What?” Mattia feigns surprise. “And the cat didn't come back to bring you a present?” “What cat?” Alessia asks, curious now because she had a cat for real, Aunt Manuela brought it home when she was on leave, a scabby stray she found scratching in the trash cans along the beach. A yellow tabby with round, phosphorescent eyes like golden marbles. Aunt Manuela named her Moon, like Sailor Moon's talking cat, even though she later discovered that she was a he. Manuela couldn't take him with her to the barracks up north, so she had trusted Alessia with him, much to her mother's and grandmother's dismay. But one morning not too long ago, while Alessia was at school, Moon had jumped off the balcony and disappeared.

“Do you know why he didn't come back?” Mattia explains as if revealing a secret. “Because he put on his magic boots, changed shape, and now he's on a mission for the Marquis of Carabas. I am the cat. Open your hand.” Alessia perches on the edge of the seat and tentatively stretches her hand toward the big strong man who says he's a cat. Mattia gives her five crisp bills. “One for each tooth,” he says. “You have to keep them, though, that way they'll grow back quicker.” “Okay,” Alessia promises. She always talks with her hand over her mouth to hide the gap in her teeth and her gums, red like slices of meat from the butcher, but the strange man with big blue eyes and sunglasses saw anyway. Still, she doesn't believe he is Moon, the tabby cat that jumped off the balcony, no.

“Do you know Tom Tom?” Mattia asks, turning on the GPS. “They stole ours,” Alessia says. “They smashed the window with a rock.” “No one ever steals anything from the Marquis of Carabas,” Mattia assures her, pointing to the little gray box to the left of the steering wheel. “Just tell it where you want to go, and Tom Tom will take you there. Come sit here.” Alessia, docile, climbs over the handbrake and catapults herself next to Aunt Manuela's mysterious friend. A strange man with a good smile that doesn't frighten her. “I want to go find the cat,” Alessia says, “I want my teeth back right now.” “Okay, let's give it a try,” Mattia says, and has her enter the letters G-A-T-T-O—Italian for cat—on the display. It takes Alessia a long time, too long. When Mattia asks her what grade she's in, she murmurs that she's in second, but she's behind. Her teacher says she's slow, attention deficit disorder. It saddens Mattia how easily they can undermine a child's self-esteem. The conformist cruelty of adults. A woman's voice, metallic yet sensual, suggests they turn left. There's clearly a Via Gatto—perhaps after Alfonso Gatto, a poet in school anthologies, whom Mattia had always liked because of his feline name. “Come drive,” he says, letting her sit between his knees and placing her hands on the wheel. Alessia smells of Play-Doh and Johnson's baby shampoo, a scent that stabs him in an undefined spot in his chest, near his heart.

He has to take two deep breaths to regain control of himself, emptying his lungs like a pregnant mother in Lamaze class. Then he places his hands, which are so much bigger, on top of hers, and removes the brake. The car moves through the deserted hospital parking lot, up and down the ramps, around the flower beds, while the woman's voice delivers increasingly abstruse, imperious, and pointless directions on how to arrive at the ineffable Cat. When Vanessa and Manuela reappear, they find the Audi making slow circles around the fountain, Alessia mounted between Mattia's arms and legs, both of them laughing as if they've known each other for ages and have always been great friends. The Paris sisters aren't laughing at all. “We have to go somewhere else, we couldn't find it here,” Manuela says vaguely as Vanessa hides in the backseat. Mattia notes that her hands are still shaking but that her pupils are less dilated. Whatever chemical substance she took, the effect is wearing off. Manuela has Alessia punch the name of their destination into the Tom Tom, then nestles her in her mother's arms. They pull onto the highway and drive without talking, guided by the invisible woman's metallic voice. Alessia leans forward on the seat, and every now and then Mattia turns and winks at her. He's good with children, so, Vanessa deduces, he's an active and engaged father.

Manuela doesn't notice, though. She's still troubled. Vanessa asked the triage nurses for the morning-after pill. And they rudely invited her to look elsewhere, because the doctors here are all conscientious objectors and they never order it. “But weren't you on the pill, Vanessa?” Manuela asked, as she left the emergency room as red-faced and ashamed as a thief, hoping that those women, intent on watching TV in the tiny glass booth, hadn't recognized her from the evening news. “I'm trying to have a child with Youssef,” Vanessa had replied, lengthening her stride. “But he's married to someone else! You're crazy, do you want to start all over again?” “What do you know about these things!” Vanessa had hissed cruelly. “You and your gun and your platoon and your gold stripes. But I'm different, I feel more feminine when I'm pregnant, breastfeeding makes me happier than anything, better than any orgasm, I want to have at least five children, I've already waited too long.” “Excuse me, but why are you worried?” Manuela followed after her, hobbling on her lame leg. “You're not even ovulating, you had your period last week. You told me so yourself. In the valley of the tombs, when I left you with Lapo.” “Well, I was bullshitting you.” “But why?” Manuela had exclaimed. “Because you're like a cop about that kind of thing, I didn't want you to think less of me,” Vanessa had said without turning around.

The GPS obediently directs them to another hospital, perched on a hill just off the highway. An ugly white barrack of a building, twelve stories tall. Hundreds of illuminated windows punctuate the night. Vanessa wants to go alone this time and Manuela doesn't insist. It's all so horrible. Mattia gets out to stretch his legs. They stroll with Alessia along the tree-lined avenue that leads to the building for the terminally ill. They take her hands, Mattia her right and Manuela her left. Mattia tells her a story that sounds like a manga version of “Puss in Boots,” with an energy and conviction Manuela would never have thought him capable of. She's sorry to have involved him in this mess, and at the same time she feels that on this miserable evening, spent navigating between exit ramps and hospitals, she has discovered a different and better man. A man to whom she feels bound by something more than just sexual attraction, by something that resembles tenderness, the kind of affection that's born from familiarity. And to think that only a week ago, she didn't even know he existed.