Limbo by Melania G. Mazzucco

neat, childish handwriting he had written SERGEANT PARIS in felt-tip pen.
    The photo is of Manuela and an Afghani woman with a shriveled face and skin wrinkled like a rotting leaf standing in front of what seems to be a grayish metal cage—prefabricated modules filled with sand and inert material that form Sollum’s impenetrable protective barrier. The woman is wearing a dark men’s overcoat, and the scarf wrapped around her head and neck leaves only her eyes, nose, and mouth uncovered. She and Manuela, slightly out of focus, are looking at the photographer, both of them surprised, almost annoyed, at having their picture taken.
    The image resurfaces from somewhere infinitely far away. Manuela had forgotten that face, the reason the woman came to the base, the incredibly brief instant of contact that the photographer froze in time. But the photo sparks the memory of the memory. And the vivid, indelible impression that woman—the first and only Afghani woman she had the chance to meet—had made on her. She can’t remember her name, though she’s certain she knew it once. The soldiers cruelly called her Skunk. All Afghanis stink, they’d say, from the lowliest shepherd to the highest-ranking general. Irritated, she had pointed out that after only a few weeks in the desert, they stunk, too. That woman’s proud bearing, the dignity of her callused feet and angular face, the vertical furrows at the corners of her mouth, her wild, mute desperation, reminded Manuela of her mother at a precise moment in her life: the day she was laid off from the fish factory. It was the summer of 1996. The economy was stagnant, unemployment was rising, financial pressures were suffocating them, and then the company outsourced its mackerel operations to Tunisia. Manuela was thirteen, Vanessa sixteen. Their future had been decided by the company manager, who had never set foot inside the factory, had never met the women who worked there, had probably never even eaten a mackerel in his life. You never see it in restaurants. Mackerel is the fish of the poor.
    Shadows had dimmed her mother’s eyes; vertical furrows were carved around her mouth—indelible. Cinzia had always dreamed her daughter would graduate from college. Manuela’s junior high Italian teacher told her that her daughter was a natural student; she had a rare mastery of language and an authentic intelligence, which consists not in the ability to memorize but in the ability to make connections. She was rebellious and her grades were poor, but Mrs. Colella shouldn’t give up or let herself be fooled: she just had to give her time to get to know herself, to accept who she was. She urged her not to waste her daughter’s talent, to consider it her inheritance—a fortune, in other words. And not to listen to people who say there’s no point in studying Greek or philosophy, that Italy isn’t America and social mobility doesn’t exist here. Manuela’s future was in her head. Cinzia, who had only finished junior high and had started working in the factory when she was fifteen, felt proud.
    After she was laid off, and the factory closed, she couldn’t make ends meet. She had to swallow the humiliation of accepting a monthly check from her ex-husband. Manuela enrolled in a vocational school that specialized in commercial and tourism management, the branch at Palo Nuova, so she could get there on the Cotral bus. It was a practical degree, good for getting a job. Her mother understood, and she didn’t stand in her way. Sometimes, in the morning, she would take her to class herself. But she never asked her daughter anything. In five years she didn’t go talk to her teachers even once. Stooped, tense, always tired, she never smiled. In that Afghani woman who dragged her plastic flip-flops in the dust at the base, Manuela had recognized the same discontent, the same rage, the same shame at not being able to offer her