Read Limbo for Free Online Page B

T-shirt, and dirty socks. She, too, lived two lives. In the first, she was the daughter of a working woman separated from—or rather, abandoned by—her husband: a rude girl who reluctantly attended junior high. She used to wonder why in the world she had to waste time writing out equations and learning geometry when—just like the ordinary Japanese girl in the cartoon who discovered she was really the warrior Sailor Moon—she might discover she was a captain, leading her men on heroic missions. During class she would fly away, doodling spaceships and whirling knives in her notebook, hidden behind the scoliotic spine of the kid in front of her. No one knew what was racing through her head. She didn’t confide her fantasies and dreams to anyone, not even her grandfather, who would have respected them. Instead, as the years went by, the more important they became to her, the more she disguised or hid them from others. She was afraid they would laugh at or belittle them. That’s how it always was, at home and at school. If you wanted something, other people would make fun of you ruthlessly, spoil your dreams any way they could. Her mother did it so she would learn to stand on her own; everyone else just to be mean. People who don’t dream are envious of those who do.
    Her Italian teacher would call her mother in three times a year. “Manuela’s lazy; she could do a lot better—she’s quick, intelligent, but she doesn’t apply herself. Try and encourage her. It’s clear she doesn’t get enough stimulation at home.” Cinzia wasn’t one of those mothers who will defend her children against all comers, no matter what. She would accept the teacher’s rebukes and go home feeling mortified, somehow to blame for her younger daughter’s disappointing academic performance, even if she couldn’t have said why. She was working herself to death in order to give Vanessa and Manuela a decent life, and she was succeeding. She had denied them nothing, except, perhaps, her presence: she was never home. Then it would all turn into a big argument around the kitchen table, as dinner got cold; Cinzia tried exhortations and encouragements, but Manuela would snort and barely listen, because she didn’t care at all. This was only her outer life; she was really somewhere else.
    In her other life, her imaginary life—the only one that really mattered—she wandered through space and time, through the galaxy and geography, the future and the past: she killed enemy aliens in order to restore Silver Millennium’s reign, rode horseback with Napoleon in the Russian steppes, fought with a bayonet in the Libyan desert, or followed Alexander the Great across battlefields, conquering the world. Sometimes, while her teacher was explaining grammar, she was off in Babylon as it burned, and as buildings collapsed in flames, she would flee on the back of an elephant laden with gold and jewels pilfered from the vanquished.
    And when she wasn’t lost in fantastic battles, she’d be on the beach, even in wintertime, with the kids from the new apartment blocks. They were an unruly, anarchic gang. They’d go explore the abandoned Nazi bunkers along the coast, now littered with porn magazines and used condoms, or peel around on their older siblings’ motor scooters, or swim in the surf when the beach clubs were flying the red flag. They had it in for everyone—the people who lived in the villas, the pretty boys at high school, the Russians who sold Soviet junk at the flea market, the blacks who picked artichokes, the Macedonians who grazed sheep for the Sardinians. Out of spite, they’d scratch the sides of cars with rusty nails. They’d choose new cars with powerful motors that belonged to Romans who came to eat at the restaurants along the beach. Manuela was an artist of incision, her marks looked like scars on the metal. They’d steal melons from the