Limbo (16 page)

His sleeping bag was all scrunched up and his bunk was a mess. A clear sign of a lack of both initiative and responsibility. I should have pointed it out, told him he risked getting written up. That's what another commander would have done. Some officers issued warnings, reprimands, even restricted soldiers' movements for much less. Once, when I was a private, my squad sergeant had said, “I'm not seeing my reflection in your boots, Paris.” And then he canceled my leave.

I hesitated at the tent flaps. Tightly rolled sleeping bags, neat cots, orderly lockers. The fetid smell of grease, sweat, men's dirty feet. The smell of every barracks in the world, perhaps the most disgusting aspect of military life. It had followed them all the way to the desert. “You play, Zandonà?” I asked him. “I used to play. Now I just practice, so I won't lose the dexterity in my fingers. Music keeps me company. Music is free.” His unexpected burst made me move closer. Amid the cookie crumbs on his cot was a tattered paperback with a seagull on the cover. “Are you sure everything's okay?” I asked him. “If there's a problem, if some of the older guys are picking on you, you can always come talk to me. I'm here to help you, I want you all to be okay.” “If I tell you everything sucks, Sergeant, what will you do, ship me home?” Zandonà asked, lifting his fingers off the strings for a minute. “We just got here, Nail, you want to go home already?”

“I called at seven this morning,” Zandonà said glumly. “It must have been three in the morning in Italy. The phone just rang and rang. My girlfriend didn't sleep at home last night. And her cell was turned off.” “It was Saturday, she probably went out dancing,” I said. “You can't expect her to live by your watch, it doesn't do you any good to assume the worst right away. You have to try and keep your jealousy in check. Otherwise, what are you going to do three months from now?” “She's mad at me, she didn't want me to leave. But I wasn't about to ask her permission. She told me I was an ass.” “I don't agree,” I said. “I was wrong to come, it's nothing like what I thought it would be,” Zandonà said. “I don't like anything here, this is an evil country, one huge reeducation camp, we came here to liberate them and instead we're being held prisoner by the very people we liberated.” “No one's holding you prisoner,” I corrected him. “If you want to be repatriated, talk to the psychiatrist. You wouldn't be the first and you certainly won't be the last. This place is for people who are motivated.” Zandonà didn't reply. He tuned his guitar and played the whole refrain this time. “It really got to me the way that Afghani looked at us yesterday,” he said in a low voice. “I can't get it out of my head.”

It was our first Afghani. The first one we were afraid of. The kids had stopped throwing rocks. The commander had spoken to the village leaders, who must have been quite convincing. Now they waved to us, and if any of them approached, it was to ask for a snack or a bottle of water. It happened during a zigzag convoy around the Ring Road. We were escorting a diesel generator, a current transformer, and a 100-kilowatt immersion pump for the well in a village five kilometers from the base. In our first in-country briefing, Captain Paggiarin informed us that Operation Reawakening's primary objective was to expand the security bubble around the FOB. It was supposed to be twenty kilometers by the end of June. But he wanted to achieve our objective well before then, to score a quick win, maybe even exceed it, to demonstrate initiative, skill, and prudence to the brigade's general commander. And he wanted to do it all without losing a single soldier, and if possible not a single vehicle either—the cost of a Lince made it just as precious as human life. Our superiors were highly competitive; they gambled with their careers in Afghanistan. Anyone who stayed in Italy was convinced he'd been wronged; he worried there wouldn't be enough time for his own company to deploy, that he would miss out on the war. Paggiarin didn't want to give his disgruntled colleagues the slightest cause for complaint. He was hoping for a quick promotion to major. I could understand his ambition. Paggiarin was known for having no particular talent, but for surrounding himself with competent subordinates. Since he'd chosen me, I hoped it was true.

At the moment, he told us, the bubble around Sollum didn't exceed five kilometers. There were no insurgents, weapons, or suspects within this perimeter, which had already been searched and cleared. But as soon as we went beyond that invisible boundary, we entered hostile territory. So it was necessary to enlarge the security zone as soon as possible. He was planning on extending it one kilometer a day. The Ninth and the Afghani Kandak soldiers were patrolling the sixth kilometer, and had already started to make the first arrests. Unfortunately, there were IEDs everywhere, and they had to keep stopping to defuse them, so the operation was advancing slowly. Just five kilometers! I thought to myself. That's a lot less than the range of a mortar. How much time would it take to build outposts and secure the FOB? But the transformer and pumps had to be delivered right away. If we were too generous, the village chief would consider us weak, wouldn't respect us, would deceive us. But if we weren't generous enough, he'd nurse secret hostilities. “He who begins well is already halfway there,” Paggiarin would say. So we pushed on toward the village, at the edge of the security zone.

Even though our vehicles were painted with camouflage so as to blend in with the sand, even though we carried only the gear that was absolutely necessary so as not to appear openly aggressive, our column moved too slowly to remain invisible. I've always liked looking through the sight of a rifle, but knowing I could be in someone else's sight was nerve-racking. We had to assume we were surrounded by a malevolent presence, an attitude that could, over time, cause paranoia. Jodice was in the gun turret of the Lince. His record indicated that he had performed well on his previous five foreign tours of duty. His obvious state of nervous excitement worried me, but I did my best to control myself. “Zero-three, Aragorn reports a Toyota Corolla approaching,” the radio crackled all of a sudden. “Aragorn reports a Toyota Corolla approaching.”

It was always the same damn make, in every attack. It was the most common one, after all. The most anonymous. It had made
Corolla
one of the most unwelcome words in the Stan vocabulary. “From where, Aragorn?” I asked. “Victor Papa right, two hundred meters, it's advancing toward you, zero-three, advancing.” “I can't see a damn thing,” Zandonà cursed. Even though he was keeping regulation distance—twenty-five meters—from the vehicle in front of us, the dust those armored vehicles kicked up was as dense as fog. He was driving blindly. Then I heard Jodice shout something in English. We were approaching the intersection, and he was ordering the driver of the Toyota Corolla to stop. The rule was that no civilian vehicle could ever join a column—not for any reason. But the car kept approaching at a steady speed toward the critical point, and it wasn't stopping. Jodice, this time his voice frantic with fear, again ordered it to stop or else he would shoot. The echo of machine-gun crackle inside the Lince. Jodice's Browning fires off an entire belt. “God, no,” Zandonà prayed, “please don't let us be the guys who get one on our third time out.”

The car has stopped, the door is open. Thick smoke that smells of gas and burnt oil is billowing out of the muffler. The driver is right there, standing next to the car, completely still, his hands up. Jodice didn't lose his head, he followed procedure, he fired into the air. The Afghani who had caused the panic was a twenty-year-old kid. He wasn't wearing a turban or a
pirhan tonban
, the traditional white outfit, but a normal checked jacket and a pair of jeans ripped at the knee. He didn't have hostile intentions, merely the stunned expression of someone chewing
naswar
, his lip puffed with a small ball of the opium-and-tobacco mix. He hadn't heard the order to stop because he had the radio on full blast: music pumped through the open door into the dumbfounded silence of the desert. The whistling refrain, intoned by a mournful male tenor, was right out of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. A romantic melody that probably spoke of love.

“Do you know who that song is by?” Zandonà said. “Is that what you were trying to play?” I asked, curious. “Ahmad Zahir, a real star in Afghanistan in the seventies, kind of like Little Tony, an overweight Al Bano with a big nose and sideburns. His father was a prime minister and he became a musician, he sang, played the accordion, gave concerts all over the country; as if Berlusconi's son were to become a pop star. He died when he was thirty-three, just like Christ, assassinated maybe, that was thirty years ago, but people still listen to his music. You can hear it on YouTube, his fans post super-low-fi videos—tulips and beaches with palm trees, I don't know why, since they don't have any beaches here. The arrangements are really basic—trumpets, drums, piano, sometimes strings. But Zahir had a beautiful voice. The lyrics run along the bottom of the videos, karaoke style, I think they're taken from classical poets, like if Iva Zanicchi had sung one of Petrarch's sonnets at Sanremo. They've never been translated, but I like them even though I can't understand the words. Music doesn't need a dictionary.”

Even after we drove past, that Afghani kid just stood there on the edge of the road, his hands in the pockets of his jeans and the ball of
naswar
in his mouth. The song followed us for a few minutes, as we paraded, as if in slow motion, down the empty road. That spaghetti western whistle suited the scene—the dust, the soldiers, the rifles, the endless horizon—but at the same time it seemed to mock us. “He looked at us as if we were an inconvenience,” Zandonà said, “the way we'd look at the lowered bar at a railroad crossing.”

*   *   *

Those first weeks at Sollum really tested me, as a soldier but also as a person. The responsibility wore on me, the physical exertion exhausted me. I was afraid of disappointing myself and my superiors, of not being suited for command, just like that officer had predicted many years ago. A soldier's first duty is discipline. If someone of higher rank tells you to do something, you have to do it. Period. And when I was a corporal I obeyed. I was in the army, but I worked in an office; I Xeroxed, answered the phone, and brought my boss coffee, just like a secretary. But I was never fully resigned to it. Angelica Scianna showed me the way out. I didn't even know the Modena Academy existed. Angelica was as blond as a Norman, as slender as a gazelle. We were born on almost the same day, the same year, so we thought of ourselves as twins. I shared a room—and a whole lot more—with her for nearly a year. We recognized each other, loved each other right away, like Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune, the warriors of the wind and the deep sea we had both adored as girls. We loved each other the way you can only when you're eighteen, a despotic, exclusive love. We lived together in infantry barracks in Friuli. We trained together on steep Alpine trails, and together we tamed the mountains—we who had both been born on the coast. Together we made photocopies and answered the phone in the public relations office, and we smiled at the barracks commander who thought we were cute (Angelica much more than me, to tell the truth) and called us his Praetorians. One night, while we were doing guard duty at a dump in desolate terrain in southern Italy where our regiment had hastily been detached, she said that we were only in an unpleasant holding pattern; the two of us couldn't keep wasting away in the heap of dead bodies that constituted the rank and file. No, we would become—at the very least—parachute officers or fighter pilots.

I started to think of my twelve months' enlistment as a sort of purgatory, a boring but necessary apprenticeship. Modena was my goal. I sent in my application. I wanted to get a degree in strategic studies. There were almost nine thousand candidates for one hundred and two places. I had no confidence but plenty of hope, and hope is stronger: as irrational and irresistible as faith. In February I was summoned to the Selection and Recruitment Center in Foligno, to take a preselection quiz. I'd never even heard of Foligno before, I had no idea how to get there. But Foligno rhymes with tomorrow: it sounded like a promise. The train station was deserted, just clusters of kids in winter coats roaming the platform and spilling into the large piazza out front, marching toward the hotels where they would spend the night.

Angelica and I slept at the youth hostel. There was a group of boys from Naples in the room across the hall. Still in their last year of high school, they didn't even have their diplomas yet. They wanted to hang out, but Angelica and I ignored them. Even though we'd applied as civilians because we hadn't accumulated enough service time to apply as internal candidates, we already felt like soldiers, whereas they were still children. And besides, we didn't feel like making friends.
Mors tua, vita mea
. We hoped they'd all fail the next morning. At nine thirty I was already at my desk. I didn't take my eyes off my paper for two hours. But I knew that Angelica was seated somewhere behind me, and her presence comforted me. The room was freezing cold, and there was a ghostly silence, all you could hear was the rain tapping on the roof, and a subtle sigh—like a collective breath. The results would be posted at four, so Angelica and I decided to wait and catch the last train home. But four became five, and then six, and in the end we raced to the station without knowing if we'd ever be in Foligno again. We boarded the Intercity, and I stood in the back of the car, my nose pressed against the window, staring at the lights of Foligno as they twinkled in the darkness like in a nativity scene. A Recruiting Center employee called the following day to tell me that Paris Manuela had scored 26,176 points. “You came in fifth, you're in,” he explained, “you'll get an official letter, you'll need to come back for more tests.” I let out a whoop as soon as I hung up. Angelica beamed. All she said was I told you so.