Limbo (17 page)

At the end of April I returned to Foligno for physical and aptitude tests. This time I stayed at the barracks: candidates were given room and board. I might be there for a week or for two days, it depended on how the tests went. It was a sort of elimination competition. Eight hundred of us were left. Just over a hundred would make it to the training. There were still too many of us. Too many women, too. I counted sixty-five. We joked cordially in the dining hall, traded advice. This was the third time for some, who were respected as veterans. But I tried to see them through the selection committee's eyes. Some displayed a less than soldierly rotundity, others an anorexic frailty. “After all,” a rubicund girl from Sassari said, “an officer has to have more brains than muscle, which is why you get fewer points for the physical. In theory you can get thirty on the written quizzes, but you can't get more than six total on your physical.” I said I agreed. Still, as soon as I'd submitted all my documents and certificates, I put on my sweats and went for a run on the track, to keep in shape—I had to capitalize as best I could my excellent physical condition because, if I made it to the next level, I'd have to take the math test, and I was sure I'd only score a few points there. On the evening of the second day, all happy, I called Vanessa to tell her I'd passed the physical: I'd run a thousand meters in three minutes and thirty-seven seconds and completed the set of push-ups in two minutes—even though the other women let me know that our superiors were willing to turn a blind eye if we crumbled. I chose to do the optional tests as well, so I jumped a meter twenty and climbed a four-meter rope. I earned five and a half points.

That evening my companions shared their anxieties; they envied my height, my agility, my fitness. They had asthma, or were allergic to mites, or had celiac disease; they had flat feet or scoliosis with a Cobb's angle over fifteen; they were nearsighted, or had had laser surgery to improve their eyesight. They had very little chance of passing the medical exam. Yet not one of those women gave up. They kept trying; they had my same determination. They were even prepared to lie. I'll never lie, I told myself, scandalized, how can you build a career based on a lie? If I were lacking some essential requirement, I would simply accept that I had to give up my dream. Forgive my intransigence. I wasn't even twenty years old.

The doctors examined X-rays of my bones and my lungs. In those translucent films clipped to the light wall, I saw myself dead. It was a strange sensation. I didn't want to die, I'd never felt an attraction to death, life was bursting inside of me. Then they moved on to the joints in my hands, back, and feet. They asked if I'd ever broken any bones or had surgery. “I've never set foot in a hospital my whole life” was my arrogant response. “Next they'll check my teeth, like a horse,” I joked later with Vanessa. “But they didn't find a damn thing. I got four point five, the top score, physically I'm a hundred percent.” “What is this, eugenics?” Vanessa laughed, “not even the Nazis went that far.” “No, it's more like a video game,” I said, “they eliminate us one by one. Only the best survive.” “Strength and Honor, sister,” Vanessa joked. “You bet, I'll call you tomorrow,” I replied.

By the evening of the third day, the center had emptied out. Twenty-six women were left. We were awaiting the psychological aptitude test, the most feared, because the psychologist's evaluation was absolute, final. No appeal, no second chance. If he tore you apart, if he wrote “introvert” or “rigid personality traits,” it'd be all over. The other women kept saying that the psychologist would give us the third degree, try to make us crack. He'd insult us, keep us waiting, standing in the hallway for three hours, just to throw us off. He'd treat us like idiots, or spoiled children. You had to stay calm, not take the bait, ignore his provocations. Above all, don't bite your nails or drum your fingers, and do not sweat. They never take the ones who sweat. Other women said those were all just myths. The key was to show you were motivated, but not a fanatic. And above all, don't lie. Don't pretend to be someone else. “Be yourself,” Angelica urged me, which is what her brother, an airman, had told her, “and it'll go just fine.” That might have been easy for the blond Angelica. But I didn't know who I was yet.

That night I was seized with fear. Being so close to my goal made me suddenly realize that I might fall short. I couldn't sleep. I washed my face with cold water and at nine stepped into the meeting room, pale and tense. But I had dry palms and enough grit to tear the world to pieces. I closed the door and sat facing the military examiner behind the desk. He was close to retirement, with a short, pointy beard. “Did you close the door?” he asked me. I nodded with a smile. I already knew that trap. A big blond kid from Matera, who'd fallen for it the year before, had told me about it in February. If you turn around to check, it shows that you're anxious and insecure, and that you don't remember what you did five seconds ago. You're not trustworthy, you'd never be able to command or become an officer. They kick you out right away. “I shut it,” I answered, looking straight at him. The psychologist's eyes were gray and inexpressive, like reinforced concrete.

I told Vanessa very little—and even that unwillingly—about the psych visit and the aptitude test. “I didn't understand anything about it, all I did was answer, they asked me a ton of questions, to trip me up, I think. I was supposed to answer true or false. I was supposed to tell the truth, but maybe I contradicted myself, it was embarrassing.” “What kind of questions?” Vanessa was surprised. “I don't know, if I ever lie, if I'm bothered by being teased, if I have nightmares, if I feel inadequate personally, if I worry about what others think of me, if I believe in myself.” “And what did you say?” “I tried to make a good impression,” I answered. My sister waited in vain for me to phone with the results. I never called.

I crowded around the bulletin board with the other women who'd made it this far. Standing on tiptoe, craning over the shoulders of an aspiring officer shorter than me, I scanned the list of names, my heart in my throat. Pacini, Parenti, Paris. Paris Manuela.
Unfit
. I read and reread the list, hoping there'd been some sort of mistake. That I'd read it wrong. That the
unfit
was Parenti Tiziana, or Pastore Margherita. But no. It was me. I felt I was dying. As I stared at my name, so tiny behind the glass clouded with fingerprints, my future passed before my eyes with piercing clarity. The companions who could finally have become my friends, but whom I'd already lost, having only just met them, a group of young women like me who would finally have made me feel like I was part of something, who would have torn me from my solitude, from that feeling of floating in a void that had made my adolescence so liquid and listless. It was the work I felt I'd been born to do. But no.

I slipped away silently, making my way past the lost friends of my future, my true friends, the ones you choose, with whom you share the most exhilarating years of your youth. The name Scianna Angelica—fit to command—burned before my eyes. Me no, her yes. It was all over. I walked to the station, and this time I knew I would never return to Foligno. That name would be forever hateful to me. Foligno rhymes with sorrow. I boarded the train almost without realizing it, like a sleepwalker, and without realizing it I got off in Rome. I let myself be swallowed by the escalators that sank into the abyss of the subway tunnel, by the crowded subway car where a dark-skinned man was playing the accordion, begging in vain for change. I emerged into the open air, and walked toward the bus station. The bus for Ladispoli already had its motor running. But I let the automatic door close, and watched as it disappeared down the end of the street. I wanted to be alone. Because the pain was all mine, and I didn't want to show or share it.

But the bus station was on a street swarming with people, gushing out of the subway like water. I couldn't go home. Or to the barracks. Not like this, not having been defeated. I started to run along a broad street lined with ancient plane trees, furrowed by clanging trams and orange buses. I passed a high school with students milling around out front. I kept running, through intersections and stoplights to where the trees seemed to draw back like a theater curtain, framing a slice of rosy sky. That open space signaled the end of the street. Rome began again on the other side. In between was the river.

The Tiber slid by below, imprisoned between massive walls. A turbid brown line flowing swiftly south. A plastic bottle bobbed along, carried by the current. To be that bottle, carried off by some powerful, dark force, unable to put up any resistance. Till then, I'd spent my life swimming upstream. It's easier to accept your destiny. Just let yourself go. It was already evening, and the riverbanks were deserted. I hurled myself down the steep stairs, sliding on wet leaves that had turned to slimy muck in the rain. I fell and banged my knee, and didn't even notice the pain. After all, I'd always known how to endure physical pain. It was the other kind of pain I didn't know how to deal with. I kept running along the riverbank, bridge after bridge, until I was out of breath. Then I stopped and let myself fall. Flat on my back, arms open wide, hair fanning out among the trash and the leaves the wind had ripped from the plane trees, some green, others rust-colored or as brown as the earth. Above me, interlacing branches filled with screeching birds, the city lights flickered, the first car headlights crossed the bridge. An incessant flow, a current from which I was excluded. Blocked, extraneous, rejected.
Unfit
.

What's wrong with you, Manuela Paris? Which response was the one that screwed you? Or was there more than one? The MMPI test—Angelica had explained—measures the subject's tendencies to falsify the results of the test, or to provide a self-image that is socially acceptable. Everyone denies feeling aggressive and having malicious thoughts: but if you deny them too much, then the responses are assumed to be false. Did the examiner notice how much the question about somatic problems, about fears and anxieties, bothered you? And yet I didn't lie: never lie. I calmly told him about the fainting spells that would come over me in class now and then, during a disastrous oral exam, or in the middle of a party that I couldn't make myself enjoy. Or the question about family problems? Why did I tell him that I felt hatred for my father, whom I knew I should love and who was dying? Or was it the question about sex? The examiner wanted to hear that I had a stable relationship, that I fucked normally, why hadn't I realized that? No, I don't have anyone, I'm too young, I don't want to tie myself down with a boyfriend. And when he asked me if I felt an aversion to sex I'd answered boldly, no, the opposite actually. What an idiot. Or was it the one about my faults: How would an enemy describe you? I thought about it, and I wasn't sure if I was supposed to tell the truth, and reveal my weaknesses, or tell an innocuous lie, to protect the real Manuela inside of me.

Your enemy, someone who hates you, would say that Manuela Paris is insecure, a girl who hides her fragility by feigning aggression, who feels alone even when she's with people, who sometimes has crying fits she can't control, who gives up when things go poorly, saying that she really didn't give a shit anyway, who avoids disappointment by saying no to things ahead of time. Who seeks out unpleasant experiences just to make sure she can feel something. Who let herself be deflowered by an industrial technology student at a school friend's birthday party, in the room where all the coats had been put, on top of the other guests' scarves and purses, because at sixteen she was sick and tired of feeling weird for never having slept with a boy. Who, after that fleeting, disappointing experience, had experimented with just about everything, only to conclude in the end that she could get the same result without having to put up with a stranger's body, breathing, idiotic conversations, and sticky sperm. Or maybe I was wrong to tell the examiner I don't go to church, I don't believe in eternal life, not even in God?

Unfit
. How was I different? Did I tell too many truths or too many lies? Did I talk too much or too little? Did I have strange thoughts? Maybe I was crazy. Maybe insanity isn't feeble-mindedness, maybe it's not the broken, raving monologues those desperate people you see wandering around outside the train station have, maybe it's this irresolvable difference that separates people like us from other men and women: the hope, the dream, almost the expectation of having a destiny. Of not being a shadow without a history, a ghost who slides through the world without leaving a mark; of wanting to do something important with one's life.

The wind whirled the leaves. It tore at the plastic bags that had been tangled in the shrubs growing along the banks of the Tiber since the last flood. But I didn't move. I'll never get up again, I thought. A cyclist riding along the banks swerved so as not to hit me. He thought I was drunk, didn't stop to ask if I needed help. No one came near me. The rare passerby veered around me, like an obstacle. Who knows how long I lay there among the leaves, my eyes wide open, staring at the evening and then the night sky. A handful of dim stars came out. I was still lying there, immobile, drained of all energy. I had no future anymore, since I couldn't live the only life that was possible for me. I could die that very evening. Throw myself into the river. Let myself be carried away by the muddy water of the Tiber. It didn't matter to me at all. It was all over. The only thing keeping me alive was the hatred that rose up in me every so often. I would have liked to get up and go back to Foligno, plant myself in front of the Recruiting Center, rip the flesh off the psychiatrist who had destroyed my dream. Tear him to pieces, force him to admit that he'd made a mistake, to ask my forgiveness, to pray for mercy. That was my destiny, that guy with the beard, a failed, bored officer—he hadn't understood the first thing about Manuela Paris; or had he in fact understood everything? Damn. Damn you. I hope your heart rots. That your testicles get gangrene.
Unfit
. Not you.