Limbo (27 page)

Flashes of light on the rock face to our left. The last vehicle in the column was hit. It came to a stop, blocking our escape. We were trapped in the middle. “Killing zone!” I yelled into the radio. “Killing zone!” What is it they taught me? What did I do during training? Get into position? Stay in the vehicle? Take shelter? But reality doesn't look like the simulations. Decide in a split second what can save your life, and the lives of others, or lose it. “Everyone out!” I shouted. We threw ourselves on the ground, dragging grenade launchers and assault packs full of ammunition, sliding between the wheels. Another RPG hissed past us and crashed into the motor of the Lince that had already been hit, sowing metal shards that bounced off the rocks and rained down on the whole column. Bazookas fired ruthlessly on the vehicles at the head of the column, but there wasn't anyone there. Spina didn't think my order was stupid, he had followed it.

I slid behind a rock and retrieved my SC 70/90. My face was covered in dirt. The heat burned my throat. But the water and provisions were back in the Lince. “It's an ambush, they're firing on us from seven and five o'clock,” I reported over the radio, forcing myself to remain calm. Dozens of rockets had hit the FOB. But it wasn't the same thing. In that gorge we were exposed, beyond the protective barriers. And I didn't know any better way to indicate our coordinates, or what the enemy position could be, because we were surrounded by rubble and ruin, a warren of ravines and caverns. The insurgents could be anywhere. They were firing from the left ridge, but also from higher up, as well as from the rocky terrain behind us, and we couldn't tell how many of them there were. We couldn't see them either; they really did seem like ghosts.

“Where are they? Where are they?” Jodice shouted as he brandished his Browning, aiming a volley at the crest of the rock face, where—three hundred meters above him—tentacles of smoke were twisting upward. I recognized the brief, disciplined volleys of a well-trained gunner, who knew not to overheat the barrel. “Get down, Spaniard,” I yelled. Bullets whizzed past my ears, but our attackers' aim wasn't perfect. They were probably still at least four hundred meters away. The radio squawked, too many people trying to talk at once, a muddle of voices, all on top of one another. I had lost contact with Spina's squad, which had sought refuge in a deep cleft between two rock faces. I tried to use the infrared strobe to indicate our position. Cramps low in my belly. While Venier babbled on about a bloody nose, shrapnel maybe, and I was trying to figure out where Zandonà had gone—I'd lost sight of him—I realized that in those months of solitude, everything had changed. I was scared for that twenty-year-old kid. I finally found him, curled up behind a low rock that only covered him up to his shoulders. “Get out of there,” I said, and he rolled next to me, shaking like a leaf, terrified, rifle between his knees. He was just a driver. He'd been trained to step into any role, just in case, but he'd never fired a shot in action, and hoped he'd never have to. Me neither, for that matter. They didn't let me participate in what were considered high-risk operations. I was scared for Owl, who never slept, for Lance Sergeant Spina, who treated me like a schoolgirl, for Venier, who went around smelling poppies, even for the Spaniard. Not for myself, though, because I didn't consider myself important to anyone except my mother. Each of us individually was nothing, but together we were everything. If something happened to my deputy, my gunner, or my driver, it happened to me, too.

Libra's calm voice came over the radio to inform Pegasus that the QRF had already been activated, we'd be exfiltrated as soon as possible. “They won't be able to rescue us,” Zandonà said coldly, “it'll take too long, they're getting closer. I saw two coming down, they're hiding back there.” We were being hit with hand grenades now, which struck the wheels of our Linces and bounced against the windshields, while bursts from AK-47s swept the snow.

The familiar noise of the Browning fell silent. Jodice was trying to get the ammunition belt unstuck. The overheated metal burned. I heard him swear as he fidgeted with the mechanism. The gun was jammed. We had no more cover. Jodice climbed out of the turret and ran on all fours, zigzagging through the slush. “Jesus Christ, I'm not even twenty-one,” Zandonà whispered, “I don't want to get myself killed like this. There's a lot I want to do with my life, why can't you just take them out? What the fuck does it take?” We aimed in the direction of the flashes. We all fired, even me. I couldn't say how long it lasted. An eternity or an instant. Amid the racket of our rifles I distinctly heard the thud of something falling. So they weren't ghosts. “King Kong,” I said to the radio, even though I didn't know if he could hear me, “there's one at four o'clock, I'll send up a tracer bullet to show you his position, our Browning is down.” Jodice holed up behind the rock at my back and pulled out his pistol. “I'm sorry, Sarge,” he said, “that's never happened to me before, I was careful not to overheat it, I respected its rhythms, it must have been defective.” He was afraid I didn't believe him. The smell of cordite and smoke. The sun cast a splash of yellow on the highest jag of the mountain. The light glided quickly across the rocks, the shadows retreated. “I got him,” Venier babbled incredulously. “I lifted my head, aimed where I saw the flash, and I got him.” But the others didn't stop. Shots were coming closer. “I saw his head explode, Sarge,” Owl whispered, “a red cloud, then there was nothing left.” My watch said 0531. They'd been firing on us for almost half an hour.

I was sure we would end up like the French in the Uzbeen Valley two years earlier—attacked, surrounded, besieged until all their ammunition ran out, and then tortured, throats cut, butchered, their mutilated bodies taken around from village to village so that people would know what happens to foreign soldiers. In Italy no one ever heard about it, the story didn't even make the papers, but for us it was a nightmare, and even though we never talked about it, we thought about it all the time. The Uzbeen Valley was too deep and narrow for the helicopters to intervene, to fire missiles and save the French soldiers. And now we, too, were in a deep and narrow valley, and maybe we wouldn't be saved either.

That was the moment I understood what war is. To be a puppet in the hands of a puppeteer who doesn't know you, doesn't care about you, doesn't even know you exist. My destiny didn't depend on me anymore, on my ability or my courage. The name of my platoon, the position of my Lince, the effectiveness of our Browning, even the weather—these were the things that could make a difference. It was just like the stories my grandfather told me about the battles between the Greeks and the Trojans under the walls of Troy. The warriors fight and kill, but above them are the gods, and it's the gods who decide who shall live and who must fall. In the end, all their courage and heroism doesn't matter. The mysterious gods who worked the strings of my destiny while I was under fire in a gorge seven kilometers from a village whose name I didn't even know were in the TFC in Shindand, in a room lined with computer monitors, an NCO who takes the call at the FOB at Bala Bayak, an officer who requests authorization for American helicopters to intervene. Either the helicopters come roaring from behind the mountains, kicking up flashes of smoke, white plumes dancing on the mountain crests and in the crevices, or our request gets bogged down, authorization is delayed, help doesn't arrive in time, and the insurgents climb down the rock face undisturbed and slit our throats one by one.

But none of this happens. While the helicopters circle too high above the gorge, we realize we're shooting at the wind. It was the wind that was blowing against the snow. Whoever it was that attacked us, whoever it was who laid the ambush, has vanished, has been repelled. A dreadful silence settles over the valley. All you can hear is the wind whipping against the rocks, and stones falling on stone.

*   *   *

That evening, back at the base, while the men were washing away the sweat and mud, the adrenaline and regret, the fear and dust that were plastered to our skin like paint, I slipped into the Lambda tent, figured out which cot was Jodice's, and left a blood-soaked tampon in his sleeping bag, in plain sight, right on his pillow. Because I really did have my period at Negroamaro. And cramps. But I went anyway. Because Manuela Paris was not a dead dog or someone's sweetheart, or some little college grad protected by headquarters. She wasn't a woman either. Manuela Paris was an Alpino.

When the Spaniard found that bloody bullet in his sleeping bag, he simply picked it up and threw it in the trash; he didn't grumble that it had stained his pillowcase, the only one he had, or that he had to sleep with his mouth on my blood for three months. We never talked about it. But from then on, he respected me not merely because of my rank, but as a person—and he became my friend.

12

LIVE

Mattia leaves the Bellavista at nine in the morning. A coal-colored wool suit and tie; maybe he really does have a work meeting. He doesn't take the Audi from the garage. Instead he gets in the dark car with tinted windows that's waiting for him, motor running, by the glass doors of the lobby. Manuela, who has just gotten up, is still dazed from the benzodiazepine, and can't see who is behind the wheel. Mattia sits in the backseat. Like an important passenger, someone worthy of a driver.

Vanessa, who is spying down to the street from the living room window, notes that it looks like one of those politicians' cars. “No,” Manuela assures her, “Mattia's not into politics, I'm sure of that, one hundred percent. He's an anarchist, a libertarian, he minds his own business, he wouldn't be the least bit interested.” “If you ask me, he's some kind of secret agent,” Vanessa pronounces. “He's in hiding here, waiting for orders to kill some terrorist in a sleeper cell, an Iranian nuclear engineer, or a member of some clandestine organization. I don't like this at all, honey,” she says. “Apart from the fact that secret agents aren't assassins,” Manuela protests, “he's not an agent, one hundred percent. I know what they're like, those secret agents, there were two of them at the FOB, and I can promise you he's nothing like them.” “Don't get involved with a secret agent, Manuela,” Vanessa urges her. “It'll complicate your life.”

They rush to get dressed because Vanessa is late, her class at the gym starts at ten, and Manuela wants to go with her, to exercise on the treadmill. The doctor had told her not to interrupt her rehab regimen for any reason, but yesterday she didn't take a single step. In fact, she twisted her ankle rolling around in bed with Mattia, and now the pain is worse. “I have to ask you to go to that party in Rome tonight, at the Gas Works,” Manuela says as Vanessa's car, a banged-up Yaris that's missing a headlight and smells of vanilla, pulls onto the Aurelia. “Why?” Vanessa asks, surprised. She looks at Manuela and almost hits a truck. “Because I want to go to Passo Oscuro with him. I'm sorry.”

*   *   *

Manuela walks on the treadmill for almost an hour, her eyes fixed on the mirror in front of her. It occurs to her that she talked to Mattia a lot about her ideas, but not about her friends; she didn't even mention them. And yet in the end, that's all she has left from Afghanistan. Everything else has scattered, like dust in the wind. She didn't dare mention them to Mattia, afraid of saying their names out loud, there in room 302 of the Bellavista Hotel. Afraid for them, and for herself. Is this what cowardice is? She has never been a coward. Is it possible to lose yourself so completely that you can no longer recognize yourself?

While she marches on the treadmill—as if she needs to get somewhere, though in reality she's only trying to put some distance between herself and her friends, to leave them behind, to forget about them—on the other side of the glass wall Vanessa is teaching salsa and bachata to her troops. Her students' outlines skip along in the mirror. Eighteen women, all rather pudgy, and three men who aren't so young anymore move gracelessly across the polished parquet floor. Vanessa watches them, keeps them in check, corrects them, a smile on her lips but unsparing in her words: in her own way, her sister is a platoon leader, too. She makes herself respected. Or rather, she expects her students to respect her work, and the art of dance. She doesn't presume to transform them into an actual dance troupe, but she would be disrespecting herself if she let their mistakes slide. They understand, and take it seriously. Those awkward, clumsy recruits, eager to make a good impression, remind Manuela of Pegasus during their final days of joint training, their final exercises before deployment. Thirty-six soldiers, they, too, eager to make a good impression, yet strangely awkward, wearing their desert camo in the green fields of the Dolomites. She's in the lead, climbing tortuous paths, her rifle strap cutting into her neck, and she's thinking, not yet, I'm still not worthy of the brown feather in my cap, as the old-timers would say, but I will be soon. She's incredibly nostalgic for the enthusiasm of those final days in Italy—and for the Manuela Paris who was preparing to deploy, unaware of all that would come. But she wouldn't want to turn back. She looks at the numbers on the treadmill display and forces herself to evaluate them objectively. Unfortunately, they're discouraging. She has walked two point three kilometers. She has to stop. The pain in her leg is unbearable.

*   *   *

The Parco Leonardo shopping center is nothing like how Teodora Gogean described it. To Manuela it just seems like a giant brick-and-glass box. The Paris sisters wander past shop windows. To make up for taking over her grandfather's cottage, Manuela plans on buying Vanessa a spectacular outfit for New Year's Eve. They haven't gone shopping together in ages. And there are more stores here than in all of Ladispoli. In the end they enter the funkiest one: the window features mannequins in black leather bustiers, latex boots, and red garters. They make their way to the dressing room with a slew of outfits under their arms. Manuela assumed she would only have to help her sister choose, but as Vanessa gets undressed she begs Manuela to give her the satisfaction just once, just for tonight, of dressing like a woman.