Limbo (45 page)

When she consulted with Lieutenant Ghigo, she told her it was normal. It happens to a lot of women during a tour of duty, their bodies are transformed. It's as if the brain sends the body a message. There's no need to inhibit menstruation with some hormonal bomb. It simply disappears: the women become soldiers, nothing more. The doctor at the military hospital told her not to worry as well. It's a result of trauma, he explained. When you're feeling better, your period will start up again on its own. But she's not feeling better at all. On the contrary, she's having a meltdown, she can't control anything anymore, she's a heap of broken shards. Dumbfounded, she waits for who knows what, balled up in the bathroom of the Posta Vecchia, her heart pounding, her body bleeding, and her mouth tasting of rust.

*   *   *

She wants to go home with Vanessa in the Yaris. She says goodbye to him in the restaurant parking lot, kissing him coldly on the cheek. Mattia, surprised, just stands there next to his rental car, turning the key over in his fingers. Alessia presses her nose against the back window and waves goodbye. He hesitates, as big as a bear, stunned and shaken among the cars, the sun already setting. He seems lost. When he buzzes her apartment at six to ask if she wants to go for a walk on the beach, Vanessa tells him Manuela's not home. She went to the doctor. She wasn't feeling well and wanted to get a prescription for those stupid drops of hers. “Did I do something wrong?” he asks her hesitantly. “How should I know?” Vanessa replies. “Please tell her to call me when she gets back.”

*   *   *

She doesn't call. She locks herself in her room, turns on the stereo, and after a long time, puts on a CD:
This Is Resurrection
, by Krysantemia, an Italian death metal group she discovered before deployment, which she took to Bala Bayak. The doleful voice of the singer and the obsessive torment of the drums helped her ease the tension. Serene Nicola Russo, who loved the rarefied melodies of Radiohead, had never been able to fathom how she could love that brutal, oppressive music, those strangled, cavernous voices that sounded like a pig being slaughtered, those lyrics that spoke of death, autopsies, insanity, cannibalism, and blood. The malicious names of her favorite groups were scary enough on their own: Amputation, Vader, Hades, Sadist, Deicide, Cryptopsy, Necrodeath. But that corrosive, blatant violence was useful. It was like it absorbed the no less brutal violence of the world and made it bearable.

As the notes of “Hope in Torment” hammer her ears, she surfs the Internet—the Ministry of Defense website, for news from the theater of operations: a hospital was inaugurated in Shindand yesterday, the other day an attack on the Eighth Alpini Regiment was thwarted; an English-language Afghani newspaper site: a teacher in the province of Uruzgan was killed, the brother of a police officer hung, a checkpoint on the road to Gereshk destroyed. A Belgian filmmaker who shot a documentary on kites declared he didn't have any problems at all in Kabul, except from the Americans when he picked up his equipment at the airport. Then she goes on Facebook, to Angelica Scianna's page. Her profile still says “Single.” Angelica had posted a photo of herself in officer's uniform standing next to a Mangusta helicopter. In some ways they look alike, both slender, as if they want the smallest surface areas possible exposed to the enemy. Angelica is pretty, strong, and free. Her twin sister. Manuela wanted to be like her, but Angelica had left her behind. She has two gold stars on her epaulet. She's in Afghanistan. Lieutenant Scianna's last post is about a return flight through the mountains during a snowstorm. White above, white below, white everywhere, snow on her windshield, almost out of fuel, emergency landing impossible, hostile region, fear of an ambush, low flying, adverse weather conditions, I did it, I'm still here! Enthusiastic comments, a shower of smiley-face emoticons. She would like to write something, but you can't revive nostalgia. She's lost her. As she hesitates, fingers hovering on the keyboard, it occurs to her that no, she wouldn't want to be in her place. She wouldn't want to fly a combat helicopter. She wouldn't want to see Afghanistan from the sky, to consider the hills and streets and villages below her as threats and targets. But she's disappointed in herself for thinking such a thing, a thought that does not belong to Manuela Paris. She hates herself for having conceived it.

She rummages in her duffel and dumps the contents out on the floor. Her bags were sent to her from Afghanistan when her regiment rotated out. They followed her to the hospital and then home, but this is the first time she's opened them. The mere sight of her duffel nauseates her. Things tumble out higgledy-piggledy, giving off the stale smell of dust. There's the white-and-black kaffiyeh and the scarves she covered her hair with when she met with the village elders. Her prepaid Banana phone cards for calling Italy. The postcards she'd received from her cousin Claudio on vacation in Sharm, and the black-and-white ones of the Herat Citadel and the Jam minaret she'd bought from the son of the beggar woman who looked like her mother and who came to Sollum one cold day in January. The beggar woman's name resurfaces intact from the past: Fatimeh. Her tattered diary. T-shirts, socks, a wad of dirty laundry. Fine pinkish yellow sand from the Farah desert falls from the pages of her diary, her clothes, and postcards, and filters onto the tile floor. A little bag of glass beads. She bought them for Vanessa, but forgot to give them to her. A pile of blue shards, once an elegant blown glass bottle that didn't survive the turbulence of the C-130. And a blue-green rug, rolled up and wrapped in a dirty rag. All that remains of six months of her life. A few smelly objects ruined by the journey. Nothing came back whole. Nothing survived. Neither things nor ideas—no hopes or dreams or memories. Not even herself.

19

HOMEWORK

I can't find anything to blame myself for. I respected military ethics, or maybe just ethics in general. So did Diego. Still, I felt uncomfortable eating dinner with him in the mess tent. The thought of his son haunted him. Lots of thoughts haunted him. I couldn't understand him. He was my friend, but I couldn't understand him. Once when we were digging into a breakfast covered in stubborn desert flies, he asked me if I wanted to have children. I told him no. He didn't believe me. “Don't you wonder what your child would look like? When you hold him in your arms and you ask yourself, will I be able to raise him? How can I teach him things I don't know?” I was quick to explain that I didn't think about it at all, I didn't feel cut out to be a mother.

“What sort of logic is that?” Diego interrupted me. “You're not born feeling cut out to be a mother or a father, you just do it. It happens. Imma and I, before I deployed, during those last three months of training, we never saw each other, and we only made love once. By the laws of probability it should have been fine. But it happened anyway. Now, when I think about it, I wish I'd never left the barracks. I wish I'd been more careful. I'm only twenty-six and I have a family to support.” I tried to convince him that he'd be a terrific father. “I know,” he answered, “I love my son already, more than anything. But I could have had a career. I'm the best, and you know it, and instead I took myself out of the running all by myself. I'll never have the heart to leave them for another tour of duty.” “You've done plenty of them already,” I said, trying to downplay things. “You should be happy about that. Bosnia, Lebanon, Kosovo, you've been all over the place. They've gone to your head, all those tours of yours.” He told me I couldn't understand. “You only really grow up when you have a child. You realize you're mortal.”

Time started moving more quickly. Paggiarin informed me that we had twelve hours to get ready: Lambda squad would leave on Saturday for the COP in Khurd, on the edge of the security bubble. It was the last week of May, twenty-five days till we went home, and Reawakening's objective still hadn't been reached. And I knew it.

Just like its name said—
khurd
means “little”—the outpost was a hole, a stone pit protected by sandbags, not much more than a trench, dug during the night with a pick and shovel, carved into the top of a barren hill on the edge of the desert. When I saw it, it seemed anachronistic; it reminded me of the trenches on the Carso. I had studied WWI defensive fortifications at Viterbo, never imagining I'd have to man one. But the Ninth had built several outposts like this one, laid out in a star shape around Sollum. Every time a section of land was cleared and secured, they'd build another one, farther out. The COPs were five kilometers from the base the first month, nine the second month, then thirteen. Khurd was at eighteen. The whole company was supposed to take turns, either in platoons or in teams of twenty or so, spending nine consecutive days at the COP, keeping watch on the mountains and the road below. There were Afghani soldiers there, too, separated from the Alpini by a wall. They communicated by shouting, in terrible English.

Sometimes nothing happened there, and the only event worthy of note was the arrival of provisions, tossed from an airplane, so the team's shift seemed like a survival course or a meditative retreat. The men came back sunburned, or battered by boredom, cold, or heat, and whether they'd seen God or minded their own business, they were happy to return to the Spartan civilization of the FOB. Other times they shot at you, from a hole just like ours, dug with a pickaxe on the opposite hill, a heap of white rocks gleaming in the sun. Light weapons, machine-gun fire, antitank rockets, even mortar fire. My Gamma team was lucky. Only flies bothered it.

When I got there, all was calm. Once I'd coordinated the rotations, Spina asked me if I wanted to go back to Sollum with Gamma. He could stay with Lambda. Khurd hadn't been designed for a woman. There wasn't enough space to carve out separate quarters. He also told me that time never seemed to pass there. Keeping watch for an hour frayed your nerves more than a whole day driving around in a Lince because—for the first time in all those months—you knew those weren't just ghosts in front of you. The rebels' position was less than a kilometer away; the only thing that separated us was a gravel riverbed, which ran dry in the hot season. We could almost see them with the naked eye. The soldiers, on their cots, waited their turn to keep watch, and then time became an endless circle again. “I'll stay,” I said. A commander who does not share the cold, the heat, the lousy food, the boredom, and the danger with her men isn't a good leader. Spina laughed and said he knew it, he'd already had them put up a dividing curtain for me.

Our shift proved to be more eventful. Our hearing had grown exceptionally acute over the months, and we were able to analyze the slightest sound for clues as to a projectile's trajectory. The interval between the thud of the shot and the roar of the explosion told us the distance from which it had been fired. A rustle in the air alarmed us, but not enough to make us move; the projectile would land far away, at most sending up some sand spurts. A whistle similar to a birdcall, on the other hand, indicated a serious threat. Which is why Jodice recognized it right away. When it was launched, at 1708 hours on our one hundred and sixty-second day, it made a sinister hiss. “Mortar, Sarge!” he shouted, pulling me to the ground. The first round hit very close by with a terrifying crash, shattering the roof that covered the trench. The second ripped the door off the storehouse; the third landed in the sandbags.

We radioed FOB immediately that we'd been attacked by Russian-manufactured mortar bombs, 122 mm, judging by the dimensions and explosive power. I asked our bombers to intervene, and was told that first they had to verify there were no civilians in the area. “Can't you divert some Black Cats?” “Negative, the AMX are engaged to the north, assisting a Spanish patrol in difficulty.” A drone had taken off from Herat, they said. A drone flies at one hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, I was thinking, it will already be dark when it starts surveying the mountain, and the sniper, or whoever it is, will already have taken cover; it will be impossible to locate him. And that's exactly what happened. I ate disgusting combat rations with the Lambda guys, prosciutto cubes and vinegary peaches in syrup. I settled down on a cot. There were no more privileges at COP Khurd. We really were all equal there.

At dawn the mortar rounds started falling again, with the same monotonous and implacable regularity. But more precise this time. One gutted the chemical toilet, forcing us—until the ingenious Giovinazzo managed to get it working again somehow—to crouch in the sand and scatter our excrement in an already restricted space, shedding any remaining modesty. Taking a shit became a test of one's courage. The explosions shook the ground and rumbled in our heads. I was tormented by migraines. The ability to react to exhaustion and stress is what distinguishes a good soldier from a mediocre one. I knew it, and so did my men. I felt trapped. I didn't want to die in a trench like a rat. Of all possible combat deaths, that seemed the most inglorious. Hunched over, I crept from one hole to the next in a tunnel that smelled of smoke and stank like an animal den. I didn't dare raise my head. Now, when I collapsed on my cot, exhausted, I had to really make sure that whoever was on guard duty didn't fall asleep, didn't get distracted even for a second. And when it was my turn, on duty with another soldier, squeezed so tightly into the hole we could barely move, the heat suffocating us, the other guy's sweat soaking my uniform, plastered so tightly together that I couldn't have said where my body ended and his began, I had to make sure that he saw what I didn't, noticed whatever escaped me. That sleepy, stinking, sweat- and dust-encrusted comrade held my life in his hands. In a certain sense, I was him and he was me. I put my life in Diego Jodice's hands. And I held his in mine. When you have shared that waiting, there's no going back. You can no longer be just yourself. His life will belong to you forever. And yours to him.