Limbo (8 page)

Loyalty and sacrifice, the watchwords that became the cornerstones of my new existence, reminded me of my grandfather's lectures, and they rang true. Lies and subterfuge, which I had resorted to many times, were now repugnant to me. As for sacrifice, I already knew that nobody gives you anything for free, neither respect nor affection. To sacrifice myself for something more noble—my country, as my instructors kept telling me, even though I didn't think I had one—made me feel important: me, a complete zero, a grub, a gnat, a provincial girl born into a dysfunctional family that couldn't offer any kind of future.

And then there were the weapons. The first time they put an AR70/90 in my hands and I held it in firing position, I knew we would get along. My drill instructor told me I had to care for it as if it were my child. That seemed somewhat excessive. Besides, I didn't know how to take care of a child. But he was right. I liked everything about my Beretta assault rifle—its awkward stiffness, its deadly weight, its pointy edges, its oily smell, even the abrasion it left on my neck, the bruise the belt made by pressing for hours against the same spot on my skin, so that my arm swelled like a drug addict's for three weeks. But the sound it made when I loaded a magazine or chambered a round, the crackle of the volley, thrilled me. In that suspended second when—before pulling the trigger—my eye focused on the target in the crosshairs, I felt I owned the world, could blast anything. Even though the weapons were complicated, and difficult to handle, assemble, and maintain, even though the pineapple-like grenades loaded with deadly compound B were heavy in my hands, and the noise of the mortars absolutely terrifying, I quickly developed a real passion for our squad's weapons. I learned everything about them, about automatic pistols, calibers, bullets, sights, rounds per second, cartridge capacity, maximum effective range, triggers, and even bullet speed. I spent hours cradling my rifle, disassembling the bolt, polishing, oiling, and lubricating it, and cleaning the bore with a brush. Then I would chamber a round and load the drum. I even talked to it. When I finished basic training and had to return it to the armory, the parting was painful, as if they were cutting off one of my limbs. You never forget your first rifle.

I didn't know what to do when I was off duty. Civilian life now seemed disappointing. On Saturdays the other women would stroll down Ascoli Piceno's main street, meet their boyfriends, go window-shopping, do laundry at the coin-op. I usually stayed in the barracks, reading tank magazines. People started saying that Manuela Paris was a fanatic.

I got the second-highest score on the physical and practical tests and on the military science exams. “You would have been first, if Angelica Scianna weren't so blond,” my roommate Guglielma Ruffilli teased. But I wanted to be friends with Angelica so I didn't take offense. Besides, they had assigned us to the same unit, same detachment, same regiment, and so we headed off together. She from Sicily, me from Ladispoli, both of us headed north, hundreds of miles from home. It was the first time so far away for both of us. That first night, sleeping in the same dorm room, we wondered what would happen now that we were finally in a real barracks.

A few hours were all it took to disillusion me. The soldiers looked down on newcomers. Merit counts less than seniority, and I was the newest arrival. I'd have the right to take it out on a new bunch of recruits a few months later. Such were the unwritten, unchangeable laws of the group, in place from time immemorial, and I had to accept them. Uphold them, even—along with the pranks, the abuses of power, and the bullying. My superiors were either paternalistic or brutal, nothing in between. But my future depended on their assessments. I was evaluated constantly. I had to have them on my side if I wanted to stay in the army, to reenlist when my twelve months were up. My five female companions were competitive—and one of them, the beautiful and clever Angelica Scianna, in fact, was obsessed with excelling. Each hoped the others would fail so she could be the only one to succeed. I had been raised as a boy in a family of women, and considered myself amphibious: I was comfortable with women, and they often confided in me, especially when they had relationship troubles, but I was comfortable with men, too. Separating people based solely on gender seemed an old-fashioned approach, as arcane as the debates on the sex of angels. I never would have imagined I'd be rejected by the men and considered a rival by the women.

In a co-ed environment, the lack of privacy turned out to be humiliating. Latrines stinking of stale urine and whipped by icy drafts; rusty sinks, dreary showers. Narrow, uncomfortable beds. Senseless discipline. Exhausting physical combat training. It was no longer a question, as it had been in Ascoli, of jogging after an instructor at a modest pace, so as not to humiliate the overweight women who, poor things, were showing such goodwill. And there were quite a few of them. The weight cutoff at enlistment was one hundred and seventy-five pounds—generous enough to include even the obese. But here you had to complete grueling marches on impassible trails, crushed under the weight of your pack and weapons. A rifle alone weighs eight pounds, but with ammunition it comes to seventeen, and that's not counting grenades and other equipment. Perhaps only Vanessa, swollen out of proportion during her pregnancy, could understand the effort required for someone as slight as me to drag around such ballast. The first time I had to slither through the mud on my elbows and climb a rope to get over a ditch, I was left behind. Incredulous, I hobbled through the rest of the course, coming in last, out of breath and spent. This one's not going to make it, I read in our trainer's eyes; give her a month and she'll quit. She doesn't have the physique. Or the head. When he bawled me out in public because I was the worst of the platoon on the rifle range—it was like I was cross-eyed, I couldn't hit the target even once—I cracked. I felt so humiliated, so disappointed with myself that I started to cry. And I didn't even have a Kleenex.

“Emotions, Paris,” the drill instructor reprimanded me, planting himself in front of me, his legs wide. “A soldier keeps them to himself.” I sniffled and stared at my boots. “Do I have to put in your character report that Corporal Paris is unable to control her emotions? That what Paris knows how to do best is cry?” “It won't happen again, sir,” I swore. After that, I saved my tears of dejection for the bathroom. I'd lock the door and flush to make noise, crouch down, and have myself a good cry. A soft sob that choked in my throat. Then, as the months went by, I found I couldn't cry on command anymore. So I stopped.

Only during theory classes did I shine. They thrilled me. Strategy. History. Religions. I had hated school, but in the barracks I discovered I liked to study. I listened openmouthed to the officer lecturing. I took notes. “Write it all down, write it all down,” Corporal Zappalà would tease me, “maybe the sergeant will hire you as his secretary.”

I didn't socialize with the short-term service guys: twenty-year-olds who ended up in the barracks because they had few other options, Neanderthal braggarts, dumb as rocks, whose only way of speaking to women was to make vulgar jokes. Except for those two or three sentimental soldiers who took themselves too seriously and hid ungrammatical love letters in our bunks, the men viewed us as sexual distractions, there to keep up the morale. If I happened to run into one in some secluded corner of the barracks, he'd try to grab me. Angelica and I would always go to the bathroom together at night; we'd watch each other's backs. All the women responded in their own ways to the unwanted attention—either by passively putting up with it, crying, or feeling flattered. I returned the insult. Foul language has never intimidated me. “Kiss my ass,” I said to a soldier who pushed me into the mess hall storage room and tried to feel me up. I realized right away that the only thing you shouldn't do was complain to your superiors: you'd be considered a pain in the ass, a whiner, weak, unable to take care of yourself, and therefore unfit to wear a uniform. They'd tear you apart in your character report, so you couldn't reenlist. In short, they'd screw you.

The guys divided female soldiers into three categories: lesbians, whores, and trolls. I wondered which was best. The lesbians were picked on and provoked a desire for revenge. The trolls, too ugly to spark pornographic fantasies, were left in peace, but ignored by their comrades and superiors. The whores, who only fucked the instructors and officers because they wanted to get ahead, were badmouthed but feared, because at the end of the day they really did move up the ladder. To Angelica and me, it seemed the lesser of all evils, so that's the category we chose. We learned to seem flattered and smile at the officers, most of them potbellied older men who courted all of us, even me, though I'd never considered myself attractive, with an old-fashioned and—all things considered—harmless gallantry. In the latrine, unrepeatable epithets accompanied my name. But in truth I never did more than offer strategic little smiles and cause a few hearts to flutter. A sergeant with amorous eyes, whom I refused a kiss, told me I wouldn't get far because I didn't understand that I needed the protection of a man. “We'll see” was my insolent reply.

But the most dangerous ones were the male chauvinists, who insisted that the officers favored the women, made things easier for them, and surrounded themselves with cute co-eds like African tribal kings. Women catalyze the attention of the media, make the Italian army appear modern, and help attract funding. But other than that, they're not worth a damn, all they do is cause problems, because having women live with twenty-year-old guys whose testosterone levels are through the roof is something not even the Americans have been able to figure out, and they've had women in their ranks for decades.

They'd make fun of us, calling us officers' pets. And they'd try to crush us during the physical tests, to show that, even though we held the same rank, we would never really be equal to them. It was all smoke and mirrors, women were nothing more than mannequins for parades who would all end up in the orderly room, the medical corps, or behind a desk. And I began to suspect they were right; when, at the end of training, I was sent to my detachment and assigned to an office, I felt insulted.

But I couldn't protest, I couldn't point out I had indicated a preference for placement as an armorer or machine gunner—because a soldier must obey above all else. I wanted to prove that the men were wrong, but I didn't know how. Lying in my bunk at night, in an enormous dormitory in the wing of my new barracks reserved for us women—privileged, protected, or simply pets, perhaps not even that; second-class soldiers in any case—I sensed I was in the wrong place. If this was all the army could offer me, if being a soldier meant saluting the flag and then counting down the hours behind a desk, answering the phone and scheduling appointments for the commander, I preferred to pack it in, request an honorable discharge, and go home. But I didn't have the courage. The army was my dream. And I didn't want to betray it.

*   *   *

The Americans came to Sollum. They had held the province until the year before and still ran the PRT at Farah. It seems they were satisfied with our work, and that made our commanders cocky. Paggiarin dreamed of a visit from General Petraeus, but he chose another base, and never made it to ours. The regular Afghan army generals came. The police chiefs came. Hours and hours spent exchanging information about regional commands, councils, cooperation with the civil components of government organizations and NGOs involved in the reconstruction of infrastructures—only a faint echo of which reached me. After flag salute, roll call, and the morning briefing, other than filling out paperwork, oiling my rifle and cleaning out the sand that threatened to jam the mechanism, other than making sure that my platoon was active—unrolling concertina wire or on guard duty in the towers—or supervising them on the firing range, I didn't have much to do. I'd never expected to be bored in Afghanistan.

At dawn, as I inspected sleepy Pegasus faces, I'd repeat to myself the names of my classes at the NCO Academy. Leadership. Daring. Honor. Loyalty. Duty. Firmness. Will. Drive. Pride. Dignity. Tenacity. If I managed to represent—and communicate to my men—all those things, then I really deserved to be here. To be a leader means to be responsible—like a father. If even one of them made a mistake, the company captain would punish me. He didn't seem to trust me yet. He kept me inside Sollum longer than all the other platoon leaders. On the list for patrol duty, he put Pegasus last. I was disappointed. But I was ready.

4

LIVE

The guest at the Bellavista Hotel does nothing but run, apparently. On Christmas Day he ran in the direction of the Tahiti, and on the morning of the twenty-sixth Manuela sees him running in the direction of the Piazza of the War Dead; he's back on the beach again in the afternoon, but this time running toward the tower. He exits the hotel quickly, from the back door, in a blue tracksuit, wool cap, headphones, and sunglasses. Manuela notes that he never leaves at the same time and always goes in a different direction. As if he were deliberately randomizing his movements. It's a professional deformation of hers: she has learned not to overlook the smallest detail.

She runs into him that same evening as, tired and slow, she finally reaches the Tahiti's Polynesian hut. He's coming toward her, still running at a good clip. He has taken off his wool cap and sweatshirt, and his T-shirt is wet with perspiration despite the cold. He has the lean physique of someone who exercises constantly. Manuela is pleasantly surprised. From a distance she had thought he was middle-aged. He sees her, too—there's no one else on the beach—just the thin girl with the shorn head sitting on the cement wall, watch in hand. Manuela checks to see if it took her less time today than yesterday, if she shaved off a few minutes. Negative. He glides past her, slowing slightly. Manuela can hear his labored breath. About thirty years old. Nearly six feet two. Muscular. Wide shoulders. Rolex on his right wrist. Left-handed, like her. She follows him with her eyes as he heads back up the beach toward the hotel. An easy stride, a fast, steady pace, and he stops only when he gets to the glass door of the hotel. There, the guest at the Bellavista turns, hesitating for a second. Manuela can tell he's looking at her.