Limbo (18 page)

When I heard foreign voices emerging from the darkness and footsteps coming closer, I finally got up. I didn't want to be raped, and, all things considered, I didn't want to kill myself either. I wanted to get revenge on that medical officer with the pointy beard, on every officer in the world. That thought gave me the strength to get shakily to my feet. When I returned to street level, I was surprised to discover that while I lay as if dead down along the riverbank, nothing had happened: cars continued to line up at the stoplight in order to cross the bridge; in reality only two hours had passed. Manuela Paris had been assassinated, but Rome continued to live, indifferent to my tragedy. The last bus for Ladispoli had already left.

I took the subway back to the station and waited for the train. I got a seat near the window, the car was practically empty, the commuters were already home by now. The coastal train heading north stopped at every station. Tuscolana, Ostiense, Trastevere, San Pietro, Aurelia, Maccarese, Torrimpietra, Palidoro. And between one stop and the next, I saw the houses outside my window lit up, fleetingly framed little living rooms, all exactly the same, families at the dinner table, people sitting on the couch watching TV—the spectacle of other people's lives enraged and infuriated me, but also left me indifferent, because I no longer had a life. They'd stolen it from me.

Vanessa came to get me at the station. I must have looked really awful, because she didn't have the courage to ask me anything. Reading the disappointment in my sister's eyes was almost worse than reading
unfit
next to my name. “I didn't make it,” I whispered. “Assholes!” Vanessa swore, devastated. “I was deemed unfit. I can't be an officer,” I explained, kicking a soda can. “It's their loss,” Vanessa said. But she was frustrated, too. She'd been hopeful, convinced I was meant to fulfill all our dreams: she had delegated hers to me as well, since she was too lazy to follow them herself.

That night Vanessa slipped into my bed. “You have to try again, Manù,” she said. “You didn't prepare enough, and besides, at nineteen it's normal to drown like an ant in a glass of water. You have to learn to handle yourself better. Get someone to explain how those damn tests work, the things you shouldn't do. You'll ace them next year. You'll pass with flying colors.” “Try again? Not over my dead body,” I swore, and I kept my promise. I wouldn't have been able to bear another failure.

At the end of my year of service I was honorably discharged with the rank of corporal and good character notes on my record, but I didn't ask to reenlist. I left the army angrier than when I'd joined. More aggressive, more hostile, more everything. I threw away my military magazines, my Sailor Moon notebook filled with stories of Amazons, the photographs of me with my classmates, of me in the barracks. I spent weeks holed up at home, like a leper, even refusing to answer the at first sympathetic and later concerned phone calls from my friend Angelica. Corporal Paris had been killed at Foligno—killed by friendly fire.

*   *   *

There's no trace of my anxiety either in my e-mails or my diary. I couldn't let it seep out. From Sollum I sent vacuous, reassuring messages about the food and the cold, as if I were on vacation. The truth is that I understood Corporal Zandonà more than he could possibly know, even if I never could have told him. The initial euphoria had worn off. I, too, felt as if I were in prison. But I couldn't fathom what crime I'd committed, and I couldn't imagine how my presence there could be considered offensive. I'd gone there in order to do my part to rebuild a country, but I spent my time guarding the base, wearing out my eyes staring at the desert, at herds of goats roaming among the rocks, grazing on thorny tufts of grass; I fixed my binoculars on old men in turbans shuffling around in their slippers in the sand and lighting fires, perhaps sending smoke signals about our movements, and droves of barefoot children collecting scraps of metal and dragging water tanks and perhaps spying on us for their fathers. I spent my time practicing at the firing range, shooting at nothing, saluting the flag that fluttered in the wind, calling roll morning and evening, and filling out forms and patrol reports. I'd never written so much in my life. I wrote with principle and precision. At Sollum I learned the value of words. I told myself that even writing was important, because what I wrote would be sent higher and higher, up a long chain of command, all the way to the NATO heads—and a piece of information that seemed insignificant to me might prove essential someday. But I would never know. I studied maps and occasionally—too infrequently for my tastes—traveled in an armored vehicle, in relative tranquillity at night, and with a great deal of anxiety during the day, and patroled a road that our very presence assured would immediately be deserted. At times, filing past long lines of stopped cars, all I could read on those faces resigned to our passing by was patience. The patience with which a peasant endures rain and droughts and locusts, knowing that this, too, shall pass. You'll pass, too: that's what I read on their dusty faces, which were framed for a second in the windows of our Lince, as we filed past them at ten kilometers an hour.

But I hadn't gone all the way to Afghanistan just to file past. I wanted to do something for those people. It is the duty of civilized countries to help less-fortunate populations. Is it possible they didn't understand that? And yet, in March alone, 721 makeshift devices exploded. Between American and various coalition soldiers, there were twenty-eight casualties. Nearly one a day. And I waited, without really knowing anymore what for. I cleaned the delicate workings of my rifle, recalibrated it, polished the scope, brushed my uniform, which was so encrusted with sand and sweat it could practically stand upright on its own, worked out elaborate itineraries on the map, chatted with First Lieutenant Russo while Radiohead sang malaise, listened to Jodice's unending anecdotes and First Lieutenant Ghigo's stories. She'd been in country the year before, in Herat, where she saw dozens of civilians every day, there was always a line in front of the base's first aid station. It was the most gratifying experience of her life. She'd even managed to send two children with cancer to Italy, where they were cured. Here, no one. No one from the nearby villages came.

The truth is, nothing ever happened. I'd come to make peace with war, or to make war to establish peace—I'd been training for it for years. It's why I'd studied political science and economic geography, applied machine mechanics, and chemical weapons, why I'd parachute-jumped and perfected my shooting and become a first-rate patroller. And it's what I'd always wanted. I wasn't born to wear out a chair in the comfortable office of some provincial barracks. I wanted to change things, get results. And I was prepared to pay a very high price. But we Italians moved with a caution and diplomacy that I understood but that still annoyed me sometimes. We didn't want to alienate anyone. We would negotiate and bargain even with bandits, people who couldn't even really be considered insurgents, just ordinary delinquents. We honed our patience with an almost Oriental focus. It was our way of gaining respect: everyone has their own strategy: some prefer a show of force, others dialogue—but it seemed like a waste of time to me. Proof of how middle class the military had become. Its ranks were full of respectable people—competent, educated, qualified—who were not looking for redemption or liberation; back in Italy they had comfortable homes, they were well-off and content. Giuseppe Lando, a chubby, taciturn rifleman, burst into tears when he heard his mother's voice on the phone for the first time in ten days.

My neighbor, Giani, the quartermaster, chose me as her confidante. She had no one else to talk to: First Lieutenant Ghigo was standoffish because she outranked Giani, and some things only another woman could understand. She was afraid she wouldn't make it till June. She missed normal life, missed going to the beauty parlor to get her legs waxed, missed having a bidet or even a toilet where she could sit down instead of a Turkish toilet where she always had to squat like a medieval peasant, missed letting her long hair hang loose, wearing a dress and high heels, in short she regretted having to put parentheses around her life as a civilized person and as a woman. Sokha Giani was a graceful twenty-four-year-old of Cambodian origin—the soldiers called her Angkor—with lithesome movements and luscious, long black hair that was offended by the Afghan sand and by the military regulations that forced her to keep it tied back at all times. But I wasn't much help. I had never cared in the least about high heels, hairstyles, or waxed legs, and a month after my arrival at Bala Bayak, I sat down in front of Sergeant Corvia, the barber on the base, and ordered him to cut off my braid.

“No,” Corvia refused. “I'm not going to do that to you, Paris, your hair's the prettiest thing about you.” “It'll grow back,” I said, “long hair's just a pain in the ass here, and washing it wastes water, and we don't have much. Cut it just below my ears, hurry up.” Corvia cut my hair. He was no hairdresser. He was used to shaving the men's limp hair, and didn't know what to do with a woman's. He improvised an androgynous cut that made me look like a pageboy in some Renaissance court—or, more prosaically, like an elf, as the guys joked. Zandonà called me Mulan, after the Chinese woman warrior in the cartoon who cuts her hair to pass as a man and fight in the army. I never managed to shake that nickname. I gathered up my braid, put it in a jar, and placed it on top of my locker. First Lieutenant Ghigo pointed out that it attracted flies, and that flies could transmit horrible diseases, so I threw it in the trash, no regrets.

If I sit still for too long, though, first I get depressed, and then I explode. I need action, and I'd trained for a high-risk mission. I'd expected to have to shoot in order to defend a position or a protected site, or to avert an attack, and I was prepared to do it. Peace can be boring sometimes, but so can war. I never imagined it could become a routine, a sequence of empty actions, an interminable pause. I was waiting—but for what? Waiting to get started. But I never did. January came and went, then February, then March began, I lost all sense of the flow of time, and after a while I wouldn't have been able to say what exactly I was waiting for.

*   *   *

The Afghanistan I had dreamed so much about was hostile—the stones, the climate, the roads, the people: all hostile. Even the animals were hostile: there weren't very many of them, and the caracal, that rare wildcat also known as a desert lynx, which I hoped to see and whose tracks I searched for in vain, remained elusive. Apart from the occasional turtledove or sparrow, all I saw during those months were gerbils, desert mice, scorpions, vipers, snakes, ticks, flies, millipedes as long as my finger and whose bite—I learned the hard way—would make your foot swell up like a balloon. But the most unwelcome of all these visitors turned out to be the honey-colored, humpbacked camel spider, with too many legs and long, antenna-like claws. When I had to get dressed in the middle of the night, I would inspect my boots carefully before putting them on. The camel spider loves the dark. Light kills him. And if you happen to flush him out, he hides in your shadow, follows you, clings to you, like a bad dream. I killed dozens of them, and dozens of them ran after me. What do you want? Why are you following me? Go away! I'd say to each spider in turn, prodding it with the tip of my boot. Every country has its totem, be it the kangaroo, the raccoon, the kiwi, the reindeer, the tiger, the bear, or the wolf. For me, that furtive, bellicose spider became Afghanistan's totem. So I decided not to kill them anymore, but to coexist with them. When I found one hiding in the expanded polyurethane foam of my helmet, I would simply shake it out into the sand. It would run away so quickly, following the line of the shade, that it wouldn't even leave tracks in the sand.

The sounds in Afghanistan were hostile. The crackle of the machine gun, the buzz of the attack helicopters that flew right over us toward the mountains, the roar of the cargo planes that delivered provisions, the thunder of the fighter-bombers, the hiss of the unmanned aircraft that accompanied us like an ethereal cloud. The smells were hostile. The stench of shit, of animals, and of men who aren't used to washing regularly or don't have enough water, of motor oil, leaded gas, kerosene, grease, rusty metal. The colors were hostile. Afghanistan—or at least that small corner of it that had been given to me—knew only primary colors. A sad, monotonous yellow prevailed. I've always believed that colors affect our soul and produce a spiritual vibration. Yellow, I thought, had a disturbing influence, like a warning signal. I associated it with traffic lights. Those yellow traffic lights that blink all night long at deserted intersections had always made me nervous. Even though the yellow here wasn't uniform, but changed with the seasons and the intensity of the sunlight, and the tone varied from mustard to peach, from lemon to sawdust, it was still alienating, it upset the mind and could drive you crazy. The sand, the hills, the mountains, and often even the sky were yellow. Yellow was my uniform, desert yellow were the armored and tracked vehicles, light yellow my helmet; my boots were yellow, and so was my sand-covered skin. The country flaunted its foreignness; it was as unfamiliar as the moon—everything seemed corroded by time, as if nothing could possibly last, and that erosion, that disintegration of all things, became the only possible reality.

Everything spoke of death. Skeletons everywhere, of trucks, cars, and tanks—only the burned-out shells remaining—skeletons of homes, schools, mosques, and shops, skeletons of sheep, donkeys, and camels, rubble, ruins, rust. Broken, shattered, useless things. A country without time, where, I learned quickly, a village might be in ruins because of Enduring Freedom bombs a month ago or because of Tamerlane's army six centuries ago. Where people looked like ghosts. The women were invisible or erased by black veils or burqas, but so were the men—anonymous, all dressed in the same traditional white outfit, buried under beards and turbans. We were ghosts, too, driving by in our armored vehicles, erased by our uniforms, made anonymous by our helmets, our bulletproof vests, our sunglasses, by the kaffiyehs we wrapped around our faces to protect them from the sand. I began to feel as if we were already dead.