Shadows had dimmed her mother’s eyes; vertical furrows were carved around her mouth—indelible. Cinzia had always dreamed her daughter would graduate from college. Manuela’s junior high Italian teacher told her that her daughter was a natural student; she had a rare mastery of language and an authentic intelligence, which consists not in the ability to memorize but in the ability to make connections. She was rebellious and her grades were poor, but Mrs. Colella shouldn’t give up or let herself be fooled: she just had to give her time to get to know herself, to accept who she was. She urged her not to waste her daughter’s talent, to consider it her inheritance—a fortune, in other words. And not to listen to people who say there’s no point in studying Greek or philosophy, that Italy isn’t America and social mobility doesn’t exist here. Manuela’s future was in her head. Cinzia, who had only finished junior high and had started working in the factory when she was fifteen, felt proud.
After she was laid off, and the factory closed, she couldn’t make ends meet. She had to swallow the humiliation of accepting a monthly check from her ex-husband. Manuela enrolled in a vocational school that specialized in commercial and tourism management, the branch at Palo Nuova, so she could get there on the Cotral bus. It was a practical degree, good for getting a job. Her mother understood, and she didn’t stand in her way. Sometimes, in the morning, she would take her to class herself. But she never asked her daughter anything. In five years she didn’t go talk to her teachers even once. Stooped, tense, always tired, she never smiled. In that Afghani woman who dragged her plastic flip-flops in the dust at the base, Manuela had recognized the same discontent, the same rage, the same shame at not being able to offer her children something better that had disfigured her mother’s face.
“She wasn’t old, Traian,” Manuela says. “I thought so, too, but it turns out she was my age: twenty-seven.” Traian doesn’t seem particularly struck by this revelation. The photo of an unsightly beggar holds no interest for him. He prefers those of military vehicles, Freccia wheeled tanks, or Dardo armored battle tanks. But now he’s looking for another one. “Look at this, from inside a Lince,” he insists, clicking on the last jpeg of the series, “you’re talking on the radio.” Manuela looks away too late. The news had made the front page in every newspaper—local, national, and online. Headlines in big letters. Next to the photo her brother wants to show her is another one, in color: a heap of burned metal, tires, rags, boots. In the foreground a blood-soaked helmet. Manuela rips the mouse out of her brother’s hand and closes the program. The taste of rust in her mouth. Traian insists she take the pen drive, a present, he really wants her to have it. He collected those articles for her, it’s her story. It must be cool being famous. He wants to end up in the newspapers and on TV one day, too, wants people to recognize him on the street and say, Hey, look, there’s Traian Paris. Manuela should explain to him that celebrity has no value, it doesn’t mean anything, but she doesn’t have the strength.
For the rest of the afternoon, until Vanessa comes to get her, as she battles Traian in Sniper, she keeps asking herself who could have taken that photo of her in the Lince. Every soldier had a camera or cell phone, they were always photographing everything. But at times like that they had other things to think about. They concentrated because a mistake or a distraction could cost them their lives. Alert, mouths dry, their stomachs in knots. It wasn’t nostalgia they were feeling, wanting to be somewhere else, or to go home. Eyes fixed on the square of the windshield, all they looked at was the road, which cut across the plateau: the fresh furrow of the tires, a straight, naked sign in the yellow, naked sand, no reference points, no trees, no poles, nothing at all. They looked at that simulacrum of road that unfurled before them, exactly the same for miles and miles. Searching for obstacles, metallic glints, unnatural bumps, turned earth, abandoned vehicles, unusual swellings, spots, shadows, carrion. And now, from all those months spent in Afghanistan, only one image remains lodged in her memory. That dazzling streak of light—ignited by the sun, swept along by the wind. The cloud of dust coming toward them, which they enter as if entering fog.
* * *
The guest at the Bellavista dines alone in the hotel restaurant and retires to his room at nine thirty. Manuela peeps at him through the living room curtains, and keeps eyeing the hotel all evening while, sitting on the couch next to Alessia, she pretends to watch a cartoon on TV—a story of enchanted castles, witches, and talking scarecrows. It’s a good movie, with great animation and surprisingly sophisticated dialogue, but she can’t manage to follow the plot. Images flash like lightning in her mind and superimpose themselves on the scenes she’s watching, the voices in her head blending with the characters’ voices. She’s sitting in her mother’s tiny living room, and yet she’s not. Swallowed by vertigo, she clings to the arms of the couch so as not to faint, a whirlpool grabs her by the legs and drags her under, down to the bottom of who knows what. She feels like she’s falling, and her foot’s numb again. Her amygdalae—the endocrine glands at the base of her brain—are to blame; her doctor explained it all to her. They create abnormal hormone levels, and the neurotransmitters that act on the hippocampus are affected as well, eroding her memory. A neurological phenomenon, perfectly understandable. Nevertheless, as she watches the movie, her foot is no longer there. And her skull is being crushed with iron tongs.
The guest at the Bellavista Hotel is watching TV, too: an intermittent azure light filters through the shutters, lowered almost to the floor. To judge from the reflections and the colors projected on the walls, it’s the same movie. He doesn’t go outside to smoke. He turns the light out at eleven. He doesn’t suffer from insomnia.
3
HOMEWORK
The forward operating base at Bala Bayak was called Sollum. The name was in honor of a famous WWII battle, and was meant to infect us with the courage of those who had defended the front in the Libyan desert seventy years before. But the base itself reminded me, more than anything else, of a Zen garden: an open box of sand raked by truck wheels and helicopter blades, which stirred up a sandstorm during takeoffs and landings. The following conclusion appears on the first page of the diary I kept while in country. I wrote it on December 23, two hours after our arrival, sitting on my pack, still not sure where I was supposed to bunk: “Arrived at FOB. We’re in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing.”
Ninth Company, Tenth Alpini Regiment was deployed on a rectangular island just under 1,000 feet long and just over 150 feet wide. The perimeter, punctuated by guard towers, was surrounded not by sea but by clouds of barbed wire and other protective barriers that obstructed the view and created the unpleasant sensation of being under siege. To the west stood a mountain, its sharp ridge a woman’s profile, like Monte Circeo, but completely devoid of vegetation. Sollum’s commander, Captain Paggiarin, observed with pleasure that our desert FOB reminded him of the Roman encampments beneath the walls of Masada; seen from the rock cliffs above, the camps in the sand below must have looked like squares drawn in the middle of nowhere, frighteningly vulnerable. Yet it was precisely from those encampments that the Roman legions had gone out to conquer the rebel city. I didn’t know the story of Masada, and didn’t say anything. But to the insurgents lying in wait atop the imposing mountain that dominated the plain, the impression our FOB gave was probably exactly what he’d described: a little fort in the middle of nowhere and—despite the vast number of high-tech weapons—frighteningly vulnerable.
The officers were quartered in small barracks that were either prefabricated or improvised as best as possible out of the ruins of a former Soviet airport, while the enlisted men were in inflatable tents, constantly besieged by the sun. They were not thrilled with their new homes. I’d hear them grumbling among themselves, but they’d go quiet whenever I came near. “I can’t decide if it’s more like a Boy Scout camp or a gypsy settlement,” Rizzo commented sourly. “What were you expecting, a hotel?” Pieri laughed. “So how is it that the guys from the Fifth are in Shindan
d while the Tenth ended up in this shithole?” Schirru muttered. A friend of his assigned to Shaft had extolled the beauty of the immense, fertile valley as well as the carpets of a certain Abdul, who was allowed a stall inside the Task Force Center base. A market was held there every Sunday. Here, nothing but dust and desert. “Clearly the Tenth has no guardian angel,” sighed a lance corporal whose name I hadn’t learned yet. Even in Bala Bayak, conspiracy theories served to explain every injustice. “It was worse in Somalia,” Masera, the QRF sergeant, assured them. “But it’s better in Lebanon,” Santapaola muttered. “They’ve even got the sea.”
I gathered up my gear and, with feigned self-confidence—it weighed fifty pounds—dragged it over to the infirmary. Housing for women is always a problem at FOBs. The officer in charge of logistics, after counting out the tents and the names on the rosters, put the three of us in the same corner of the base, in a container fifteen feet long and six feet wide. On my right, the more sheltered side, was First Lieutenant Ghigo, medical doctor. On my left, the side most exposed to dust and drafts, behind a curtain hanging from a clothesline, Corporal Giani, Quartermaster. I took the middle. I was an NCO, the link between enlisted personnel and the commissioned officers: the middle was my place, my job, and in a certain sense my mission. There were almost two hundred people at Sollum, but only three of us were women. A gunner had been replaced at the last minute because of a cavity in her molar. No one in our medical corps specialized in dentistry so they didn’t let you deploy if you were in danger of getting an abscessed tooth.
I slapped the dust from my cot, unrolled my sleeping bag, folded up my duffel and my pack, took out my bathrobe, and headed for the showers. Guys were in line for the john. There were only twelve of them: chemical toilets, squatters. A few were in line for the showers, too, but I had the key to the one reserved for women. As I walked past I could feel their hostile gazes on the back of my neck. I didn’t give them the satisfaction of turning around. I knew what they thought about privileges for women.
As soon as it got dark, I slipped into my sleeping bag. Though I was exhausted from the trip, I couldn’t fall asleep. The incessant hiss of the generators and the sound of vehicles maneuvering in the square kept me awake. And adrenaline made my blood tingle. For the first time in my life, I was exactly where I wanted to be. This was what I’d been hoping for ever since that evening in November 1992, when the Manuela Paris I recognize as myself was born: the story that led me to Bala Bayak begins way back then. When I was nine years old.
Even though I preferred sports and playing outside to fairies and toy kitchens, I could never even have imagined becoming a soldier. Strange as it may seem, dreams need an echo in reality; you can’t dream of something you can’t conceive of, something you don’t know. And when I was little, Italy was the only country in Europe whose armed forces still didn’t take women. Even Portuguese women could enlist. When it comes to civil rights, Italians are always last. That evening my life lit up. Sprawled on the couch, a greasy cardboard box on my knees, I was dining on pizza, Coca-Cola, and potato chips. Alone, because my mother was racking up overtime at the fish factory, my father was in the hospital recovering from an operation to remove a tumor in his shoulder, and my sister, Vanessa, was rolling around on her bed with a boy in the next room. She had just discovered that her unripe figure made her irresistible to men, whose attention she craved. I kept the television on with the volume cranked up to avoid hearing their grunting. In short, I was at home, alone, wedged between the cushions on the couch, confused, and bored as only a nine-year-old girl who has finished her homework and played with all her toys can be, another day gone without anything happening, the same as yesterday and the day before and tomorrow—when all of a sudden, smiling Amazons appeared on the television screen.
Not the ancient Amazons my grandfather used to tell me about every now and then, woman warriors who would cut off one breast, who had fought at the walls of Troy, and whose captain, Penthesilea, was killed by swift-footed Achilles. No, these were modern Amazons, practically my contemporaries. The news was reporting on an experiment entitled “Italian Women: Soldiers for a Day” or something like that, which thirty young women had participated in. It showed them in uniform, marching in a barracks in Rome. Ordinary women, and yet, to a young girl watching wide-eyed from her tiny living room in Ladispoli, they were already bathed in a mythical glow. In truth it was only a publicity stunt; it would still take several years for the armed forces to accept women for real. But I didn’t know that then, and staring at those women marching happily around the parade grounds, I was overwhelmed, first with amazement and then with joy. I knew instantly that that was where I belonged. And for the first time I let myself think I wasn’t simply some hopeless mess of a girl.
From that moment, since the only books in my house were Reader’s Digests my mother had bought who knows when, and which sat gathering dust on the top shelf in the living room, I started going to the public library in the piazza. I became a compulsive reader. I would devour encyclopedias in search of stories about female warriors and was delighted to discover that there were lots of them, in every era and in every part of the world. I diligently copied out their stories in a small notebook, on the cover of which triumphed the powerful and invincible Sailor Moon, the warrior of love and justice whom I’d by then discovered in TV cartoons, and with whom I identified completely. But Sailor Moon was the invention of an ingenious Japanese writer, also a woman, whereas the female warriors whose deeds I recorded had really existed—or at least that’s what those books made me believe. There was May Senta Wolf Hauler, nicknamed Little Wolf, who in 1917 fought as an Austro-Hungarian infantry soldier in a mountain battle and took defeated Italians prisoner. And the Amazons of Matitina, an island in the Caribbean, near Guadeloupe, where, as Christopher Columbus learned from the natives in his retinue, only women—deadly with bow and arrow—lived; they coupled with males only once a year, no doubt making them take care of the fruits of their union, unless of course they were girls. The Matitina Amazons had fought hard against the Spaniards. But my favorite was an Italian like me, Onorata Rodiani, who at twenty became a soldier of fortune after killing the man who tried to rape her. In the fifteenth century, this woman, disguised as a man, fought for thirty years under several captains, until she was mortally wounded in battle. I never showed that secret notebook to anyone, and when I was twenty, in the throes of depression, I threw it away. I still regret it. But I never forgot the bellicose companions of my youth. For it was with them that I spent those years while I waited to grow up so I could enter the barracks in Rome. The world would still have to change, the laws would have to be reformed, and the Italian army reorganized, but I wasn’t in a hurry. And knowing I’d been born neither too early nor too late, but just at the right moment, gave me a strange strength—the certainty of having a destiny.
And now there I was, in the desert, with my people. At the NCO Academy in Viterbo, when it was time to indicate our preference, I didn’t ask to join the paratroopers or Lagunari—the amphibious assault regiment—the posts my classmates coveted most. I asked to join the Alpini, who were trained for mountain combat, because I was convinced that, throughout our history, they had formed the democratic base of the army, the true infantry of the people. In every Italian war, the Alpini were the only ones who showed they knew not so much what duty was, but what the fatherland was: they communed with the land their fathers and grandfathers had tilled, hoed, and farmed for centuries, with the animals they knew how to raise and slaughter, with the trees they knew how to prune, fell, and turn into firewood and charcoal, with the stones that became roof tiles and walls, with the rocks and mountains that marked Italy’s borders. In short, they really knew how to be Italian. Since I graduated near the top of my class, I got my wish even though I wasn’t born in Alpino territory.
I put my earphones on, the volume low. Death metal is so repetitive it sends me into a trance. I listened to Gory Blister’s Graveyard of Angels CD, just r
ight for the naked yellow cemetery that stretched for miles and miles around me. I dozed off, only to be roused by Giani’s screams. A scorpion under her pillow! First Lieutenant Ghigo grumbled that the sting of an Afghani scorpion is rarely fatal. “But girls, I told you to keep your mosquito nets closed and to inspect your bunks. This place is full of scorpions and camel spiders, it’s no fun finding one in your sleeping bag. Just kill it, okay?” she snorted. But Giani was in a panic. “But how?” she kept repeating. “How? It’s huge, it grosses me out.” Ghigo didn’t move. She was thirty-four, a first lieutenant, an elder, to her we were newbies. In the army, seniority is everything. I unzipped my bag, put on my slippers, and switched on my flashlight—shielding it with my hands, because the base was in blackout. I whistled in astonishment. The scorpion was gold, like a coin, and as big as my hand. It waved its poisonous stinger like a flag. A war machine created by nature. Perfect in its own way, and perhaps necessary in this environment. A sting probably wouldn’t be fatal, but I didn’t feel like finding out. We two were incompatible. Giani’s wide eyes told me it was up to me. I certainly couldn’t ask the guys for help. I was their commander, they would have teased me forever. And besides, they were too far away. I sent the scorpion flying to the floor with a towel and then crushed it with my rifle, thrusting the butt into its abdomen with all my might. I heard a crunching sound, like glass shattering. I was sorry that that scorpion was the one to welcome me to Afghanistan—and that that was how I reciprocated.
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