Mattia asks the waiter to bring two hot chocolates with whipped cream, rubs the tuft of hair on Manuela’s forehead, and says she has quite the imagination for a soldier. In his mind, soldiers are practical types, not susceptible to introspection and melancholy, who live day by day, acting without asking themselves too many questions. He had hoped Sergeant Paris was one of those soldiers—which would be a real rarity for a woman, practically a miracle. But no, he’s not married and never has been. There’s no abandoned wife waiting for him somewhere. And he’s not a criminal. But he doesn’t want to talk about the past, the past doesn’t exist, he wants to live in the present, enjoy every instant as if it were his last, just do things. He downs his hot chocolate quickly, pays, and asks her if she wants to go home. Yes, she does.
* * *
As they cross the bridge in Ladispoli that leads to the shore and join the long line of cars searching slowly, attentively, yet in vain for a parking space, Manuela is wondering how to tell him that she can’t go up to his room. That she likes him, a lot, but she just can’t. Can’t let herself go like that, so soon. She’s not that kind of girl. Not anymore, anyway. When she was twenty, maybe, but army life has changed her, she’s a different person now. But Mattia stops in front of the gate to her building without asking her anything. His high spirits seem to have evaporated. He looks at her as if he’ll never see her again, as if it’s all already over even before it’s begun.
Manuela stalls for time, rummages in her purse, pretending to look for her keys. The Bellavista sign casts bluish reflections on the hood of his Audi. The digital clock on the dashboard says 6:14. Manuela has nothing to do. She sees before her a long evening, empty as the blank pages of the notebook that sits waiting for her: pointless conversation, questions she can’t answer, silence, and then, night. Insomnia, anxiety, benzodiazepine, torpor, nightmares. She doesn’t want to leave him right now. She really likes this large, older, secretive man. “It’s better if you just go,” Mattia says.
Manuela retrieves her crutches from the backseat and opens the door. Mattia doesn’t even turn his head. He stares dully at the dashboard display, the red seat belt light, green for headlights, yellow for heat, the oil gauge, gas gauge, odometer. Anything so as not to meet Manuela’s velvety, disappointed eyes. Tottering on the narrow sidewalk, one elbow resting on the roof, leaning into the car as if unable to tear herself away without a real goodbye, without a plan to meet again, as if they hadn’t just spent three hours in the cold in the middle of a lake, glued to each other, thinking of nothing else. “Is something wrong?” Manuela asks him. “I’m a totally normal girl, even if I know how to command a platoon. And I’m also the kind of soldier you were talking about, I don’t dwell on the past and I don’t ask a lot of questions. I prefer action.” Her voice is uncertain, choked by too many unspoken questions. Mattia hesitates for a second too long, and she has already straightened up. Erect and proud on her crutches, she waits, expecting an explanation, and she deserves one. “I’m sorry, Manuela, but it’s better if I just keep watching you from the balcony,” Mattia says. “Better for whom?” she demands, stiffening. “You don’t know anything about me!” She slams the door and walks away without turning her head.
* * *
“Giovanni called,” Cinzia announces as soon as she realizes her daughter is home. “He’ll call back.” Manuela heads straight for the bathroom so she won’t have to meet her mother’s gaze. The mother who, since she’s come back in pieces, treats her like she’s sixteen, and thinks she can still control her daughter’s life. But I don’t need her help or her pity. She turns on the hot water in the tub. She’s chilled to the bone. Bathe, wash away Mattia’s smell, the traces of his saliva. Never see him again. There’s nothing more humiliating than being rejected.
“He still loves you,” her mother comments, shuffling down the hall in her slippers. “You can’t just throw away such a long engagement like it was nothing. I don’t understand why you don’t get back together with him. You’re almost twenty-eight. It’s time you started a family. A house. A husband. Children. A normal life.” “Mind your own business,” Manuela cuts her off, slamming the door. Her mother steps closer, is about to knock, but then hesitates, her hand resting on the handle. She doesn’t understand Manuela anymore. She had hoped this tragedy would open her eyes. But that’s not the way things went. Manuela doesn’t want to think about the future. And yet she has to muster her strength and accept that it’s over. She has to go it alone, ask to be discharged, collect the money she’s due, and use it to make a new life. It’s not going to be an X-ray that convinces her she can’t be a soldier anymore. “I told Giovanni you were out with Vanessa,” she shouts so as to be heard over the water rumbling in the tub. “I know it’s not true. I’m not asking you who you were with, you’re an adult, it’s your own business. But I decided to lie for you because you’d be happy with Giovanni. He’s a good guy, and he even has a steady job now. A permanent contract.”
Manuela pretends not to hear. She undresses quickly, and throws her clothes in the hamper. She catches her reflection in the mirror over the sink, already steaming up from her bath. Shimmering in the oval fog is an angular, bony body, unnaturally white, still bearing the traces of a tan. Forearms and neck slightly darker than the rest: the only parts of herself the spring Afghan sun had unintentionally settled on during her downtime. But the bright red scars on her right leg stand out against that sickly, white flesh, as if drawn in blood.
* * *
As she eats dinner, sitting in her usual place, looking out on a sliver of stormy sea, Manuela recognizes Mattia’s outline in the shadows. He’s on the balcony of the Bellavista, smoking, and staring at the lights in their apartment, at the Christmas tree which is still up, the shabby couch, the ugly paintings, the calendar from the bank. And at her. Manuela draws the curtains and shuts him out.
At ten Giovanni calls back. He had tried her several times when she was in the hospital, but she never answered. They quickly run out of things to say. Her head, her leg, the operations to reduce and then stabilize her fractures, the metal wires to hold the fragments together, the cement injected in her weakened bones, the shrapnel fragments still inside her. “They might be able to remove some of them, maybe, with more operations. But most will never come out. So now I’m made of steel.” “You’ve always been a bionic woman,” Giovanni says. And then the conversation dies. In the silence, Manuela recognizes the whimper of Giovanni’s griffon Champagne. He’s probably holding the dog in his lap. She gave the dog to him when he was just a puppy, right before she left for Kosovo. He was all ears then, a ball of bristly, honey-colored fur. She’d bought him in her cousin Claudio’s pet shop, to keep Giovanni company during her tour of duty. He sent her pictures almost every day. “Let’s raise our dog until it’s time to have a baby,” he would say, “we can practice on him.” Manuela loved Champagne. Dogs ask for so little—food, some petting, a bit of attention—and give back boundless loyalty. Giovanni asks her why she hasn’t updated her Facebook profile in months. He kept checking her page, but there were no new posts, the last one was from June 7, just a few words, he still remembers them, he’d read them a hundred thousand times. “48° C in the shade. Just before sunset, and the sky is a deep blue, like the bottom of the sea. We rotate out in 13 days. Too bad, I could stay here a whole year, I’m happy here.”
Manuela says that her life stopped on June 8, and now the thought of telling her 258 so-called friends on Facebook what she’s up to seems completely absurd. “But I’m not one of your so-called friends on Facebook,” Giovanni interrupts, surprised. “You were supposed to marry me in the Our Lady of the Rosary Church. You already had a ring.” “But we didn’t get married,” Manuela says. “You can have the ring back if you want, it’s too tight, I never wear it.”
Giovanni prefers not to push it. He asks her when she’s going to come see him. He lives in Civitavecchia now, he bought a house, his parents helped him out. “Did you get your degree?” Manuel
a asks him. No, in the end he dropped out. He only had five more exams, but the fees were too high and he just couldn’t juggle work and school. When he won a place as a regional employee, category C, he started working eight hours a day, and he just couldn’t do both. The last exam he took was two years ago. Manuela says it’s a shame not to finish university after all the effort he put in, especially when he was so close. She thinks he should reconsider. Giovanni says it’s not worth it now. “This is what studying like crazy all those years got me, Manuela—all through our twenties, our best years. Do you realize that the reason I could never visit you in Viterbo was I had to get my engineering degree? It kills me to think I lost you for a civil service job in the Civitavecchia jail.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Manuela interrupts him. “It just didn’t work, I wasn’t the right wife for you. In fact, you know what I think? You don’t need a wife. It’s the last thing you need.” Giovanni swallows the insult, but insists she at least come see his place. It’s brand-new, 700 square feet in a new development, terraced homes, with a yard, a view of the sea, she’d like it. Manuela won’t settle on a date, but promises she’ll call him in the next few days. Cinzia, who has been eavesdropping on bits of their conversation, sighs with satisfaction. Her daughter will change her mind by January 12.
Manuela dilutes her benzodiazepine drops in a glass of water and gulps them down. Vanessa’s not back yet so it’s up to her to put Alessia to bed. She helps her get into her pajamas. They’re acrylic, so as she puts them on they give off a crackling wave of sparks. Manuela can’t fall asleep. Tension makes her spine crack, her muscles ache, and her neck burn. She has a headache and nausea. Today of all days, the first time since June 8 that she hasn’t once thought about Afghanistan. Not in the Audi, not on the paddleboat, not in the café. No sickly sweet taste of blood in her mouth, no sound of the explosion, no stink of burnt flesh. Today she had been her old self again, as if it really were possible to forget what had happened. Push a button and erase it all—painlessly. And reconnect with her interrupted existence.
Mattia is still on the balcony. He’s waiting for her. But what more is there to say? Whatever it was he was searching for in her, he didn’t find. It all went wrong, though she doesn’t know why. She reads the first chapter of a story about a mouse to Alessia, but the girl wants her mother. Vanessa’s still not back, what a wild one, she certainly knows how to dive headfirst into life. Alessia lies stiff under the covers, her fists clenched, listening for a noise on the stairs, waiting for her mother. She struggles to stay awake, though sleep closes her eyes. “Go, Aunt Manù,” she says every once in a while, “go away.” She doesn’t fall asleep until page seven. Manuela doesn’t go out onto the balcony to smoke. Instead she goes back into the pink bedroom, the walls covered with Hello Kitty posters. She’s dazed but awake. The drops don’t do anything for her anymore. She should increase the dose. But she needs to take it slow. The bottle’s almost half-empty and she can’t refill it without a new prescription. She won’t be able to sleep tonight and she’s afraid she won’t be able to control her anxiety. That she’ll feel sick, vomit until she rips her insides out. She places a plastic tub next to her bed, just in case. She undresses in front of the window. She takes off her jeans, then her sweater. She stands there naked. The shutters are open. She hasn’t drawn the curtains, and her bedside lamp is on. She knows he’s there, on his balcony at the Bellavista, and that he’s looking at her.
7
HOMEWORK
The first time I heard Corporal Zandonà’s voice was on a Sunday. The army chaplain was celebrating mass in the big tent, and all the company soldiers and officers at the FOB who were free went. Some out of conviction, some out of boredom—nothing else to do—others out of fear that their absence would be noted. I was going, too, for that very reason. But I was running late. I’d washed my hair and that day the water had barely dripped from the showerhead. I shivered for a long time under a trickle too meager to rinse out the shampoo, my teeth chattering because even though the sun was hot during the day, springlike almost, at night the temperature dropped below freezing. The cold froze the pipes, drained camera batteries, jammed the heating units in the tents and containers, turned puddles into ice. The chaplain’s booming voice, distorted slightly by the speakers, echoed in the unnatural silence of the base. All of a sudden I heard music. Notes dribbling out, staccato, a vague melody I thought I recognized. It was coming from the soldiers’ tents. I stuck my head in the last one as I rushed past on my way to mass. The soldier with the red hair, the mute, Boy, O Bebè, Baby, Nail—Zandonà, in other words—was sitting cross-legged on his cot, strumming a guitar. He kept playing the same chord, but the melody eluded him.
His sleeping bag was all scrunched up and his bunk was a mess. A clear sign of a lack of both initiative and responsibility. I should have pointed it out, told him he risked getting written up. That’s what another commander would have done. Some officers issued warnings, reprimands, even restricted soldiers’ movements for much less. Once, when I was a private, my squad sergeant had said, “I’m not seeing my reflection in your boots, Paris.” And then he canceled my leave.
I hesitated at the tent flaps. Tightly rolled sleeping bags, neat cots, orderly lockers. The fetid smell of grease, sweat, men’s dirty feet. The smell of every barracks in the world, perhaps the most disgusting aspect of military life. It had followed them all the way to the desert. “You play, Zandonà?” I asked him. “I used to play. Now I just practice, so I won’t lose the dexterity in my fingers. Music keeps me company. Music is free.” His unexpected burst made me move closer. Amid the cookie crumbs on his cot was a tattered paperback with a seagull on the cover. “Are you sure everything’s okay?” I asked him. “If there’s a problem, if some of the older guys are picking on you, you can always come talk to me. I’m here to help you, I want you all to be okay.” “If I tell you everything sucks, Sergeant, what will you do, ship me home?” Zandonà asked, lifting his fingers off the strings for a minute. “We just got here, Nail, you want to go home already?”
“I called at seven this morning,” Zandonà said glumly. “It must have been three in the morning in Italy. The phone just rang and rang. My girlfriend didn’t sleep at home last night. And her cell was turned off.” “It was Saturday, she probably went out dancing,” I said. “You can’t expect her to live by your watch, it doesn’t do you any good to assume the worst right away. You have to try and keep your jealousy in check. Otherwise, what are you going to do three months from now?” “She’s mad at me, she didn’t want me to leave. But I wasn’t about to ask her permission. She told me I was an ass.” “I don’t agree,” I said. “I was wrong to come, it’s nothing like what I thought it would be,” Zandonà said. “I don’t like anything here, this is an evil country, one huge reeducation camp, we came here to liberate them and instead we’re being held prisoner by the very people we liberated.” “No one’s holding you prisoner,” I corrected him. “If you want to be repatriated, talk to the psychiatrist. You wouldn’t be the first and you certainly won’t be the last. This place is for people who are motivated.” Zandonà didn’t reply. He tuned his guitar and played the whole refrain this time. “It really got to me the way that Afghani looked at us yesterday,” he said in a low voice. “I can’t get it out of my head.”
It was our first Afghani. The first one we were afraid of. The kids had stopped throwing rocks. The commander had spoken to the village leaders, who must have been quite convincing. Now they waved to us, and if any of them approached, it was to ask for a snack or a bottle of water. It happened during a zigzag convoy around the Ring Road. We were escorting a diesel generator, a current transformer, and a 100-kilowatt immersion pump for the well in a village five kilometers from the base. In our first in-country briefing, Captain Paggiarin informed us that Operation Reawakening’s primary objective was to expand the security bubble around the FOB. It was supposed to be twenty kilometers by the end of June. But he wanted to achieve our objectiv
e well before then, to score a quick win, maybe even exceed it, to demonstrate initiative, skill, and prudence to the brigade’s general commander. And he wanted to do it all without losing a single soldier, and if possible not a single vehicle either—the cost of a Lince made it just as precious as human life. Our superiors were highly competitive; they gambled with their careers in Afghanistan. Anyone who stayed in Italy was convinced he’d been wronged; he worried there wouldn’t be enough time for his own company to deploy, that he would miss out on the war. Paggiarin didn’t want to give his disgruntled colleagues the slightest cause for complaint. He was hoping for a quick promotion to major. I could understand his ambition. Paggiarin was known for having no particular talent, but for surrounding himself with competent subordinates. Since he’d chosen me, I hoped it was true.
At the moment, he told us, the bubble around Sollum didn’t exceed five kilometers. There were no insurgents, weapons, or suspects within this perimeter, which had already been searched and cleared. But as soon as we went beyond that invisible boundary, we entered hostile territory. So it was necessary to enlarge the security zone as soon as possible. He was planning on extending it one kilometer a day. The Ninth and the Afghani Kandak soldiers were patrolling the sixth kilometer, and had already started to make the first arrests. Unfortunately, there were IEDs everywhere, and they had to keep stopping to defuse them, so the operation was advancing slowly. Just five kilometers! I thought to myself. That’s a lot less than the range of a mortar. How much time would it take to build outposts and secure the FOB? But the transformer and pumps had to be delivered right away. If we were too generous, the village chief would consider us weak, wouldn’t respect us, would deceive us. But if we weren’t generous enough, he’d nurse secret hostilities. “He who begins well is already halfway there,” Paggiarin would say. So we pushed on toward the village, at the edge of the security zone.
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