Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  Even though our vehicles were painted with camouflage so as to blend in with the sand, even though we carried only the gear that was absolutely necessary so as not to appear openly aggressive, our column moved too slowly to remain invisible. I’ve always liked looking through the sight of a rifle, but knowing I could be in someone else’s sight was nerve-racking. We had to assume we were surrounded by a malevolent presence, an attitude that could, over time, cause paranoia. Jodice was in the gun turret of the Lince. His record indicated that he had performed well on his previous five foreign tours of duty. His obvious state of nervous excitement worried me, but I did my best to control myself. “Zero-three, Aragorn reports a Toyota Corolla approaching,” the radio crackled all of a sudden. “Aragorn reports a Toyota Corolla approaching.”

  It was always the same damn make, in every attack. It was the most common one, after all. The most anonymous. It had made Corolla one of the most unwelcome words in the Stan vocabulary. “From where, Aragorn?” I asked. “Victor Papa right, two hundred meters, it’s advancing toward you, zero-three, advancing.” “I can’t see a damn thing,” Zandonà cursed. Even though he was keeping regulation distance—twenty-five meters—from the vehicle in front of us, the dust those armored vehicles kicked up was as dense as fog. He was driving blindly. Then I heard Jodice shout something in English. We were approaching the intersection, and he was ordering the driver of the Toyota Corolla to stop. The rule was that no civilian vehicle could ever join a column—not for any reason. But the car kept approaching at a steady speed toward the critical point, and it wasn’t stopping. Jodice, this time his voice frantic with fear, again ordered it to stop or else he would shoot. The echo of machine-gun crackle inside the Lince. Jodice’s Browning fires off an entire belt. “God, no,” Zandonà prayed, “please don’t let us be the guys who get one on our third time out.”

  The car has stopped, the door is open. Thick smoke that smells of gas and burnt oil is billowing out of the muffler. The driver is right there, standing next to the car, completely still, his hands up. Jodice didn’t lose his head, he followed procedure, he fired into the air. The Afghani who had caused the panic was a twenty-year-old kid. He wasn’t wearing a turban or a pirhan tonban, the traditional white outfit, but a normal checked jacket and a pair of jeans ripped at the knee. He didn’t have hostile intentions, merely the stunned expression of someone chewing naswar, his lip puffed with a small ball of the opium-and-tobacco mix. He hadn’t heard the order to stop because he had the radio on full blast: music pumped through the open door into the dumbfounded silence of the desert. The whistling refrain, intoned by a mournful male tenor, was right out of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. A romantic melody that probably spoke of love.

  “Do you know who that song is by?” Zandonà said. “Is that what you were trying to play?” I asked, curious. “Ahmad Zahir, a real star in Afghanistan in the seventies, kind of like Little Tony, an overweight Al Bano with a big nose and sideburns. His father was a prime minister and he became a musician, he sang, played the accordion, gave concerts all over the country; as if Berlusconi’s son were to become a pop star. He died when he was thirty-three, just like Christ, assassinated maybe, that was thirty years ago, but people still listen to his music. You can hear it on YouTube, his fans post super-low-fi videos—tulips and beaches with palm trees, I don’t know why, since they don’t have any beaches here. The arrangements are really basic—trumpets, drums, piano, sometimes strings. But Zahir had a beautiful voice. The lyrics run along the bottom of the videos, karaoke style, I think they’re taken from classical poets, like if Iva Zanicchi had sung one of Petrarch’s sonnets at Sanremo. They’ve never been translated, but I like them even though I can’t understand the words. Music doesn’t need a dictionary.”

  Even after we drove past, that Afghani kid just stood there on the edge of the road, his hands in the pockets of his jeans and the ball of naswar in his mouth. The song followed us for a few minutes, as we paraded, as if in slow motion, down the empty road. That spaghetti western whistle suited the scene—the dust, the soldiers, the rifles, the endless horizon—but at the same time it seemed to mock us. “He looked at us as if we were an inconvenience,” Zandonà said, “the way we’d look at the lowered bar at a railroad crossing.”

  * * *

  Those first weeks at Sollum really tested me, as a soldier but also as a person. The responsibility wore on me, the physical exertion exhausted me. I was afraid of disappointing myself and my superiors, of not being suited for command, just like that officer had predicted many years ago. A soldier’s first duty is discipline. If someone of higher rank tells you to do something, you have to do it. Period. And when I was a corporal I obeyed. I was in the army, but I worked in an office; I Xeroxed, answered the phone, and brought my boss coffee, just like a secretary. But I was never fully resigned to it. Angelica Scianna showed me the way out. I didn’t even know the Modena Academy existed. Angelica was as blond as a Norman, as slender as a gazelle. We were born on almost the same day, the same year, so we thought of ourselves as twins. I shared a room—and a whole lot more—with her for nearly a year. We recognized each other, loved each other right away, like Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune, the warriors of the wind and the deep sea we had both adored as girls. We loved each other the way you can only when you’re eighteen, a despotic, exclusive love. We lived together in infantry barracks in Friuli. We trained together on steep Alpine trails, and together we tamed the mountains—we who had both been born on the coast. Together we made photocopies and answered the phone in the public relations office, and we smiled at the barracks commander who thought we were cute (Angelica much more than me, to tell the truth) and called us his Praetorians. One night, while we were doing guard duty at a dump in desolate terrain in southern Italy where our regiment had hastily been detached, she said that we were only in an unpleasant holding pattern; the two of us couldn’t keep wasting away in the heap of dead bodies that constituted the rank and file. No, we would become—at the very least—parachute officers or fighter pilots.

  I started to think of my twelve months’ enlistment as a sort of purgatory, a boring but necessary apprenticeship. Modena was my goal. I sent in my application. I wanted to get a degree in strategic studies. There were almost nine thousand candidates for one hundred and two places. I had no confidence but plenty of hope, and hope is stronger: as irrational and irresistible as faith. In February I was summoned to the Selection and Recruitment Center in Foligno, to take a preselection quiz. I’d never even heard of Foligno before, I had no idea how to get there. But Foligno rhymes with tomorrow: it sounded like a promise. The train station was deserted, just clusters of kids in winter coats roaming the platform and spilling into the large piazza out front, marching toward the hotels where they would spend the night.

  Angelica and I slept at the youth hostel. There was a group of boys from Naples in the room across the hall. Still in their last year of high school, they didn’t even have their diplomas yet. They wanted to hang out, but Angelica and I ignored them. Even though we’d applied as civilians because we hadn’t accumulated enough service time to apply as internal candidates, we already felt like soldiers, whereas they were still children. And besides, we didn’t feel like making friends. Mors tua, vita mea. We hoped they’d all fail the next morning. At nine thirty I was already at my desk. I didn’t take my eyes off my paper for two hours. But I knew that Angelica was seated somewhere behind me, and her presence comforted me. The room was freezing cold, and there was a ghostly silence, all you could hear was the rain tapping on the roof, and a subtle sigh—like a collective breath. The results would be posted at four, so Angelica and I decided to wait and catch the last train home. But four became five, and then six, and in the end we raced to the station without knowing if we’d ever be in Foligno again. We boarded the Intercity, and I stood in the back of the car, my nose pressed against the window, staring at the lights of Foligno as they twinkled in the darkness like in a nativity scene. A Recruitin
g Center employee called the following day to tell me that Paris Manuela had scored 26,176 points. “You came in fifth, you’re in,” he explained, “you’ll get an official letter, you’ll need to come back for more tests.” I let out a whoop as soon as I hung up. Angelica beamed. All she said was I told you so.

  At the end of April I returned to Foligno for physical and aptitude tests. This time I stayed at the barracks: candidates were given room and board. I might be there for a week or for two days, it depended on how the tests went. It was a sort of elimination competition. Eight hundred of us were left. Just over a hundred would make it to the training. There were still too many of us. Too many women, too. I counted sixty-five. We joked cordially in the dining hall, traded advice. This was the third time for some, who were respected as veterans. But I tried to see them through the selection committee’s eyes. Some displayed a less than soldierly rotundity, others an anorexic frailty. “After all,” a rubicund girl from Sassari said, “an officer has to have more brains than muscle, which is why you get fewer points for the physical. In theory you can get thirty on the written quizzes, but you can’t get more than six total on your physical.” I said I agreed. Still, as soon as I’d submitted all my documents and certificates, I put on my sweats and went for a run on the track, to keep in shape—I had to capitalize as best I could my excellent physical condition because, if I made it to the next level, I’d have to take the math test, and I was sure I’d only score a few points there. On the evening of the second day, all happy, I called Vanessa to tell her I’d passed the physical: I’d run a thousand meters in three minutes and thirty-seven seconds and completed the set of push-ups in two minutes—even though the other women let me know that our superiors were willing to turn a blind eye if we crumbled. I chose to do the optional tests as well, so I jumped a meter twenty and climbed a four-meter rope. I earned five and a half points.

  That evening my companions shared their anxieties; they envied my height, my agility, my fitness. They had asthma, or were allergic to mites, or had celiac disease; they had flat feet or scoliosis with a Cobb’s angle over fifteen; they were nearsighted, or had had laser surgery to improve their eyesight. They had very little chance of passing the medical exam. Yet not one of those women gave up. They kept trying; they had my same determination. They were even prepared to lie. I’ll never lie, I told myself, scandalized, how can you build a career based on a lie? If I were lacking some essential requirement, I would simply accept that I had to give up my dream. Forgive my intransigence. I wasn’t even twenty years old.

  The doctors examined X-rays of my bones and my lungs. In those translucent films clipped to the light wall, I saw myself dead. It was a strange sensation. I didn’t want to die, I’d never felt an attraction to death, life was bursting inside of me. Then they moved on to the joints in my hands, back, and feet. They asked if I’d ever broken any bones or had surgery. “I’ve never set foot in a hospital my whole life” was my arrogant response. “Next they’ll check my teeth, like a horse,” I joked later with Vanessa. “But they didn’t find a damn thing. I got four point five, the top score, physically I’m a hundred percent.” “What is this, eugenics?” Vanessa laughed, “not even the Nazis went that far.” “No, it’s more like a video game,” I said, “they eliminate us one by one. Only the best survive.” “Strength and Honor, sister,” Vanessa joked. “You bet, I’ll call you tomorrow,” I replied.

  By the evening of the third day, the center had emptied out. Twenty-six women were left. We were awaiting the psychological aptitude test, the most feared, because the psychologist’s evaluation was absolute, final. No appeal, no second chance. If he tore you apart, if he wrote “introvert” or “rigid personality traits,” it’d be all over. The other women kept saying that the psychologist would give us the third degree, try to make us crack. He’d insult us, keep us waiting, standing in the hallway for three hours, just to throw us off. He’d treat us like idiots, or spoiled children. You had to stay calm, not take the bait, ignore his provocations. Above all, don’t bite your nails or drum your fingers, and do not sweat. They never take the ones who sweat. Other women said those were all just myths. The key was to show you were motivated, but not a fanatic. And above all, don’t lie. Don’t pretend to be someone else. “Be yourself,” Angelica urged me, which is what her brother, an airman, had told her, “and it’ll go just fine.” That might have been easy for the blond Angelica. But I didn’t know who I was yet.

  That night I was seized with fear. Being so close to my goal made me suddenly realize that I might fall short. I couldn’t sleep. I washed my face with cold water and at nine stepped into the meeting room, pale and tense. But I had dry palms and enough grit to tear the world to pieces. I closed the door and sat facing the military examiner behind the desk. He was close to retirement, with a short, pointy beard. “Did you close the door?” he asked me. I nodded with a smile. I already knew that trap. A big blond kid from Matera, who’d fallen for it the year before, had told me about it in February. If you turn around to check, it shows that you’re anxious and insecure, and that you don’t remember what you did five seconds ago. You’re not trustworthy, you’d never be able to command or become an officer. They kick you out right away. “I shut it,” I answered, looking straight at him. The psychologist’s eyes were gray and inexpressive, like reinforced concrete.

  I told Vanessa very little—and even that unwillingly—about the psych visit and the aptitude test. “I didn’t understand anything about it, all I did was answer, they asked me a ton of questions, to trip me up, I think. I was supposed to answer true or false. I was supposed to tell the truth, but maybe I contradicted myself, it was embarrassing.” “What kind of questions?” Vanessa was surprised. “I don’t know, if I ever lie, if I’m bothered by being teased, if I have nightmares, if I feel inadequate personally, if I worry about what others think of me, if I believe in myself.” “And what did you say?” “I tried to make a good impression,” I answered. My sister waited in vain for me to phone with the results. I never called.

  I crowded around the bulletin board with the other women who’d made it this far. Standing on tiptoe, craning over the shoulders of an aspiring officer shorter than me, I scanned the list of names, my heart in my throat. Pacini, Parenti, Paris. Paris Manuela. Unfit. I read and reread the list, hoping there’d been some sort of mistake. That I’d read it wrong. That the unfit was Parenti Tiziana, or Pastore Margherita. But no. It was me. I felt I was dying. As I stared at my name, so tiny behind the glass clouded with fingerprints, my future passed before my eyes with piercing clarity. The companions who could finally have become my friends, but whom I’d already lost, having only just met them, a group of young women like me who would finally have made me feel like I was part of something, who would have torn me from my solitude, from that feeling of floating in a void that had made my adolescence so liquid and listless. It was the work I felt I’d been born to do. But no.

  I slipped away silently, making my way past the lost friends of my future, my true friends, the ones you choose, with whom you share the most exhilarating years of your youth. The name Scianna Angelica—fit to command—burned before my eyes. Me no, her yes. It was all over. I walked to the station, and this time I knew I would never return to Foligno. That name would be forever hateful to me. Foligno rhymes with sorrow. I boarded the train almost without realizing it, like a sleepwalker, and without realizing it I got off in Rome. I let myself be swallowed by the escalators that sank into the abyss of the subway tunnel, by the crowded subway car where a dark-skinned man was playing the accordion, begging in vain for change. I emerged into the open air, and walked toward the bus station. The bus for Ladispoli already had its motor running. But I let the automatic door close, and watched as it disappeared down the end of the street. I wanted to be alone. Because the pain was all mine, and I didn’t want to show or share it.

  But the bus station was on a street swarming with people, gushing out of the subway like water. I couldn’t go home.
Or to the barracks. Not like this, not having been defeated. I started to run along a broad street lined with ancient plane trees, furrowed by clanging trams and orange buses. I passed a high school with students milling around out front. I kept running, through intersections and stoplights to where the trees seemed to draw back like a theater curtain, framing a slice of rosy sky. That open space signaled the end of the street. Rome began again on the other side. In between was the river.

  The Tiber slid by below, imprisoned between massive walls. A turbid brown line flowing swiftly south. A plastic bottle bobbed along, carried by the current. To be that bottle, carried off by some powerful, dark force, unable to put up any resistance. Till then, I’d spent my life swimming upstream. It’s easier to accept your destiny. Just let yourself go. It was already evening, and the riverbanks were deserted. I hurled myself down the steep stairs, sliding on wet leaves that had turned to slimy muck in the rain. I fell and banged my knee, and didn’t even notice the pain. After all, I’d always known how to endure physical pain. It was the other kind of pain I didn’t know how to deal with. I kept running along the riverbank, bridge after bridge, until I was out of breath. Then I stopped and let myself fall. Flat on my back, arms open wide, hair fanning out among the trash and the leaves the wind had ripped from the plane trees, some green, others rust-colored or as brown as the earth. Above me, interlacing branches filled with screeching birds, the city lights flickered, the first car headlights crossed the bridge. An incessant flow, a current from which I was excluded. Blocked, extraneous, rejected. Unfit.