They load little dishes with baby artichokes, burrata, and goose salami. They set out the soup tureen filled with lentils and homemade cotechino that Cinzia cooked two hours earlier, turn on the portable stereo Vanessa lent them, tune in to a local radio station playing trance music, light the gas heater and candles, and huddle on the tablecloth. “To us, and to you, Mattia, whoever you are,” Manuela says pointedly, hoping he’ll finally tell her something about himself. But he doesn’t take the bait. “To you, Manuela, whoever you are,” he echoes, raising his glass. Outside, the wind whistles and bends the tamerisks, working its way through the windows. The sea laps against the beach. Every now and then a passing train makes the panes tremble and the fragile walls shake. They eat slowly, silently, savoring the food and each other’s company.
At ten o’clock they go out onto the beach. With their coats, scarves, and hats, they’re transformed into woolen ghosts. Manuela says that in Italy the sky isn’t real, light pollution has suffocated the stars. Mattia says the stars are still there, even if they can’t see them. “Things don’t need us in order to exist.” As their eyes adjust to the darkness, constellations start to emerge. But looking south, toward Rome, the city lights project a whitish reflection onto the sky, a glimmer that fringes and dispels the night. They walk in the opposite direction, following the darkness, until Manuela’s knee starts to protest. At eleven they’re stretched out on the mattress—that, too, on loan from Vanessa and Youssef—he in his socks and she in his coat, because the heater has a limited range, beyond which you freeze. They’re so intertwined, so intent on penetrating each other’s body, on exchanging fluids and moods, on breathing and drinking each other in, on touching each other and whispering words, if not exactly of love then of something pretty close, that they don’t even notice when the overexcited DJ starts counting down to the stroke of midnight—ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, Happy New Year!
Manuela’s cell phone finally rouses them. It’s Vanessa, calling to wish them a happy new year. The former Gas Works is pumping out techno music at a hellish volume, Vanessa is totally wasted and spits out incoherent phrases, Manuela can’t understand a word. “Who are you with?” Manuela asks, alarmed. “Who’s there with you?” “A shitload of people,” Vanessa shouts, “I met some real nice people, honey.” A man’s voice butts in, annoyed. “Vanessa’s giving me a blow job, I’m sandpapering her tonsils…” “Fuck you,” Vanessa laughs, “Happy New Year, hon, Happy New Year to your friend, too, the KGB spy, I love you, honey, have fun!” “Vanessa? Who are you with, Vanessa?” but her sister has already hung up.
A second later, Giovanni calls, she hears music in the background again, but more suffused this time—George Michael, Boy George: 1980s throwbacks, like at a house party. They exchange perfunctory greetings. Her mother calls, Traian and Teodora Gogean, Puddu from Barbagia, Pieri from Como, Giani from Ortona, Vito from Siracusa, her cousin Claudio. Lots of Pegasus and Ninth Company guys send text messages, Sergeant Piscopo from Logistics and Serra from EOD, Lance Sergeant Spina, the Alpini on duty at the Salsa barracks in Belluno, the nurses from the Celio, and Scilito from the hospital in Turin. Even an “unidentified caller.” “Manuela?” says a musical feminine voice, “I love you, amore mio, Happy New Year.” “Who is this?” Manuela asks, the voice is hard to make out, as if it were coming from very far away. “It’s Angelica, Angelica Scianna.” “Oh God, Angelica!” she exclaims, because she really wasn’t expecting to hear from her, “I love you, too, Happy New Year, but where are you?” The voice is gone, though, the call dropped. The texts keep coming, at least forty of them.
“You have a lot of friends,” Mattia says. “Some are numbers I don’t recognize, I don’t even know who they are,” Manuela says, making light of it. “They probably sent a group text to everyone on their contact list.” She doesn’t want to depress or hurt him, because she realizes that while she was answering calls and fiddling with her phone and wishing parents, friends, Alpini, sappers, cousins, and strangers a happy new year, Mattia’s cell was silent. Not a single call from his mother, father, relatives, or friends. As if he were all alone in the world. Well, he does receive one phone call, which he answers. “Thank you so much for thinking of me,” he says formally, as if speaking to his boss. “Happy New Year to you, too.” A pause, the other person says something, but he turns away, to keep her from hearing, and she can only make out one word: soon. “Thank you, I know, I understand. Happy New Year.” Manuela would like to ask him who is the lone interlocutor who has modestly inserted himself in their celebration. But Mattia didn’t interfere with her calls, so she can’t.
They pop the champagne—kept cold on the veranda—at 12:46. They wish each other a happy new year, link arms, and empty their glasses. She’s not used to drinking, and the alcohol goes straight to her head. They go out to the beach and watch the glow of fireworks erupting above Palo Castle. There’s a huge party going on there. In town, someone is still shooting off rockets, firecrackers, and cherry bombs, too, but fortunately they’re far away, so the noise is muffled, innocuous. “We should have bought some fireworks, too, Catherine wheels and fountains,” Mattia says. “I bought some from a Chinese guy last year. They shot out green, red, and white, like the flag, you would have liked them.” “I don’t like fireworks anymore,” Manuela says. “They remind me of tracer bullets, smoke bombs, things I saw over there. You know what I’d like?” she adds nostalgically. “I’d like to have my Excalibur here. That’s what I called my rifle, a Beretta SC 70/90. I was used to having it with me all the time. It became a part of my body. I miss it, I don’t know where to put my hands anymore—don’t laugh, you can’t understand. Excalibur has a cadence of six hundred and seventy rounds a minute, and an effective firing range of four hundred meters. I’d put a bottle on the shoreline and fire at it from here. My aim wasn’t very good—to tell you the truth, I was hopeless. When I was a private, my instructor told me it was because I’m left-handed. That I’d never become a good shot, never get my dream job. I dreamed of becoming a mountain explorer, or a gunner even, imagine. Not even if I tied my left arm behind my back and learned to use my right, he said. There would always be someone better than me. But I tried, and I improved. My hands stopped shaking, and they still don’t. I wouldn’t miss the bottle at this distance. It would shatter into a million pieces, and bring us good luck. You have to break things on New Year’s Eve.”
“Shoot it without bullets, without hurting it,” Mattia says. He places the champagne bottle at the far end of the yard, near the fence, on a wooden crate. Manuela positions herself to take aim, rests her elbow on her knee, closes one eye and pretends to place the other on the scope, to grasp the barrel, to chamber a round. She’s about to pull the trigger but instead she gets up, biting her lip in pain. “I can’t hold that position anymore,” she says. “I guess I should give up. But I never give up. I don’t surrender.”
Mattia puts his arm around her shoulders. “You’re young, Manuela, you see everything in black and white. For you, things are either right or wrong, good or bad. But that’s not how things really are. Nothing is white forever. Everything changes color. A piece of fruit, a baby’s hair, voices, even shadows. Sometimes white becomes black, bad becomes good, and vice versa. Refraction, that’s the secret. When light rays enter a medium with a different density—and this is true for sound and thermal waves, too—they bend. Things act on each other, they don’t exist in a vacuum, one without the other. They influence and change each other over time. They change color, understand? One day, what now seems to you a punishment and an unjust penalty may turn out to be an opportunity.”
“I don’t believe it,” Manuela says, “and besides, I don’t have time to wait, I want things now, now is what matters to me.” She hurls a stone at the bottle and knocks it off the crate. Palo Castle has quieted down and they can hear the sound of the sea again. The temperature is near freezing. They go back inside. But she says he has to take her home now. “Why?”
he asks, surprised. “Because I don’t want you to see me sleeping,” Manuela says. “I take sleeping drops, but I still scream, and I wake up every night and throw up. I don’t want to ruin everything.” “I snore, I broke my nose playing rugby,” Mattia says, “and in the morning my beard’s already a quarter of an inch long, it grows on its own, like on dead people. But I won’t scare you and you won’t scare me. I can’t even imagine not sleeping next to you tonight, Manuela. You’re the person I want to see first thing tomorrow morning, as soon as I open my eyes.” “Are you superstitious?” she teases him. “Do you really believe you’ll have good luck if the first person you meet on the first day of the new year is a woman?” “I’m not superstitious,” he says, blowing out the candles. “I’m happy.”
13
HOMEWORK
Pegasus had accrued ninety-six hours of leave. Since there was nowhere in Afghanistan to spend it, the only possible destination was Dubai. But there wasn’t enough room on the C-130 for everyone, and just getting to Herat was already complicated enough. The helicopters that delivered supplies and spare parts were overloaded, and besides, there were too few of us, the commander couldn’t leave the base undefended at such a critical juncture. The soldiers realized that only those who were wounded or had suffered a serious family tragedy would be granted leave. It didn’t exactly help morale but no one complained, at least not to me. They found out that Colonel Minotto’s sister had died the month before, and he wasn’t even allowed to go to the funeral. But after the firefight in the gorge, the captain authorized the four guys from 06, the Lince that got blown up, to take some time in Dubai—even though they only had mild abrasions—and maybe one other who was showing signs of psychophysical breakdown. Better one less stressed-out soldier than one more ineffective one. The difficult season had begun. As for Andrea Pieri, the doctors insisted he be shipped back to Italy. He was still shaken from being thrown from his Lince, his tour of duty was done. Michelin was desperate to stay, though, and he begged me on his knees not to dishonor him like this, he wanted to remain at his post, with his comrades. He had a right to. He’d recover, so we decided instead to send him to Dubai with Zanchi, Curcio, Montano, and Mason. But who else?
Lance Sergeant Spina and I held long and painful secret meetings. The soldiers spied on us, anxious. We agreed on some right away: no leave for Martelli, Schirru, Lando, Rizzo, Venier. Spina suggested Giovinazzo, Good Egg: he was married and his wife was prepared to pay her way to meet him. Or else Puddu: his mother was dead and his father had had heart surgery the year before. I should have remembered Zandonà. Our guitar player performed more than honorably during the attack, but the experience had shaken him badly. He was drained; he needed to recharge his batteries or he wouldn’t make it through his whole tour of duty. But I made a different choice, and I paid for it. “Jodice,” I said. “His girlfriend’s pregnant, when he left he didn’t know, and when he gets back she’ll practically be due, he has a right to get used to feeling like a father.”
Corporal Giani wanted to go to the TFS base at Farah. She’d been begging me every other day for a month to put in a good word for her with First Lieutenant Russo. “He listens to you,” she would say, when I explained to her that I didn’t have any say in the matter. “He trusts you. Please help me, I’ll go crazy if I don’t see him.” Her boyfriend Antonello was at Farah, an EOD sapper. It was torture knowing he was less than a hundred miles away but still out of reach. She would never have believed she could be so in love. Giani was born in Cambodia, and was adopted when she was three. She told me that her almond eyes and olive skin made her feel all wrong until she joined the army and discovered that in her uniform she was the same as everyone else. Her four years of service would be up next October. But she wanted to reenlist for another four in order to stay near him somehow. Her boyfriend had already done two tours of duty in Afghanistan. When she was waiting for him in Italy, at the Belluno barracks warehouse thousands of miles away, she hadn’t really realized what he did, how dangerous his job was. But now that she was here, it was a nightmare. When the platoons went out on patrol or for a cordon and search, and she stayed behind at the FOB with the cooks and clerks, she’d have crying fits. She couldn’t control herself. Maybe she was having a nervous breakdown. But she didn’t want to tell her boyfriend, didn’t want it to weigh on him, because he loved his work. “I didn’t even tell the chaplain, I haven’t ever told anyone before,” she confessed, turning off the shower and putting on her bathrobe. “But I trust you, Paris.” It seemed that certain things could only be said in the gloomy Afghan spring, with the off-key music of war in the background. “Your boyfriend knows what he’s doing, nothing’s going to happen to him,” I said. “And anyway, don’t be ashamed that you love him. It’s a beautiful thing. I’ve never felt that way. I’m like these Afghan rocks. Nothing grows inside of me.” I trusted Quartermaster Giani, too.
“Okay,” First Lieutenant Russo said, pretending not to know the reason for Giani’s request. “I asked the CO to authorize her to go to the TFS warehouse with my CIMIC cell; they’re getting a shipment from Herat on Tuesday, she can help sort the goods.” “I’m very grateful, Nicola,” I said. Russo smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “You’re not leaving?” he asked. “You’re tired, it would do you good to unplug for a bit.” “I wouldn’t know what to do in Dubai, I’d never be able to go to the beach while you’re all here,” I replied. “I’d rather stay, in case I’m needed.” He didn’t comment, but I could tell he appreciated my decision. We’d gotten to know each other by then; words weren’t necessary. I would have liked to spend more time with him. The helicopter came to get them at dawn. The sand was already burning. The hot season in the Stan had begun.
* * *
I had always considered friendship to be a grossly overrated word. My grandfather would always say to me that a man could count on two hands the people he could truly trust in a lifetime. A woman on one. You’re lying if you disagree. I had always told him I agreed. My friendships—intense, fierce, and ephemeral—lasted as long as a summer storm. They would end over one wrong word, over a heated argument filled with insults you could never take back, or simply out of indifference. I tired easily of people; my sister used to say I had a heart of steel. In elementary school I made friends with my desk mate, a boy named Khamel, who was as beautiful as an angel and as dumb as a rock, and whom I loved secretly, with no hope of reciprocation. We’d do our homework together at his house because his father was an engineer from Libya and his mother ran the pharmacy in the piazza, and he lived in a three-story house with a huge room all his own, overflowing with toys—electronic monsters from Japanese cartoons, racetracks for his cars—all of which thrilled me for years and formed a significant part of my love for their owner. I dropped him when he threw a birthday party and didn’t invite me, because his father, who didn’t like him playing with me, was going to be there. I never knew if his father rejected me because I was a girl or because my family was poor, but I gave Khamel up for good. My friends from the new apartment blocks lasted through middle school. Hormonal storms, Pitbull’s crimes, and my own remorse separated us. I ran into Pitbull once, at the train station when I was on leave. I was in uniform; he was serving a two-year sentence for robbery. He’d be let out of Rebibbia during the day, but had to go back there every night. “You were my best friend,” he said, greeting me cheerfully. “If I have to go to jail again, I hope you arrest me next time.” I tried to explain the difference between a soldier and a police officer, but he just laughed. He asked for my cell number, so he could call me sometime. I made one up.
At the NCO Academy in Viterbo I developed a real sense of camaraderie with the other student sergeants in my year (the second years welcomed us with irritation and various kinds of ritual hazing, and I was never able to forgive them). We were united by the pride of rank, the dream of becoming specialists in weapons, communications, or explosives, of becoming platoon leaders or nurses, and by our common ambition to represent the f
uture of the Armed Forces. NCOs are the ones who hold the troops and headquarters together, they’re the backbone or link between the bodies and the minds, both soldiers and commanders, which made us feel doubly important. Living in the barracks and having very little free time for almost two years—until we were sent first for specialist training and then to our respective units—I was with them all day long, morning, noon, and night. We were together in class—English and IT, contemporary history and PE, lessons on driving a Puma, an Aries, and an armored Centaur, and urban warfare. We shared the gym and the mess hall, the crazy studying, the fear of failing, the highs and the lows. All of which, instead of making things easier, ended up making them more complicated. The usual group dynamics surfaced: competition, rivalries, jealousies, passions both repressed and latent, envy, gossip. The only one with whom I found I had a real elective affinity—we both loved death metal and for both of us joining the army was basically like emigrating to another country—was Vito, a Calabrese with fiery eyes. We kept each other’s dreams alive: he wanted to be a dog handler, assigned to an EOD unit; I hoped to lead a platoon. Vito didn’t get the job he wanted: he took an electronics course, to learn the software in a Freccia, and became a tower tech for IFV tanks, whereas I was sent to a weaponry specialization course. We lost track of each other, meeting again only on Facebook, where we exchanged encouraging messages. After the attack, Vito started a Facebook group about me, but once the first wave of sympathy passed, the number of members dropped, and after a while he closed it.
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