It’s snowing in Turin. When the Alitalia ATR lands at Turin-Caselle Airport, the windows are streaked with ice. Manuela deftly maneuvers her crutches down the aisle and the sloping exit ramp, carrying her bag herself and refusing the help of the steward assigned to the disabled. She’s wearing her uniform for the first time in several days, and her Norwegian cap with the eagle in the center. People turn to look at her as she crosses the arrivals hall. Tall, thin, a perfectly pressed uniform, polished boots, gold epaulets—and crutches. But no one recognizes her. When people see an injured soldier, they think: athlete with a torn meniscus. The four thousand soldiers eating dust and TNT in central Asia exist only for their families.
For forty-five minutes, as the taxi fords the traffic, dodging trucks stuck in the snow on the bypass, she chats with Mattia on her cell, giving him an up-to-the-minute report of her journey. It’s always a treat to take a comfortable civilian airplane after those C-130s and Chinook helicopters. She spent nearly three months in the Turin hospital, but it seems as if she’s seeing the city for the first time. The river is wide, the trams deafening and cumbersome, the avenues sketched with snow, the balconyless buildings sealed up like battlements. “Why didn’t you come with me?” she asks all of a sudden. “You didn’t ask me.” Turin is white, geometric, cold. The symmetry of the streets and the repetitiveness of the intersections suggest an immutable order and make her feel safe. “Would you have come?” Manuela asks in astonishment as she rummages in her pocket for her wallet. “Even if you had to sit and wait for me in the lobby all day?” “Listen, Manuela,” Mattia starts to say, “there are a lot of things I should have told you. But it was all so new, you can’t start something on the end of something else, it wasn’t because I lacked courage, but because I trusted you so much.” “Forty euros, do you need a receipt?” the taxi driver says, pulling up in front of the military hospital gate. “Yes, please,” Manuela says, even though she doubts they will reimburse travel expenses, and then to Mattia, “What are you trying to tell me? I don’t understand.” “Good luck,” he says. “Just relax, it will all be fine.”
The hospital again. The ticking of her crutches on the opaque marble floor again. The high windows. The perpetual glare of the livid neon lights. The dark uniforms against the white walls. The guard’s glass booth at the entranceway. The Dardo and Mangusta helicopter posters. The Armed Forces calendar on the glass door of the ward. The smell of disinfectant. The sadness of injured bodies moving up and down hallways. Legs, clavicles, vertebrae imprisoned in plaster casts, braces, collars. Bones compromised by accident or disease. Disharmony, imperfection, pain. It feels like months have gone by, but it’s only been twenty days. “Welcome back, Sergeant,” Nurse Scilito greets her merrily. “What did Santa Claus bring you?” “Love, I think,” she says laughingly.
“Lucky you,” Scilito sighs, gesturing to the door. They’ve gotten her old room ready for her, but she hopes she won’t need it. The last flight for Rome isn’t until after nine. The medical evaluation board is waiting for her. She wants to get it over with as soon as possible. She goes in.
They test her knee and ankle function, then send her underground to the radiology department. She hangs her uniform on a hook and stiffens in front of the X-ray machine in just her underwear. She holds her breath. She’s had so many X-rays! And every time the doctor holds those black sheets up against the light, revealing the crumbled imprint of her bones. The white part—which should show her kneecap, fibula, tibia, malleolus—breaks off, as if whoever drew it had lifted his pencil from the page, and fades to black: a sign that her fractures had not healed. But a myriad of dark stars dot the X-ray. Metal fragments, the shrapnel still inside her. “You can get dressed now, thank you,” says the voice of the radiologist, barricaded behind a protective wall. “Can’t you tell me anything?” she asks without much hope. The radiologist has already seen. He already knows.
She goes from one building to the next, from one wing to the next. She subjects herself patiently, as docile as a lamb, to every kind of test, including an encephalon-rachis-cervical-lumbosacral MRI. She emerges from the radioactive shadows of the basement into the brightness of the surgical orthopedics ward. She goes from one specialist to another, finally ends up in the secluded neurologist’s room. When she enters, he’s talking on the phone with his daughter, he’s in no hurry to deal with her and lets her wait, on the edge of her seat, nervous, angry with that girl, or woman, who demands her father’s attention and delays the truth. They stick probes in her knee, apply electrodes to her skull and clamps to her heart. She explains to the physical therapist that she has been scrupulous about doing her rehab, and it’s worked: her crutches are a habit now more than anything else, they reassure her, but she doesn’t really need them, in fact she’s thinking of buying herself a cane. Her foot is responding well, she can walk, though still only for short distances. Her knee is stiff, that’s true. But the movement is fluid and harmonious. Her back isn’t bothering her, neither are her vertebrae. She’s about to tell him she made love curled up on her epistropheus, contorting herself like a snake, without breaking in two, but refrains: military ethics.
She answers the same questions over and over. She tells the truth, but not all of it. She downplays the pain—which, every time she walks on the beach, stabs at her heels so sharply it paralyzes her, forcing her to rest. She mitigates but doesn’t hide certain unpleasant symptoms: muscular tone weakness, dizziness, loss of balance. Lying on the table inside the MRI capsule, she tells herself that science is a utopia and machines are of no use. They’re X-raying her brain, and will be able to see the tiniest abnormalities. But they can’t see the only thing that’s really in there, a strange man who says his name is Mattia Rubino.
At two, Colonel Rocca, the president of the medical evaluation board, invites her to the officers’ mess. A withered man with huge ears and curly lobes, piggy eyes. He has a reputation as an old-school officer who’s still not used to the idea of women in the armed forces, so the invitation surprises her. There’s no one in the mess because the hospital is still practically empty after the holidays. She eats a bland risotto and some overly salted braised beef that makes her thirsty all afternoon. The colonel informs her that General Ercoli will be coming up from Rome tomorrow. He’s expecting her at the Pinerolo barracks at eleven. “Tomorrow?” she asks, disappointed. The last plane for Fiumicino will take off without her. And she won’t sleep with Mattia tonight. “Perhaps there’s been some mistake,” she tells him, “I don’t think I know General Ercoli, and I’m not in the Taurinense Alpini Brigade. I’m in Julia, Tenth Regiment, from Belluno, I’m being treated here instead of Belluno on Colonel Minotto’s advice.” “General Astorre assured me that you have a very high IQ,” Rocca says bitterly. “He’s clearly mistaken.” Manuela nervously jabs her braised beef with her knife. Who is this Ercoli? She’s never heard of him before. And what does he want from her?
At four she meets with the psychologist. She’s nervous and her heart is beating too quickly—she fears this exam even more than the X-rays, the MRI, or CAT scan. She wants and needs to seem cured, capable, of sound mind. If the psychologist decides she’s still suffering from PTSD, that it has become chronic, she can forget going back to active duty. No more in-country tours. Offices, orderly rooms, dying of boredom in some provincial barracks. A desk jockey, more or less. And not even twenty-eight years old. The best, the perfect age for a soldier. Not too young and not too old. The summer of one’s life. She forces a smile. She looks for affirmation in the gray eyes of the mustached man sitting behind the desk, but finds only an inexpressive, impenetrable wall. The psychologist asks her how her insomnia is, if there have been any incidents of vomiting during the night. “I’m sleeping better,” she replies, “and the vomiting has decreased, only three or four times in twenty days.” (Honesty, she thinks, you’re not being honest, Sergeant Paris. Nine times, you have vomited nine times.) “Medication?” “I’m taking the drops,” she explains, “but really more
out of habit, out of fear, than necessity.” “Flashbacks? Numbing? Nightmares? Hyperarousal? Emotional anesthesia?”
“Pretty good,” she says, “numbing only once.” Some intrusive flashbacks, but she considers their effect positive because they have helped her overcome her amnesia and restored her memory. Stress is more or less under control, and she is no longer emotionally detached. She can’t tell him about Mattia, or that perhaps—probably—she has fallen in love. In a certain sense for the first time. She has never experienced such powerful emotions. She feels an irresistible urge to say his name. To touch him. She blushes when Mattia looks at her. And she feels herself blossom like a rose when she looks at him. But a soldier keeps her emotions to herself, so she simply assures him that the resumption of old habits, going home, being in a familiar place, but one that is extraneous to her professional life, has been very good for her, just as he had predicted.
“And your aggression?” the psychologist asks without looking at her. “Colonel Minotto informed us about the unfortunate incident you were involved in.” “I’m pretty good at keeping it under control; unfortunately, that day I lost it. I made a mistake. I don’t know why it happened. But I didn’t try to hide it, I notified my superiors immediately, I called Captain Paggiarin that same evening. The captain, I mean the major, tried to reassure me. He helped a lot.” The psychologist jots down something on the piece of paper in front of him. The Torvaianica goalie’s father appears before her eyes, cowering in the mud, all curled up in an attempt to escape the pain. She would curl up like that, too, in her hospital bed, when the painkillers wore off and her shattered bones seemed to want to pierce her skin and climb outside of her. “Nurse!” she would cry. “Nurse!” The nurse explained that she was trying to get into what is called an analgesic position, but that it was bad for her. She had to remain in traction. Finally they hung her leg from the ceiling with a pulley, and anchored her neck to the bed. They crucified her. “The victims still haven’t filed against me,” she notes. “So it seems less serious to you if the people you attacked don’t turn you in?” the psychologist insinuates. “No, it’s very serious,” she whispers. “But it won’t ever happen again, I know it, I’m absolutely certain, you have to allow me one mistake, just one.”
“And have you done your homework?” he interrupts her. “Did you bring me your self-monitoring diary?” “I haven’t had much time to write,” she confesses. “But I’ve thought a lot about the things you told me, I’ve done the cognitive reconstruction exercises in my head. I’ve recognized my automatic thoughts, have focused on goals, I’ve practiced what you called exposure. You remember how I really didn’t want to go to the baptism of Diego Jodice’s baby? You told me I had to address my avoidant behavior and take advantage of an event like that to relive the trauma, that it could help me. Well, I went to the baptism, I saw the guys from my platoon, and it happened. I relived everything. It was incredibly painful, but it did me a lot of good. I’m definitely better now.” She repeats it several times, and it’s true. He has to believe her.
The psychologist takes notes. Manuela cranes her neck but can’t decipher the words he covers the paper with. His handwriting is tiny, cryptographic practically. “I feel freer now,” she explains, “it’s been a while since I’ve had a crisis.” “How long is a while?” the psychologist asks. “Well, since I’ve been home,” she says with conviction, because the fainting spell in the Parco Leonardo dressing room seems so remote to her now. “I can talk about what happened to me. I’ve remembered a lot of things, even the sequence of the attack, I can handle the memory, I can live with it, accept it. It’s a part of me now. I realize that I’ll never be able to erase it, I’ll carry it inside of me my whole life, but that doesn’t scare me. I feel I’m a stronger person now.”
The psychologist asks her if she considers herself capable of handling a new situation. “New in what sense?” she asks suspiciously. “A radical change,” the psychologist explains. Manuela thinks about Mattia. But the psychologist probably means something completely different. “Yes,” she says, “I think so.”
* * *
“When are you coming back?” Mattia asks her when she’s finally able to call him. It’s 8:53 p.m. Her meeting with the psychologist lasted nearly five hours. “Tomorrow afternoon, I hope,” she says to him, “I still have one more appointment, and then I have to get my leave stamped. It expires tomorrow, you know, but they’ll give me an extension. I still can’t return to active duty.” Her voice echoes too loudly in the silence of the hospital. Darkness sticks to the buildings. In the pavilion across the street only one light is on, and the solitary window looks like a lantern in the night. “I’ll pick you up at the airport,” Mattia says. “Let me know which plane you’re on.” “So you found your driver’s license?” she asks. Jokingly, because it seemed funny to her that a forty-year-old man would go out without any form of ID. “I don’t have a license,” Mattia says. “I mean, I have one, but they have to issue me a new one, it’s a bit complicated to explain, but what’s the worst that could happen? At most they’ll give me a ticket, and I’d have to be really unlucky to run into the cops, it’s only a few miles to Fiumicino from here. I want to come get you, it means a lot to me.”
“Who is Marco?” she asks, gesturing to Nurse Scilito to leave her dinner tray on the table. “Why?” he asks after a second’s pause. “The other night while you were sleeping, you called out to him.” “I don’t remember,” he glosses over her question. “I’ve told you everything and you haven’t told me anything about yourself,” Manuela says. “Sometimes I feel like I’m with no one and it scares me.”
No reaction. Silence. For a few seconds all she hears are the nurses laughing in the hallway, and Thom Yorke’s voice in the distance, singing I’m lost at sea, don’t bother me, I’ve lost my way, I’ve lost my way. She really hit home. “Who are you?” she asks. “You know how to transform fear into energy, Manuela,” Mattia tells her. “So you’re also capable of facing a man without a shadow. Because that’s what happened to me, more or less. I don’t cast a shadow, I lack substance, I’m empty, there’s nothing inside me.”
“So you’ve been bit by the camel spider,” Manuela says. “Did I tell you I killed dozens of them in Bala Bayak? They would hide in our helmets and shower shoes. They’re real scary-looking, a cross between a spider and a scorpion. They’re afraid of the light and are always looking for dark spots. They follow you, to hide in your shadow. An Afghani I knew—the only Afghani I knew, the interpreter, his name was Ghaznavi—said that according to legend, if a camel spider bites you, it steals your shadow, in other words your soul.” “That must be what happened,” Mattia allows. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” Manuela says, changing her tone, “it’s too important to talk about over the phone, when we’re three hundred miles apart.” Mattia says that in truth there’s really not much else to talk about. When she hangs up, she’s sorry she didn’t say something a little more intimate. I miss you, too, I think about you all the time, I think I love you, something along those lines. But she has never been able to talk like that.
* * *
General Ercoli doesn’t waste any time on formalities. Sitting in a swivel chair, stiff in his ribbon-covered uniform, he tells her that someone spoke to him about her—but he’s careful not to say who. Manuela Paris’s human qualities and professional competence have not passed unobserved. In the highly likely event that she is declared permanently unfit for military service and discharged, she will still have an opportunity to serve her country. “But I don’t want to be in the reserves!” she says impulsively, then immediately falls silent, turning red in the face at the incredible lack of discipline she has just shown in interrupting a general. It’s just that she is shocked. Is this mellifluous dinosaur telling her they’ve already thrown her out? Without even awaiting her test results and the board’s recommendation? Or does he already know what they are thinking? Have they already made up their minds? “In the highly likely event that you ar
e discharged,” General Ercoli continues, pretending not to have noticed her outburst, “you still have the opportunity to serve your country. Might you be interested?”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Manuela says, making an effort to stay calm. To control herself. She used to be able to do it. Interested in joining national intelligence? A position of great responsibility and much sought after. “We receive hundreds of letters every day, from aspiring volunteers. But you have to be recruited. Naturally the job demands total commitment. But you’ve always said you feel you were born for operational life and want to dedicate yourself to serving your country.” “Wow, I really haven’t thought about this,” Manuela says. She doesn’t know how to react. She certainly can’t blow him off right away, on the spot, without knowing who sent him and why. Without knowing if they have already thrown her out of her life, without any hope, or if she’s still a sergeant. She would like to explain that a soldier is the opposite of a spy. There was an intelligence guy in Sollum, the same rank as her, who for six months did nothing but spy on the officers and enlisted men, meet with shady characters, and act as if he owned the place. He didn’t deign to speak to us and no one ever found out his name.
“You don’t have to decide right away,” the general says. “Think it over. Sleep on it. We’ll be in touch.” Manuela gets up. She wants to run away, but she forces herself to express her gratitude for the opportunity she has been offered. She handles it well, the general will never know what is going through her head. This is the way a soldier behaves. “Yes, sir,” she finally says, clicking her heels and bringing her hand to her hat in salute. I don’t need to sleep on it, she should have said. I’ve already decided. The answer is never. I’m an Alpino, and always will be, even if I never go out on patrol with my men again, even if I never end up in some distant outpost that looks out over nothing. Alpini are in trenches and under fire. Alpini build roads and dig through rubble and even pick up trash. We don’t serve politicians, we serve Italy. We don’t have secrets and we do our duty in the light of day. We wear our past on our uniforms, and not merely in our ribbons and badges: and anyone can read it. Our names are sewn onto our uniforms, right over our hearts.
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