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 objective 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.

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 Recruiting 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.

What’s wrong with you, Manuela Paris? Which response was the one that screwed you? Or was there more than one? The MMPI test—Angelica had explained—measures the subject’s tendencies to falsify the results of the test, or to provide a self-image that is socially acceptable. Everyone denies feeling aggressive and having malicious thoughts: but if you deny them too much, then the responses are assumed to be false. Did the examiner notice how much the question about somatic problems, about fears and anxieties, bothered you? And yet I didn’t lie: never lie. I calmly told him about the fainting spells that would come over me in class now and then, during a disastrous oral exam, or in the middle of a party that I couldn’t make myself enjoy. Or the question about family problems? Why did I tell him that I felt hatred for my father, whom I knew I should love and who was dying? Or was it the question about sex? The examiner wanted to hear that I had a stable relationship, that I fucked normally, why hadn’t I realized that? No, I don’t have anyone, I’m too young, I don’t want to tie myself down with a boyfriend. And when he asked me if I felt an aversion to sex I’d answered boldly, no, the opposite actually. What an idiot. Or was it the one about my faults: How would an enemy describe you? I thought about it, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to tell the truth, and reveal my weaknesses, or tell an innocuous lie, to protect the real Manuela inside of me.

Your enemy, someone who hates you, would say that Manuela Paris is insecure, a girl who hides her fragility by feigning aggression, who feels alone even when she’s with people, who sometimes has crying fits she can’t control, who gives up when things go poorly, saying that she really didn’t give a shit anyway, who avoids disappointment by saying no to things ahead of time. Who seeks out unpleasant experiences just to make sure she can feel something. Who let herself be deflowered by an industrial technology student at a school friend’s birthday party, in the room where all the coats had been put, on top of the other guests’ scarves and purses, because at sixteen she was sick and tired of feeling weird for never having slept with a boy. Who, after that fleeting, disappointing experience, had experimented with just about everything, only to conclude in the end that she could get the same result without having to put up with a stranger’s body, breathing, idiotic conversations, and sticky sperm. Or maybe I was wrong to tell the examiner I don’t go to church, I don’t believe in eternal life, not even in God?

Unfit. How was I different? Did I tell too many truths or too many lies? Did I talk too much or too little? Did I have strange thoughts? Maybe I was crazy. Maybe insanity isn’t feeble-mindedness, maybe it’s not the broken, raving monologues those desperate people you see wandering around outside the train station have, maybe it’s this irresolvable difference that separates people like us from other men and women: the hope, the dream, almost the expectation of having a destiny. Of not being a shadow without a history, a ghost who slides through the world without leaving a mark; of wanting to do something important with one’s life.

The wind whirled the leaves. It tore at the plastic bags that had been tangled in the shrubs growing along the banks of the Tiber since the last flood. But I didn’t move. I’ll never get up again, I thought. A cyclist riding along the banks swerved so as not to hit me. He thought I was drunk, didn’t stop to ask if I needed help. No one came near me. The rare passerby veered around me, like an obstacle. Who knows how long I lay there among the leaves, my eyes wide open, staring at the evening and then the night sky. A handful of dim stars came out. I was still lying there, immobile, drained of all energy. I had no future anymore, since I couldn’t live the only life that was possible for me. I could die that very evening. Throw myself into the river. Let myself be carried away by the muddy water of the Tiber. It didn’t matter to me at all. It was all over. The only thing keeping me alive was the hatred that rose up in me every so often. I would have liked to get up and go back to Foligno, plant myself in front of the Recruiting Center, rip the flesh off the psychiatrist who had destroyed my dream. Tear him to pieces, force him to admit that he’d made a mistake, to ask my forgiveness, to pray for mercy. That was my destiny, that guy with the beard, a failed, bored officer—he hadn’t understood the first thing about Manuela Paris; or had he in fact understood everything? Damn. Damn you. I hope your heart rots. That your testicles get gangrene. Unfit. Not you.

When I heard foreign voices emerging from the darkness and footsteps coming closer, I finally got up. I didn’t want to be raped, and, all things considered, I didn’t want to kill myself either. I wanted to get revenge on that medical officer with the pointy beard, on every officer in the world. That thought gave me the strength to get shakily to my feet. When I returned to street level, I was surprised to discover that while I lay as if dead down along the riverbank, nothing had happened: cars continued to line up at the stoplight in order to cross the bridge; in reality only two hours had passed. Manuela Paris had been assassinated, but Rome continued to live, indifferent to my tragedy. The last bus for Ladispoli had already left.

I took the subway back to the station and waited for the train. I got a seat near the window, the car was practically empty, the commuters were already home by now. The coastal train heading north stopped at every station. Tuscolana, Ostiense, Trastevere, San Pietro, Aurelia, Maccarese, Torrimpietra, Palidoro. And between one stop and the next, I saw the houses outside my window lit up, fleetingly framed little living rooms, all exactly the same, families at the dinner table, people sitting on the couch watching TV—the spectacle of other people’s lives enraged and infuriated me, but also left me indifferent, because I no longer had a life. They’d stolen it from me.

Vanessa came to get me at the station. I must have looked really awful, because she didn’t have the courage to ask me anything. Reading the disappointment in my sister’s eyes was almost worse than reading unfit next to my name. “I didn’t make it,” I whispered. “Assholes!” Vanessa swore, devastated. “I was deemed unfit. I can’t be an officer,” I explained, kicking a soda can. “It’s their loss,” Vanessa said. But she was frustrated, too. She’d been hopeful, convinced I was meant to fulfill all our dreams: she had delegated hers to me as well, since she was too lazy to follow them herself.

That night Vanessa slipped into my bed. “You have to try again, Manù,” she said. “You didn’t prepare enough, and besides, at nineteen it’s normal to drown like an ant in a glass of water. You have to learn to handle yourself better. Get someone to explain how those damn tests work, the things you shouldn’t do. You’ll ace them next year. You’ll pass with flying colors.” “Try again? Not over my dead body,” I swore, and I kept my promise. I wouldn’t have been able to bear another failure.

At the end of my year of service I was honorably discharged with the rank of corporal and good character notes on my record, but I didn’t ask to reenlist. I left the army angrier than when I’d joined. More aggressive, more hostile, more everything. I threw away my military magazines, my Sailor Moon notebook filled with stories of Amazons, the photographs of me with my classmates, of me in the barracks. I spent weeks holed up at home, like a leper, even refusing to answer the at first sympathetic and later concerned phone calls from my friend Angelica. Corporal Paris had been killed at Foligno—killed by friendly fire.

*   *   *

There’s no trace of my anxiety either in my e-mails or my diary. I couldn’t let it seep out. From Sollum I sent vacuous, reassuring messages about the food and the cold, as if I were on vacation. The truth is that I understood Corporal Zandonà more than he could possibly know, even if I never could have told him. The initial euphoria had worn off. I, too, felt as if I were in prison. But I couldn’t fathom what crime I’d committed, and I couldn’t imagine how my presence there could be considered offensive. I’d gone there in order to do my part to rebuild a country, but I spent my time guarding the base, wearing out my eyes staring at the desert, at herds of goats roaming among the rocks, grazing on thorny tufts of grass; I fixed my binoculars on old men in turbans shuffling around in their slippers in the sand and lighting fires, perhaps sending smoke signals about our movements, and droves of barefoot children collecting scraps of metal and dragging water tanks and perhaps spying on us for their fathers. I spent my time practicing at the firing range, shooting at nothing, saluting the flag that fluttered in the wind, calling roll morning and evening, and filling out forms and patrol reports. I’d never written so much in my life. I wrote with principle and precision. At Sollum I learned the value of words. I told myself that even writing was important, because what I wrote would be sent higher and higher, up a long chain of command, all the way to the NATO heads—and a piece of information that seemed insignificant to me might prove essential someday. But I would never know. I studied maps and occasionally—too infrequently for my tastes—traveled in an armored vehicle, in relative tranquillity at night, and with a great deal of anxiety during the day, and patroled a road that our very presence assured would immediately be deserted. At times, filing past long lines of stopped cars, all I could read on those faces resigned to our passing by was patience. The patience with which a peasant endures rain and droughts and locusts, knowing that this, too, shall pass. You’ll pass, too: that’s what I read on their dusty faces, which were framed for a second in the windows of our Lince, as we filed past them at ten kilometers an hour.

But I hadn’t gone all the way to Afghanistan just to file past. I wanted to do something for those people. It is the duty of civilized countries to help less-fortunate populations. Is it possible they didn’t understand that? And yet, in March alone, 721 makeshift devices exploded. Between American and various coalition soldiers, there were twenty-eight casualties. Nearly one a day. And I waited, without really knowing anymore what for. I cleaned the delicate workings of my rifle, recalibrated it, polished the scope, brushed my uniform, which was so encrusted with sand and sweat it could practically stand upright on its own, worked out elaborate itineraries on the map, chatted with First Lieutenant Russo while Radiohead sang malaise, listened to Jodice’s unending anecdotes and First Lieutenant Ghigo’s stories. She’d been in country the year before, in Herat, where she saw dozens of civilians every day, there was always a line in front of the base’s first aid station. It was the most gratifying experience of her life. She’d even managed to send two children with cancer to Italy, where they were cured. Here, no one. No one from the nearby villages came.

The truth is, nothing ever happened. I’d come to make peace with war, or to make war to establish peace—I’d been training for it for years. It’s why I’d studied political science and economic geography, applied machine mechanics, and chemical weapons, why I’d parachute-jumped and perfected my shooting and become a first-rate patroller. And it’s what I’d always wanted. I wasn’t born to wear out a chair in the comfortable office of some provincial barracks. I wanted to change things, get results. And I was prepared to pay a very high price. But we Italians moved with a caution and diplomacy that I understood but that still annoyed me sometimes. We didn’t want to alienate anyone. We would negotiate and bargain even with bandits, people who couldn’t even really be considered insurgents, just ordinary delinquents. We honed our patience with an almost Oriental focus. It was our way of gaining respect: everyone has their own strategy: some prefer a show of force, others dialogue—but it seemed like a waste of time to me. Proof of how middle class the military had become. Its ranks were full of respectable people—competent, educated, qualified—who were not looking for redemption or liberation; back in Italy they had comfortable homes, they were well-off and content. Giuseppe Lando, a chubby, taciturn rifleman, burst into tears when he heard his mother’s voice on the phone for the first time in ten days.

My neighbor, Giani, the quartermaster, chose me as her confidante. She had no one else to talk to: First Lieutenant Ghigo was standoffish because she outranked Giani, and some things only another woman could understand. She was afraid she wouldn’t make it till June. She missed normal life, missed going to the beauty parlor to get her legs waxed, missed having a bidet or even a toilet where she could sit down instead of a Turkish toilet where she always had to squat like a medieval peasant, missed letting her long hair hang loose, wearing a dress and high heels, in short she regretted having to put parentheses around her life as a civilized person and as a woman. Sokha Giani was a graceful twenty-four-year-old of Cambodian origin—the soldiers called her Angkor—with lithesome movements and luscious, long black hair that was offended by the Afghan sand and by the military regulations that forced her to keep it tied back at all times. But I wasn’t much help. I had never cared in the least about high heels, hairstyles, or waxed legs, and a month after my arrival at Bala Bayak, I sat down in front of Sergeant Corvia, the barber on the base, and ordered him to cut off my braid.

“No,” Corvia refused. “I’m not going to do that to you, Paris, your hair’s the prettiest thing about you.” “It’ll grow back,” I said, “long hair’s just a pain in the ass here, and washing it wastes water, and we don’t have much. Cut it just below my ears, hurry up.” Corvia cut my hair. He was no hairdresser. He was used to shaving the men’s limp hair, and didn’t know what to do with a woman’s. He improvised an androgynous cut that made me look like a pageboy in some Renaissance court—or, more prosaically, like an elf, as the guys joked. Zandonà called me Mulan, after the Chinese woman warrior in the cartoon who cuts her hair to pass as a man and fight in the army. I never managed to shake that nickname. I gathered up my braid, put it in a jar, and placed it on top of my locker. First Lieutenant Ghigo pointed out that it attracted flies, and that flies could transmit horrible diseases, so I threw it in the trash, no regrets.

If I sit still for too long, though, first I get depressed, and then I explode. I need action, and I’d trained for a high-risk mission. I’d expected to have to shoot in order to defend a position or a protected site, or to avert an attack, and I was prepared to do it. Peace can be boring sometimes, but so can war. I never imagined it could become a routine, a sequence of empty actions, an interminable pause. I was waiting—but for what? Waiting to get started. But I never did. January came and went, then February, then March began, I lost all sense of the flow of time, and after a while I wouldn’t have been able to say what exactly I was waiting for.

*   *   *

The Afghanistan I had dreamed so much about was hostile—the stones, the climate, the roads, the people: all hostile. Even the animals were hostile: there weren’t very many of them, and the caracal, that rare wildcat also known as a desert lynx, which I hoped to see and whose tracks I searched for in vain, remained elusive. Apart from the occasional turtledove or sparrow, all I saw during those months were gerbils, desert mice, scorpions, vipers, snakes, ticks, flies, millipedes as long as my finger and whose bite—I learned the hard way—would make your foot swell up like a balloon. But the most unwelcome of all these visitors turned out to be the honey-colored, humpbacked camel spider, with too many legs and long, antenna-like claws. When I had to get dressed in the middle of the night, I would inspect my boots carefully before putting them on. The camel spider loves the dark. Light kills him. And if you happen to flush him out, he hides in your shadow, follows you, clings to you, like a bad dream. I killed dozens of them, and dozens of them ran after me. What do you want? Why are you following me? Go away! I’d say to each spider in turn, prodding it with the tip of my boot. Every country has its totem, be it the kangaroo, the raccoon, the kiwi, the reindeer, the tiger, the bear, or the wolf. For me, that furtive, bellicose spider became Afghanistan’s totem. So I decided not to kill them anymore, but to coexist with them. When I found one hiding in the expanded polyurethane foam of my helmet, I would simply shake it out into the sand. It would run away so quickly, following the line of the shade, that it wouldn’t even leave tracks in the sand.

The sounds in Afghanistan were hostile. The crackle of the machine gun, the buzz of the attack helicopters that flew right over us toward the mountains, the roar of the cargo planes that delivered provisions, the thunder of the fighter-bombers, the hiss of the unmanned aircraft that accompanied us like an ethereal cloud. The smells were hostile. The stench of shit, of animals, and of men who aren’t used to washing regularly or don’t have enough water, of motor oil, leaded gas, kerosene, grease, rusty metal. The colors were hostile. Afghanistan—or at least that small corner of it that had been given to me—knew only primary colors. A sad, monotonous yellow prevailed. I’ve always believed that colors affect our soul and produce a spiritual vibration. Yellow, I thought, had a disturbing influence, like a warning signal. I associated it with traffic lights. Those yellow traffic lights that blink all night long at deserted intersections had always made me nervous. Even though the yellow here wasn’t uniform, but changed with the seasons and the intensity of the sunlight, and the tone varied from mustard to peach, from lemon to sawdust, it was still alienating, it upset the mind and could drive you crazy. The sand, the hills, the mountains, and often even the sky were yellow. Yellow was my uniform, desert yellow were the armored and tracked vehicles, light yellow my helmet; my boots were yellow, and so was my sand-covered skin. The country flaunted its foreignness; it was as unfamiliar as the moon—everything seemed corroded by time, as if nothing could possibly last, and that erosion, that disintegration of all things, became the only possible reality.

Everything spoke of death. Skeletons everywhere, of trucks, cars, and tanks—only the burned-out shells remaining—skeletons of homes, schools, mosques, and shops, skeletons of sheep, donkeys, and camels, rubble, ruins, rust. Broken, shattered, useless things. A country without time, where, I learned quickly, a village might be in ruins because of Enduring Freedom bombs a month ago or because of Tamerlane’s army six centuries ago. Where people looked like ghosts. The women were invisible or erased by black veils or burqas, but so were the men—anonymous, all dressed in the same traditional white outfit, buried under beards and turbans. We were ghosts, too, driving by in our armored vehicles, erased by our uniforms, made anonymous by our helmets, our bulletproof vests, our sunglasses, by the kaffiyehs we wrapped around our faces to protect them from the sand. I began to feel as if we were already dead.

But it wasn’t the fear of death, that would come later. It was like a time lag, a displacement: a sense of total remove from what I was doing, and even from my own self. The feeling that I’d already passed by, that I was moving about not in reality but in a dream. In a dream no one hears your voice, your actions make no impact, and their consequences are unpredictable. Words don’t mean what they should. Distributing medicine, toys, and notebooks to people whose houses had been bombed by planes or who had shot at us a month before seemed hypocritical to me. Our checkpoints—controlling a deserted intersection in the middle of nowhere, rummaging through some poor shepherd’s pickup, commandeering empty gas cans, accusing him of transporting them in order to resupply drug traffickers, while entire caravans of jeeps loaded with arms and drugs slipped past behind our backs, on mysterious mountain tracks—seemed like a pointless act of theater, like trying to empty the ocean with a leaky pail. I didn’t have the courage to talk about it with anyone.

“Our real enemy is time,” I dared to say one evening to First Lieutenant Russo: a skinny, lightweight man with a mustache who didn’t roll his r’s—I’d singled him out as the most intelligent of the officers—in love with Afghanistan and with his work. “We have to bring home results immediately, back home every member of the coalition faces elections, internal arguments, operational and human costs, and every piece of bad news cancels out a hundred positive developments and shortens the time we have. It never makes the news when we thwart an attack, but every single loss makes the public think we’re losing. But the Afghanis have all of eternity ahead of them. It’s paradoxical, but time is their most powerful weapon. And the only one we can’t fight against.”

First Lieutenant Russo gave me a surprised look, asked me if I remembered the philosopher Zeno, and switched off his laptop. I always wondered what he was writing, but we never became close enough for me to ask. I shook my head. “They don’t teach you philosophy at tourism management school.” “Our first year of high school, we covered the Greek philosophers,” Russo said. “One of them was Zeno of Elea, which is near Salerno supposedly, and my mother’s from Salerno, so I took a liking to him. He lived during the fifth century BC, and was a disciple of Parmenides. He invented dialectics. He taught how to take apart your adversaries’ theses, reduce them to absurdity. Zeno wanted to show that the universe is made up of one unique and immutable being and that movement does not exist. He used paradoxes to do so. The most famous is the one with Achilles and the tortoise. Achilles is incredibly fast, the tortoise incredibly slow. But Achilles will never catch up with a tortoise who starts even a little ahead of him. By the time Achilles reaches the point where the tortoise started, the tortoise will have already moved farther ahead, and even if the distance is practically imperceptible, Achilles must reach the tortoise’s new point of departure, and in the meantime the tortoise will have gone even farther, and so on, until infinity. In short, Zeno said that space and time are infinite, so it’s impossible to make up the distance. Becoming and movement are absurd if examined with the tools of logic and reason.”

I wasn’t sure I understood what First Lieutenant Russo, or Zeno of Elea, meant, or if by telling me this story he wanted to say he agreed with me—or, on the contrary, show me that I was wrong and warn me to not ask too many questions. But I didn’t want to be Achilles and chase after an objective I would never reach. I was beginning to ask myself what would happen when we were gone. “Will we leave behind solid institutions?” I asked him. “Or a sand castle? Will the country hold? Will what we’re doing be swept away? Will it be like we never even existed?” Russo smiled and spread his map out on the table. “Our duty is to extend the security bubble to twenty kilometers all around Sollum. To secure this village, and this one, and this one”—he pointed with his pencil to nearly invisible dots on the map. “That’s all.” The dots circled in red indicated where IEDs had been identified, or where—in the previous months—Italians had been attacked. The map had measles.

*   *   *

I was crumbling under contradictions and solitude. For years my relationship with my family had been halfhearted, but now I found myself anxiously awaiting the moment when I could call Ladispoli. I’d get in line for a computer, send e-mails, post silly little things on Facebook, look at my friends’ pages, study their idiotic photos snapped furtively at a party or a pub, or in the snow. I’d Skype my sister, my mother, even Traian. I’d make them tell me about themselves, in order to cling to something real, because my life wasn’t.

Little by little, though, it was as if the thread were being cut. The important people in my life began to fade, became even more unreal than the ghosts around me. I’d call Italy once a week, then even less frequently. I discovered nostalgia. Once I was surrounding a village with my platoon while CIMIC coordinated a swap. The villagers would give us their weapons—ammunition belts, rifles, mines—and in exchange we would distribute useful items. Actually, we made the ANA soldiers distribute them: it was up to them to make contact with the population, and people were happier to receive things from their fellow countrymen. Hoes, farming equipment, sacks of seeds and rice, used clothing, shoes. You never gave anything away for free here, it was a country without compassion. A soldier picked up a pair of women’s boots. Brown leather, fake snakeskin. Identical to the ones my mother wore the day of my first communion. Those boots had walked for twenty years to reach me over there. But they didn’t reach me. The soldier gave them to an old man in exchange for a hand grenade, I never figured out what good they did him. Three months after my arrival in Afghanistan, the Italian life of Manuela Paris was already the dream of a dream.

In March it snowed. A tentative but persistent snow, which turned to mush in the tepid midday sun, and then froze over again in the nighttime cold, creaking ominously under our boots. The whiteness erased the towers, the protection barriers, the barbed wire, the road, the ruins of the village opposite the base. The bad weather shut us up in the FOB: convoys, outreach missions, and joint operations with ANA soldiers were all suspended. “When I was in Bosnia,” Jodice told the soldiers shoveling snow to clear a path to the bunker, “a storm hit us. So much snow fell that it trapped us inside the huts. We were buried alive. We had to climb out through the chimney. My commander was so fat he got stuck. I had to go at the chimney with a pickaxe to get him out. Later they handed me the bill. For damaging military property, they said.”

Then the rains came. The desert bloomed: a downy green coat, intangible and ephemeral, covered the sand—for a few hours. But even the rain was hostile. It gushed violently, cruelly from the sky, and when it hailed, the balls of ice that hit my head were as hard as rocks. Torrential rains lashed the tents and flooded the base. The sand turned to mud, and the mud became a dense slime, thick as cement, which clung to our boots and stuck to the ground, so it was an effort to take even a single step. The rains flooded the fields, erased all tracks, swept away the fragile village houses, swallowed up sheep, goats, trucks. We were cut off for days, not even our provisions—which arrived only from the sky—could reach us. The mess kitchen closed. We ate precooked rations, crackers, canned ravioli and sauce, and flavorless medallions of beef. “When I was in Lebanon,” Jodice told us, “I’d had it with those shitty K rations, so I ate a jellyfish. The cook and I put it in a pot and boiled it for an hour, like an octopus. Then we ate it, little bites, with sugar. It tastes good, kind of like aspic.” There was no time to comment on Jodice’s recipe; the mournful howl of the siren sounded. The FOB was under attack. We ran to get our weapons, then to the bunker or our battle positions, hurriedly but also somehow calmly. Everyone knew where to go. They’d warned us it would happen. And it did. We knew what to do. “Lebanese jellyfish aren’t edible,” I said to him after the alarm was over. “You don’t believe me, Sarge?” Jodice asked, astonished.

The warnings became an everyday occurrence, and anxiety spread, as contagious as a cold. I slept little, alarmed at the slightest sound. An officer sneezing in the next container was enough to make me leap to my feet. Then I didn’t sleep at all. Awake on my cot, I listened to the symphony of whistles, snorts, coughs, hisses, and snores that rose, with varying intensity, from the officers’ huts and the soldiers’ tents: everyone snored, their noses and lungs were clogged with sand. Eyes wide open in the pitch black, I tried to imagine the men hiding on the mountain facing us, in position in the cold, busying themselves with the weapons they’d learned to handle as children. I asked myself what they truly hoped for, if they hoped for anything. People here didn’t give the impression they were waiting for anything. I wondered who they were; how many they were. If they attacked us with any kind of coordination at all, we would be in trouble. One hundred twenty soldiers and one dog—with no drone support, held hostage by the weather, confined to the hangars by the rain, the helicopters hundreds of kilometers away, grounded by the storms, stuck on an isolated base in the middle of nowhere—as solitary as shipwrecked souls. The night was impenetrable, and the silence, broken only by rifle shots in the distance, was frightening.

They attacked us for seven days in a row, raining 107 mm rockets on us: the mortar platoon leader was given authorization to respond to their fire. I saw the shells launch. They rose into the air, making an arc like a comet. The first one moved me, the second upset me, and then after a while the spectacle left me indifferent—like a habit. We were hoping to neutralize the threat. But threat was merely an abstract word used to domesticate a concept. The threat was people. Yet it all seemed tremendously normal. Every soldier tranquilly performed the necessary gestures, as if it were a drill. Myself included. But I always felt like I was dreaming. None of this was real. When, after the attack on the fourth day, it was my turn to send two teams to comb the area, I almost couldn’t believe they might actually encounter insurgents. And in fact they didn’t—even though they searched for them for hours, staying out all night.

Captain Paggiarin congratulated Pegasus for the coolheadedness and discipline we showed in our baptism by fire. Other platoons hadn’t been so efficient. “Buy us a drink, Sarge,” said Zandonà, “we deserve it.” The beer had run out, so with the last bottle of Coke we toasted Saint Hesco Bastion, Saint Beretta, and Saint Lince. “Our sergeant doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, and doesn’t fuck, so let’s drink to Saint Manuela,” Jodice proposed. We were toasting my supposed virtue when a rocket landed near our vehicles. “Looks like God disagrees,” Jodice laughed, kissing the Padre Pio medallion he wore around his neck. “Sarge is no saint, even she has her sins.” I told him to knock it off. There was nothing to laugh at. The splinter effect of a 105 mm shell is fifty meters. In other words, the rocket just missed us. Everything faded into a dreamlike unreality. But the shells were real, as were the shards of broken glass, the flat tires, the craters in the sand.

I started to feel afraid. An irrational fear of dying in the desert, two thousand eight hundred miles from home, without having accomplished even one of the things I’d come here to do. I wanted more time. In that suspended moment between the whistle of the rocket and the rumble of the explosion, I thought this could be the final second of my life. I looked at the yellow tents, the milky sky, the soldier closest to me—Zandonà, with his freckles and boyish face—and the moment took on a bitter sweetness, a bottomless melancholy. And the more I felt afraid, the more the wild beauty of the country pierced me, like shrapnel, deeper and deeper, entering my veins, hurting me. The more Afghanistan repulsed me, the more it tried to crush and annihilate me like an insect, the more I began to love it, this naked, essential country, in which even a nail is important.