The Human Body

by Paolo Giordano

  The soldiers hold their breath, some instinctively cover their face with their hands, while the cargo containers, intertwined and now lacking air support, plummet to the ground in free fall, the unprecedented speed dragging the heavy load down.

  The crash raises a cloud of dust that takes several seconds to clear. The guys aren’t sure what to do. They step forward a few at a time, their keffiyehs pressed against their noses.

  “What a fucking mess,” Torsu says.

  “All because of those air force dickheads,” Simoncelli says.

  They surround the crater carved out by the cargo pallets.

  Food, that’s what was in them. About a hundred boxes of canned tomatoes have exploded, spraying red liquid all around, but there are also crushed packages of frozen turkey meat—pinkish shreds scattered in the sand, shimmering in the sun—canned mashed potatoes, and milk streaming out of plastic containers in several places.

  Di Salvo picks up a handful of crumbled cookies. “Breakfast anyone? You can even dunk the cookies in the milk.”

  “What a fucking mess,” Torsu says again.

  “Yeah, a big fucking mess,” Mitrano repeats.

  The pool of milk spreads around the pile, skims the soldiers’ boots, and mingles with the tomato purée. The birds of prey, which have already started wheeling about in ever tighter circles, mistake it for an inviting puddle of blood. The parched soil quenches its thirst by quickly soaking up the red liquid; it stays dark for a few seconds, then forgets it was ever moist.

  Very little of the meat supply is salvageable. The slices of turkey recovered from the dust are barely enough for a quarter of the men and the cooks refuse to cut them into smaller pieces because they’d end up with children’s portions. What with delays and glitches, the soldiers haven’t eaten meat in over a week, and when they see trays of pasta with vegetable oil again, a riot almost breaks out in the mess hall. To calm things down (and because he himself has a great desire for steak), Colonel Ballesio agrees to the first breach of regulations, authorizing an expedition of two vehicles to go to the village bazaar and buy meat from the Afghans. The soldiers chosen for the mission show up at the FOB three hours later, triumphantly greeted by whistles and applause, with a cow stretched out on its side tied to the roof.

  The animal is butchered on a nylon tarp spread out on the ground behind the dormitories of the 131st, hung out overnight at ambient temperature, and roasted for lunch. Due to adverse winds, the smoke from the grill fills the mess hall, but instead of bothering the soldiers, the stench of burning meat fuels their excitement and their appetite. They shout that they want the meat cooked rare and the cooks are happy to oblige. The thick steaks come to the table nice and pink inside: planting a fork in them releases trickles of pale blood that pools on the bottom of the plastic dishes. The meat is tough and not too flavorful, but still more appetizing than the thawed turkey, which is now rotting in the garbage bins. The guys eat until they’re bursting. A spontaneous ovation erupts for Colonel Ballesio, who stands on the bench, raises his glass, and recites a phrase that, given what happens later on, is destined to become famous in its way: “I tell you with a colonel’s certainty that this is the best meal you’ll find anywhere in all of shitty Afghanistan.”

  After lunch, the guys of the Third return to their tents to rest. Torsu and a few others head for the Wreck. They’ve done their best to make it habitable: there are now folding tables with Ethernet cables hanging overhead, along with sticky rolls of flypaper full of dead sand flies. Michelozzi, who knows something about woodworking because of his father’s trade, has built a bar counter by nailing together the boards of some walkways. It’s all it takes for the Wreck to attract people from the other tents, especially at night, even though there are almost never enough drinks to restock it.

  Like most of his companions, First Corporal Major Angelo Torsu also keeps hard-copy pornographic material in the double bottom of his backpack, but he hasn’t yet used it: since he’s been spending time with his virtual girlfriend he has something better available. It’s because of her that he’s subscribed to a satellite connection that costs him a small fortune and attracts the envy of his fellow soldiers. But man, it’s worth it, since it means he can talk to her whenever he feels like it.

  He sits down in a corner of the room and inserts the modem key. He waits for the signal light next to the name of Tersicore89 in his list of contacts to go from red to green.

  THOR_SARDEGNA: r u there?

  TERSICORE89: ciao my love

  That’s one of the fantastic things about his new girlfriend: she greets him in certain ways that make the skin on the back of his neck tingle.

  THOR_SARDEGNA: what were you doing?

  TERSICORE89: i’m in bed . . .

  THOR_SARDEGNA: but it’s at least ten thirty in the morning there!

  TERSICORE89: it’s saturday! and i was out late last night

  A twinge of jealousy clenches Torsu’s belly. He literally feels something shift inside.

  THOR_SARDEGNA: who were you out with?

  TERSICORE89: none of your business

  He feels like closing the laptop screen, slamming it down. He doesn’t like playing games. “Bitch,” he writes.

  TERSICORE89: movie with a girlfriend + a glass of wine. satisfied?

  THOR_SARDEGNA: who cares

  TERSICORE89: come on, stop it. how’s your mission going, soldier? i miss you like crazy. i looked up the place you’re at on google earth and printed the map. i hung it over the bed

  With Tersicore89, Torsu has discovered that pure imagination has some indisputable advantages. First: when done at the computer, sex lasts as long as he wants, provided he restrains his hands as needed. Delaying ejaculation enables him to reach unprecedented and almost painful levels of arousal—often he feels like he’s about to explode. Second: he’s able to picture a woman who is exceedingly gorgeous, sexy, and tall, much more gorgeous-sexy-and-tall than he thinks he deserves (not that he’s tried to construct a complete portrait of Tersicore89; for the time being it’s easier to think of her as individual body parts, details). Third: the medium of the Net helps him confess certain intimate things that he wouldn’t otherwise dare say out loud. Having a woman’s body close by, its reality and urgency, has always inhibited him a little.

  Nevertheless, for some time now he’s had an urge to see Tersicore89. Not exactly in the flesh, not yet, but at least framed half-length by the webcam. It’s a desire that arose in him with the approach of the mission. She excludes the possibility, but he keeps insisting, even now.

  THOR_SARDEGNA: let me see you

  TERSICORE89: stop it

  THOR_SARDEGNA: just for a minute

  TERSICORE89: it’s not the right time yet. you know it

  THOR_SARDEGNA: but it’s been four months already!

  TERSICORE89: we’re just getting to know each other

  THOR_SARDEGNA: i know more about you than about that bastard Cederna who sleeps in the cot next to me . . .

  TERSICORE89: if i let you see me, you won’t listen to a thing I say anymore, all you’ll think about is whether i’m pretty enough and about my body and my breasts, which maybe you’d like to be bigger. you wouldn’t even see who’s inside anymore. you men are all like that and i’ve already been through it, thanks

  THOR_SARDEGNA: i’m not like that

  He’s lying—he knows it and she can tell. His most recent relationship, with Sabrina Canton, had ended in part because of a raised mole she had on her chin. Torsu couldn’t take his eyes off that dark growth. In the final weeks the mole had become gigantic, a chasm that had swallowed her whole.

  TERSICORE89: you men are obsessed with looks

  THOR_SARDEGNA: how about i let you see me?

  TERSICORE89: don’t you dare!

  THOR_SARDEGNA: then you’re the one obsessed with looks. are you afraid i’m not go
od-looking enough?

  TERSICORE89: no. that’s not it. you’d put me in a situation of being manipulated. showing yourself would be like saying, look, i have nothing to hide, and that would imply that i, on the other hand, since i won’t let you see me, do have something to hide, and that’s manipulation

  THOR_SARDEGNA: would imply??? you talk too complicated!

  Actually, it’s precisely her way of talking—that is, of writing—that fascinates him. He never would have imagined that something like that could interest him in a woman. It’s true, Torsu likes chatting with Tersicore89. In a few months they’ve each confided more secrets to each other than they’ve ever shared with anyone. For example, she’s the only one who knows about his mother’s recent stroke, and how now she drools a little whenever she eats. And Torsu, at least according to what she swears, is the only one who’s read the poems she writes at night in a leather-covered notebook. Not that he understood much, but certain phrases really moved him.

  TERSICORE89: when you come back from your mission . . . maybe . . .

  THOR_SARDEGNA: they might kill me this very day

  TERSICORE89: don’t even say that as a joke

  THOR_SARDEGNA: they could launch a rocket right here in the place where i’m writing to you and rip my arms and legs to shreds. my brain would squirt out of my ears and eyes, and smear up the screen and i wouldn’t be able to write to you anymore

  TERSICORE89: stop it

  THOR_SARDEGNA: never again

  TERSICORE89: stop or i’ll log off!

  THOR_SARDEGNA: okay okay. your tits aren’t really small though, are they?

  TERSICORE89: no. they’re big and firm

  THOR_SARDEGNA: describe them better

  TERSICORE89: what do you want to know?

  THOR_SARDEGNA: everything, how they look. how y—

  “If you ask me, she’s a he.”

  The voice is very close to Torsu’s ear. Frightened, he gives a little yelp and snaps the lid shut. Zampieri is standing behind him.

  “What the fuck do you want? How long have you been standing there?”

  “Are you sure she’s not a guy?”

  “Get the hell away!”

  “Tersicore is a man’s name.”

  “She’s not a guy!”

  “How do you know that?”

  Zampieri leans her behind on the edge of the table and crosses her arms, as if wanting to get into a long discussion. Torsu has the beginning of an erection in his pants and Tersicore89 waiting for him inside the computer. “Would you please leave?” he says, controlling himself.

  She ignores him. “The Internet is full of people who pretend to be what they’re not for their own smutty purposes. Men who pretend to be women, for instance.”

  “Do you mind telling me what the fuck you want from me?”

  “I’m just trying to protect you. You’re a friend of mine.”

  “I don’t need anyone to protect me.”

  Zampieri tilts her head. She studies her nails, chooses one, and starts biting it.

  Torsu says: “Anyway, a man wouldn’t write certain things.” He has no idea why he’s now trying to convince her.

  “I’d be able to write like a man if I wanted to,” Zampieri replies, skeptical.

  “No one had any doubts about that.”

  “Besides, if she doesn’t want to be seen, it means there’s something wrong.”

  “Fuck, you actually read all of it?”

  “Some. Big, firm tits. Mmm . . .”

  “Shut up! Anyway, I don’t want to see her either.”

  “How come?”

  “Just because.”

  Zampieri strokes his hair and the back of his neck, making him shiver. “Torsu, Torsu . . . what’s the matter? Do real women scare you?”

  He shoves her hand away forcefully and she bursts out laughing. “Give my regards to your little boyfriend,” she says, then walks away. She’ll probably go straight to the others and blurt it all out. Who the hell cares. Torsu opens the computer lid again.

  TERSICORE89: r u still there?

  THOR_SARDEGNA: i’m here. sorry, i lost the connection

  Awkwardly they pick up where they’d left off. The conversation quickly degenerates into a rapid exchange of you-do-this-to-me-I-do-this-to-you, but the first corporal major’s mood has been ruined. He’s constantly turning around to make sure no one is watching him. From time to time the image of a young male adolescent sitting in place of Tersicore89 crosses his mind, disconcerting him. A severe fit of nausea rises up as he writes and reads, and he has stomach cramps. The malady worsens until he can no longer stand it. He’s obliged to sign off in a hurry. He promises Tersicore89 he’ll be right back.

  Walking briskly through the base, he forces himself not to make eye contact with the other soldiers or be distracted by the small hawks wheeling around the watch tower. He wants to keep what’s left of his arousal alive until he reaches the latrines.

  Halfway there the first wave of wooziness hits him. The unsteadiness quickly passes from his head to his body, a quaking that he feels in the lower part of his abdomen. Within seconds, the pangs intensify to a point that makes him start running.

  He reaches the chemical toilets, turns the first handle but the door is locked; he opens the second cubicle and finds a gruesome spectacle there; he enters the third and barely has time to latch it and pull his pants down, then he crouches over the aluminum squat toilet and releases his bowels in a single surge.

  Slowly he exhales, his heart pounding in his ears. Another discharge takes him by surprise, coming suddenly and even more violently than the first, accompanied by acute stabbing pains. His digestive tract is in complete revolt. Torsu squeezes his eyes shut and grips the handle; he has the feeling he’s being sucked into the hole. He tries not to look at the splatter of liquid shit on his bare thighs and the edge of his pants.

  When the sharp pangs subside, he rests his head on his outstretched arm and remains like that another minute, exhausted and appalled by the gravity of what’s happened to him. A feeling of relief spreads through his entire body along with a powerful drowsiness. For a few seconds he dozes off in that unnatural position.

  Angelo Torsu is the first to show symptoms of food poisoning, maybe because he overdid it, filling his plate with cow meat three times, or because he’s never had a strong stomach. Nevertheless, while he’s still cowering inside the cramped toilet, two soldiers hole up in the adjoining latrines and he recognizes the sounds of an emergency similar to his own. Within a few hours Staphylococcus aureus has invaded the FOB and the base is in chaos. There are eighteen toilets available and at least a hundred men affected, with attacks hitting them twenty minutes apart.

  By four in the afternoon the latrine area is overrun by a pack of trembling soldiers with greenish faces. They’re gripping rolls of toilet paper and shouting to those inside the stalls to hurry it up, damn it.

  There are four people ahead of Corporal Major Enrico Di Salvo, among them Cederna. Di Salvo is considering asking his buddy to switch places with him, because he’s afraid he won’t make it, but he’s sure he’ll say no. Cederna is a top-notch soldier, funny when he wants to be, but he’s also a real bastard.

  Di Salvo tries to remember when he’s ever felt this bad in the past. When he was thirteen he was operated on for appendicitis, and in the months prior to that he’d wake up at night with cramps that prevented him from walking upright to his parents’ room. His mother was mistrustful of drugs and his father wary of specialists’ fees, so they treated him with limonata. The pain didn’t go away and at some point his mother would return to bed, upset with him: “I told you to drink it while it was hot and you insisted on waiting. So it didn’t do any good.” When the ambulance came to take him, the inflammation had worsened into peritonitis. But not even the pain at that time may have been as intense as
what he’s now feeling. “Cederna, let me go ahead of you,” he says.

  “Forget it.”

  “Please, I can’t hold it anymore.”

  “Get a bag and do it in there, then.”

  “I don’t like shitting in bags. Plus I can’t make it to the tent.”

  “Your fucking problem. We’re all in the same boat.”

  Di Salvo doesn’t think that’s true, though. Cederna isn’t at all pale and he has yet to let out a moan or make a grimace. The other guys are gasping with pain. The first in line has started jerking the handle of a toilet that’s been closed for too long. He receives an insult in return and kicks the metal door.

  No, he’s definitely never felt this bad. He has knives planted in his spleen and liver, he’s got the chills, and he’s dizzy. If he doesn’t get to the toilet in a few minutes, he’ll have to throw up, or worse. He might even faint. That stuff they ate was poison.

  As if that weren’t enough, after lunch he’d made a brief visit to Abib’s tent and they smoked some hash together, just one gram, crumbled into the tobacco of a cigarette. Abib has a strange way of preparing the mixture; instead of heating it with a lighter, he rubs it between his fingers for a long time and then lets his saliva drip over it. You’re disgusting, Di Salvo told him the first time. What? You’re disgusting. Abib looked at him with that sly smile of his. After months at the base with the Italians he could speak a few words of Italian but instead he always spoke English: Italians no know smoke, he’d replied.

  Maybe it’s because of Abib’s saliva that he now feels worse than the others. Who knows what disgusting infection he’s passed on to him. He lives in the tent with the other two interpreters, on those carpets that stink of feet. An incredible odor, like sticking your nose in a sweaty sock. At first Di Salvo didn’t want to sit down, but now he’s gotten used to it. He just tries not to put his head down, even when he feels light-headed.