The Human Body

by Paolo Giordano

  “Yeah.”

  “It would be even better if you turned the cartridge belt right side up,” Masiero says sharply.

  “Of course. Sorry, sir.”

  Zampieri goes on fumbling with the lid, but the machine gun keeps slipping and pitching forward, a recalcitrant animal. René is impatient. From below, the guys are watching their platoon mate with a mixture of sympathy and curiosity and glancing at René, as if asking him to intervene. The captain, leaning his forearms on the windowsill of the tower, wears a sarcastic grin. Zampieri finally manages to hold the weapon with her elbow and close the feed assembly. “Done.”

  “It’s about time. Charge!”

  The girl tries to pull the charger handle back, but it’s too stiff. René himself felt a little resistance earlier. Now he’s sure Zampieri won’t make it. In fact, she tries again, but can’t pull it all the way back.

  “Maybe it’s jammed,” she says softly.

  Masiero elbows her aside. “It’s not jammed, damn it! It’s you who’s inept!” He loads the weapon with a violent jerk. “Now fire!”

  Zampieri isn’t trembling, but her cheeks are redder than usual, her neck rigid. René, too, can feel the blood pulsing everywhere, in his ears, hands. Zampieri hastily takes aim, the MG recoils, and the round winds up about twenty yards above the barrel. The captain swears, then stands behind the girl and shoves her forward with his pelvis, toward the butt of the machine gun. If they weren’t appalled, the guys would certainly venture a few salacious remarks.

  “Fire, damn it!”

  The rounds land even farther away from the target. Zampieri gives a little cry: her breast is painfully pressed between the weapon and Masiero’s sternum. He yanks her around and starts shaking her. “And you’re supposed to be a gunner? Huh? A gunner? We’re in Gulistan, goddamn it! Here they’ll slaughter us thanks to people like you!”

  The guys in the platoon have bowed their heads a little. René, on the contrary, is determined to stare the captain down till the end.

  “What if you’d been on guard duty last night? You’d have gotten us all killed. This is a war and you don’t know how to use a machine gun!”

  Zampieri is rigid. She looks like she’s surely going to break at any moment in Masiero’s grip. The capillaries in her eyes have exploded into red.

  “Captain,” René speaks up.

  Masiero turns around, furious. “What?”

  “Maybe you’re being too intimidating.”

  René remains at attention, expressionless, as Masiero slowly walks over to him, breathing through his mouth.

  “I’m intimidating her?”

  “The men have never used that weapon before today.”

  “Oh, darn. I’m sorry about that. Maybe I should have given the young lady a water pistol. Has she fired that yet?”

  René remains silent. His expression doesn’t change at all, nor does that of his men, speechless at the foot of the tower. They’ve been trained to be strictly impassive, to keep their worst thoughts well hidden behind their eyes, and Masiero was one of their instructors. The captain moves even closer to René, stops a few inches from his face. He looks at the stripes pinned to his jacket, as if he weren’t perfectly familiar with them. “Marshal, tell me. Have you ever been involved in a firefight? A real firefight, I mean.”

  “No.”

  “Answer the way you respond to a superior, Marshal.”

  “No, sir.”

  “I see. Too bad. Oh, but don’t let it worry you. This mission you’ll have your turn. And you know why? Because over here they shoot. Here they hate us and want to kill us all. Did you hear those dazzling fireworks last night? Well, be aware that it wasn’t a party and that they won’t stop until they’ve razed this base to the ground and wiped out all the infidel dogs like you and me. You know what the Taliban do to prisoners, Marshal?”

  “No, sir.”

  “They crucify them. Like Jesus Christ. Can you imagine a rusty nail planted in the nerves of your hand? You men down there, can you imagine that? Mademoiselle, can you imagine it? You starve to death, or bleed out. It can take up to three days. The fuckers moisten your lips to make you last longer. And you know what else they do, Marshal?”

  “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “No, sir.”

  “They bludgeon you with a club, for hours and hours, until you can no longer tell whether you still have clothes on. But they’re careful not to kill you. Because afterward they lock you in a cell full of insects and let them finish the job. Or else . . . ask me, Or else what?, Marshal.”

  “Or else what, sir?”

  “Or else they hang you upside down until all the blood flows into your brain and it bursts. Pow! Now do you understand why it’s useful to know how to load an MG?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And do you think the young lady with the blond curls back here has also understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Because it would be a shame if those beautiful golden locks were to get smeared with blood, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Masiero pauses. The silence is so absolute that René can hear his own breathing. “Well, then,” the captain says finally, “we’re done here.”

  Masiero climbs down the ladder. The soldiers stand at attention as he parades by them, not deigning to look at them. Up on the fortification, René smiles at Zampieri as if to tell her not to take it so hard—nothing serious, really.

  • • •

  Twilight is Lieutenant Egitto’s favorite time of day. The air suddenly turns cooler, but it’s not yet biting cold like at night. In the evening light, the FOB seems to shrink, and colors other than the usual ocher and green can finally be seen around the rock-strewn square as the soldiers go about in colorful robes and flip-flops. For a couple of hours, the mood is one of peaceful everyday life. Even the lieutenant’s hardened apathy cracks and he experiences unexpected bursts of good humor.

  Adjacent to the showers is a tent with a heater, used as a locker room, but Egitto doesn’t like to undress in front of his colleagues—he’d rather do it inside the stall, even if the space is tight. He’s perfected a way to take off his clothes and put them back on while balancing first on one leg and then the other, so that his feet don’t make contact with the filthy floor without his flip-flops. Survival at the FOB requires skill in countless little things like that.

  The water is lukewarm, not really hot, but after about ten seconds it feels pleasant enough. Someone left his body wash on the shelf. Egitto unscrews the cap and sniffs the contents: it has a strong aroma, pungent and inescapably male, the kind that often lingers in the locker rooms at the barracks. The guys like to swathe themselves in dense clouds of fragrance. They spray their chests, even their genitals, with powerful deodorants, which then stagnate in the muggy air—another difference between him and them: the lieutenant washes with alkaline soap from the dispensary.

  He pours the liquid into his hand, rubs it onto his chest and shoulders. The scrubbing opens small, dark wounds at the spots that are in the worst shape, which then heal immediately. The lieutenant directs the stream of water to the shreds of dead skin scattered on the ground until they’re sucked down the drain. Maybe the owner of the body wash is waiting outside the door. When Egitto passes him he’ll recognize the scent of his shower gel and God only knows how he might react. The guys are unpredictable. In any case he’d be right: you don’t steal a buddy’s soap—it’s one of those crimes that in an outpost in the middle of the desert takes on gigantic import. He pours out some more, spreads it over his groin and on his legs. Then he stands under the water with his eyes closed, until someone knocks on the door. He’s used up his three minutes in the shower.

  Back at the infirmary, he finds the tent zipper halfway open. “Anybody there?”

  A female voice comes from the
other side of the green canvas: “Alessandro? Is that you?”

  The flap opens and a bare arm emerges followed by a shoulder, a strip of white towel, then the round face of Irene Sammartino, with her hair pinned up. Irene. The half-naked hologram of her is projected before the lieutenant from a distant universe, far off in time and space. Bewildered, Egitto takes a step back from the apparition.

  The woman smiles at him. “I chose this cot. I didn’t know where you slept. There’s no sign of a living soul.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Irene tilts her head to one side, folds her bare arms across her breasts. Her breasts were never very large, though they weren’t small either; Egitto roughly remembers how it felt to cup one of them in the palm of his hand.

  “Is that any way to welcome an old friend? Come here. Let me give you a kiss.”

  Egitto approaches, reluctantly. Irene looks up to study him carefully, compensating for the slight difference in height that separates them; she seems to want to make sure that all his features are in place. “You’re still pretty good looking,” she says, satisfied.

  The towel covers only part of her thighs and sways each time she moves. What’s holding it closed at the collarbone isn’t a knot, just a corner tucked under the edge, which could come loose at any moment, displaying her entire body. Egitto doesn’t know why he’s considering this possibility. Irene Sammartino is there, barefoot, in his tent, and he has no idea why—he doesn’t know where she came from, whether she rained down from the sky or sprouted from the earth, what her intentions are. She plants two friendly kisses lightly on his cheeks. She’s wearing a nice scent that doesn’t arouse any memory in him. “Come on, Lieutenant, say something! You look like you’ve seen the devil himself!”

  Half an hour later Egitto is asking Colonel Ballesio for an explanation, as the colonel meanwhile turns his attention to wiping out the bottom of a container of yogurt with his finger.

  “Irene, right. She said you were friends. Lucky you. Nice piece of ass, no doubt about it. But she blabbers a mile a minute. Nonstop. And she makes jokes that frankly I don’t get. Don’t you think there’s something pathetic about women who make jokes that aren’t funny? My wife is that way. Never had the guts to tell her.” Ballesio sticks his whole finger in his mouth, pulls it out, glistening with saliva. “Plus, she seems like one of those who have a tendency to put on weight. Her legs—I mean, have you looked at them? They’re not fat but you can tell there’s a good chance they will be. I had an overweight girl as an NCO and . . . phew! Those chubby ones have something about them . . . something swinish. Did she get settled in okay?”

  “I let her have my cot.”

  “Good. I appreciate it. I would even have kept her here, but since you’re already friends . . .” Did he just wink at him? Or was it only his impression? “Besides, I have this terrible snoring problem. It almost cost me a divorce. My wife and I have slept in separate rooms for fourteen years. Not that I mind, but sometimes I wake myself up because I’m snoring so loud. A buzz saw, that’s me.” He coughs. “No remedy for it, Doctor?”

  “None, Colonel.” Egitto is angrier than he lets on.

  Ballesio inspects the bottom of the container, in case there might still be a trace of yogurt. He even scrupulously licked the foil lid, which is now lying on the table. He tosses the container into the trash can, but misses. The plastic cup bounces off the rim and rolls on the ground, at the lieutenant’s feet. Egitto hopes he won’t ask him to pick it up. “Of course. Because there is no cure. Patches, lozenges, sleeping on my side—I’ve tried everything. There is no solution. If a person snores, he snores, end of story. Anyway. Our Irene will be here a week, helicopters permitting.”

  “What is she doing here, Colonel?”

  Ballesio looks at him sideways. “You’re asking me, Lieutenant? How should I know? Afghanistan is full of these Irenes wandering around. They look into things, they investigate. It wouldn’t surprise me if your friend were here to gather information about one of us. Who can tell? Today a soldier complains about some bullshit and they immediately pounce on you like vultures. She can be my guest, though. I have nothing to protect anymore. If they were to force me to retire tomorrow, I’d be more than happy. You, on the other hand. Watch your ass.”

  Egitto takes a breath. “Commander, I’d like to ask permission to sleep here. I won’t bother you.”

  Ballesio’s face darkens, then relaxes in a smile again. “Oh, no, I know that. Of course you wouldn’t. If anything I’d be the one disturbing you. Tell me: what’s the problem, Lieutenant?”

  “I feel it’s more appropriate for Irene to have her privacy.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re a faggot.”

  “No, sir.”

  “You know what my old man always used to say? My dear Giacomo, he’d say, Se ’l te pias moll, ghe n’è fin che te vöret—if you like them limp, there are as many as you want. That’s just what he said, but in dialect, which sounds even worse.” The colonel grips his jewels through his pants. “He was a pig. At eighty he would still get into bed with his caregiver. Poor thing, he died alone like a dog. I don’t know if we understand each other, Lieutenant”—the wink again, this time obvious—“but as far as I’m concerned, you and your guest can do whatever you want. I have nothing against a little healthy promiscuity.”

  Egitto decides to completely ignore the gist of the colonel’s allusions. How would Ballesio react if he knew the exact nature of his friendship with Irene Sammartino? He has no desire to reveal it. He repeats slowly: “If I won’t disturb you, I’ll move in here. Temporarily.”

  “Okay, okay, whatever you like,” Ballesio says impatiently. “You know something, Egitto? You’re the most boring officer I’ve met in thirty years of service.”

  That night, however, Egitto doesn’t sleep at all. Ballesio really does snore like a buzz saw and the lieutenant spends his time fretting, imagining the commander’s gluey uvula vibrating in his air passage, the glands suffused with blood, swollen, hypertrophic. He’d like to get up and shake him hard, but he doesn’t dare, he’d like to go back to the infirmary and grab a packet of Ativan, but he doesn’t dare do that either. Irene Sammartino is in there, sleeping. When he thinks about it, he’s still dubious, wondering whether it may have been just a lengthy, detailed hallucination. The most he can do is tone down Ballesio by shushing him. The colonel quiets down for a few seconds, then starts in again, louder than before. Sometimes he goes into apnea and when he starts breathing again he produces monstrous sucking sounds.

  Egitto’s frustration leaves him vulnerable to the assault of memories. The protective shell of the duloxetine softens, and gradually he surrenders to the stream of thoughts. The lieutenant retraces the few, predictable episodes that he still recalls about his affair with Irene. How long had it lasted? Not long, a couple of months at most. They’d attended the same courses together at officers’ training school. They’d become close because they were somewhat more casual than their very proper colleagues—she in that vehement way of hers and he with his caustic style, an unexpectedly valuable legacy of Ernesto’s rants.

  The attraction the lieutenant felt for Irene was on the cool side, but at times it suddenly flared up and blazed like a fire doused with gasoline. What he remembers best about the time he spent with her is having sex in the cramped dorm room, the sheets always a little damper than he would have liked. But Irene’s emotional excesses had soon become a cause of anxiety, and when the erotic flare-ups had begun to occur less frequently, Egitto hadn’t found a way to reignite them.

  He has an image of the two of them lying on his single bed, awake and inert; it was a Sunday morning and they were listening to the guttural cooing of the pigeons on the windowsill. It sounded like the cries of wild human orgasms, a suggestion that Egitto chose to ignore: it was the precise moment when he realized that he no longer had any desire. He said so to Irene, in those same
brutal terms, more or less.

  But getting rid of Irene Sammartino hadn’t proved to be so simple. A couple of weeks after the breakup there’d been an unpleasant aftermath: she summoned him to a café in the city center and with a devastated air confessed that she was six days late—it couldn’t be a coincidence, no, her cycle was always right on time, infallible. Still, she hadn’t wanted to take the test, not yet. They’d walked for hours under the arcades, not touching; in his mind Egitto considered various scenarios, barely keeping his nerves under control and occasionally trying to persuade her to make sure. It turned out to be a big mistake. In the months that followed, Irene would turn up when he least expected it. Their mutual friends, generally speaking, were more his than hers, but Irene never passed up a chance to run into him. She always arrived alone, smiling, and for a while she’d be implausibly animated. She’d talk to everyone, ignoring him, but when she could no longer keep up the role, she retreated into silence. She’d start looking around, fidgety as a cat, throwing frequent glances in his direction, and sooner or later in the course of the evening they would find themselves alone, asking each other how things were going, increasingly uncomfortable.

  Then, overnight, Irene disappeared into thin air. The conjecture that spread among the school’s students was that Intelligence had enrolled her in a special program abroad. Egitto wasn’t surprised: she had always been sharp, skillful at communicating. He hadn’t wondered too much about it, in any case. He felt relieved.

  Colonel Ballesio’s nose emits a high-pitched whistle, like the shriek of a rocket, which then ends in a sudden burst. Egitto tosses and turns on the cot for the millionth time. Irene Sammartino . . . How many years has it been? Eight? Nine? And after all those years she shows up right there, in Gulistan, in his tent, like a Trojan horse that fate has suddenly slipped into his protected haven. To disturb him, to bring him back. To what, he doesn’t know. To the glittering world of the living? No, fate has nothing to do with it. Egitto is often tempted to give in to the lure of coincidence, but in this case Irene Sammartino has had a hand in it. If she came to the FOB, it’s because she chose to come—she must have something in mind: he’s not going to let himself be fooled. Watch your ass, Lieutenant.