“Francesco Cederna. Pay no attention to him. He’s a wild man.”
On the few occasions he’s seen him, Egitto got the impression that Cederna was an excitable, volatile type, the kind who picks fights in bars, like the guys his sister assumes populate the army’s ranks. There’s something disturbing about his eyes; the blinking of his eyelashes is slightly more sporadic than that of normal people.
He realizes that Cederna is teasing Torsu. The tension between the two rises, until a third soldier comes forward to calm them down. They switch positions and shortly afterward Torsu gets off the Lince. He takes off his helmet and sets it on the ground. Egitto watches him unfold a black bag and arrange it inside the helmet; then he pulls down his pants and crouches over that improvised toilet.
Now that Egitto sees the boy hunched over his helmet like an egg, his face strained, he has some misgivings about whether he acted hastily in allowing him to come. But there’s nothing he can do about it now. Passengers can’t be taken back at this point. The young man will just have to grit his teeth until they get where they’re going.
As if called upon, Torsu looks up at him. Egitto makes a thumbs-up to ask if everything is okay and the soldier nods assuredly. There’s not much chance of hiding, so he doesn’t even try. Egitto, on the other hand, doesn’t feel the need to look away, nor does he stop scarfing down the slop from the can, not even when the soldier stands back up and wipes himself as best he can, displaying his entire arsenal. Under normal conditions the lieutenant would have turned aside or at least pushed the food away. Not now. He watches and chews. Something in him has definitively changed since they advanced beyond the security bubble, and especially since the bomb tech found the first explosive device; where he is now, in the heart of the valley, there’s no longer any trace of modesty or shame. Many of the qualities that distinguish humans from other animals have disappeared. From now on, he reflects, he himself no longer exists as a human being. He’s turned into something abstract, a cluster of pure alertness, of pure reaction and endurance. Unexpectedly, he’s come amazingly close to the absence of individuality that he’s been pursuing by any and all means since the day his father died, the day he started taking drugs that could make him lose himself.
The lieutenant watches Torsu attend to his business, Senior Corporal Major Camporesi watches him, Cederna and the other guys watch him: all of them enjoying the scatological spectacle of their colleague Torsu, all of them without feeling any emotion.
Egitto upturns the can and swallows the congealed sauce to the last drop, then sets the can aside. An acidic belch rises from his stomach; he holds it in.
Cederna sticks his fingers in his mouth, pulls out a chewed piece of gum, and throws it at Torsu. “You’re always crapping, you shitty Sardinian,” he yells to him. “You’re a fucking digestive tract.”
• • •
The mine clearing operations go on for more than two hours. By the time they set out again the guys are bored, dazed, and all but cooked in the savage heat. The vehicles have become hotboxes. It’s afternoon and any trace of their initial enthusiasm has vanished.
For Ietri things are worse than for the others, but by now he’s used to believing that. It’s only the first day on the road and he can’t stand sitting any longer, stuck in the backseat with Di Salvo next to him, standing on the turret, kicking his thigh with his boot tip every time he changes direction with the machine gun. He always does it to him and not Pecone, as if on purpose, hundreds of little kicks in exactly the same spot, since Di Salvo is continuously swiveling.
Besides that, he has a privileged view of Zampieri and Cederna, who are sitting in the front seats, exchanging smiles, teasing glances and banter, which, as he interprets them, all refer to sex. As if they wanted to flaunt what they did to the whole world, Zampieri is sporting a livid hickey the size of a coin on her neck. Ietri has been torturing himself all these hours imagining Cederna holding her head wedged and sucking her skin. His imagination has gone so far as to picture Zampieri’s blood being suctioned to the surface to form the bruise. Did they go all the way afterward? For sure they did—Cederna isn’t the type to pull back or leave things halfway. But it doesn’t make much difference at this point. Ietri has decided that from now on he doesn’t like any girl anymore and no longer has a best friend. It’s awful to think about it. It makes him feel alone, inconsolable, and hurt.
Di Salvo lands another little kick on his nerve.
“Hey, watch it! Shit!” Ietri bursts out.
“What are you getting all worked up about back there, verginella?” Cederna chimes in.
What stings Ietri more than anything, though he would never admit it, is that his friend hasn’t even noticed how angry he is or that he hasn’t spoken to him since morning. Now he has two choices: answer him rudely and make his resentment known, or continue not speaking to him, make believe he doesn’t exist. By the time he makes up his mind, however, Cederna has already forgotten about him.
Via radio, René is urging them to pick up the pace. The Third has to make up a fairly substantial gap, because in the last hour they’ve made two extra stops, due to Torsu’s intestinal problems. The third time René denied him permission to get out of the vehicle and the soldier is now forced to perform his evacuation operations on the turret, standing, to the benefit of Mitrano and Simoncelli, whose heads are directly level with his pelvis. He drops his pants and briefs to his knees, unfolds the garbage bag, and manages as best he can.
Poor guy, Ietri thinks, seeing what’s going on in the Lince behind them in the rearview mirror, but his sympathy stops there. At this moment he’s too absorbed in pitying himself. He lets that insistent feeling draw him into a series of ever morbid fantasies that eventually verge on thoughts of death. It’s the only way he’s able to coddle himself, sinking deeper into misery.
He glances out the window, but there’s nothing to see, not a tree or a house, not a color other than that of rock and sand. He’s overcome by a feeling of nostalgia for the town where he grew up. When he was in middle school, and even more in high school, he hated Torremaggiore and its deserted streets. He was the only heavy metal freak within fifty miles and wore the Slayers apocalyptic T-shirts as a shout of protest. Now he’d give anything to be back there. Even just for a little while. He’d like to be dozing on the high bed with the wrought-iron headboard, in the room that was too bright in the afternoon to really sleep, listening to the rattle of his mother’s pots in the kitchen, her radio set low so it wouldn’t disturb him.
Why does he always want too much and always what he can’t have, things in the past or, worse yet, those that will never come? At age twenty he’s beginning to wish that all those desires would vanish without a trace. There certainly must be a point at which a man stops being conflicted, in which a man finds himself exactly where he wants to be.
From a dizzying height in the sky, a hawk swoops down and Ietri follows its flight. Just before touching the ground the bird soars again, picks up a current, and lets it carry him, adrift, in midair. It’s a sight that the corporal finds inspiring. There, that’s how he should be.
The Lince brakes suddenly, flinging him forward. Ietri’s forehead hits the seat’s reinforcement bar; then he bounces back. A whiplash injury to his neck that he pays no attention to, because first he has to figure out what’s happened.
Di Salvo has crashed down ass-first and let out a shout; a few cases of ammunition have overturned, and there are cartridges scattered everywhere, some even between his legs. Cederna swears, then slaps the dashboard. “You guys okay?” he asks.
Automatically, Ietri replies, “Yeah.” He couldn’t manage to keep up his silence this time either.
• • •
At first they call it a ditch, but in all respects it’s a crater, so deep that, looking into it, you can see water glimmering. A well in the middle of the desert—who would believe it? The right front wheel of the Lince
has ended up in it, while the others are reared up. When Zampieri tries to step on the gas, the wheels spin around in the air, shooting clumps of earth in every direction. The real problem is that the vehicle’s chassis is lodged on a rock outcropping. Towing the vehicle is risky because they might damage the gas tank and they can’t leave it there because regulations prohibit it. (God only knows what the enemy would do with the Lince if they were to get hold of it!) The only solution is to try to raise it and drag it forward. But it weighs ten tons.
They have a good field of vision, so almost everyone gets out, and for the first few minutes at least they’re grateful to whoever caused them to stop. They take the opportunity to stretch, bending over to grab their ankles and twisting their backs from side to side. They try decreasing the vehicle’s load: after the passengers are out, the gear and ammunition are also unloaded. Cederna and Di Salvo dismount the Browning from the turret and at that point there’s nothing left to remove unless they pull out the seats, as some have suggested.
It’s hopeless. Even with six and then twelve pairs of strong arms trying to lift the Lince, it won’t budge. René is furious and he’s not the only one: Captain Masiero radioed his contempt from up ahead, shouting that he had no intention of stopping because Goldilocks isn’t capable of driving. He ordered the column to be temporarily broken and René didn’t have the nerve to object and say that it was an extremely risky plan. He knew the captain would lay into him and then proceed to do whatever he wanted.
Masiero, together with the bomb techs and most of the military vehicles, has continued along the track to get on with clearing the terrain. As soon as the trouble with the Lince is resolved, the rest of the convoy can catch up with them by moving more quickly. The guys of the Third and the truckers watch the vehicles that preceded them disappear behind the mountain. Now they’re orphans. Their situation is as tragic as it is simple: the longer it takes them to get out of the fix they’re in, the greater the distance they’ll have to cover without the ACRT’s protection, now in the forefront, blindfolded and barefoot in a terrain full of mines. The more time they lose, the greater the possibility that a stupid accident might turn into a much bigger disaster.
So they get busy, each however he can. They strain their biceps and cut their hands in an effort to raise the vehicle. They count one . . . two . . . lift, and only when they’re out of breath do they release their grip. Even the Afghans have sensed the danger and, grouped beside the Lince, offer advice that no one understands.
Corporal Zampieri is the only one standing on the sidelines. After almost burning the clutch to drive the heap of scrap iron forward, she’s now focused on vigorously resisting the tears that are choking her. What’s the matter with her? Why didn’t she see the hole? She thinks she must have come close to nodding off. She’d been struggling to keep her eyes open for over an hour, tempted by the urge to doze off with her face squashed against the steering wheel, and instead of spilling a bottle of water over her head, she’d let herself be lulled.
What an idiot! She feels like kicking herself. Instead she bites her right thumb and chews the skin off, since the nail has already been bitten as far down as possible. Gnawing her fingers has an immediate calming effect. During periodic visits, the doctors always make offensive comments about that habit, but she ignores them. As she moves from the battered thumb to her middle finger (which doesn’t offer as much satisfaction except for the joy of ruining something intact), she reviews, one at a time, the phases she’s all too familiar with, stages from similar situations in which she’s fouled up: shame, the wish to disappear, fierce anger, the urge to vindicate herself.
Cederna comes over. He throws an arm around her shoulder, more comradely than affectionate. Last night Zampieri was sure he really liked her, but now she knows that his interest was just due to the general excitement and lasted only briefly. Even when they entered the tent she had the impression that Cederna wanted to have some fun with her for lack of a better alternative. Giulia Zampieri has always been the kind of girl men have a good time with. No one really wants her seriously. They do what they want with her body, sawing off her head. She knows this and by all appearances she couldn’t care less.
She tried to enjoy the fun, and later, when she was having a hard time getting to sleep, she rated Cederna’s performance as coolly as guys must rate their bed mates. Nothing special, hasty and repetitive. She tried to silence the insistent frustration that demanded something more, something better, and not just from a sexual point of view. She fell asleep wondering whether she’d been infatuated with him for too long, an unacceptably long time, and fearing that their little fling may have punched a hole in the sealed container that kept that feeling in check.
“It could have happened to anyone,” Cederna says. “Sure, it’s a fucking disaster. But it could have happened to anyone. That is, almost anyone. It wouldn’t have happened to me, for instance.”
Zampieri says nothing. She shrugs off his arm.
“When you can’t see beyond an obstacle, you always have to go around it,” he continues. “You can’t know what to expect up ahead.”
“Are you teaching me how to drive, asshole?”
“Hey, don’t get mad. I’m just giving you a piece of advice.”
“I don’t need your advice. Why don’t you beat it and leave me in peace?”
Cederna winks at her. He’s really a blowhard. How can she like someone like that?
He leans over and whispers in her ear: “Maybe you’re just a little tired. You were pretty wild on that cot.”
There it is. That’s what Cederna thinks of her. That she’s a woman men can be brazen with, and say things like “You were pretty wild on that cot” and freely admit all the filthy acts that normally they only dare to imagine.
She gives him a shove. “I’m not the least bit tired, get it? If you really want to know, you didn’t last long enough for me to even begin to get tired.” She says it loudly so the others can hear. They turn around, curious.
Cederna grabs her arm. “What the hell’s wrong with you, huh?”
“Maybe it’s time we said what you’re really worth, Francesco Cederna. So everyone will know.”
“Shut up!” Cederna raises his right arm to smack her, but it’s not clear he’d have the guts to really hit her because Ietri appears out of nowhere and comes between them.
“What’s going on?”
“Get out of my way, verginella.”
“I asked you what’s going on.”
Cederna stands right under his nose, Ietri a whole head taller. “Get out of here, I said.”
“No, Cederna. I won’t get out. You get out.” Ietri’s voice cracks a bit with emotion.
At the far right of Zampieri’s field of vision is the wedged Lince with the guys scrambling around it, in the center the aggressive profile of Cederna, and to the left, out of focus, Ietri’s. Zampieri is and isn’t present. Right now her heart is blank, empty. Her arms are trembling and her cheeks burning. Men always know how to handle her, but she’s learned how to handle men.
She turns slowly. She reaches out to the back of Ietri’s neck, pulls him to her. The sensual kiss she plants on his mouth has no sentimental implication; it’s a clear act of revenge, of self-defense, a rejection of the ferocious animal threatening her.
She breaks it off with a smack of her lips and glances sidelong at Cederna, who’s turned pale. “You should ask your friend to teach you, you know. He’s no verginella. No way! He knows what’s what.”
• • •
It’s after five and the sun is low on the horizon when René decides to take a chance and go for broke. “We’ll hook it up to the ambulance,” he says.
“That way we could wreck both of them.”
“We’ll hook it up to the ambulance, I said.”
They use a double tow hitch; then René himself gets behind the wheel. He doesn’t want t
he responsibility for any slipup to fall on one of his men. He’d like the guys to recognize his generosity, but instead they stare at him skeptically as he gets set to start; some even think he wants to take credit for it. He tries not to pay any attention. By now he knows: the chief quality required of a commander is to be able to forsake any form of gratitude.
He steps firmly on the accelerator. The ambulance’s tires spin at full speed, kicking up a dust cloud. The tachometer goes to six thousand rpm; a high-pitched screech forces the soldiers to cover their ears. The Lince rocks back and forth and seems to want to tip over on its side, but instead, with a single violent lurch, it’s out of the hole. The accident leaves its mark in a silvery scar on the underside of the vehicle.
René regroups the column and they set out again, but the severed convoy doesn’t get very far. By now the sun is gone. Moreover, through his binoculars René can see a village. Lartay. He can’t make up his mind whether it frightens him or not. Captain Masiero got past it unscathed with his troops and is now awaiting the stragglers in an area with better visibility, beyond the group of settlements. Ending up so far apart wasn’t part of the plan—the captain, completely ignoring his own error of judgment and skipping over any apology of course, had muttered into the transmitter that there was no suitable place to spend the night until they reached Buji Pass, so he’d pressed on down there, end of story. René is tempted to try to join him, but he can’t run the risk of being trapped in a village in the dark.
This is the first time he’s heading a mission with any real danger, the first time he has to make such a difficult decision. If he’d been handed the prospect of such an opportunity, even just that morning, he would have been dazed with excitement, but now he doesn’t feel the sense of achievement he expected. He’s definitely more worried than proud.
The Human Body Page 20