The Human Body (12 page)

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
.

 • • • 

I
etri and Zampieri climb the main tower for guard duty. The moon is a luminous crescent over the mountain and Ietri recalls a mnemonic verse he learned in elementary school:
The moon is a liar—when it forms a D it's
crescens
, waxing; when it forms a C it's
decrescens
, waning
. With D in the sky, his father would get up before dawn to plant sugar beets. With C he'd left the house one evening in May and never returned.

“There's a waning moon,” he says to himself.

“Huh?”

“Nothing.”

Zampieri sits on the ground, legs outstretched. She swings the tips of her boots back and forth. “It's cold,” she says. “Shit, just think about January. We'll freeze to death.”

Ietri pulls his gloves out of his pocket and offers them to her. She ignores him and goes on talking while studying the stripped skin around her right thumbnail. She bites it where it's pinkest. “The captain should come up here. To see how cold it is. Not a chance, though—he doesn't get his ass dirty.”

“Who, Masiero?”

Zampieri stares at the tip of her boots, persistently gnawing at her finger. “Did you see how he treated me? He called me ‘mademoiselle,' like I was some dumb fashion model.”

“Is that what it means?”

Again she ignores him. “I know how to load an MG—take my word. I can load any weapon in the world. That machine gun was mounted too high. Masiero should see me shoot with my SC. I'd rip that barrel to shreds.”

“You couldn't hit that far with an SC,” Ietri contradicts her, but right away he gets the impression that it wasn't the right thing to say. Zampieri in fact looks at him confused, somewhat disgusted, before she continues. “That gun was jammed, I told him. It must have been Simoncelli who fired before me. He always fucks up the artillery.”

She takes her thumb out of her mouth, rubs it with her forefinger. She loosens her ponytail and shakes her head. She's more beautiful with her hair like that, Ietri thinks, more feminine.

A moment later she's sobbing uncontrollably. “He called me ‘young lady'! Sexist bastard! He doesn't act like that with you guys. Oh, no! It's only because I'm a girl. Stupid me. An idiot . . . when I chose . . . this . . . line of work.”

Her shoulders heave as she weeps and Ietri has to suppress the urge to stroke her head.

“I'm . . . not . . . capable.”

“Of course you're capable.”

She jerks her head up suddenly and gives him a withering glance. “No, I'm not! What do you know, huh? Nothing. Not a damn thing!”

The outburst seems to calm her down. Ietri decides not to protest. Zampieri is still crying, but more softly, as if it were just a different way of breathing. Ietri doesn't know how to console a girl. He consoled his mother many times, especially during the tough time when his father disappeared in the fields, but that was different. He didn't have to do much, because she did it all: she held him tight enough to nearly smother him and repeated,
Mama is here with you
,
Mama is here with you
. “I think I'm incapable sometimes too,” he says.

“But you always do everything right. Your cot is always in order, you're always on time for muster, you never complain or act like an asshole. There he is! Corporal Ietri, the perfect little soldier!”