The Human Body (25 page)

 • • • 

I
n a single day he's gone to the masseuse five times. The hand job is demeaning, it doesn't fully satisfy him, but what else can he do? She shoves him away if he tries to get more. When he happens to find the door at the compound locked, he kicks and punches it. “Come out of there!” he yells. He walks around the base aimlessly and goes back less than half an hour later. She's there. He beleaguers her with questions—can he possibly be jealous of a prostitute? She'd simply gone out to go to the toilet. He struggles to calm down.

Before the third evening in Delaram he runs out of money. He tries to persuade Oxana to give him a free session. She won't even let him get near the cot. Cederna hurls a load of insults at her. It doesn't do any good.

He goes back to the tent even more frantic. He asks Di Salvo to lend him some money. He's the best friend he has left.

“I wouldn't even lend you a dime, you asshole.”

“Please.”

“Beat it, Cederna. Go beg from someone else.”

He turns to Pecone, to Rovere, to Passalacqua, even to Abib. They all tell him they don't have any money or just flatly say no, with a rudeness he doesn't feel he deserves. Finally he tries Zampieri.

“What do you need it for?”

“I can't tell you.”

Zampieri's eyes are lined with dark circles. “I wouldn't give it to you anyway,” she says.

“It's an emergency.”

“No. It's not. We've already had an emergency. Now there's no emergency anymore.”

“Come on, Zampa, help me out.”

“Do you know how many hours it's been since I've slept? Eighty-four. I counted them. Eighty-four. I don't think I'll ever be able to sleep again.”

He walks away. He hasn't scraped together even one euro. He doesn't know what he'll do if he doesn't come up with the money.

Before supper he's back in front of Oxana's compound. He'll give her something in exchange. He has a very nice knife—it's worth much more than ten euros. A knife with a rubber handle and antireflective coating on the blade. It will cost him to part with it, but he'll buy another one just like it back in Italy.

He bursts into the small room and this time she's on the other side of the curtain with someone. She chases him out, swearing at him in her own language. Cederna sits outside on the ground. It grows dark as he imagines what the woman is doing with the other soldier. He's sure she must allow him to go further, of course, because he's an American. When the man comes out, he shines his flashlight on him briefly. A black guy. Oxana has just been with a black man! He rushes in like a fury, slamming the door behind him. He wants to catch her still half naked. Instead Oxana is wearing her usual apron and is placing clean towels on the cot.

“Were you with that guy?”

She gives him a scornful look. She shrugs. She doesn't understand.

“Tell me. Do you perform these little services for blacks too?”

“Do you have the money?” she asks him, not turning around.

“No,” Cederna says.

“No money, no massage.”

She's ready to send him away again. He has to calm down. Cederna pulls the knife out of his belt. “I have this,” he says.

Oxana jumps back. She presses against the wall. “Put it away!” she cries. She tries to reach out a hand to the drawer of a wheeled cart.

She's misunderstood him. Cederna didn't mean to hurt her. He bursts out laughing. “See how fast you've changed your tune now?”

“Put it away!” the woman repeats.

What does she take him for? A badass? “Okay,” Cederna says. “If that's what you think, then let's have some fun.”

He moves close and rolls the cart away with his foot. She doesn't take her eyes off the black blade.

Cederna brandishes the knife in his hand (he can twirl it 360 degrees between his fingers, one of the many little tricks that make him the envy of a lot of people). “Oh oh oh,” he says. “No money, no massage? And that guy who was here before, did he have money?”

Oxana huddles on the floor. “Please,” she begs.

It's at this point that Cederna fully realizes the possibility that is being offered to him by the six-and-a-half-inch blackened steel blade. His money has run out. Oxana is alone. Who's going to go and report it? Officially she doesn't exist—there are no prostitutes inside a military base. And in a few hours he'll climb aboard a helicopter and return to the FOB. Even if the masseuse enjoyed internal protection, which seems likely, her buddies wouldn't have time to get organized and come looking for him.

Only a few seconds go by between reflection and action. The army trained him to react quickly.

He helps her get up, gently. He pushes her toward the cot, makes her turn her back. Oxana obeys the knife point as if it were a magic wand. She's strong, but not strong enough to prevent him from securing both her hands with his left. He uses his right hand to undress her and undress himself, the bare minimum, then he grabs the knife that he's been clenching in his teeth and places it under her chin. He sinks it into the flesh of her neck a little, without cutting her. He doesn't want to hurt her.

You really are a savage, Francesco Cederna
.

I'm a wolf—didn't they tell you?

Oxana is no longer screaming; her moans might also be cries of encouragement. She stiffens when he bites her shoulder and Cederna feels driven to do it again. He wants to rip her to shreds, chew her up. He's drooling on her neck, her hair. There, the thoughts are fading, finally. The ghosts are evaporating. That's all he needed; it wasn't much. He's a soldier; he knows how to get what's denied him.

Afterward, he won't remember much. Only his last look at the masseuse before he flees the compound: the pullover rolled halfway up her back, the apron on the ground, slacks and panties scrunched up around her ankles, and a pair of shapely legs, pale in the reddish light. One of them is shaken by a slight tremor. Cederna, sated, lumbering, disbelieving, charges out, swallowed up by the night.

 • • • 

G
iulia Zampieri has been wandering through the American base for hours, in a darkness that unlike the absolute darkness of the FOB is interrupted by neon lights over the entrances to the barracks. Her mind is blank, as if someone had sprayed it down with a hose. She turns a corner behind a tent and comes across a makeshift swing: a truck tire hanging by two chains from a metal tripod. What are the marines doing with a swing? It sounds like some kind of a joke: What does an American soldier do on a swing? The only thing he can do, Zampieri thinks: He swings.

She sits on the rubber ring and leans back into the opening. She gives a push with her legs. The chain screeches. She touches the ground again with her toes, then begins moving the way she was taught a century ago, in a previous life: bend and stretch, bend and stretch . . . She flexes her torso to accelerate the swinging. The swing lulls her, back and forth in the warm, dark, stagnant air.

B
y the time the soldiers return to FOB Ice, the weather has changed. It's been raining nonstop for three days, a fine, debilitating rain. In a very short time the region reaches the average annual precipitation level, then doubles it, triples it. The dust on the ground becomes muddy sludge, then liquefies completely. Wherever there's a slope, however slight, the slime oozes down. The rivulets converge into a torrent that runs through the base from north to south and spills out the main entrance. One by one, weak points in the tents' impermeability begin to appear and the infinite imprecisions with which they were erected become evident. The men are forced to dig ditches around each perimeter, patch holes, spread tarps. For them it's a cruel, cynical lesson on how life goes on: some have died, but those who've survived have to roll up their sleeves, make sure they stay dry.

Lieutenant Egitto placed a bucket under a tear in the roof. The drops plunk down at regular intervals, like the ticking of a clock. He's also spread some rags on the ground, at the entrance, so the soldiers can scrape their boots when they come in. Only a few show up, however. A new sense of reserve has spread through the base in the aftermath of the mission: who has the nerve to seek treatment for conjunctivitis, the flu, or a harmless hernia when five companions died under enemy fire and another is virtually out of commission? Egitto himself takes part in that unprecedented version of personal neglect. He's stopped shaving, he hardly eats, and he washes sparingly, even his teeth.

Irene is gone. He found a note from her rolled up inside one of the bottles of antidepressants, which she replaced with a handful of jelly beans. An affectionate gesture, though also meant to chide. The note simply has her initials and phone number, no greetings or comments. Why did she leave her number? And what is he supposed to do with it? He's put it away among his personal effects, certain that he won't use it.

He doesn't feel sad, either about her departure or—on a much more serious level—about the men's deaths. Maybe it's the pills that hold him back, or else he's no longer capable of feeling. Though the second hypothesis troubles him, the first is not much consolation. He's experiencing something he already knew: that all grief, suffering, and compassion toward other human beings can be reduced to pure biochemistry—hormones and neurotransmitters, inhibited or released. When he realizes this, what he finds himself feeling, unexpectedly, is indignation.

Since he's unable to come up with anything better, he decides he'll force himself to do it: it will be his own personal form of atonement for the horrors he witnessed and took part in. Abruptly, one Friday night, he stops taking the medication. He unscrews the cap and empties the powdery contents in the trash basket. In its place he chews a raspberry jelly bean. He suspends the treatment cold turkey after eight months, violating the recommendations of the pharmaceutical company with surreptitious glee.

He expects some kind of aftereffect as a result of not taking the drug, but for days nothing happens, if you don't count insomnia and a few brief hallucinatory episodes. His mood is a level plain. The grief remains frozen, someplace else. The lieutenant starts to doubt it exists at all. He remains unmoved during the funeral service performed in the mess hall by a visiting chaplain. He's unmoved when he talks—mumbles—on the phone with First Corporal Major Torsu, in Italy, where he's about to undergo his third maxillofacial reconstructive surgery. He's unmoved by the fragile, absent sound of Nini's voice, or when the first sun in days breaks through the veil of clouds and restores the mountain to its golden splendor.

After meals he still goes to talk with Ballesio. At first the colonel seems uncertain as to what attitude to adopt with respect to the general mourning. Then, evidently, he decides it's best to follow his instinct—that is, carry on as if nothing has happened. He has his own way of trying to raise Egitto's spirits, which is not very effective. More and more often they remain silent, Ballesio concentrating on the pipe he's recently taken up, Egitto watching the smoke rings formed by the colonel's lips, which dissolve as they float upward.

Egitto's body is first to react. He gets a fever, a high one: at night it hovers around 104 degrees. His body temperature hasn't risen that high since he was a child, when Ernesto would examine him, listening through his stethoscope, his mouth and nose well protected by a mask. Huddled in his sleeping bag, Egitto perspires profusely, racked by shivers. He stays in bed for two days in a row, but doesn't ask for help. He has them bring him a basin of water, enough so he doesn't have to leave the tent. Ballesio comes to see him once, but he's too sick to remember, afterward, what he said to him and what he replied. All he remembers is that the colonel didn't stop talking and waving his arms around as he loomed over him with that big round moon face of his.

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the fever goes away, leaving him dreamy and strangely energetic, determined about an action that he hasn't yet begun and isn't even aware of. Egitto feels like walking, moving; he treks from one end of the base to the other several times a day. If only he could leave the FOB, he'd set off and run for miles without tiring.

The only available means to get away is the phone, however. After ten days of putting it off, he decides to dial Marianna's number.

“I've written you eight e-mails—
eight
of them. I called every damned ministry office to find you and you didn't
bother
to return my call. Do you have any idea how
upset
I was? It was
awful
. Didn't you think about how worried I'd be?”

“I'm sorry,” Egitto says, but the apology is automatic.

“I hope they'll send you home now.
Right away
.”

“The tour lasts another four months.”

“Yes, but you've suffered a
trauma
.”

“Like a lot of others here.”

Marianna exhales loudly. “I don't
feel like
having this discussion with you anymore. I'm . . . worn-out. Have you called Nini, at least?”

It's the first time in many years that Marianna has expressed interest in their mother, concerned about the fact that Nini might also be worried about him. Egitto is astounded.

Obviously he's mistaken.

“Have you spoken to her about the house?” his sister adds.

“No.”

“Alessandro, I asked you to please take care of it. This is the right time to sell—in fact, we're
already
late. With the crisis in the real estate market, that place is depreciating every day.”

Only now does he get it: the stopper that's bottling up his emotions and is now pushed out by pressure is not due to compassion or pity; it's not due to grief. It's due to pure anger, and it erupts from his stomach, flooding his spinal cord and spreading through the nerves to their peripheral endings.

“You could have spoken to her,” Egitto says.

“Are you crazy, Alessandro? I
don't speak
to her.”

“You're the one who's interested in selling the house. You could have spoken to her.”

“Look, what you've been through can't have been pleasant. I realize that. But that doesn't give you the right to take it out on me.”

“I love that house.”

“You
don't love
that house.
We
don't love that house, remember? Remember how it was to live there?”

“It was all a long time ago.”

“That doesn't change
any
thing, Alessandro. Not a thing. They didn't even come to my wedding. They didn't give a damn.”

“You've never asked me what this place is like.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You've never asked me what it's like. Here.”

“I think I can imagine what Afghanistan is like.”

“No, you can't. You can't imagine it. There's a huge mountain, without a single tree or a tuft of grass. Right now the summit is covered with snow and the boundary between the snow and the rock is sharp, like you wouldn't believe. And there are other mountains, much more distant. At sunset each of them takes on a different nuance—they seem like theater curtains.”

“Alessandro, you're not well.”

“It's a magnificent place.” The scaly patches on his skin are throbbing in unison, they're about to burst. Perhaps there's new skin underneath, an intact epidermis. Or maybe there's only bloody, gory flesh. “And another thing, Marianna. On your wedding day, as we walked down the aisle, we weren't invincible. We just told ourselves we were. We told ourselves it was just fine that way, better even, that everyone would see that we were . . . free and independent. But it wasn't true. Only two crazy people believed it. Everyone else felt sorry for us.”

Marianna is silent now, as the lieutenant experiences the sour taste of having gone too far, crossing a line he hadn't even dared consider before.

“Talk to you soon, Marianna,” he says.

He has time to make out his sister's final, muffled protest: “So you're on her side now?” A stab in the back. There's nothing he can do about it. He hangs up.

No, he's not on Nini's side. He doesn't know whose side he's on anymore.