For a few moments optimism even alleviates the nagging concern about his legs. In fact, when he’d revealed his discovery to the doc a little while ago—better they know it right away; if they had to kick him out they might as well do it as soon as possible—the lieutenant had merely shaken his head skeptically: “Bones don’t grow after you’ve developed.” In return, he’d listed a number of absurd maladies that should be considered, given the ineffective response to the drugs: cholera, typhoid, some amoebic infestation, and others he can’t remember now.
He was a little put out by the doc’s failure to show concern for his problem. Lieutenant Egitto is a decent enough sort. Torsu has seen him regularly, he hasn’t skipped even one injection, but the doc has a brusque way about him all the time; he never says one word more than necessary. Who the hell cares. Now Torsu knows the leg isn’t serious, he’s had to run to the latrines only once since this morning, and soon he’ll have Tersicore89 all to himself again. Feeling confident, he hurries to the tent.
The spark of terror that runs through his body at the sight of the snake coiled up near his foot gives him instant, unexpected vigor, proof that his body, if it wants to, is fully capable of reacting. Torsu jumps backward, then takes a few more steps back, stumbles, and gets up again, never once taking his eyes off the reptile.
“Fuck!” he cries. His face feels all tingly from the fright.
The snake’s triangular head swings slowly from side to side, as though dazed. The skin is glossy, pale blue, marked with bands of a lighter color. Torsu feels dizzy, for a moment the fever flares up again, clouding his mind, and he regards the reptile with the detachment of a delirious vision. Then the snake makes a 180-degree turn, languidly unwinds to its full length, and begins to move away from where Torsu is standing. The first corporal major is fascinated. He glances around, looking for something. Finally he bends down and cautiously grabs one of the large bricks piled around the tent stake. “Stay still,” he whispers.
He knows quite well that snakes are fast. He saw a documentary once about constrictors and he recalls how quickly they can pounce. He wonders if this snake is the kind that constricts or if it has poison in its glands. There’s no way of knowing: snakes all look somewhat alike. He raises the brick with both hands. He holds his breath and hurls it down.
The snake’s head explodes, splattering bluish blood around; the brick teeters for a moment, then tips over on the battered head again. Deprived of its brain, the reptile’s long tail begins thrashing wildly; it wheels around, waving its dripping extremity. Torsu slowly moves closer, mesmerized. Seized with a violent spasm, the decapitated snake grazes his calf, as if trying to sink its fangs into it though it no longer has any. Torsu lets out a scream.
Then the slimy creature grows quiet. It continues pulsating on the sand for a few seconds, then expires completely. The soldier is forced to close his eyes the instant the creature dies.
“Wow!” he yells. “Holy shit! Wowww!” His heart is pounding with excitement. In their first days in Gulistan the guys set up a kind of locker area outside the tent where they could hang their towels: simple S-hooks affixed to the iron mesh of the HESCO Bastion wall. Torsu removes his stuff, hangs it on a buddy’s hook, then slips his hook off the wall. He walks back to the dead snake, bends down, and plants the iron S-hook in its tail, raising the decapitated reptile off the ground and above his hip. It seems a bit slender to be able to strangle a man, but Torsu knows that nature is full of paradoxes—you never can tell. In any case it’s a respectable prize.
He hangs the carcass in the Wreck, in the middle of the clothesline. Then, suddenly exhausted, he flops down on a chair and sits there admiring it for a long time. He’s never seen anything so repulsive and attractive at the same time. As a child he fished for crabs and, sure, sometimes he happened to come upon an eel or a river snake, but they were small and scary, nothing to do with the creature that now dangles limply before his eyes in the lethargy of early afternoon. It’s majestic, that’s what. In his region, he recalls, they say that every snake guards a treasure.
• • •
Cederna and Ietri are working out on a bench in full sun. They’ve lifted makeshift dumbbells and are now grinding out mixed abdominals: normal, twisting, and reverse crunches, so as to involve all the muscles. The body must be sculpted piece by piece, methodically, although many people don’t know it. There are some who always repeat the same three or four exercises at the gym. They have no idea what they’re doing.
The two soldiers take turns holding each other’s ankles down and now it’s Cederna’s chance to catch his breath. When Ietri rolls up toward his knees, he can smell his buddy’s pungent odor: sweat mixed with the “keto” breath you get during physical exercise. It’s not unpleasant, not too much.
“You’re not pumping much, verginella. You look like a sack of potatoes. What’s up?”
Ietri grimaces with fatigue. He’s in a bad mood. Since they scoured the village, he’s felt out of sorts. At night he’s had distressing dreams that he can’t shake off by day. “I don’t know,” he says. “I just don’t feel like being here anymore. Maybe.”
“If that’s it, I’ll let you in on a little secret: no one wants to be here.”
“You’re going on leave in a week.”
Ietri loosens the fingers laced behind his head to help push himself up. At eighty crunches he stops with his back flat on the bench. His stomach is pulsing rapidly. The acute pain in his lower back tells him he did well. “Cederna?”
“Yeah?”
“Remember the house we swept yesterday?”
“You call that a house? It was a shitty pigsty.”
“Maybe it wasn’t right to burst in that way. We broke down their door, those poor people.”
“No, you broke down the door.”
“Well, okay, that’s not the point.”
“And anyway, who the hell cares about the door?”
“It was just a family.”
“What the fuck are you saying? How do you know? Those Taliban bastards disguise themselves. Maybe the guy had a stick of dynamite hidden up his ass and we weren’t even aware of it.”
“Mattioli dragged him by the hair. There was no reason to.”
“He wouldn’t move.”
“He was scared.”
“Hey, what the hell’s got into you, verginella? Are you getting soft-hearted? Watch out, that’s how they try to fuck with you, by making you feel guilty. They make sheep’s eyes at us and then they kill us.”
Ietri isn’t convinced, though. As he sees it, that was just a family of poor unfortunates. He starts a new series of crunches, even though his back pain hasn’t entirely subsided. He twists his torso ninety degrees to the left, then to the right, alternately working his obliques.
“Besides, haven’t you seen how they treat women?” Cederna asks.
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Keep your heels down, man! It has a lot to do with it.”
“It’s their culture.”
“I’m fed up with that story about cultures, get it? If a culture sucks, it sucks, case closed. There’s nothing more you can say. Like Japanese food.”
“Japanese food?”
“Never mind. Someone needs to teach these barbarians how to be civilized, sooner or later. And if kindness doesn’t work, then we’ll find another way to teach them. Keep those heels down!”
Ietri can barely keep it up. He still has twelve more to go. “I don’t know if that’s why we’re here,” he persists, through clenched teeth.
“Of course that’s why. Imagine if they put one of those burkas on your mother. I’m telling you, the Arabs are even worse than the Chinese. Worse than the Jews too.”
They switch places. Ietri tries to picture his mother covered by a long black garment. She wouldn’t look much different than she does now. A question occurs to
him, but he doesn’t dare ask it. Cederna blows in his face every time he raises his torso. Damn, he’s strong—it’s a struggle to hold his ankles down. The face of the American Indian tattooed on his abdomen crumples up and slackens. Finally Ietri spits it out: “Listen, can I ask you something?”
“Shoot, verginella.”
“What exactly does Jew mean?”
Cederna frowns, but doesn’t stop. “What the hell kind of question is that?”
Ietri immediately gets defensive. “Forget it. You mentioned Jews before, and I . . . it was just a question, that’s all.”
“It’s a dumb-ass question. A Jew is a Jew, right?”
Now he’s blushing. He knew it was better not to ask. But he’s been carrying the question around for so long and for some reason, he’s not sure why, he finds it natural to trust Cederna. He falls for it every time. “I know,” he tries to make up for his mistake, “I mean, the whole story about Hitler and the concentration camps and all that. But . . . what I mean is . . . with a black, you can see that he’s black. But if someone is a Jew, how can you tell?”
Cederna stops, panting. He leans on his forearms. He spits to the side, then stares at the sky, thinking. “There’s no specific way,” he says. “You just know. Some people are Jews and other people know it.” Then something occurs to him; his eyes flash. “And obviously you can tell by the last name.”
“By the last name?”
“Sure. That writer, for instance . . . Primo Levi. It’s a Jewish name.”
“That’s it? The last name?”
“That’s it, right. What did you think it was?”
Cederna resumes his crunches. Ietri can feel his friend’s tendons lengthen in his hands and then release. “You don’t know a fucking thing, verginella.”
“Cederna?”
“Yeah.”
“Could you stop calling me verginella? Please.”
“Not a chance.”
“At least not in front of the other guys.”
“I’ll stop when you’re not a little virgin anymore, verginella.”
Ietri chews his lip. “Speaking of which,” he says.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Now you started. Shoot.”
He just can’t keep his mouth shut, damn it! Where does Cederna get that power to pull the truth out of him all the time? He already messed up once, when he talked to him about girls, and now he feels like he’s about to make another misstep, but he can’t stop himself. “What do you think of Zampa?”
Cederna stops abruptly. “Uh-oh! Watch out! Why do you ask?”
“No reason. Just curious.”
“The verginella has a crush on our comrade!”
“Ssshh! Come on, I’m serious.”
Cederna again assumes the philosophical expression he wore when he was explaining about Jews. He really gets on Ietri’s nerves when he does that.
“Zampa . . . has a nice pair of tits. But an ugly face. Plus, any female who serves in the army must have a screw loose.”
“I don’t know.” Ietri hesitates. He feels as bashful as a little kid. “I like her a little. Being together, that’s all.”
“You’re really an unlucky bastard, pal.”
“Why?”
His friend is now sitting beside him, wiping the sweat from his armpits with his T-shirt. He has multicolored tattoos even on his biceps and a smaller one on his neck, where puncturing the skin must hurt like a bitch. Each one represents a symbol, a memory, and if you ask him, Cederna is more than happy to expound on them. He keeps Ietri on tenterhooks for a while. Then he says: “Because she’s a lesbian, of course.”
Ietri’s head slumps. Lesbian. How can that be? Lesbians have short hair. Zampa’s hair is long, golden blond. “How do you know that?”
“Come on, man, it’s obvious! Besides, if she weren’t a lesbian, do you think it’s possible she’d be so good all the time? Twenty-four/seven thrown in with us guys without doing anything? No way. She’d be wild by now.”
Ietri would like to go into it more, but they’re interrupted by Vercellin, who runs up to them waving his arms like a maniac. “Guys! Hey, guys, come and see!”
“What’s happening?” Cederna gets up.
For a few seconds the silhouette of his face casts a shadow over Ietri. Darkened, that’s how Ietri feels, for a myriad of reasons that he can’t separate from one another. And this new, shocking news.
“Come and see what Torsu found,” Vercellin says. “It’ll blow your minds!”
• • •
The Sardinian’s hunting trophy triggers great euphoria in the Third. His platoon mates congratulate him, and Torsu stays on his feet just to enjoy the glory, despite the fact that his fever has taken a new upswing. The guys invent a courage competition: they take turns touching the dead snake—all except Mitrano, who turns out to have an atavistic terror of slithering creatures. Then a challenge is issued to see who will dare lick it. The only ones to do so are Cederna and Simoncelli; they then describe the taste, contradicting each other several times and only confirming for certain that the taste is really disgusting. Cederna wants to take the snake off the hook and wrap it around his neck like a scarf, but the others won’t let him. They start dancing around the carcass, first each on his own, then in a conga line led by Pecone. Marshal René and a few others stand on the sidelines, though joining in with smiles of approval. Zampieri takes over a table and does a sensual dance. Tracing irregular circles with her pelvis, she slides her open hands from her neck to her breasts and then farther down, to her groin. Then she joins her hands above her head as if in prayer, and unwinds every joint, from her wrists to her ankles, imitating the sinuous glide of the snake. Ietri doesn’t take his eyes off her for a second. Lesbian? No way—this time Cederna is dead wrong.
When their excitement dies down, the guys get on the computers to share the discovery with their girlfriends, but the women don’t seem to really get it. All they do is squeal, “Eewww gross—yuck!”; they laugh but only because they hear the men laughing on the other end. Then the soldiers scatter through the base, each one in search of an audience from the other companies: Come and see, come on, we caught a snake. The pilgrimage to the Third’s headquarters lasts until late in the evening. Flashlight beams flickering in the darkness converge from all over to admire the hanging reptile. Even Colonel Ballesio shows up and, contemplating the creature with his arms folded, says: “Old Mother Earth sure does produce a whole lot of disgusting things.” Then he adjusts his testicles and goes away.
Lieutenant Egitto has accompanied his guest to the Wreck and is now lighting the way back to the infirmary with his flashlight. He aims the beam of light on her legs and tries to remember the shape of her bare calves, their consistency. He’s pretty sure he bit them on one occasion, and that he bit down too hard, making her angry.
Inside the infirmary, Irene slips off the fleece he loaned her (she’d hinted at having had some kind of experience in the Middle East, but she wasn’t equipped for the desert cold, a strange detail that renewed the lieutenant’s doubts), tosses it aside without folding it, and sits on the desk. “I doubt I’ll be able to sleep now that I know there are snakes roaming around loose at the FOB,” she says.
The soldiers had hailed her when she entered the cement hut. They’d demanded that she photograph them as a group around the snake. Egitto had stood on the sidelines.
“We should have one of your beers to celebrate.”
She’d poked around in the fridge too, evidently. “They’re the colonel’s. I doubt he’d be pleased.”
Irene jumps down off the desk. “The colonel’s, of course. I bet he won’t say anything.”
She bends over the refrigerator and turning around three-quarters gives him an impudent look. Egitto accepts the can of beer she hands him. When Irene pops the cap on hers, the liqui
d fizzes out onto her hands and she laps up the foam like a greedy cat. “Remember when we did it at Fornari’s party?”
Once they’d surrendered to lust inside a friend’s shower. A lightning-quick coitus, one of the transgressive highlights of Egitto’s erotic life. Sure, he remembers.
“It’s been a while, huh?”
Irene Sammartino is no longer anything like the impulsive, flighty girl he used to know. She’s morphed into a skillful woman, one who can translate her thoughts into Dari and a moment later flirt shamelessly while sipping a can of beer.
“Yeah, a really long time,” Egitto replies briefly.
Later they brush their teeth outside the tent. Neither of them feels like walking to the toilets, so they use a small bottle of mineral water. The toothpaste they spit out forms small frothy white gobs near the fence. Egitto ends up with spittle on his jacket; she wipes it off for him with the back of her hand. They laugh about it together. Brusquely, they say good night to each other and bed down on opposite sides of the canvas tarp. Egitto immediately turns off the light.
He can’t get to sleep, though. He keeps seeing the guys crowded around the snake’s mutilated carcass and Irene popping the tab of the can, the beer foaming over her hands. He’s extremely aware that she’s just a few yards away and he knows the meaning of the look she gave him just before—the word available comes to mind and the word intention is also spinning around in his head.
Skipping over several logical steps, he finds himself fantasizing about married life with Irene Sammartino. He imagines her as a woman who drags along a heap of clutter with her, fills the space with magazines and piles of paper, and leaves her clothes piled up on the couch. This doesn’t bother Egitto, not too much; he observes her through the chinks of that disorder. He loses himself in a close scrutiny of her anatomical merits and defects, the way he used to back when they were together, as if attraction could be computed that way, at a desk, based on a two-column table.
Just look at what he’s come to, imagining detailed little scenarios around the only woman he’s shared a room with in a long time, a woman he would never, ever have wanted to meet again. Fate, or more likely someone forcing its hand, put them together and now expects to spawn the obvious consequences. But the lieutenant doesn’t like the idea. He’s not about to get himself in hot water, not with Irene Sammartino.