Limbo (40 page)

But Ghaznavi no longer had the book, unfortunately. During Afghanistan's darkest years, he had burned all the books in his library, one by one. Out of fear. He wept as he poked the fire. All that beauty, flying away in the smoke and turning into a pile of cold ashes. He had learned a few bits of the
Mathnawi
by heart, and he would read it in his mind, eyes closed. As he told me these things, I wondered if I could accept a gift from him, and I told myself no. So it was just as well that he didn't have that book anymore, or else I would have had to insult him by refusing. “Books are our truest friends,” Ghaznavi said. “They are your companions through good times and bad, they never desert you. You may abandon them, but they know how to forgive you.” And he was in need of companions because he had no one left. His brothers and nephews had emigrated to Canada. His wife and children were refugees in Iran, and he rarely saw them; it pained him. “Why don't you have them come back?” I had asked naïvely. Ghaznavi looked at me with a sorrowful smile. And it took me weeks to understand what he couldn't say: it was too dangerous, he'd been working for the foreigners for too long, by now a lot of people knew he was an interpreter, they would be hung.

“But even now,” Ghaznavi continued, ignoring my question, “it's difficult to buy a book.” If any Alpini, when their tour of duty was over, wanted to leave him theirs, he would be grateful. “I'll spread the word,” I had promised him, “I'll collect everything I find.” And I had. Ghaznavi's future library included Russo's
The Road to Oxiana
, my history and travel books about Afghanistan, two novels from Barry Sadler's series about the immortal soldier Casca Rufio Longinus that belonged to Spina, Lorenzo's
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
, Giani's
Twilight
books; other Panthers contributed
The Lord of the Rings
, three mysteries, and a book by Mauro Corona. Ghaznavi recited some verses of Rumi:

A narrow passageway runs between your heart and mine, my love.

I have found the door, and now I know what spring is.

My heart is a pool of clear water that reflects the moon.

Ghaznavi was quick to explain that the erotic language is a metaphor: the poet sings his love for God. I reflected that love, be it for a man, a woman, or God, called for the same words. I would have liked to have someone to say them to.

I tried to remember what else I talked to him about. Oh yes, I had asked him about the customs of the nomads, whose black goat-hair tents had appeared along the banks of the Farah River in the spring. Were they Taymanis? Or Kuchi? And about the local men's gestures, which I couldn't work out, and why they held hands, like lovers. About the
kareze
, the traditional canal irrigation system, which a cooperation project was supposed to restore. Operation Reawakening had already cleared two square kilometers for use. About the danger of the brown-and-white striped viper I'd spotted near the latrines. (Ghaznavi's answer was comforting: hemotoxins, as deadly as a cobra, watch where you step, especially if you get up in the night, because it is an irritable nocturnal predator.) I'd asked him all sorts of things, and I'd also asked his forgiveness. “The wise man knows and asks,” he had replied with a smile, “the ignorant man doesn't know and doesn't ask.” But Ghaznavi never asked questions. He knew he couldn't, and he didn't want to step out of line, so he was saving them for a day when he might be able to get some answers. The accusation was insulting. But a river doesn't become dirty just because a dog puts his paws in it. They could say what they wanted; the sad Professor was not a spy or an opium dealer, I refused to believe it.

“It's ridiculous,” I protested stubbornly. “Just yesterday when we were searching the village of Tamyrabad, we confiscated six drums of gas from a truck driver suspected of supplying drug dealers.” “Paris, can you repeat the argument you made to me a month ago, in the mess tent?” Paggiarin interjected. “No, I don't remember,” I said hastily. But I remembered all too well, unfortunately. I wanted to swallow my tongue. Fiery rivulets of sweat streamed down my spine.

“Sergeant Paris was struck by the quantity of poppies surrounding us,” Paggiarin reported, looking Minotto in the eye. “She asked me why the ISAF countries couldn't legally purchase opium, to use in hospitals in the West. That way, the Afghani peasants would have an income and the Taliban would lose their principal source of revenue. That's what she said. I didn't report it because I hadn't grasped its potential danger.”

“I know it may seem like a risky idea,” I said, trying to endure the radioactive gaze of Colonel Minotto. “But it's not, actually. My father died of cancer, he suffered like a dog because the hospital wouldn't give him any morphine. Not everyone understands the importance of pain relief therapy, and morphine is expensive, too expensive for many. It seems a tremendous waste to let all this opium enrich the drug dealers and the Mafia, to let it ruin the young, Italians included, when it could be doing good, helping Afghanis to live—and Europeans to die—with dignity.”

“It is not your job to come up with strategies to fight drug trafficking, Sergeant,” the colonel cut me off. “The best think tanks in the world are working to find a solution to this plague. Which, however, cannot be dealt with until the safety of this country is assured and its development set in motion. I am sure you will never propound such an argument again.” “Yes, sir,” I said.

“Have you ever noted any strange behavior in your men?” Minotto insisted, scrutinizing me. I knew what he was thinking. That he had discovered me when I was just a student at the NCO Academy, that he had believed in me. And had challenged me. The first time I met him, during training, he told me I should think of myself as a mosquito larva. If I settled in the first comfortable pond I found, I'd certainly be able to grow and to fly eventually, but I wouldn't go far. If, on the other hand, I humbled myself and hid in the tire of a plane, if I survived the difficulties of the journey, I would travel the world. I accepted the challenge, and he taught me everything I knew; he had encouraged, supported, rewarded me. And I had disappointed him. I was sorry he suspected me. His esteem meant more to me than anything. At least up until that moment. “Nothing unusual,” I assured him. “It would be a matter of unprecedented and intolerable seriousness, and it would be my duty to advise my superiors immediately.” “Keep an eye on Ghaznavi. And report to the captain if there is any suspicious talk among your men,” Minotto concluded wearily. “Yes, sir,” I said. The next time I saw him was at the Celio military hospital. We never spoke about that conversation in the command hut at Bala Bayak again. But the fact that it occurred can never be erased.

As I walked in the sun toward my tent I was aware that I hadn't been honest. I had not told the colonel that my men said suspicious things all the time. But what could Minotto have done to us? Set the military police loose on us? Asked the dog unit to intervene with their drug-sniffing canines? And what would TFS have said? He would have disgraced Ninth Company and the Alpini—for nothing. Besides, what else were the men supposed to talk about? We were literally living in the middle of a poppy field. In April their purple, white, pink, red, and yellow petals inflamed with color the valleys we crossed to get to the villages to be searched, cleared, and assisted. There the desert retreated. It was like a carpet of colored silk. We were surrounded by opium, growing out in the open. Something had to be done. The Americans had initially tried to use force. They wanted at first to bomb the poppies with napalm, though later they decided to simply uproot them. But good intentions do not always bring about good results—almost never, in fact. In reality, they condemned entire peasant families to abject poverty; the poppy harvest was their only means of subsistence, and when that was taken away, the Americans lost the peasants' initial sympathy and ended up pushing them to the rebels' side. So they changed their strategy completely: the allies promised incentives to peasants willing to grow saffron instead. They distributed bulbs and fertilizer; in fact, most of the convoys we escorted that winter carried tons of bulbs and fertilizer. The first harvest, the previous year, had been encouraging: a hectare of saffron crocuses yielded four times what a hectare of poppies did. But some of the peasants had their throats cut and their fields burned, and the changeover proceeded slowly—and in the meantime, the ISAF commanders, who were eager to conquer the hearts and minds of the Afghani people, preferred to resign themselves to tolerating the poppy fields to ensure if not benevolence, then at least neutrality. Whenever we left the FOB, we made our way through fields of flowering poppies.

If you cut the seed ball open with a knife, a milky white juice oozes out, which turns brown with contact with the air. It's sticky, as thick as cream, and the smell goes to your head. The soldiers would talk about it when they thought the officers and NCOs couldn't hear them. The peasants began the harvest in mid-April. Men, old people, and children moved through the fields, each with a knife in hand and a container hung around his neck. The soldiers could see, and they wondered how it worked. How that dark paste was transformed into opium and heroin. And where they refined the drug. But that one of them could think of buying it, or taking it, or smuggling it into Italy seemed impossible to me. We'd been living side by side for months, in such close quarters that we even knew how many times someone went to the shitter. Curcio had a brother who smoked heroin and had ended up in rehab, but you can't suspect someone because of a relative. Nevertheless, I promised myself I would send him on patrol as soon as possible so I could inspect his kit.

Then I remembered that one torrid night in May, Lorenzo told me about the time he'd overdosed on opium oil. It was so hot I couldn't fall asleep. Neither could he. We were sitting in the sand. I could see the whites of his eyes gleaming in the dark. We'd never been this close before. We were playing a sort of game of truth or dare, telling each other the very worst things we'd ever done. The moments we were most ashamed about, and which all the same we couldn't truly regret. I had told him about Mrs. Ferraris. I was still in middle school and was hanging out with the gang from the new apartment buildings. When spring came, it was as if the cage I'd felt trapped in all year opened. Instead of going to school, I'd pedal my bike along the shore, my textbooks in the basket and the wind in my hair, go for swims at the Torre Flavia beach. I'd been bragging to my friends about how I'd been going swimming since the end of March, and the colder the water, the more the others respected me. I had chronic bronchitis, I could spit mucus ten feet, blowing it out my lips. I was so good at forging my mother's signature on my excuses—Cinzia Colella, with little circles over the i's—that not even she would have noticed the difference. On the days I skipped school, I'd wander around Ladispoli with a short, stocky kid with curly hair, whose nickname was Pitbull. He would tease the boys and make the girls fall in love with him. He made fun of the weak and timid kids in our group, calling them lice and making a show of humiliating them. Whoever caved became his groupie and slave, scorned by everyone else. I was the kind who never held back. To show I wasn't afraid of anything, I'd cross the highway on foot, from one lane to the next, climbing over cement guardrails, indifferent to the tractor trailers that blinded me by flashing their high beams. I drank an entire liter of wine (I vomited so much afterward, it might be the reason I later stopped drinking). I stole T-shirts from a clothing store and bottles of whiskey from a roadside diner, in plain view of the security cameras and the watchmen. One morning in April, Pitbull asked me to get Vanessa's motor scooter because he wanted to buy a cell phone. I like to think now that I didn't realize the connection between those two things, but the fact is I did and I didn't say anything.

I'd already been driving my sister's scooter for a while, on the sly. Pitbull told me to circle around the market piazza, to maintain a good speed and not to brake. We went by the post office twice. “Keep going,” Pitbull said. I saw her first. She was crossing the street right on the white stripes, her blue leather purse dangling from her shoulder. She was slowed by age and the shopping bags she carried in both hands. As we pulled up alongside her, Pitbull shouted, “Gun it!” and so I did. I didn't even turn around, I just kept my eyes on the road in front of me. But evidently he didn't pull hard enough—lack of experience—or the leather strap was too resistant. The fact is, the old lady clung to her purse for a few feet and then took a disastrous fall, face-first, tomatoes, zucchini, and peppers rolling across the asphalt. I slalomed among the cars and fled along the promenade while passersby shouted and rushed to help the unfortunate woman. In the rearview mirror I could see a spot of red blood on the white crossing stripes.

After we rounded a turn, Pitbull tossed the purse and had me drop him at his brother's garage. He said he was sorry; the old lady was dressed well and seemed rich, but she had only fifty thousand lire in her wallet. He handed me two ten-thousand-lira bills. I told him I didn't want them. I hadn't done it for the money. He kissed me on the mouth and I bit his lip. I didn't do it for him, either. I revved the engine and took off. The beach clubs were closed, so I hid between the beach huts. I was afraid these were my last hours of freedom. I was afraid of going to jail. Of all the buildings rising up in the distance, the jail was the one that always terrified me. I'd look the other way when we drove by. A strange thought came to me as I sat there, teeth chattering from cold and shock. That the incident wasn't really what it seemed. I hadn't dragged to the ground, injured, and maybe even killed an old lady: it had been me—the other Manuela, the real Manuela, the one still waiting to be born. I'd killed her. They'd come for me now, I'd be tried and locked up in that frightening building, and the warrior Manuela would never exist. I wept, huddled in a damp changing room that smelled of mold and salt. But time passed and no one came. So I calmed down. Maybe they wouldn't find me. They hadn't recognized me. Maybe I could still salvage my dream. I abandoned the motor scooter at the dump and set it on fire.