Free Limbo by Melania G. Mazzucco Page A

anything to do with that worm.) The overnight field training exercises—three days in the woods with a tent, a sleeping bag, and a pack—thrilled me (I’d always dreamed of going camping). Being away from home, which for many was the cause of tears and sobbing, turned out to be good for me, because my family was made up of rancorous, unhappy, and confused individuals who unloaded their frustrations on one another, punishing each other for imagined wrongs. The only one I missed was Vanessa. We’d grown up together: her voice and her laugh had been the soundtrack of the first eighteen years of my life. But Vanessa—even though she was pregnant and for some reason I can’t remember anymore wasn’t supposed to drive—would take the car and come see me on Saturdays. And a few hours of her talking nonstop—she’s a real motormouth—was more than enough. Communal living, which the other women considered agreeable at first but increasingly trying as the weeks wore on, was for me a pleasant surprise: I’d felt very alone growing up. The discipline didn’t seem oppressive to me, as it did to more than half my companions, who dropped out; on the contrary, it relaxed me, because for the first time in my life someone was telling me what to do, and I had no choice but to obey. I had to accept the rules or be punished or excluded; I had to zip it, even if I was convinced I was right. In short, it was as if I was always wrong, no matter what: a total demolition, from the bottom up, of everything I’d ever been. Up till then, I’d always made my own decisions, and the more someone tried to force me to do something, the more I’d resist. I’d never made my bed before; at most I’d pull the covers up over the pillow, and by morning the crumpled sheets would have left zebra stripes on my skin. I had never cleaned up my room, never cared what condition my clothes were in. But in the barracks—after three savage scoldings—I complied. My bunk was perfect, my uniform pressed, my boots polished. When I went home months later, my mother said I was so changed she hardly recognized me.
    Loyalty and sacrifice, the watchwords that became the cornerstones of my new existence, reminded me of my grandfather’s lectures, and they rang true. Lies and subterfuge, which I had resorted to many times, were now repugnant to me. As for sacrifice, I already knew that nobody gives you anything for free, neither respect nor affection. To sacrifice myself for something more noble—my country, as my instructors kept telling me, even though I didn’t think I had one—made me feel important: me, a complete zero, a grub, a gnat, a provincial girl born into a dysfunctional family that couldn’t offer any kind of future.
    And then there were the weapons. The first time they put an AR70/90 in my hands and I held it in firing position, I knew we would get along. My drill instructor told me I had to care for it as if it were my child. That seemed somewhat excessive. Besides, I didn’t know how to take care of a child. But he was right. I liked everything about my Beretta assault rifle—its awkward stiffness, its deadly weight, its pointy edges, its oily smell, even the abrasion it left on my neck, the bruise the belt made by pressing for hours against the same spot on my skin, so that my arm swelled like a drug addict’s for three weeks. But the sound it made when I loaded a magazine or chambered a round, the crackle of the volley, thrilled me. In that suspended second when—before pulling the trigger—my eye focused on the target in the crosshairs, I felt I owned the world, could blast anything. Even though the weapons were complicated, and difficult to handle, assemble, and maintain, even though the pineapple-like grenades loaded with deadly compound B were heavy in my hands, and the noise of the mortars absolutely terrifying, I quickly developed a real