Free Limbo by Melania G. Mazzucco Page B

passion for our squad’s weapons. I learned everything about them, about automatic pistols, calibers, bullets, sights, rounds per second, cartridge capacity, maximum effective range, triggers, and even bullet speed. I spent hours cradling my rifle, disassembling the bolt, polishing, oiling, and lubricating it, and cleaning the bore with a brush. Then I would chamber a round and load the drum. I even talked to it. When I finished basic training and had to return it to the armory, the parting was painful, as if they were cutting off one of my limbs. You never forget your first rifle.
    I didn’t know what to do when I was off duty. Civilian life now seemed disappointing. On Saturdays the other women would stroll down Ascoli Piceno’s main street, meet their boyfriends, go window-shopping, do laundry at the coin-op. I usually stayed in the barracks, reading tank magazines. People started saying that Manuela Paris was a fanatic.
    I got the second-highest score on the physical and practical tests and on the military science exams. “You would have been first, if Angelica Scianna weren’t so blond,” my roommate Guglielma Ruffilli teased. But I wanted to be friends with Angelica so I didn’t take offense. Besides, they had assigned us to the same unit, same detachment, same regiment, and so we headed off together. She from Sicily, me from Ladispoli, both of us headed north, hundreds of miles from home. It was the first time so far away for both of us. That first night, sleeping in the same dorm room, we wondered what would happen now that we were finally in a real barracks.
    A few hours were all it took to disillusion me. The soldiers looked down on newcomers. Merit counts less than seniority, and I was the newest arrival. I’d have the right to take it out on a new bunch of recruits a few months later. Such were the unwritten, unchangeable laws of the group, in place from time immemorial, and I had to accept them. Uphold them, even—along with the pranks, the abuses of power, and the bullying. My superiors were either paternalistic or brutal, nothing in between. But my future depended on their assessments. I was evaluated constantly. I had to have them on my side if I wanted to stay in the army, to reenlist when my twelve months were up. My five female companions were competitive—and one of them, the beautiful and clever Angelica Scianna, in fact, was obsessed with excelling. Each hoped the others would fail so she could be the only one to succeed. I had been raised as a boy in a family of women, and considered myself amphibious: I was comfortable with women, and they often confided in me, especially when they had relationship troubles, but I was comfortable with men, too. Separating people based solely on gender seemed an old-fashioned approach, as arcane as the debates on the sex of angels. I never would have imagined I’d be rejected by the men and considered a rival by the women.
    In a co-ed environment, the lack of privacy turned out to be humiliating. Latrines stinking of stale urine and whipped by icy drafts; rusty sinks, dreary showers. Narrow, uncomfortable beds. Senseless discipline. Exhausting physical combat training. It was no longer a question, as it had been in Ascoli, of jogging after an instructor at a modest pace, so as not to humiliate the overweight women who, poor things, were showing such goodwill. And there were quite a few of them. The weight cutoff at enlistment was one hundred and seventy-five pounds—generous enough to include even the obese. But here you had to complete grueling marches on impassible trails, crushed under the weight of your pack and weapons. A rifle alone weighs eight pounds, but with ammunition it comes to seventeen, and that’s not counting grenades and other equipment. Perhaps only Vanessa, swollen out of proportion during her pregnancy, could understand the effort required for someone as slight as me to drag around such ballast. The