Free The Human Body by Paolo Giordano Page A

he’s being sucked into the hole. He tries not to look at the splatter of liquid shit on his bare thighs and the edge of his pants.
    When the sharp pangs subside, he rests his head on his outstretched arm and remains like that another minute, exhausted and appalled by the gravity of what’s happened to him. A feeling of relief spreads through his entire body along with a powerful drowsiness. For a few seconds he dozes off in that unnatural position.
    Angelo Torsu is the first to show symptoms of food poisoning, maybe because he overdid it, filling his plate with cow meat three times, or because he’s never had a strong stomach. Nevertheless, while he’s still cowering inside the cramped toilet, two soldiers hole up in the adjoining latrines and he recognizes the sounds of an emergency similar to his own. Within a few hours
Staphylococcus aureus
has invaded the FOB and the base is in chaos. There are eighteen toilets available and at least a hundred men affected, with attacks hitting them twenty minutes apart.
    By four in the afternoon the latrine area is overrun by a pack of trembling soldiers with greenish faces. They’re gripping rolls of toilet paper and shouting to those inside the stalls to hurry it up, damn it.
    There are four people ahead of Corporal Major Enrico Di Salvo, among them Cederna. Di Salvo is considering asking his buddy to switch places with him, because he’s afraid he won’t make it, but he’s sure he’ll say no. Cederna is a top-notch soldier, funny when he wants to be, but he’s also a real bastard.
    Di Salvo tries to remember when he’s ever felt this bad in the past. When he was thirteen he was operated on for appendicitis, and in the months prior to that he’d wake up at night with cramps that prevented him from walking upright to his parents’ room. His mother was mistrustful of drugs and his father wary of specialists’ fees, so they treated him with
limonata
. The pain didn’t go away and at some point his mother would return to bed, upset with him: “I told you to drink it while it was hot and you insisted on waiting. So it didn’t do any good.” When the ambulance came to take him, the inflammation had worsened into peritonitis. But not even the pain at that time may have been as intense as what he’s now feeling. “Cederna, let me go ahead of you,” he says.
    â€œForget it.”
    â€œPlease, I can’t hold it anymore.”
    â€œGet a bag and do it in there, then.”
    â€œI don’t like shitting in bags. Plus I can’t make it to the tent.”
    â€œYour fucking problem. We’re all in the same boat.”
    Di Salvo doesn’t think that’s true, though. Cederna isn’t at all pale and he has yet to let out a moan or make a grimace. The other guys are gasping with pain. The first in line has started jerking the handle of a toilet that’s been closed for too long. He receives an insult in return and kicks the metal door.
    No, he’s definitely never felt this bad. He has knives planted in his spleen and liver, he’s got the chills, and he’s dizzy. If he doesn’t get to the toilet in a few minutes, he’ll have to throw up, or worse. He might even faint. That stuff they ate was poison.
    As if that weren’t enough, after lunch he’d made a brief visit to Abib’s tent and they smoked some hash together, just one gram, crumbled into the tobacco of a cigarette. Abib has a strange way of preparing the mixture; instead of heating it with a lighter, he rubs it between his fingers for a long time and then lets his saliva drip over it. You’re disgusting, Di Salvo told him the first time.
What?
You’re disgusting. Abib looked at him with that sly smile of his. After months at the base with the Italians he could speak a few words of Italian but instead he always spoke English:
Italians no know smoke,
he’d replied.
    Maybe it’s because of