This is a true story. I’m experimenting with a different character point of view. I will soon get my personal stories out of the way, as the personal has its limits, but I’ve never told my story of being god’s idea of a living breathing pomo joke before in any consistent way. Life would happen, it would be weird and inexplicable and I’d get on with it. I’ve got a few more episodes left to get out of my system, so I can move on to synthesis, to the conceptual, the fictional, the trivial, and the frivolous, with little dashes of heart and soul, and as many zingers as I can muster.
This is part one of the martial phase of my silly Siddhartha’s journey. In part two Igor will lube up his entire body on Thai boxing liniment, learn what a TKO means and all about what knees can do to faces. Don’t worry after this he’ll be an avowed pacifist, who’s looked into the abyss, realised how shallow it was and walked away.
Igor had returned from Johannesburg, love sick specifically for a judge’s daughter from Pretoria with a heroin problem and homesick more generally for Africa and methcathinone and biker gang raves and disco biscuits and naked afterparties and domestic help, and had acquired the obstinate notion that he was a naughty boy and military discipline would set him right. Structure and order and hierarchy and perhaps some sort of brotherhood. Maybe it was because he’d found the raging drill sergeant in “Full metal jacket” somewhat arousing. Maybe the idea of an ordered world with clear rules was so alien it might just be the ticket. Most likely it was that the comedown that Sunday was particularly harsh. Anyhow, shiny boots, a sharp uniform, marches, parades, epaulettes, and physical punishment all seemed vaguely titilating. He wanted a manly officer to make him run laps and do pushups and be his ubermensh sergeant-daddy and ensure he made his bed in the morning. He wanted to be surrounded by a bunch of naughty, brave boys in matching uniforms.
The French foreign legion was his first choice, the McKinsey of tough love for the wayward and the illegitimate. As a plus they’d probably even send him back to Africa. Upon further reflection he realised that they wouldn’t be sending him to the fun, sub-Saharan parts and the commitment was a minimum of five years. Five years under French martial law and a posting in northern or western Africa, probably defending a Uranium mine in Niger from rightfully pissed off local warlords. What a drag. These two factors somewhat dampened his enthusiasm for running off to be yelled at stylishly in French.
First as history, then as farce didn’t apply to Igor, he was god’s pomo joke, outside of history, so it usually was farce right from the very beginning. As it just so happened, while he was a stowaway in South Africa picking up a District 9 accent, a love of big motorbikes, and more than a few obscure vices, his wholesome father had been re-enrolling him every year in that final year of high school he was missing to ward off the encroaching demands of Italian military service. Igor owed the Italian state ten months of his life. Since Tuscany is traditionally a left voting region, most of his high school peers had opted for civil service postings as conscientious objectors, which meant home cooked meals and a few hours a day lounging about at the local ambulance dispatch flirting with nurses.
Igor at the time didn’t have a left-wing bone in his body. Most of his ideas about the world came from that American apocalyptic survivalist cult of pseudo-evangelical hippie swingers where his parents had met and raised him. He had grown up being told things like “maybe it wasn’t really six million Jews” and “oh Hitler wasn’t good but they really were kind of asking for it by introducing all of that decadence into wholesome western civilisation”. So martial survivalist fantasises were de rigueur for silly, horny, twenty-two year old Igor.
There was an option to sign up as a volunteer for one year, this meant the ability to choose a battalion and a decent stipend of around 560 Euros a month (610 if he made corporal, woop!). So, to the bewilderment of his friends and family, Igor signed up to be posted at school of the engineering corps in Rome, his first choice had been an operative battalian in the Alpine corps in Aosta, and the somewhat perverse reason for that was how moving he found the Alpine corp choir song "Ponte di Perati”, sung in Pasolini’s Salo’. The song is about the tragedy on the Perati bridge when fascist Italian troops were routed and massacred on their way to invade Greece, largely due to ill preparedness and strategic idiocy on the part of the Italian generals (besides the fact that they shouldn’t have even been trying to invade Greece at all). Sometimes historical events are both farcical and tragic the first time around. Igor always regretted not having gotten into the active Alpine battalion, becoming an “Alpino” for life with a funny feather-featuring felt cap and being stationed up in the sublime white peaks of the northern Alpine region. But Rome, that ancient decadent city, was nothing was nothing to be sniffed at, and the parties would probably be better for silly Igor’s personal pomo Bildungsroman evolution from god’s joke into a real human, rather than armed ski patrols with dour northern “polentoni (eaters of polenta)” in the Alps.
The military physical involved a trip to Florence, where a bunch of aspiring recruits or conscripted sulks where made to strip naked, line up, and present themselves one at a time to an uninspired military doctor to be poked and prodded and measured and weighed, and present their best case for acceptance or dismissal on medical grounds. Part of this ritual also involved lifting one’s cock so the medical officer could briefly fondle each scrotum for abnormalities to much blushing by the provincials and much sniggering by the people sophisticated enough to think that have one’s balls fondled in a conveyor line was funny rather than simply mortally embarrassing. Balls having been fondled and bill of health declared fit, Igor was provided with the address and date for appearance in Rome.
On a cold day in February of 2004, Igor woke up early and took the train down to Rome, then the subway to the EUR stop, and arrived at a worn collection of barracks and classrooms with a vast internal courtyard which would be his home for the next year. Igor was struck with how ugly and drab these buildings were, with peeling paint where pure military functionalism met underfunded institutional decay. Had he made the worst mistake of his life? He was somewhat comforted to notice his fellow platoon novices were equally depressed.
“The first day is the worst”, said Luca, a gangly boy from Bari, “then about a week in you realise it’s not so bad.”
Luca was three months into his year-long term, so obviously far outranked them in army wisdom and the hazing hierarchy. All the new recruits were from below Rome. Igor was a Tuscan boy, the only one from north of Rome, with the same Tuscan accent as the infamous comedian Roberto Begnini, so it was naturally assumed, much to Igor’s chagrin, that most of what Igor said in that Tuscan accent was funny. But Igor was in no mood for comedy, he wanted discipline and physical exertion. None of these boys had joined the army out of a passion for military discipline or the need for adventure. Most had joined because the one-year volunteer army service gave them a slightly higher chance of getting a permanent job as a cop, or ideally a cushy government office job where they could get their second cousin to clock in for them every other day. Yes, the Italian army is largely composed of pragmatic, work shy southerners because it’s a reasonable place to find a chance at lifetime employment. This obviously wasn’t going how he’d expected it at all.
The new recruits were swarthy boys of all shapes and sizes from Puglia, Calabria, and Campania. These definitely weren’t boys destined for glorious warfare, they were too good natured, too well fed, too kissed by the pale Mediterranean sun, and too well-loved by their mothers. This made for gregarious, raucous company that thousand-yard stare Igor was having none of. Let’s see how they survive basic training, he thought.
Basic training in the esteemed engineering corps of the feared Italian army consisted of being fitted with a tailored dress uniform, and issued a full set of clothing and accessories, including a cute little brown Esercito Italiano branded washing kit with a nail clipper, a shaving razor, toothpaste, and a toothbrush, very Alitalia business class. The military fatigues and the boots issued were of a quality calibrated perfectly by the suppliers to last exactly one year, and not a second beyond that. Once the boys were fitted in their uniforms with their budget business class courtesy bags, they were herded into classrooms and taught about the martial law they were now under, how to recognise military ranks, and how to salute one’s superiors. The bulk of military training outside the classroom consisted in marching lessons around the giant courtyard. Yes, Igor, in his infinite wisdom about life mostly gleaned from American cinema had ended up in a battalion whose main raison d'etre was military parades for special occasions.
And there were many special occasions in Rome. Rome was the city of parades, of marches, of protests. There was the changing of the guard at the Altare della Patria, the drug pride parade, the festa della repubblica, the regular pride march, the Natale di Roma, and political parades of every stripe. A lot of these parades required hundreds of soldier boys to fill up blank space to satisfy some general’s ego (Italian generals and tech VPs have a lot in common). They mostly marched, stood around in neat lines holding unloaded Berretta AR70 rifles, or were sent to fill up the pews in Catholic services. Igor was surprised at how “not secular” the army was, and refused to attend these services on the grounds of being an atheist. He just so happened to be the only person in his battalion who identified this way. The captain didn’t quite know what to do with him when the others were dutifully filling up pews, so he was often left to wander the barracks during the day.
One day during one of his wanders around the deserted barracks he noticed the door to the small on-premise chapel was open. He went inside and stumbled towards the sacristy, cordoned off behind the altar by a heavy curtain. Igor was fascinated by the ornate, ceremonial robes, the bottles of wine, and the unflavoured chips. He opened a bottle and found a chalice which served its purpose, and after a few drinks began to look hungrily at the neat packets of chips. They were unflavoured and unsalted but they were unbelievably light and melted in his mouth, they also helped the wine go down faster. A few chalices of wine and many fistfuls of chips later, Igor got bored. He’d been warned all his life by the puritan maxim “idle hands are the devil’s workshop” but it’s funny how quickly moral maxims are forgotten when true boredom sets in. The mind craves stimulation, the spirit craves mischief, and the body usually craves other bodies. Today Igor’s mind is being stimulated by the idea that perhaps it would be fun to take off his military fatigues down to his underwear, don the fancy ceremonial dress, fill up the chalice once more with wine, and perhaps fill this other wider chalice (which seemed perfect for the purpose) with those nice melty chips, and go for a scamper around the concrete quad at the centre of the barracks.
This is how the on-duty guard patrol found Igor. Drunk, wearing nothing but army boots and a chasuble, holding in one hand a wine-filled chalice and in the other a host-filled ciborium from which he was dipping his head into to grab mouthfuls of the flavourless melty body of Christ. Guard patrol corporal Cristiano, a short, usually sunny fellow from Otranto was first stunned then outraged at the sacrilege. But the quad was wide, Igor’s legs were long, and the patrol boys were inconvenienced by their useless unloaded guns and oversized hats.
They chased him across the quad, begged him to cease and desist from this blasphemy, but they couldn’t catch the tall boy seized by the whims of a different, older, and very mischievous god. The chasuble flew upwards in the wind, blocking Igor’s view, and he ended flying straight into the nonplussed arms of the chaplain, wine, host, mischievous attitude and all.
“Igor, what the hell! You’ll need to be punished for this behaviour!”
“How many push ups do you want me to do? or maybe I could run some laps before bed?”, Igor helpfully suggested, happy to finally getting a taste of the Full Metal Jacket experience he’d signed up for.
“What are you talking about? You’re getting a week’s detention!”, replied the world-weary captain.
Detention meant no evening pass to wander Rome freely until 2200. It meant an evening locked away in the barracks and it meant mess hall food for dinner. That was it. There would be no shouting, no collective punishments, no physical pain. The sweet relief of harsh sensations would need to be found elsewhere. His inner drill sergeant demanded a satiation that could only be filled with violence, loud music, and physical exertion. He’d been half-hoping that the blasphemy would get him a sound beating, or at least the chance of a good fight. But the Italian army was too pragmatic and bureaucratic for Igor’s fantasies of chaos. Also, he really didn’t like rifles. They were heavy, they were noisy, and they required a lot of cleaning.
They taught him to use a Berretta AR70, to shoot from standing, kneeling, and prone positions. They also taught him to use a German belt-fed MG 3 heavy machine gun with one tracer round every four. They went out into a nature reserve, set up themselves up in teams of two. One would shoot, the other handled the belt feed, and they fired the MG into the sea. The tracer rounds dashing towards the waves like angry red fireflies. He learnt how to use hand grenades that exploded on impact. The most striking thing about explosions was how light travels faster than sound, so explosions are silent, almost harmless, until a moment later when the suspended destruction crashes into your ears.
When basic training was complete they were assigned to jobs around the school. Igor was assigned to work with two marshals and a captain in the IT department. This was an office job now, with easy hours and jovial colleagues. One of them was a poet and wrote a poem for Igor, which he still remembers to this day. This marshal saw into Igor’s young angry, confused soul far better than he ever could at the time.
A Igor, ma dove vai? Con quel portamento che ti da turbamento, tra l’essere e l’apparire. Lasciati andare, col onda, anche anomala del istinto, che ti renderà più distinto
Instinct however, doesn’t come easily to those who grew up across worlds, always on the road, imitating strangers and making it up as they went along. Igor had no right to yearn for South Africa as a home, no sense of being Italian, and natively spoke American English, a place he’d never been. Germany was a passport he happened to have and Switzerland was a name on his birth certificate. How was any of this supposed to make sense? It would be decades of decanting later for all those worlds to not feel in conflict with each other, for them to coalesce and synthesise into a fine wine of creative tensions rather than the jangled conflicting loyalties and wistful saudaude he’d felt as early as he could remember. Few kids could say that they spent a year of their early twenties, like a budget nineteenth century aristocrat, working out their existential dilemmas by taking long rambling walks across Rome and the Vatican, or losing all reason in front of a wall of speakers at one of the many squatter parties in the city. Igor was lucky, and he was not immune to all that beauty, but it’d take a while to get through that thick skull filled with mischief and longing.
Guard duty was a constant during the army. This went from simply being a hall monitor, watching over two hundred sleeping soldiers for a two hour shift, to needing to spend an hour, completely immobile, guarding the eternal flame at the Altare della Patria. Once, Igor was particularly bored, and was tasked with guarding the general’s office. This office was wide, spacious and immaculate, in stark contrast to the general decay of the rest of the facilities. On the general’s desk was a desk pad calendar, of heavy grained paper beautifully embossed with the logo of the engineering corp. Igor, now a corporal, was bored. Time wasn’t passing and he wasn’t allowed to read books. He began to draw one large veiny cock on the desk pad, then a mushroom cloud of smaller cocks on each of the four corners. He’d also been to a street party recently, which others called a protest, and had heard some antiwar slogans, which he began writing in big block letters between the different-sized cocks. He figured this was a harmless prank, and the general would simply snort laugh once in private at all those penises and puerile slogans, then rip it off and resume his existence as a dignified NATO general. Igor’s guard shift ended and he scampered out into the twilight for dinner, almost completely forgetting about the penis slogans.
The general, as it turned out, was an extremely dignified religious man (obviously from the South, they lack humour about the strangest things), and was not at all amused by the gift of vulgar street art on his desk pad. Especially not leftwing slogans. This ideological subversion must be dealt with at once!
Igor was summoned before the colonel, who was not at all appeased by the explanation that it was boredom and carelessness that had led to the drawings, rather than malicious desire or, even worse, repulsive ideological leanings, which had led Igor to insult not just the general, but the entire army and the Italian state.
In the end it was the chaplain who saved him from a court martial, yes the very chaplain into whose arms he’s collapsed only months earlier wearing all that ceremonial Catholic garb. The chaplain, good Catholic priest that he was, nurtured no rancour for silly Igor’s antics, and entreated the general to avoid the bureaucratic pain of a court martial in favour of a more informal hearing where Igor was sentenced to ten days in the brig. Still no physical punishment, but at least he’d avoided a criminal record and possibly years of legal proceedings (given the glacial pace of the Italian court system) for the crime of drawing engorged genitals on a general’s desk calendar.
The days in the brig passed, and eventually the one year of service came to an end. Igor didn’t get what he wanted, he hadn’t learnt discipline become part of a brotherhood here. His most vivid memory of his time there, the essence of how he ended up viewing national pride was at a Sunday adunata, or morning assembly, where on regular days of the week the entire quad would fill with thousands of soldiers at 0700 sharp, to sing the national anthem before commencing the day’s tasks. But on Sunday, on that warm summer morning, the quad was almost empty, and the only soldiers marching were those in detention who had failed to secure a weekend pass. A dozen snoozy, hungover solders marched lazily onto the quad, and at the given signal launched into the world’s least respectful rendition of a national anthem. Twelve boys, each deliberately singing at a unique key and tempo, the lieutenant facing them looking pained and angry at this farcical rendition of Il Canto degli Italiani.
There was nothing the lieutenant could do. The military handbook mandated this daily ritual, but didn’t explicitly mandate music lessons or specify that the national anthem must be sung in key and with an inner sense of pride and dignity. So we didn’t.