"Per chi viaggia in direzione ostinata e contraria."
Smisurata Preghiera, Fabrizio De André.
When I started my Civil Service — compulsory back then — I managed to start on exactly the wrong day.
Conscientious objector, they called it.
Back then, by the military and civilian standards of the time, military service was for real men, civil service was for spineless cowards, half-men.
And so on and so forth.
Anyway, I started my Civil Service in a tiny town in the lower Benevento area, right on the border with the province of Caserta.
A terrible place. A nightmare.
I started on the 4th of June, 1998.
There was the Neapolis Festival on, Deep Purple were playing.
Technically, I missed my first "return to base" on my very first day of Civil Service.
The next day, the town hall officer told me he'd seen me heading to catch the train, and that he'd already alerted the relevant military district.
What a bastard.
That repressed little jobsworth also told me that when I walked along the town's main street, I had to be careful — I had to walk on the right-hand side of the main square.
Because the right side was for the decent young people, the left side was for the rough, bad ones.
An absolutely hideous square. A proper eyesore.
Badly built, funded with the '80 earthquake money.
An eyesore with a fountain in the middle.
I was put in charge of manning the radio and/or phone for the civil protection and/or Red Cross.
My job was to call the ambulance if needed.
Nothing ever happened in that little town or nearby.
Just the odd elderly lady, nothing serious.
Until, after a couple of days on shift, I got a call from a mother screaming in tears, something like:
"Help, help, my little boy's got his head stuck in the steering wheel of the bumper cars at the pumpkin festival in XXXX (another middle-of-nowhere village)."
Without missing a beat, without laughing, I took the call, alerted the ambulance, went home, packed my things, and left — after just 3 days — my beautiful Civil Service posting in a terrible town in the lower Benevento area, to start reporting for medical checks at the military hospital in Caserta instead, for about 180 days.
And it was right there, on the train back — a regional train that stank of everything — that I decided they would never, ever have me.
Never, ever.
Never.
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