I took the phone into the bath and dialed Pierre’s number. It felt somewhat naughty to be speaking to him while steaming in that lemony vapor.
“Finally,” said Pierre. “I’ve been looking for you all over. The photo editor of the
Observer
—the magazine—wants you for a job.”
Behind the gravelly accent there was a certain anxiety in his voice, and I liked that.
“It’s a fantastic assignment. The writer is Imo Glass.”
“Imo Glass?” I had never heard the name. I wanted to ask Pierre if Imo was a man’s or a woman’s name, but decided against it.
Pierre said she was a very good writer based in London who also happened to be an old friend. He told me I had to leave right away, as soon as I got a visa and the vaccinations.
I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure what the word “vaccinations” actually involved.
“To Kabul. You have to go to Kabul.”
A pause.
“What? Are you kidding me?” I laughed as I traced my finger through a bubble of water and soap. “I think you have the wrong number, Pierre.”
Pierre cleared his throat, feigned a nonchalant tone. “No, I don’t. This is for you.”
“Pierre, are you out of your mind? Why are you even—”
“Wait, Maria—”
“No, listen. Why are you even calling me about this? This has nothing to do with me. Send someone else. One of those guys who go to war zones. They’ll love an adventure.”
“This is a story on Afghan women and arranged marriages, Maria. We can’t have a guy shoot women in Muslim countries. And here’s the thing—Imo told her editor how much she loves your work. She actually requested that we hire you.”
“Which work?”
“Well, she has
seen
your work.”
“You mean the Barbie doll picture?”
This was the shorthand Pierre and I used for the Thai child prostitute photo, which had done the rounds of the world, had been published in so many magazines and had made me famous for a year.
“I wish you hadn’t done that,” I said.
“Done what?”
“You know. Showed her the photo. Since you represent me—am I right?—you should’ve told her I no longer do reportage.”
“I haven’t
done
anything. The photo is on our Web site and anyone can look at your work. Imo knew the picture perfectly well. The photo editor is extremely excited to have you on board. And besides, I think it’s time you did something like this. You’re ready to start again and this is why I really insist that you say yes. Because I’m your agent and I represent you. That’s why.”
He paused. I didn’t say anything.
“Maria? Are you there?”
“Yes.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just can’t believe this is happening.”
Three years ago, at a time when we were still trying to spend as little time apart as possible, I had followed Carlo to Bangkok, where he had to attend a conference on AIDS. He thought I might enjoy coming along. I had planned to see the Golden Buddha, a couple of good museums and the floating market by myself while he was at the conference, but I didn’t feel comfortable on the streets—too much noise, pollution and traffic, too many gadgets and fake designer labels sold everywhere. I spent most of my time in our air-conditioned hotel room reading novels and waiting for Carlo to come back from his meetings.
Then one night, as we were heading to a restaurant, our taxi broke down and we had to pull to the side of the street. While Carlo and the driver were fidgeting with the engine, I saw her. She must have been around ten. She was sitting on a low stool on the step of a dingy little house. Her face made up, her skinny body swathed in a glittering fabric, dirty feet and flip-flops. She was intent on braiding a broken Barbie doll’s hair, with the serious look children have when they are imagining scenes and secret plots. The next minute I saw her step off the stool and barter with a client on a scooter, the Barbie doll abandoned on the chair. I searched for my digital Leica in my purse. I clicked.
The glitter, the red taillights of cars in the distance, her dark red lipstick, the face of the man on the scooter, the way she arched her back as she’d been taught to do. The broken Barbie lit by a neon light looked like a tiny naked corpse. It was perfect.
Only I wasn’t that photographer anymore.
“I don’t even like driving a car on the highway,” I said. “As if I want to go to Afghanistan.”
“Maria,” Pierre begged. Then he said he was asking on bended knee.
“But why me? There must be a million photographers out there you could—”
“I tried. Everyone who I would trust to do this job right is on assignment somewhere. Margaret De Haas was supposed to go, okay? Yes, I did think of her first. But last night she fell—can you believe this?—from her
bicycle
and broke her foot.”
“Then you should call that American woman. The one who moved to Baghdad for six months, what was her name?”
“I rang her. She’s pregnant.” I heard him sigh. He blew into the phone.
“Maria, I’m asking you as a personal favor.”
“But there’s a war—”
“What war?” he said, regaining strength, sensing a chink had opened up. He immediately wedged his foot in. “The war per se is over. There is
no
war as such in Afghanistan, Maria. Iraq, yes, there’s a war. But in Kabul there’s a proper parliament now. Don’t you read the papers?”
“Yes, I do. And I also read about the Taliban, kidnapping and bombs going off still. Seriously, Pierre, I don’t want to go.”
“It’s going to be a big feature. Besides, it’ll put you back on the map, Maria.”
“Oh, please. Which map? I don’t care about the map.”
“I do, as your agent and your friend. You know the way I feel about that. I think that by the time you’re forty you will look back to this moment and regret not having—”
“Oh, God, Pierre, please, please, please. Don’t start with me on this.”
“We’d make sure you’d be traveling safely, taking all necessary precautions. It’s a great assignment, Maria, it’s material for another World Press Photo award. And it’ll be an in-and-out kind of thing. No more than two weeks of your life, I promise.”
“Pierre, I—”
“Sleep on it and call me in the morning. You owe me that much at least.”
“All right. But the answer is no.”
The next day I was sitting at the table in the small kitchen at my father’s place. After my mother’s death he had sold the apartment in Via S. Marco where we grew up—he said he didn’t need the space anymore—and moved into a cheaper neighborhood now bustling with immigrants from North Africa, Sri Lanka, streets lined with Asian groceries, Chinese take-out joints. He liked the feeling of being surrounded by people from other countries, who spoke different languages and listened to their loud music all day. He said he had had enough of living next to
“sciurette e cummenda”
all his life, an untranslatable expression that describes uptight Milanese.
That day I watched my father as he was puttering in the kitchen and realized his getting older actually meant he seemed to be getting lighter and lighter. He made me a coffee with his single-cup coffeemaker. Aging is this too, I thought. One becomes cautious, economical. Everything begins to shrink, not just the horizon one has ahead, not just the time that’s left, but one’s needs as well. One is careful not to let anything go to waste. Extravagance becomes a thing of the past.
I had told him about Pierre’s phone call and he had already put a folder aside for me with newspaper clippings and documents he had downloaded from the Internet.
“
Ecco, guarda,
here I put some background material for you to read. A brief history of the Soviet invasion; this one here is about the civil war, and this is a story on General Massoud’s assassination, when two kamikaze pretended to be reporters wanting to interview him. You remember that, don’t you?”
“Yeah, right…more or less.” I nodded vaguely. I was in a hurry to go home and I didn’t have time for a lesson.
“And all this material I got from an American Army site. It tells you about the movement of troops, contingents, et cetera. Good idea to keep an eye on it every now and again. It’s interesting. Well…”
He flipped through his ordered pages, moistening his finger, his reading glasses perched on his nose. He had already highlighted the more relevant paragraphs in yellow. He smoothed the pages with his hand and lined them up, taking care that the margins all coincided perfectly.
He still used the same teacherly gestures even now that he had retired from school. But he no longer looked as well groomed as he used to be when he was a professor of Italian literature at the Liceo Parini.
He taught Italian literature for over forty years. He’s had hundreds of students. Every now and again I happened to run into one of them.
“Maria Galante? I had a professor named Galante in school,” they would say, and when I told them that he was my father, they wouldn’t stop. The most passionate teacher I ever had, such an inspiration; he was the one who encouraged me to write; if it wasn’t for him…And on and on and on.
Sometimes, when my brother and I were teenagers, at the dinner table he would mention their names, talk about the ones he thought were more gifted, or the ones who made him laugh, as if they were distant relatives, or people whose names we were supposed to remember. At times he would read some of their writing aloud to my mother. I’d watch my parents bend over the paper, laugh, discuss, make comments, with the same participation as if it were their own children’s work. My brother and I would make a face and snicker.
Now, since my mother’s been gone, a sweet Filipina named Teodora comes for two hours a week and takes care of ironing my father’s shirts. He has, however, learned to do the laundry, and does his own shopping at the supermarket with the discount coupons. When my mother was alive I don’t think he even knew how to cook himself an egg. I feel a sense of great tenderness whenever I think how much he has adjusted, without the faintest trace of bitterness, to this new life. How he’s willing to look after himself as if housekeeping was just another skill he was eager to learn.
“The Bactrian Empire, where Alexander the Great treaded.” He was smiling and musing. “The river Oxus. I’m so jealous.”
He pulled out a book from the shelf.
The Road to Oxiana
by Robert Byron in an old-fashioned British edition.
“Your mother’s. You should read this before you go. It’s a masterpiece.”
I smiled. The shirt cuff poking out under the sleeve of his sweater looked frayed. His hair too long.
“I found a little Dari dictionary online and I saw it’s not a very hard language to learn. It sounds beautiful, like Farsi. I printed it for you. Look, I put it here at the back. I’m sure the people there would be very pleased if you said ‘good morning, thank you’ in their language. These things do make a difference.”
I could see the child he once was float to the surface and reveal himself. It was this child—not the retired teacher, the scholar of
lingue romanze
—who was grinning at me, imagining himself in Kabul.
“It’s a country that’s suffered a great deal and is still suffering. An extraordinary people, I think.”
He pushed his reading glasses halfway down his nose and looked at me, checking my sullen expression.
“When would you have to leave?”
“Hmmm. I’m not sure. It would have to be soon, I think.”
“You accepted, didn’t you?” he asked.
“I’m still thinking about it, Papà. It’s not an easy decision.”
I’d been awake much of the night, worried and anxious. It felt to me, as I stared into the blackness of my room, like when I was a kid standing on a diving board and everyone behind me was yelling, “Jump, jump!” So great was the shame of doing an about-face and going back that I closed my eyes and jumped. Better to get it over with right away than to face the humiliation. But a dive is only a leap—yippee, you instantly reemerge screaming with joy, amazed that you did it—and terror gives way to euphoria in half a second. A trip to Afghanistan felt more like a never-ending tunnel. A fear that would never subside till I reached the other side and the light.
The
metropolitana
was crowded and stuffy. I leafed quickly through the folder my father had put together. Too many names, too many dates to take in. Too many factions and wars. Too complicated the plot of this country for the last five hundred years. I almost immediately put the folder back in my satchel. I realized that I never owned that particular character trait that had always defined my father: he had always retained his relentless curiosity, the desire to be engaged in other people’s lives. The persistence in keeping track of what goes on in the world still seemed to concern him, as if crises, wars, famines, the tiny heartbreaking victories, the huge defeats of the planet were happening right on his own doorstep. Nothing was too remote for him, not a flood, not a dictatorship, not the conditions in a refugee camp of unknown minorities. In his solitude he was never alone. He was busy and engaged, participating in all the world’s grievances.
That afternoon I had to shoot a slice of tofu blueberry cheesecake next to a mug of steaming coffee for a new yoga magazine. Dario was leaning over the set moving tiny blueberries around the frame with tweezers. Nori was busy blowing cigarette smoke on the surface of the brown liquid through several straws joined together. She had to avoid any airflow in order for it to curl up nicely from the cup, so once she had blown the smoke, she had to retrieve the straw very slowly; but we could never get it right, it kept looking like a cloud of cigarette smoke rather than steam. After a while Dario started complaining about a sharp pain in his back. Nori said she was going to be sick if she had to inhale any more nicotine. By five thirty we were all in a lousy mood and I felt we couldn’t wait to get rid of one another.
I heard my phone ring at the other end of the studio. Dario ran to get it for me, but I saw I had one missed call and a message on the voice mail.
“Hallo, Maria, Pierre here.” He sounded annoyed and detached, like a stranger. “It’s after five and I still haven’t heard from you, so I figured that means no thanks in your language. This is just to let you know that I’ve alerted Samantha Jordan, you know, the one from Cape Town, I think you met her once at the office. I’ll call her to confirm tomorrow, so I think I’m covered.”