End of Manners (3 page)

He paused and then sighed.

“Just in case you were feeling guilty about letting me down.”

Of course I remembered Sam Jordan. A slim thirtysomething blonde with piercing blue eyes and a very good body. I had checked her work online after we had met hoping it wouldn’t be as good as her looks. But it was.

When I got home that night I googled Sam Jordan once more and went through her portfolio. Her portraits were stunning. The landscapes were like paintings, brushstrokes on a canvas, brilliant use of the light, splashes of vibrant color. The images were bold, ironic and poetic at the same time. She would be good in Afghanistan. The minute Imo Glass and the photo editor saw this portfolio, they would forget all about me.

I was exhausted and I had a long list of shots for the following day. Gelato, mousses and sherbets, which are particularly hard work as they tend to ooze and need to be shot very quickly. I dozed off in front of the TV. Fragmented images of the tofu blueberry cheesecake kept creeping back into my sleep like a song I couldn’t get out of my head, but the vivid colors were those of Sam Jordan’s photos. I sprang up from the sofa around midnight, possessed by an unusual fury, and dialed Pierre’s number. I got his voice mail this time.

“Pierre, it’s me. This is crazy, I can’t believe you didn’t get my earlier message. I rang this morning to tell you I was going to take the job. Now I get this message about Sam Jordan. What the hell is going on here?” The more I lied, the more confident I became.

“I even sent you a text three hours ago. Were you joking or what? Don’t you dare alert anybody. This isn’t funny anyway.”

I hung up the phone without even saying good-bye.

A power move—I knew from when it had been done to me one time too many.

MY PARENTS MET
in the early sixties, a time when an Irish girl was a rare and exotic thing for a young Italian to come across. They met in Rome in Babington’s Tea Rooms at the feet of the Spanish Steps, the only place in Italy where one could get proper English tea and cucumber sandwiches. My father was staying with his uncle at the time, theoretically looking for a job after graduation, in actuality loafing around, toying with the idea of being a poet. Every afternoon he would pop in there because he loved anything foreign and because the tearoom was next to the house where Keats had died, which enhanced the romantic flavor of his fruitless afternoons. My mother was a young university graduate student on her first holiday abroad—she came from a modest family in southern Ireland and knew very little of the world. She was staying in a cheap pensione by the train station, counting every lira she spent and falling in love with all that was Italian. But on that rainy afternoon she was longing for a proper cup of tea and a scone. It took my father two minutes to invite himself to her table. He wanted to fall in love with someone different; she was dreading the idea of going back home, to the drab, smelly rented room she had in Dublin. They didn’t speak the same language and talked in broken French. This thrilled them even more.

In their honeymoon pictures my mother smiles on a bridge in Venice in a short-sleeved yellow sweater and a checkered skirt, a headband holding her curly red hair in place. My father looks thin, more interesting than handsome, impeccably dressed despite the little money he was making at the time as a public school teacher, surrounded by the flurry of pigeons that every shot in Piazza S. Marco includes. Every year afterwards, on their wedding anniversary, the two of them would travel from Milan to Rome and would go back to Babington’s for high tea; even when the trip and the tearoom’s pricey meal had become too expensive, they still made a point of going. They said they feared it would jinx their marriage otherwise; I think it cheered them up to keep this one extravagance. They maintained the ritual till Leo and I were out of school and had left home. By then the traveling had become too tiring and the joke had lost its audience—us—and run out of steam.

The end of the ritual didn’t affect their marriage. But maybe they were right about the jinx. Because it was right after they stopped that my mother got sick.

My mother had the romantic look of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, but she didn’t know it, and never carried herself as such. If anything, she was self-conscious of her freckles and flaming hair. Her taste in clothes was funny, very un-Italian. She was not quite frumpy, but she wore all the wrong colors. I remember watching her on the nights of parent-teacher conferences; I’d be praying that my teacher wouldn’t think her ridiculous, and that the other kids wouldn’t laugh at her. They never did, yet I worried: she looked so helpless to me, cloaked in her funny caftans, or in those large, bold prints she liked to wear, the blouses with ruffles and puffy sleeves she saved for special occasions. I loved her and feared for her—could sense her anxiety, the insecurity that seemed to follow her wherever she went, whether on the bus, in a grocery shop or at the beach. She blushed when people didn’t understand her pronunciation, or when she got the tenses wrong. No matter how many years she’d lived in Italy, she seemed never to belong.

I worried too much about her; over the years, that worry spilled into my personality and became my own.

Pierre was, he said,
aux anges,
“to the angels.” A flamboyant expression for ecstatic, which conjured putti trumpeting on clouds.

He sent me links to some of the stories Imo Glass had written in the past for the
Guardian
and the
Observer
and articles on the situation of women’s rights in the southern provinces. He also sent me via courier a guide to Afghanistan that had just been published in England. I spent the next few days online reading the
Kabul Daily,
looking at ads for new restaurants and at the classifieds, scrolling Wikipedia like mad on different Afghan entries, checking from geography to literature to food. I waited anxiously for the guide to come, as if the book had the power to dispel all my fears and answer all my questions. In the meantime my mother’s yellowing edition of
The Road to Oxiana
provided wondrous descriptions of what Kabul, Herat and Kandahar had been like in the forties: “Hawk-eyed and eagle beaked, the swarthy loose knit men swing through the dark bazaar with a devil may care self confidence. They carry rifles to go shopping as Londoners carry umbrellas.”

The guide finally came through. Its content proved more up-to-date than Byron’s journal but far less alluring. It wasn’t aimed at travelers—there had been none for decades and none seemed to be coming anytime soon—it had been conceived for use by aid workers, reporters, donors, local NGOs. The security tips went something like “Don’t walk off the road into the bushes for a leak! Mines are everywhere; minimize your time in bazaars and crowded areas, vary your routes to and from office/residence as much as possible. Do not go outside while there is shooting. What goes up must come down.”

A short paragraph on women and photography stated that photographing Afghan women had often proved difficult, particularly in the most conservative Pashtun areas. Taking their portrait without their consent could lead to an ugly situation. A CNN crew who had been filming women in a hospital without their permission had been detained at gunpoint.

Pierre rang to say that the insurance for me and Imo Glass was going to cost the paper a fortune. His voice was crisp, ebullient almost.

“You’re going away covered by a policy that’s the Ferrari of insurance,” he said. I guess he thought this sounded reassuring.

“Great. Does that mean they cover the ransom in case we’re kidnapped?”

Pierre laughed as if I had said something really funny.

“Probably. In any case you’re most welcome to go over the policy here at the office when you come to London. It’s thirty pages long.” And then the laugh again.

“And how about the assignment for
Gambero Rosso
?” I asked. “I was scheduled to shoot for them the first week of December. What are we going to do about the—”

“I’ll take care of it. They’re my next phone call, in fact. They will find someone else, no problem, so don’t you worry about that.”

He was brimming with enthusiasm, as if canceling that shoot was a personal victory. I heard paper rustling from his end. It pissed me off that he should be so efficient. He told me that the insurance required us to take a course.

“Hostile environment training,” he said. “It’s the least they can expect, with what they’re covering.”

“Which means?”

“They teach you how to behave in situations of potential danger. It’s like going to school and taking classes about safety, first aid and stuff like that. There are only two companies in the world who provide this kind of training and they’re both based in England. People who have to go off to hot zones come here from all over the world. So we’ll fly you over, you’ll start the course on Monday, meanwhile we’ll take care of your visa and so forth and then you and Imo will leave together from Heathrow the following week. It works out very neatly like that.”

I said nothing. He was beginning to get on my nerves with all that optimism and positive feeling about everything. My brief fantasy about the two of us in the south of France seemed to belong to another era of our relationship, eons away.

“There’ll be about fifteen of you in the course. They’re holding it in the country, here, just outside London.”

“What do you mean
in the country
?”

Pierre cleared his throat.

“Yes, they’re deporting you to a sort of mansion in Hampshire, in the middle of the English countryside. All the participants have to live there for the duration of the course. You’ll go to classes from eight till six. It’s going to be hard work.”

There was a pause. I didn’t fill it.

He chuckled. “Basically you’re going to boot camp.”

My silence grew deeper. An absence of breath, more than a suspension of sound.

“It’ll be fun, you’ll see. There’ll be a whole bunch of interesting people who work in interesting places. It’s an experience, Maria. In fact, you don’t realize how lucky you are. I’d be in it like a shot.”

Sure he would. I heard the papers rattle again in the background.

A couple of days later I met my father for lunch in a trattoria in his neighborhood, where they’ve known him for years and call him “Professore.” We sat at his usual table in the back, facing the faded Miró print and the old wooden cupboard. The table was covered with a sheet of paper and a quart of cheap white wine
della casa
had been placed between us. Naturally, my father had now printed more pages from the Internet about my survival course.

“I did a search and in the end I found this group. They’re called ‘Defenders.’” He grinned. “It must be them, they’re the only ones who do this kind of thing. It’s like something out of James Bond!”

The photos he downloaded looked pretty muddy in the smudgy black and white of his old printer. I could scarcely make out a group of people sheathed in bulletproof vests and helmets. Another picture showed a table covered with firearms of every kind: rifles, machine guns, grenades. A close-up showed a man in full camouflage gear, his face blackened like in the poster of
Platoon.

“I don’t know about James Bond,” I said. “They look more like mercenaries to me.”

“They’re
not
mercenaries. These are ex–British marines. It’s a totally different ball game,
mia cara.
”

Domenico, the owner of the trattoria, came over in his apron and tried to tell us some very fresh scampi had just come in. But my father wasn’t ready to pay attention to food yet.

“Look at this, Domenico,” he said, handing him the pages. “Maria is going to Afghanistan on assignment for the
Observer.
But first she has to do a survival course with these guys.
Guarda qui,
they simulate all kinds of scenarios: a shooting, a car bomb, whatnot. What they do is they teach you how to react, how to avoid getting in trouble,
capito
? It’s proper special forces training, look at this.”