End of Manners Page 2

  “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.”

  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 pa
per 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.