End of Manners by Francesca Marciano Read Free Book Online Page A

fainting spell as if it had never happened. He asked what I was going to do in Kabul. I muttered something about arranged marriages and diverted the conversation to him and the situation in South Africa. I wasn’t really listening, just nodding occasionally whenever I heard the familiar names, like Soweto, Mbeki, Mandela, Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As Nkosi mentioned how one of his best friends had been shot by the police back in the eighties and how he himself had been to jail, I lost myself gazing at the roast with mashed potatoes and baked carrots sitting on my plate. I began to nudge it imperceptibly with my fork, imitating the way Nori assembles the food for a shot, creating neat symmetrical mounds of vegetables next to the entrée.
    The Defenders were all sitting together at a long table at the back of the room, hunched over their plates, their heavy shoulders caved in, elbows resting on the table. They were gnawing meat from bones like characters in a medieval painting. They were taciturn and gloomy, doubtless not looking forward to another interminable week of lessons repeated all over again to a bunch of fools who passed out at the mention of blood.
    I had the impression I could actually hear their teeth grinding the bones.
             
    “I’ve had dinner with this very nice South African journalist,” I said on the phone to my father, who called me that evening.
    I could just picture him, sitting on the checkered sofa in front of the mute TV screen tuned to the satellite news channel, cigarette in hand, eager to hear my report.
    “Which paper does he write for?” he asked, as if he read the Johannesburg dailies regularly and knew the names.
    “Um…I didn’t ask. He’s very smart. I think he was an activist during the apartheid years.” I sighed, realizing that I hadn’t listened to Nkosi with enough concentration to appease my father’s insatiable curiosity.
    “How’s the weather?” I asked.
    “November weather. The same as you left. What do you care about the weather, anyway?” He sounded impatient now. “Tell me more about this South African journalist.”
    “What do you want to know? He seems bright, he’s nice, he’s…I don’t know. It’s not as if he told me his life story.”
    “
Va bene.
What is it like over there? What about the marines? What kind of place is it?
Allora?
Do you think you could give me some kind of description?”
    By now he would’ve had his plate of pasta and the one glass of red the doctor allowed him for dinner. He had probably saved this phone call till the end of the day, in order to savor it with his last cigarette. I could feel his excitement buzz through the phone line.
    “All right. What would you like me to tell you? It’s like, let’s see—there are all these aid workers and journalists, the food’s terrible, the hotel is like a badly refurbished manor house they rent out for weddings, with fluorescent lights and blue carpeting on all the floors; it looks like a rest home. Actually it’s almost funny. The Defenders are…I don’t know, kind of impenetrable. They look like a herd of bison. Quiet and dangerous. How does that sound?”
    “A pretty caustic description.”
    I heard him chuckle. I had succeeded in amusing him. Now—I knew it—he would put down the phone and repeat all I had said verbatim to Leo.
             
    The next day I woke up at five. Outside it was pitch-dark and rainy.
    My room was tiny, not much bigger than a closet, and I was feeling claustrophobic and unhappy. Another source of anxiety was the lesson on firearms that was scheduled to open the day. I certainly didn’t want to pass out again.
    I started surfing the satellite channels and suddenly came across the images of one of the English hostages in Iraq—a middle-aged, kind-looking man in an Day-Glo orange jacket—pleading with his government to help and listen to the kidnappers’ requests. I immediately switched to the next station, where a