“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.”
Domenico put down his order pad and leaned over the table to thumb through the pages that my father promptly started to translate.
“See,” my father said. “Look what big bruisers they are. These people have all been to Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan. When she gets back she can teach us a few tricks!” He laughed and reached across the table to squeeze my arm with fatherly pride. Domenico looked at me and laughed too, shaking his head in disbelief.
I looked at them both, their reading glasses lowered onto their noses: my father, bony and creaky; Domenico, short of breath, a paunch, layers of fat and cholesterol level off the charts.
They surveyed the photos with the greedy eyes of a couple of kids handling someone else’s toys.
“Brava, Maria!” said Domenico. “Send us a postcard and I’ll put it by the cashier. But make sure you come back in one piece.”
Then he raised himself up and resumed his professional manner.
“So, today I have linguine with scampi, the fresh ones I mentioned before, or else I recommend paccheri di gragnano with zucchini flowers…”
I left for London with two very different pieces of luggage. I pulled out my beat-up old canvas Domke bag from my photojournalism days to stow my two 35 mm camera bodies, a digital Leica, a multitude of lenses, flash cards, batteries, notepads, pens. I packed it exactly in the same sequence as I used to, with the efficiency and speed of a surgeon laying out his instruments. It felt good to take along such a light bag instead of the heavy metal case packed with my studio cameras and another with my lighting equipment.
The second bag, a much heavier suitcase, was the result of an endless search through my closet that had taken up a whole afternoon and a good part of the night. The outcome was a bundle of stockings, sweaters, scarves, odd gloves, twisted in a formless clump of soft, loose material that made me nauseous just to look at it. I carried and dragged these two different weights with an equal measure of pride and contempt for the reassuring firmness of the first and the suspect lumpiness of the second, which looked like a vital organ about to burst.
The Observer had booked me into a small but fashionable boutique hotel in Kensington, furnished with minimal furniture. The room had orchids in vials on the night table and lounge music CDs in the bookshelf. I was under a gigantic showerhead in the black bathroom when the phone rang. I ran to answer, dripping water all over the crisp sheets. It was Imo Glass. She told me in a flurry of hyperbolic adjectives that she was very happy to work with me and that she found my photos “absolutely extraordinary.”
I, on the other hand, asked her if she was by any chance Japanese. A foolish question—I knew it as soon as I blurted it out—but the minute I had heard her name from Pierre I had established, for some reason that now escapes me, that she must have a Japanese mother and a Jewish father. I had subsequently proceeded to form my own mental picture of Imo Glass: tiny, with glasses and sleek jet-black hair cut short, with the studious, genial air that certain Japanese girls have.
She laughed. “I wish. Unfortunately Imo stands for Imogen.”
Her voice was rich, throaty, her vowels precise. Another image instantly superimposed itself onto the studious Japanese girl: a tall blonde with fair skin, an English rose, delicate and yet unyielding, able to survive anything in spite of her fragile appearance.
“Let’s meet for coffee at my club. You know the Front Line, don’t you?” she asked. “It was founded in memory of journalist and photographer friends who were killed in war zones.”
“Excellent,” I said, but frankly it didn’t sound like such a great omen to start with. When I arrived—late, I took the wrong line on the tube and had to change trains—she was waiting for me in the bar, ensconced on a purple velvet couch under an enormous photograph of a fair-haired man swathed in a keffiyeh and pointing his telephoto lens at a tank in the middle of a desert. I wondered if he was still alive.
Imo, as it turned out, was languid, round, like a reclining beauty by Rubens, with thick, wavy dark hair, tanned skin, dark red full lips and the aquiline nose of a Nefertiti. The partially unbuttoned white shirt offered a glimpse of her cleavage beaded with a light film of sweat and of her generous breasts. She wore an oversized cashmere cardigan with rolled-up sleeves that could’ve been left behind by a lover (she didn’t look like the marrying kind). Thick Indian silver bracelets clinked at her wrists and as she hugged me I caught a whiff of patchouli. Imogen Glass emanated body heat, female humors and fluids. She appeared to be someone who loves to walk barefoot and doesn’t burn in the sun. I confessed to her straightaway that she didn’t look anything like I had imagined. She laughed.
“I bet. Genetically speaking, I have nothing in common with Imogen Glass. My real name is Lupita Jaramillo.”
“Oh, that’s why,” I said, not really getting what she meant.
“My adoptive mother decided to name me after her own mother. Unfortunately she was called Imogen. But I was born in Medellín.”
She paused and then specified, “You know, the hometown of the cartel?”
She laughed again and I did too, not knowing what was so funny about that.
“I didn’t expect you’d speak such fluent English,” she said. “That’s another bonus.”
“Well, my mother was Irish. At home m
y brother and I spoke English with her.”
Imo noted the “was” and gave me a sympathetic smile.
“Anyway. I can’t wait to tell you what the plan is. Pierre has told you more or less what this is about, right?”
“Yes, he’s sent me a couple of stories on forced marriages. I looked online and—”
“Yes, yes, of course,” she interrupted me dismissively. “I know the story has been done a million times already. But we’re going to do something slightly different.”
She leaned across the table, closer to me, and lowered her voice in a conspiratorial manner. “In case you’re interested in desserts, they have these chocolate éclairs here which are amazing. I’ve already ordered you one.”
She took out a notebook and some newspaper clips and put on a pair of reading glasses with rectangular red frames. They made her kind of look silly and I appreciated her insouciance in wearing them.
“I call them the Vaginas of Journalism, you know,” Imo said, arching an eyebrow.
“Who?”
“Oh, those women reporters who have built their career on women’s abuse and sufferings around the planet. You know, genital mutilation, rape, incest, you name it. They couldn’t believe their luck when the Taliban came on. A big story that only a woman in a burqa could do? Too good to be true.”
“Right,” I said a bit warily.
“A few of them still give speeches about their experiences at the time of the Taliban rule, of how they risked their life traveling through Afghanistan incognito pretending to be some Pashtun man’s wife. Right in this club, for instance. Oh, you should have heard them.”
She gestured vaguely around the room.
“The lectures, the talks. They just couldn’t stop telling the story.”
I gave a snicker, eager to show her how boring that sounded to me too. But how our assignment was going to be different from what the Vaginas had done was still unclear to me.
“A few of them still keep the burqa they traveled with in their closet, like a trophy. I’ve seen them wear it to parties. Talk about bad taste.”
A waiflike waitress brought the éclairs. They were enormous.
“What we’re going to do instead has a totally different angle. First of all, not much has changed for women in the rural areas since the end of the Taliban regime, and that’s a fact. But one thing has changed: information. What is happening is that now, with television, radio, the presence of NGOs and all the information that is beginning to seep through from the West, the women are beginning to realize what their rights are. Before, and under the Taliban, every girl knew she belonged exclusively to her father and then to her husband, and that was the end of the story. But now the more they know, the more desperate they feel about the condition they’re in. As a result, the suicide rate among women who are forced to marry has increased. Numbers are sketchy, but they’re on the rise.”
Imo gulped down half her éclair in a couple of bites—I could tell it was filled with custard and not real cream. She let out a little moan of pleasure and wiped her lips with her middle finger.
“You could draw a stunning graph of what this is about. Basically, the more information, the more suicides. The women are ready to take their own lives now more than ever because they know the world is watching them. Isn’t that just the perfect paradox?”
“That’s really interesting. I had no idea,” I said, unable to find something more clever to say.
She looked at me, squinting slightly as if to get me in focus. I feared she might think me an idiot. But she smiled, lifted a smudge of chocolate left on her plate with her finger and licked it.
“I know. It’s a great story.”
She shuffled through her papers.
“First of all we go and speak to this one here, what’s-her-name, let’s see…Roshana Something from the Afghan Human Rights Commission, she’s the woman on top of the statistics and from her we’ll get the numbers right. Then we go to the villages where these girls have immolated themselves. We try and talk to the girls who are about to be forced into a marriage and see what they have to say about that. And then—you’ll snap!”
I told her what I had read in the guide about photographing women.
“I must admit it made me quite anxious,” I said.
She smiled and grasped my hand across the table. She pressed it between hers, leaving me stunned.
“I know, I know, it’s always the same story, isn’t it? It all seems impossible from here, then once you get there…Oh well, one always finds a way, as you must know from experience. You’ll see—I’m sure we’ll manage to come home with incredible material. Besides, I don’t know whether you feel the same, but the harder it is to get a story, the more excited I get. I become even more obsessed.”
I cleared my throat and nodded, perhaps too weakly. I got the impression that she was disappointed by my lack of enthusiasm. I had a pretty long list of questions I was anxious to ask, mostly about vaccinations, the medicines I would need to bring with me, the actual danger of land mines, of being kidnapped and so forth. But in the face of her fervor, I didn’t want to sound small.
Imo glanced at my plate and realized my éclair was almost intact. Her eyes widened.
“Are you not going to finish it?”
I shook my head. She took the éclair between her thumb and forefinger and swallowed it whole, in one go. And this, in the secret language of women, especially one with hips as broad as hers, is a clear manifestation of self-esteem and strength of character.
By the end of our first meeting in London, Imo Glass’s personality had had a sort of miraculous effect on me. I felt like a teenager who had developed a crush on the new girl in class. She had won me over completely. She told me bits and pieces about herself, none of which was of much consequence. Her bio sounded as if it belonged to four different people. She grew up in London but had lived in St. Petersburg as a student; she spoke fluent Russian (on top of French and Spanish, which she had learned while living for a year in Mexico City with a boyfriend). She had covered wars in Sudan, Sierra Leone, Kosovo; she practiced Tibetan meditation and adored soccer.
“I’m in love with Francesco Totti,” she declared. “He’s my number one favorite, along with Ronaldinho.”
I wasn’t prepared for so much personality, charm, or for that overflowing effusiveness that she kept expressing with such ease (she grabbed my hand again twice during our conversation and then on the street she casually put her arm around my shoulders). I was flattered by so much attention, and the prospect of spending a week in Hampshire with those marines together with her made it all more acceptable. I had actually envisioned myself in a flak jacket running through the English countryside with Imo, together escaping a terrorist attack. Suddenly the idea of doing the course with her seemed an opportunity for a great adventure that would consolidate our friendship. Essentially, I realized in a flash that anything done in Imo’s company would take on a whole new light.
I was gratified by the respect she seemed to grant me for no reason I could discern, and I decided it wasn’t necessary to remind her I hadn’t been out there on the streets in years and never once in a war zone. The Barbie doll picture seemed to have had enough power to make her trust me completely. Whatever the reason, I didn’t want to deter her faith in me.
“We could take the train together tomorrow,” I suggested, as we were saying good-bye in front of the cab she was about to climb into. “Unless you were planning to drive.”
“Where?”
“To the country. Wherever this place is. For the course, I mean.”
“Oh, right. The Defenders,” she said, letting the name dangle for a second in the air. “Oh, no, darling, I’m not going to come. I did that course already years ago, when I went to Sudan. The insurance only needs you to do it once. But don’t worry, I’ll see you next Monday at the Emirates check-in at Heathrow.”
She hugged me tight and kissed me on both cheeks. The disappointment must have redrawn my face,
as I felt my cheeks sag, my nose lengthen. What an idiot. Someone who hops from one war zone to another, what was I thinking? She didn’t need the Defenders to defend her.
“They’ll do all sorts of things to you, just wait and see,” she said, wrapping her black cashmere coat around her. “You might just love it!”
And with a devilish grin she disappeared into the darkness of the large cab, leaving behind a sweetish, spicy scent.
I walked back to the hotel in order to digest the meeting, constantly checking my “London from A to Z” map for fear of getting lost again. I felt Imo Glass was a person whose definition eluded me. Perhaps because a little girl born as Lupita Jaramillo in the slums of a South American city ruled by drug traffickers, and who subsequently mutated into a woman by the name of Imogen who grew up in Notting Hill with an art historian (father) and a psychotherapist (mother) as adoptive parents, was a unique creature whose DNA had flourished in total anarchy. That’s probably why she seemed able to effortlessly shift from one language to another, from one country to another, as if she were always swimming in the same water and consequently managed to feel at home just about everywhere. But what struck me the most about her was her total lack of fear in the way she approached complete strangers—the waitress at the club, the taxi driver, me—enveloping everyone with festive familiarity, a secret weapon that tamed them on the spot, neutralizing any aggressive potential.
The following morning at seven, I had an appointment at Paddington station at the platform with my course companions. Pierre had told me over the phone that it was going to be a short trip and that one of the instructors was supposed to meet us at the other end, at Hampshire station.
I was the last to arrive. I spotted them right away as, tottering and sweaty, I lugged my big suitcase along. They had all gathered under the platform roof and were watching me as I wobbled toward them. I knew right away I was the only Italian of the group. I guess they had only just met, but already they looked to me like a well-bonded team that was about to set off on vacation. A consolidated group that viewed with suspicion the only stranger, the one no one wanted to share a room with. They shared a similar look: casual and contemporary, equipped in Nikes and North Face; their snazzy cell phones, literary magazines poking out of bags, iPods and woolen caps. They greeted me and my about-to-burst suitcase with incredulous grins, since they were all carrying hand luggage. We quickly introduced ourselves to each other and I didn’t even try to memorize a single name; for the whole journey I pretended to be reading the Guardian, half listening to their wry comments on what was awaiting us.
End of Manners Page 3