Read Online End of Manners by Francesca Marciano - Free Book Online Page B

box and, in front of everyone, graded my intervention.
    “Let’s see what we have here. Maria, you acted quickly, you turned off the engine straightaway—well done, it was the first thing to do. You immediately checked the airway and response and that was good too.”
    He had resumed a detached, impersonal tone, gone back to being an instructor. For some reason I didn’t fully understand yet, I felt a certain disappointment. Only two minutes earlier, I had been comforting him as he moaned, reassuring him that he was not going to die, that everything was going to be all right, and now this sudden change in our relationship had caught me off guard.
    “You realized right away that the head wound was only superficial, and you handled it quickly—which is right, although your bandaging technique needs some improving.”
    He coughed a thick smoker’s cough that seemed to originate from deep inside his lungs. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
    “So far, so good. But there’s one thing you didn’t pay attention to.”
    He pointed to his ear and asked the group, “Can anyone tell me what this is?”
    A few of them gingerly stepped in to look, but shook their heads.
    I felt a pang of jealousy. Obelix and his injuries were my responsibility, they belonged to me and I didn’t want anyone to come between us. I stepped in and studied the rivulet of dried yellow liquid that ran from his ear down his neck. I hadn’t the faintest idea what that was supposed to be. I looked at Obelix, hoping he’d give me a clue. I shook my head.
    “Cerebrospinal fluid leakage,” he announced darkly. “It tells you there’s a serious head injury, possibly a skull fracture. You wouldn’t have thrown me backwards and forwards like that if you’d been aware of it.”
    “Yes, actually, I didn’t—”
    “You forgot to check to see if my neck, or spine, was broken,” he went on, ignoring me, “and that was a serious mistake. What else. You dragged me out of the vehicle rapidly and you remembered to lay me on a blanket to prevent hypothermia. Well done. The splint wasn’t bandaged securely enough. But all in all, I’d say you didn’t do too badly.”
             
    “I think I’m beginning to get the hang of this.” I was bragging to my father, who called me again that night. He was thrilled by my daily schedule and didn’t want to miss a detail.
    “Tomorrow we’ve got a class on land mines and after that we go into a checkpoint situation.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Okay, what they do is they stage a checkpoint, like in one of those countries where there’s a revolution going on, a civil war, something like that. Then they split us up into groups and each group in turn pretends they are a news crew that needs to go through. One of us plays the producer, another one is the cameraman and the other one is the journalist.”
    “Hmmm…”
    “We get to the checkpoint in our vehicle and the guys, the militia or whatever, start asking for money, passports, documents, bribes. In other words they start giving us a hard time, saying we can’t go through, our papers are not in order, blah blah blah. Basically they threaten they’ll have to keep us there. Stuff like that.”
    “But what are they actually teaching you,
tesoro
? I still don’t understand.”
    Despite the endearment my father suddenly sounded irritated.
    “Well, the point is we have to figure out how to extricate ourselves from the situation, how to react without getting us into more trouble. There are all these unwritten rules one needs to know, like always take off your sunglasses, keep your hands on the dashboard.”
    “On the dashboard?”
    “Yes. Then you have to know how much cash you need to have at hand in case they decide to keep your passport, how to handle the really aggressive guys, who to pay and how. Apparently checkpoints in danger zones are where the most incidents occur. People get shot at checkpoints all the time, you