Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar Read Free Page A

beat for the newspaper includes both Central America and the Caribbean, but no air connections link them directly. To fly from El Salvador or Nicaragua to, say, Cuba or Haiti, you have to go through Miami. My habit is to stay a few days in transit with my notes and laundry and receipts strewn over the floor of my hotel room.
    I do my expense accounts, work, order room service, see a few friends, try to decompress. But I am jumpy and short-tempered—I find myself flinching at loud noises. I take a stab at talking about the chaos I’ve witnessed, describing my fear, the paralyzing proximity of gunfire and bullets. It doesn’t help. Over drinks with a friend at the News Café in South Beach, bathed in late-afternoon sunshine and gazing at the young models sauntering down thesidewalk, I find it impossible to recount the scene of the dead priests, or convey the ordeal that followed. It’s not beyond my powers of description; it’s just too starkly out of context. Except for other correspondents, no one can relate. No one wants to hear it.
    I live nowhere that is really home, my friends are far away, and the places I work are joyless and terrorized. The idea that a good meal can wash away the taste of terror is ridiculous. But my thoughts keep wandering in that direction. I want a blowout meal, something spectacular. I want it as balm, as a diversion, as fortification, as an escape. I find the best Italian restaurant in town, a sedate place in Coral Gables, take a table on my own, and start ordering. I order the San Daniele prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella and tiny pungent olives. I order littleneck clams, risotto with saffron, and a Roman chicory salad. The waiter nods and starts back to the kitchen, but I smile ruefully and tell him,
Sorry, I’m not quite done
. I order more—veal with mushrooms and a good bottle of Barolo. I eat slowly, delighting in the meal. This is gluttony, pure and simple, but I’m not just hungry for the food; I’m hungry for pleasure in the vague hope that it may neutralize some of what I’ve seen.
    The trip to Florida will be short, I know. There is news in Haiti—a power grab by the army, a bloody interlude, nocturnal gangs roaming the capital. But I crave some touchstone of normalcy and home. So in the few days I have in Florida I find it with my grandparents, well into their seventies, who live in a retirement community in Boca Raton.
    The drive from Miami to Boca is under an hour, and I know exactly what to expect when I get to my grandparents’ condo. My grandmother will have the front door open, and she will be standing just behind the screen, surveying the parking lot, so by the time I park and step out of my car she will be out at the second-floor railing, beaming and bellowing my name.
    She is tiny and shrunken and fragile, bony in my arms. Her arthritic hands are knobby and liver-spotted.
    â€œDid you drive on I-95?”
    She is terribly anxious, and I can hear the fear in her voice.
    â€œOf course, Nana, there’s no other way to go.”
    â€œThe TV said there are crazy people shooting at cars there! It happened just a few weeks ago. Honey, I wish you wouldn’t go on that road, such crazy people.”
    My grandparents—dotty, off-kilter, fussy, familiar—are well past their prime. Listening to their patter is like revisiting the sound track of my childhood.
    They live a mile from the beach but never go. They spend their days indoors, avoiding the sun, shuttling between doctors and hospitals. With visitors the talk runs to health problems, funerals, obituaries, taxes, and restaurants. My grandparents love to eat.
    We set off for the early-bird special at a French place, and on our way they introduce me to neighbors who recognize me from my grandparents’ bragging.
    â€œThe foreign correspondent! How are you, foreign correspondent?” The neighbors shout so loudly that I take a step back.
    My grandmother grips my