by Nino Ricci
It happened one morning that I found a snake in my kitchen. It seemed to have come in through the window, had somehow crawled in under the shutter and draped itself over one of the crossbars of the window’s grille; and in the shuttered dark I didn’t notice it until a flicker of movement caught my eye, inches from me, as I poked a stick through the grille to prop the shutter open. I drew back, my heart pounding, the snake outlined now, a long, slim green, in the window’s light, a mamba perhaps, deadly. I seemed to process a thousand thoughts in an instant, seemed to need to kill it and yet take away from it some uncertain advantage or blessing, as if it had come like a messenger out of my own past; but the snake remained where it was, placid but alert, its tapered head flexed in calm tensed awareness of me. For a moment an absolute stillness seemed to settle over the room, I at my end and the snake at his, staring; and then finally the snake seemed to reach a decision, slithered an instant, and was gone.
Later, composing in my head the story I’d tell, I grew aware that the first audience I’d imagined for it was Rita, realized how she’d become for me over the course of our letters this constant inner companion, how then every event in my life seemed always to lead back to her as its final referent. For perhaps the first time I felt a genuine sense of loss at how I’d mismanaged things between us, of plain regret. Somehow I’d missed the simplest things, the simplest possibilities, that we might somehow have shared our lives, been human, that it would have cost us so little to be simply ourselves.
XXXI
I’d chosen to extend my contract into a third year. I was allowed a paid trip home but took a cash equivalent instead, spending the summer stretched out beneath a scorching equatorial sun on a tiny island off the Kenyan coast, the last destination off the muddy coastal road that went north from Malindi; but when I returned to my posting at summer’s end a great lethargy overtook me, the country having grown too real somehow through my having chosen to remain there, seeming ramshackle and gritty and wearing now beyond endurance. There was an election that fall, a transition to civilian rule, though for all the pomp and promises the only thing that seemed to change once the election had come and gone was that the soldiers at checkpoints were gradually replaced with civilian police; and yet finally my malaise seemed less the result of the country’s ills than of my own continuing detachment from them, the sense of the randomness of my presence there, the mistake I’d made in not reckoning how much my contentment had depended on the illusion there was some real life I’d be returning to. In early September I’d helped with the orientation of a group of new volunteers and they’d seemed from a different race, fresh-faced and curious, earnest, ambitious, still reeking of their robust northern lives; and I’d been confronted in them with the fact that life at home had continued on in my absence, that I might be a stranger there when I returned.
At Mayflower the first Americans had come and gone, replaced by another who’d slowly grown bitter and strange, then another again; and each of these new arrivals seemed to strip me of some of my own sheen of newness, made me seem less the transient, less the innocent. I sensed now in how taken for granted I’d come to be that I had been a disappointment somehow to the rest of the staff, leading my quiet life there at the edge of the bush, never quite living up to whatever first false promise they’d seen in me when I’d arrived – there was perhaps nothing but the normal indifference of familiarity in this, and yet it disheartened me to see the early sense of possibility I’d felt whittled now down to a kind of everydayness, my students, my work, the few teachers on staff whom I felt some rapport with. I tended to gravitate toward the other outsiders, the Ghanaians, the Indians, the Ibos, recognizing in them the subtle embitterment of the migrant at being out of place; but even then there was always the small lie at the bottom of our friendliness, the small wariness, the fear of exposing some sudden embarrassing chasm between us.
I’d formed by then an acquaintance of sorts with Kate Townsend, through her gaining an entry into the world of white expatriates, the limbo I seemed to accede to as my stay in the country lengthened. Kate was known at the school for the roster of men she kept, mainly wealthy alhajis and businessmen, every now and then one of their Volvos or Mercedes parked discreetly for a few hours or days beneath the plane trees that shadowed her house and afterwards Kate reporting on whatever gifts had been bestowed on her. She’d had a son by one of them, round-faced and olive-skinned, his hair blondish like his mother’s but coiled into supple cherubic curls; though the father was the worst of the lot, Kate said, didn’t visit for months at a time, borrowed money he never returned. She seemed comfortable with this arrangement, one that was perhaps merely the extreme of a fluidity of family arrangements that appeared fairly common in the region, women often raising their children apart from their husbands, with their own incomes, their own lives; yet in it seemed to reside most clearly the contradiction of her life there, at once exotic and mundane, resolving itself around a whiteness she both exploited yet held in no special regard, that had ceased to have any connection to the elsewhere it drew its power from.
There were others like this, teachers mainly, seeming, like Kate, to stay on simply through a sort of inertia, earning only the usual meagre government wage, without special prerogative or power except what came to them randomly through their whiteness; they seemed a perverse sort of emigrant, coming to where they’d be privileged rather than scorned for their difference and yet more hopeless for that, always outside, without prospects. There was a Canadian I heard about at some point who’d come to the country as a volunteer years before and stayed on, the stories people told of him giving the sense of some fabulous eccentric; but when I’d met him finally I’d been surprised at how common he seemed, how predictable his insights, how undramatic and small his daily life, his only distinction the inconsonance of his Canadian ordinariness lost there without context or purpose in a world that reflected nothing of him.
In a sense it was easier to understand the other whites, the ones who held themselves apart, came strictly for the money, their instincts seeming more basic, their motives more pure. There were a number of them who worked for a cement factory outside the town, their housing compound tucked away behind high, glass-studded walls well off the main road; and entering there was like arriving at some misplaced North American suburb, with the tidy brick bungalows and landscaped lawns, the smell in the buildings of an air-conditioned newness, the group of them secluded there as in a throwback to colonialism, all evidences of the country held out. The few times I accompanied Kate to the club there the conversation veered always toward an aggressive racism, people anxious to establish where I stood, to have me on side; and what seemed to drive them in this was a fear, the constant need to reaffirm what they were, what they imagined they stood for, like an immigrant’s holding hard against the threat of some creeping assimilation. Kate was always quick to condemn these people when we came away from them but among them remained evasive, anxious perhaps to preserve her small privileges with them; and what disturbed me was how quickly I began to grow like her among them, how my own resistance to them seemed made merely sullenness and petulance in the face of their monolithic certainties.
In the end it was only with Mr. Tsikata, the head of English, that I had formed what might have been called a friendship. From the outset I’d been drawn to him, to the sense he gave of some complicity he was willing to enfold me in; and that first instinctive bond carried us through the initial carefulness and false steps, the arabesque of awkward deference we seemed in the first months to circle each other with. Early on I’d searched out his house once with some question or problem, finding it in a ramshackle block that appeared to be a sort of ghetto for the Ghanaians, merely rooms really, arranged like barracks around a dirt courtyard with a blackened fire pit at its centre, Mr. Tsikata seeming in that setting in his faded after-work Kente-cloth tunic like some spry village elder, from another world.
“Ah, Victor, come in, come in, so you’ve found me out!”
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But I could feel his beaming embarrassment as he ushered me in, the hopelessness in him as he made a few helpless gestures to rearrange the disorder of his tiny sitting room; and it was several months after that before I could bring myself round to asking him over for supper, afraid of putting him in the awkward situation of having to reciprocate. He seemed so elaborately pleased, so touched, when I finally did so that I thought I’d made a mistake in delaying. But then the day he was to come he sent a message to me through one of the students: there was another obligation he’d forgotten, he was terribly sorry, hoped he could make it up to me by instead having me over to his own home the following evening. Some shadowy ritual of hospitality seemed to be playing itself out – it was as if in finally signalling that invitations were possible I’d also somehow shamed him by having been the first to offer one.
When I arrived at his house the next evening I found a woman and small boy with him: his wife and son, visiting him from Ghana, though he’d never mentioned a word to me about their coming, seemed awkward again at this new self-revelation, this seeing him at home, in his element. All evening long his wife hovered in the background hardly involved with us except in her sullen brief asides to Mr. Tsikata in what I took to be Ashanti, in Mr. Tsikata’s gruff replies; and it was only toward the end of the meal that I gathered these asides had formed a sort of terse running translation of our own conversation, that all the while I’d been imagining his wife’s resentment at my intrusion she’d been quietly directing toward me this carefully focused attention. When I finally conveyed a compliment to her on the food through Mr. Tsikata her face lit in a smile like sunlight.
“She says it’s the guest that makes the meal good,” Mr. Tsikata translated for her, “not the cook.”
After a time, Mr. Tsikata and I had become cohorts of a kind, forever joined now in the ceaseless trials and demands of the school’s extracurricular activities. Our first politeness gave way to a deeper one, more instinctual, each of us seeming to see in the other a sort of mentor, I in his competence and humility, he in whatever arcane knowledge or power he imagined I brought with me from the world I’d come out of. He began to come to me with various private projects and schemes, boyish and hopeful though there was almost always the hint of a swindle in them, a creative writing school in England that offered tutoring by correspondence, a university in the States that offered Master’s degrees.
“I dunno, these kinds of things usually aren’t very reputable.”
“Ah.”
And then his smiling abashment, the small dwindling in him as another possible future slipped away.
In the summer following the second year of my placement he had returned to Ghana, hopeful that elections there might bring some improvement that would make it possible for him to remain. We exchanged addresses, promised letters, future visits; but then a few days before fall term began he returned. I happened to be in the lorry park in Ikorita on some errand when his bus came in, saw him from a distance as he stepped from the bus’s undignified closeness, his travel-dirtied clothes, his tattered suitcase, the patch of sweat that darkened the back of his shirt; he seemed suddenly lonely and old like some road-wearied pedlar, reduced like that by the humiliations of African travel, by the prospect of returning again to his twilight life in this strangers’ country. I thought of skirting him but then he caught sight of me, seeming for once to forget his awkwardness at being caught out.
“So you see I’ve come back after all, you thought you’d got rid of me!”
And when I came up to him he wrapped an enfolding arm around my shoulder in spontaneous affection, caught up in the fullness of his sad pleasure at seeing me again. I sensed the heads turning around us, the smiles, for an instant all the lorry park seeming to focus in on this single odd moment of feeling as if to confirm it in its rightness.
The letters from my father had eventually begun to dwindle. All along they’d seemed to suffer more than most from the mails, months elapsed sometimes between their Canadian postmarks and their arrival; and now it had begun to grow difficult to discern any continuity from one to the next, any accumulation, each seeming merely a kind of repetition, working out the same formula of greeting and complaint. He’d had some argument with Tsi’Umberto, he didn’t say over what; he was considering selling out his share of the farm to Rocco and Domenic; he’d been in hospital for a pain in his chest, he didn’t say what had caused it. At one point in my second year he’d written at length about a heavy snowfall that had caused some sort of breakage in the greenhouses.
By the grace of God we were able to save some of the crop before it all froze but how much damage we had we won’t know until the end of the summer. I hope the insurance will pay for some of it but so far we haven’t seen a penny from them, in the meantime we had to pay all the costs from our own pockets.
I’d had the impression from his tone that the farm was on the verge of imminent collapse; but then his next letter had made no reference to what had happened, moving on to other matters, other complaints. These lapses made it seem as if his problems had little reality outside the first moment he wrote of them, perhaps true in all their intensity in that instant, in the blunt insistence of the written word, but then dissipating afterwards into the general flux of his life.
What had remained consistent was only his tone, the constant sense of upheaval, its underlying inducement to guilt – it often seemed to me that that was the point, not some new honesty between us but this other veiled language of accusation. Out of the blue once he mentioned he’d gone in for confession: “I made my peace,” he said, “but there are some things the priest doesn’t know, only God knows.” But all this seemed melodrama somehow, the lurking ominousness, the implication that his life was on the brink of some dissolution – a single crisis might have caused me concern, but this steady stream of them suggested he was simply carrying on with his life much as he always had, selecting from it for me only what fit some unspoken working out of old grievances and pain.
Then toward the last months of my third year at the school I got a letter from him that truly unsettled me. He’d begun in the usual way, greetings and family news, then gone on to some sort of conflict he’d had with the Italian club board; yet there was a strange buoyancy in his tone, a sort of hovering remove from things as if he himself were absent somehow. I grew aware of a creeping incoherence, shifts of thought I couldn’t quite follow, that seemed to slip for an instant into a kind of darkness – he went on for nearly a page about this problem with the club and yet I couldn’t grasp the essence of it, all his referents secretive and sly as in a whispering, boyish plot, “those people,” “the others,” seeming to wind toward some vague final coming together that was never reached. Then at the end no formal closing, untypical, his last sentence simply dropping off into empty space without so much as a punctuation mark.
I had a premonition then of his death, the idea he’d seemed to be urging me toward all along, then discounted it at once as something that couldn’t come true exactly because I’d imagined it, was merely my reflex attraction to doom, my reaching always toward the simplest most dire solution to a problem. But the sense of his absence lingered, the feeling that the person who’d written his earlier letters, who might have been reached, had crossed over now into some new remoteness. I began a letter to him in English but was afraid of some misunderstanding, began one in Italian but felt reduced in it to the merest commonplaces – we hadn’t so much as a language between us, had always been forced, especially in our letters, to some compromise, my simplified English, his careful Italian. It occurred to me, exactly now when it seemed already too late, that perhaps all along I’d misread him, missed some crucial clue, had mistaken for maudlin what had been merely a lack of skill, such a little thing as that, the uneasy forcing of emotion into the unwieldiness of an unfamiliar idiom.
In the end I wrote back to him in my usual tone, careful and bland, thinking somehow to anchor him with my own normalcy, touching on some of
the things he’d said as if to make him, myself, believe in the sanity of them; yet I sent the letter off without any faith that it would have effect. I thought of writing to Aunt Teresa as well but then reasoned that there was no point, that I would be home soon, that if something had happened I would have heard, though at bottom I was vaguely afraid of the letter’s falling into my father’s hands; and afterwards, when the worst had happened, I guarded the strange illusion that it was somehow best that I hadn’t written after all, that to have put the thing into words would have been a kind of incrimination, proof that it had been foreseeable and yet we’d done nothing.
The next news I had of my father was in fact of his death: I came home from class to find Richard Harmond waiting for me on my verandah, so transparent in his awkwardness that I thought again my first expectation must be wrong, that bad news couldn’t come in so obvious a package.
“It’s your father.” He was unable to bring himself to say the actual words, letting his flushed silence stand in for them. “They said they would try to hold the funeral until you got back.”