The news shocked us all and cast a shadow on our day. It made me reflect once again on the thin thread which separates us from disappearing into nothingness. I became pensive, and for the rest of the day we were all quiet. I decided to drive down next day to Nairobi to offer Tubby my condolences.
In the afternoon, Emanuele asked me to go fishing with him and he drove me to the Big Dam. The mood still hung on me, and I ended up sitting on the shore looking at him casting and swiftly getting one black bass after another.
Sitting there on the rocky red earth, I talked to him about the temporariness of our passage on earth, and about the importance of living in the here and now. I spoke of Paolo and of his feelings for this place, our commitment to keep the balance between the wild and the tame. Again I told him about my last Will in case anything happened to me. He listened in silence, apparently absorbed in his fishing, and so quiet was he that I almost thought he had not paid attention. When I finished, he folded the rod, put it neatly aside, and came towards me. He sat on his haunches just in front of me, looked straight into my eyes and said seriously: ‘Fine, Pep. I got all that. Now I would like to tell you what I would like you to do if I die first.’
The sun was setting behind the dam wall, and in the evening shadows I could not see his eyes. A flock of pelicans landed in the water feet first, balanced on wide white wings, with hardly a ripple.
‘You cannot die. You are seventeen.’ Even to me, the feeble denial sounded lame.
He did not note my interruption.‘I would like to be buried close to Paolo. I would like a yellow fever tree on my grave too. For the music, Bolero, by Ravel. That cushion you made for me, with NO, PEP embroidered on it, under my head. Champagne, for my anniversary. And, as you just said to me, I also would like you to go on with life and to take care of Sveva.’
In the fear which gripped my mind, I could only realize that he had thought about this before. On the mirror-like surface of the lake a fish jumped. A loud chattering of birds heralded the approaching silence of the night. My voice was hollow and out came only a whisper. ‘Whatever could you die of, at your age?’
A sudden smile transformed his face for a second, and in that moment I knew what he was going to say. He squeezed my hand, as if to reassure me. His voice was quiet, patient, with just a touch of irony, as if explaining the obvious to a child. He chose Swahili, as if the exotic language was more appropriate to an exotic death: ‘Nyoka tu’ (‘Just a snake’).
He stood up. I stared at his long bare legs, covered almost to the knee in the motorbike boots. I had not yet noticed how tall he had grown in recent months. In the stillness before night fell, darkness gathered fast, painting greys and blacks on what seconds before had been molten gold and vivid warmth. It was as if only he and I remained in all the world. I shivered. ‘Please don’t. If you died, it would be my end also.’
He collected the rod and the fish, and started walking towards the car. I could sense he was smiling, ‘No, Pep. You are a survivor. You will make it. Let’s go and clean this fish.’
A reply died on my lips. We drove home in silence.
After the intense weekend everyone seemed tired. Emanuele wrote his diary as usual, the slim muscular legs in tight jeans outstretched in front of him. The white shirt with a round open collar, and a blue waistcoat, set off his young, strong neck. Oria took a few more photographs at the table, catching his serious eyes in the flickering candlelight, and the dark halo of his hair.
The Douglas-Hamiltons left early next morning for the coast. Emanuele drove them to the airstrip, and they flew back to Kuti for the customary goodbye, flying low over Paolo’s grave and down towards me. Having anticipated Iain’s trick of making me go down flat on my stomach, I stood with my back to the tallest petria for protection, waving and sending kisses to their four smiling faces.
I drove straight to Nairobi to see Tubby. Jack’s body had been finally found and it was discovered that he had died of a heart attack after all. Perhaps, to his fisherman’s heart, the largest trout he had ever caught had brought too much joy. There would be a memorial service later in the month at Longonot Farm in Naivasha. I promised I would come down for it, and I drove back to Laikipia the same day. I was uneasy, with a sense of foreboding, and I wanted to be with my children.
All seemed fine there, but Emanuele told me next morning that his female cobra had escaped. He was worried because she had been sick with a sort of mouth rot, and he was determined to find her. I was playing with Sveva, a round fair little angel, when he approached us across the lawn, and I could see from the look on his face that something had happened to upset him. A snake was slung across his shoulder, looking limp and dead. It was larger and thicker than I had imagined, and it was the cobra.
‘I killed her,’ Emanuele announced in his matter-of-face voice, but with a tinge of regret. ‘Mapengo and I smoked her out of the hole where she was hiding. We miscalculated the amount of smoke and she suffocated. Her heart has stopped. She’s quite dead. It is my fault.’
It often happened that I could foresee what Emanuele was about to say. Now, I saw a thought dart through his mind, and I knew he was thinking of an episode which occurred a few days earlier, when Colin had revived a young calf by blowing down its lungs through a pipe. We had been very impressed, and Emanuele had asked many questions. Now he stood suddenly, a determined expression in his eyes, and started walking towards the house, the snake swinging around his neck like a thick wet towel, saying over his shoulder, ‘I am getting one of those silver straws of yours from the bar. The ones you use for Pimm’s. I’ll try to revive her.’
I closed my eyes wearily. There seemed to be no end to this. Yet Emanuele had a way of making even something as absurd as trying to revive a spitting cobra through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation seem a perfectly normal exercise. Sensing my dismay, he stopped for a moment and came back a few paces to reassure me. ‘She has no spit left anyway. She has just spat from the hole, at my goggles.’ He pointed to the goggles hanging round his neck, smudged with grey, sticky saliva. I shuddered.
When he came back a little later, I could see he had succeeded. His face was alight, transformed as only his face could be. He explained to me how the heart had started beating again, and the elation he had felt at being able to resuscitate her. That night he described the story in his diary in great detail and ended: ‘… and if she lives, I shall call her Bahati, “the Snake of Good Luck”, because she came back from the dead.’
It had worked for the snake.
31
The End of the World
… Who is Mungu?’ I asked.
‘Mungu lives up there,’ they answered, ‘and if he wants you to live, you live and if he wants you to die, you die.’
Llewelyn Powys, Confessions of Two Brothers
It began like any other day with the tea brought after a knock at the door of my bedroom in Laikipia. Simon’s smiling‘Jambo, Memsaab,’ and all the dogs coming in to greet me, cold noses against my cheek and tails wagging. Simon’s tall frame was silhouetted against the windows as he pulled the curtains to let in a fierce sun. It was already hot. The rains were late. It was 12 April 1983, during the Easter holidays. Soon after, Sveva came in, hugging her favourite African doll. She was two-and-a-half years old, a blonde cherub with deep blue eyes and beautiful, easily tanned peach-bronze skin, like Paolo.
I was drinking my tea when Emanuele knocked and walked in, followed by his dog Angus, a large yellow Alsatian, the best-looking of Gordon’s sons, and stopped at the foot of my bed. I observed how tall he had become, how broad were his shoulders, and how his shaven jaw was no longer a child’s. He wore khaki shorts and a khaki shirt, sleeves rolled at the elbows. From the belt hung a knife, and the inevitable snake-tongs. He was seventeen. A handsome young man with quiet ways, a brilliant mind and an intriguing personality, which made him extremely attractive to girls. ‘Buongiorno, Pep,’ he said with his new husky man-voice, ‘can I have a rubber band?’
I knew what he wa
nted the rubber band for. He used them regularly, to tighten a piece of plastic round the neck of a sterilized jar. He would push the glass against the fangs of a deadly puff-adder viper. The gland was squeezed against the rim of the glass, and the venom spurted out in a spray. Emanuele then crystallized it, using a chemical procedure. We found the band.
‘I am going to milk the snakes.’
‘I hate you doing that,’ I could not help saying.
He looked at me in his peculiar way, straight in the eye, with just a glint of amusement. ‘You always worry. I have done it dozens of times.’ I knew he was right.
His face was suddenly transformed by one of his unexpected smiles, he touched Sveva’s cheek affectionately, and he was gone, his dog following.
I stood looking at him from the door.
Off he went in the light of the early morning, with the shadow of the house on the lawn, as the sun rose behind it. His shadow was long on the grass and the sun on his back streaked his hair with a golden halo. He was young and strong and handsome … and no longer mine. He walked in long easy strides through the glory of the bushes in bloom, under the shade of the yellow fever trees, the snake-tongs swinging at his waist, past the swimming-pool, towards the snake pit.
He went away, and he never turned back.
I watched him with a strange feeling about me, like a cloud of premonition which closed round my stomach like a painful fist. When I could see him no longer the lawn looked suddenly empty. I sighed, and went to have my shower. Sveva followed me, with her doll. I was towelling my hair dry when I realized someone was knocking.
The urgency made the glass of the door rattle and my saliva dry out. I stopped drying my hair, and shouted in answer: ‘Kitu gani?’ (‘What happens?’).
‘Mama.’ Only Mapengo, Emanuele’s snake man, called me then ‘Mama’, the familiar respectful African way of addressing a married woman. His voice sent a chill down my spine. It was low and altered, unnaturally hesitant and unrecognizable. In the hollow stillness of doom, the only sound was the echo of my terror.
‘Mama, iko taabu kidogo…’(‘There is a small problem …’).
‘Emanuele? Nyoka?’(’A snake?’).
‘Ndiyo’ (‘Yes’).
‘Terepupa?’(‘A puff-adder?’).
‘Ndiyo.’
‘Wapi?’(‘Where’).
‘Gikoni’(‘In the kitchen’).
I did not stop to think for a second. With a conscious effort which took everything out of me, I refused to indulge in useless despair. Not just yet. I knew I could not afford hysterics, and I knew I could not lose time. I was alone, far from help, twenty minutes’ drive from our airstrip and eight kilometres from Colin’s house. I was the only one who could drive, and the only one who could help. I also knew that if I lost my head nothing could be done to save him … Save him? I knew instinctively it was already too late, but that I had to try in every way I could.
That day and the night and the day which followed, I shed layers of my being as a snake sheds its skin. I kept coming in and out of myself, watching myself acting as from a great distance, and suddenly re-entering my body and the agony of my tormented soul.
Now I watched one part of me splitting from the other, and taking over.
The new Kuki grabbed yesterday’s clothes from the laundry basket. Like an efficient, emotionless robot, she took the glasses without which she knew she could not see, and the hand-set radio. Before reaching the door in two strides she was already screaming into the set, trying to keep her voice steady and clear: ‘Emanuele has been bitten by a puff-adder. A puff-adder. Very seriously. Call the flying doctors. Now. Immediately. I am driving him down.’ She repeated the message twice, in English and Swahili, while running towards the kitchen, ignoring Sveva’s bewildered screams, and once she was sure the message had been received, threw the radio aside. The stones of the passage were cold under her running bare feet. She was there.
The kitchen walls were green and the silence hung like a shroud. They stood silent as only Africans can, and the eyes moved to her in unison, expressionless, then returned to the shape on the floor.
Emanuele sat rigid, legs spread out on the green cement, facing the window. With a feeling of overwhelming unreality, she crouched in front of him. From his open mouth, green saliva dribbled in ugly bubbles. The skin was grey, the eyes staring and glassy. She waved a hand in front of them and he did not flinch. With a pang of anguish, she realized he was blind.
At that moment, I again became his mother.
With his right hand, he cradled his left: in the first joint of the index finger was a tiny black mark, unswollen, which he had already cut with his knife. No blood: the snake bite.
I looked at the fingers with the very short nails and the brass bracelet around his wrist, the gift of a girl he would kiss no more. I took his hand gently in mine and I sucked the small wound from which the life I had given him was seeping away. I sucked and I spat and nothing came out.
Where was the adrenalin? Where did he say he kept it? Was there time to look for it? The serum. In the fridge. Now. In the urgency, I tore the fridge door from the hinges: the uncanny strength of despair and impotence.
‘Emanuele. Emanuele ascoltami. Ti taglio la mono? Do I cut your hand? Do I cut your arm?’ Useless questions dictated by hopelessness and desperation. Emanuele was dying and I knew there was nothing I could do. Bitten in the snake pit with a lethal dose, he had climbed out, walked all the way to the kitchen and collapsed there. Through the exertion, the poison had reached his heart. His blood was coagulating.
‘Emanuele.’ My desperation to make contact a last time, to hear again his voice, to bring him back to consciousness. Was he deaf too? This could not really be happening to me.
The eyes flickered weakly, focused on mine for an instant with immense fatigue, and there was a faint glimmer of recognition. The strangled voice was no longer his voice. There was no fear and no expression in it.
The pain in my chest matched his. For a moment my vision blackened, and I forgot to breathe.
‘Mamma,’ he whispered hoarsely, slowly, in Italian. ‘Muoio, mamma.’ I am dying, mamma.
With irreversible agony I realized he had called me ‘mother’ for the first time in his life.
These were his last words.
I tried to remember afterwards if there had been any note of fear, of regret, of pain and horror in his voice. But there was only an expressionless certitude of the inevitability of his death. He knew well and accepted what was happening: as he knew – and I did not – that he had already been bitten too many times by vipers, and that another bite would be fatal.
His eyes clouded again and the body became rigid. Still holding his hand I lifted my eyes to Simon’s. I read in them what I could not yet accept. Like all the rest he was waiting for a signal, an order about what to do next. My voice sounded unnaturally calm and far away. The other Kuki. ‘Simon, Mapengo. Weka yeye kwa gari maramoja. Beba yeye pole pole. Sisi nakwenda saa hi.’ (‘Carry him gently to the car immediately. Do not let him move. We go now’).
Of all the things I have ever done and will ever do in my life, the worst by far was having to drive my dying son to bring him to useless help. We carried him like a rigid log of wood and laid him on the back seat. Simon sat with Ema’s head on his lap and Mapengo jumped in the boot. The noise of the engine drowned Sveva’s screams. I would have to take care of her later. The gardeners and house-servants stood watching, mute, in a line, without waving.
I put my foot down on the accelerator and my hand on the hom. We took off, skidding in a cloud of dust and blaring noise I did not hear, wheels biting the road without mercy, careless of pot-holes and rocks … I kept switching my eyes from the road to the rear mirror which reflected Emanuele’s grey face and staring eyes. There was nothing I wanted to do more than to hold him and kiss him and touch him, but I had to drive, I had to concentrate on the road.
Two giraffes crossed the track at the Kati Kati boma just in front
of us, and the outraged trumpeting of a small herd of elephant I disturbed faded in the speed. Just before reaching the Centre I almost hit a donkey cart, and at that moment I felt a surge of pain in my limbs which came in waves, and my womb contracted as if giving birth. A voice, unrecognizable, was wailing loudly: who was it? I moved my head to look at Emanuele in the mirror and I stared at my face with an open mouth: I was screaming. Simon’s hand had come forward and turned the mirror towards me so that I could not look.
I stopped on Colin’s back lawn. The smell of burnt tyres hung in the air with the noise of the brakes when I erupted from the car. It seemed like a film in slow motion. Colin, Rocky, their children, the dogs … coming towards us, a question in their eyes.
I was past minding. I had gone to hell and died with him, and now the world could just crumple and swallow me for all I cared.
It is never so simple.
‘He is dead,’ I just said. The voice, like my body, no longer belonged to me. There was this disembodied numbness.
Colin was already opening the door, pulling him out, feeling his pulse, listening to his chest. ‘No. He is still alive. Just. Come on, Ema! Quick, Kuki. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. You. Now. I will do heart massage.’
That other Kuki, with a face of stone, knelt on the grass over the young man’s face. Numberless times she blew into his mouth while Simon held his head. It felt heavy on her bare legs. The lips were cold, like some resilient rubber. Air frothed back with saliva. Colin worked rhythmically on his chest. How long it went on I will never know, as time had ceased to matter. Nothing else existed but my boy’s face and his mouth and my mouth and my wild hope, and my despair. I prayed to the unknown God who grants us life. I promised Him all I had, all I was, in exchange for that one life.
I Dreamed of Africa Page 19