God did not hear me.
I concentrated on breathing my life back into Emanuele, pouring it out of me with all my love. I went on and on and on until I realized that a hand was heavy on my shoulder and a voice – Colin’s voice – was saying: ‘Stop. He is gone, Kuki. Oh shit. Oh shit, Ema. He is gone, there is nothing you can do.’
Slowly I lifted my head and looked up at the sky of Africa. The first to break the silence – it seemed to me – were the cicadas. Then the thousand hidden birds. Through the canopy of leaves above, I could see white clouds moving soundlessly. I waited quietly for the earth to crack open and swallow us all. The world went on as ever. The hills were as blue, the breeze as gentle.
From a great distance my voice said, ‘He was my son.’
Colin’s fingers dug deeper in my shoulder.
I looked up for my boy’s smiling face soaring like a freed bird above the treetops.
‘Where has he gone?’
Colin’s voice had a broken edge when he answered quietly, ‘He is watching you, Kuki. He is right up there with Paolo. They are having a good laugh together.’
Good, sane, dependable Colin. He knew these were only words, which could give me no comfort. I looked into Simon’s antique eyes and in their mute depths I recognized my grief. I looked at Mapengo. He was crying without noise. ‘Wapi yeye?’ (‘Where has he gone?’) I repeated, and did not need an answer. Time stood still.
A silent group of Africans had gathered around us in a circle. I had not seen them coming. Now I noticed their bare legs like a boma of wooden sticks, their patched trousers, old shukas, bare feet, rubber sandals, worn safari boots. I looked at their expressionless faces, one by one.
Emanuele’s head was heavier on my lap.
I sat there, watching his young dead face, cradling it gently, not to hurt him more. A shadow of moustache on his upper lip. A tiny mole I had never noticed before on the cheekbone. A leather string around his strong neck with a Turkana charm which had not helped. The brown eyes were glazed and open, staring up and reflecting a sky he could no longer see. If I had to go on living, this was the turning-point, the pivot around which whatever happened to me after would revolve forever.
With Simon’s apron I wiped his mouth, his nose. A caress on his forehead, to tidy his hair. A kiss, two kisses, to close his eyes forever.
The eyelids felt fragile, like petals of gardenia.
It had happened again. I, too had died. Another stage of my life had again ended. I, too, was now born new.
The other Kuki stood up and I heard her saying: ‘Let’s bring him home, to bury him.’
A ray of sun touched my cheeks, and it was a cool, lifeless sun, which bore no arrows.
32
The Longest Day – the Longest Night
Meglio morire colla testa bionda
che poi che fredda giacque sul guanciale
ti pettinó, coi bei capelli a onda
tua madre, adagio, per-non farti male.*
Giovanni Pascoli, L’Aauilone
Silently, as if in a dream, we put the shell which had been Emanuele back into the car. I slid into the back seat, nestling his head on my lap, kissing his hair, his face, gently, as I had not done since he was still a little boy. Lightly, so as not to disturb my sleeping child. Colin drove. The car moved slowly. The news had spread and everyone was out, men, women, children, expressionless, lining the road, as still as people in a painting. The car drove slowly through the silent crowd.
As in a haze, I saw again the donkey cart, the feeding elephant. The giraffe had gone. The world seemed unconcerned. Warthogs ran away, tails straight, from the menanda at Kuti. Before the gate we stopped, and sent Mapengo ahead to alert people, and make sure Wanjiru would take Sveva away: she was too young yet for that side of death.
The garden was the same, a green oasis of flowers, bushes, trees, and a thousand singing birds I did not hear. Close to the garage, where he had just left it, lonely and now useless, was parked his beloved yellow-and-blue Yamaha, some empty snake bags hanging from the saddle.
We drove across the lawn with our sad cargo, up to the range of bedrooms.
‘Where?’ asked Colin.
No hesitation, as if I had always known.‘On my bed, Paolo’s side.’ Where else?
I waited in the car, under the same tree where Paolo’s coffin had been put three years before, while the bed was made ready: a board, a clean green sheet. And there we laid him gently. I remembered the first time I had ever held him in my arms: another world, another life, in Venice. Another me. Snow had fallen in the night, and a grey silence, broken by muffled disembodied seagulls, hung on the canal outside. His crib was white, with lace. Carefully, awkwardly, so as not to hurt my baby, I had slipped on a white dress, trimmed with ribbons. Now, I removed the crumpled and stained khakis, and dressed him ritually in clean ones. Short trousers, a camouflage shirt which had been Paolo’s and which I knew he had coveted, as if I had only kept it for this moment. Button by button, with my clumsy fingers, I fastened it in place. Carefully, awkwardly, so as not to hurt my baby.
I was vaguely conscious of Colin’s supportive presence in the room. We did not speak. He simply held a basin and handed me in turn a sponge, a towel, a comb. Carefully, with a hollow feeling of ‘never more’, I did what I had to. When Colin pulled the curtains, I turned my head, and our eyes fell simultaneously on the suspended ostrich egg. It hung still where Paolo had put it, from the central beam of the four-poster bed. It hung white, eerie with its secret message … of love … of death … of hope … perhaps of wisdom.
‘Kuki,’ said Colin, ‘you must break it now. Now, or never.’
He was right. What more could happen?
Darkness enveloped me in a swirling vortex, and for a while, blissfully, I knew nothing. A few minutes, perhaps, and Colin’s face again came into focus, emerging from the shadows, anxiously watching over me. His strained and concerned eyes were saying wordlessly that I had not been dreaming. I was awakening to the true nightmare.
Wearily, I brushed Emanuele’s hair. Black unnatural shadows were spreading through his face. The ugly tide of death and poison was claiming him.
Respecting my need to be on my own, to weep, to crumble without any witness, Colin went, not before saying, ‘We’ll radio-call your friends. Someone must keep you company.’ I just wanted to be left alone. To think. To face, alone, what I must face. Yet I knew people would arrive for the burial. Emanuele’s burial … how absurd. Just a few moments ago – a few hours, lives, millennia – there was a future. Now, nothing. I explained to Colin what Emanuele had told me … a few days ago? Was it only a few days? The place, the music, and as many of his friends as could be found: after all, this was going to be his last party. I asked him also to arrange the legal side: to make sure nobody came to take him away and cut him up. No need to torture him. We knew how he had died. Colin nodded. As ever, I could rely on him.
The friends I asked for were especially close and they both had suffered major losses. Carol had lost her man in an aeroplane crash; Aino, her infant son, to leukaemia. I knew they would be gentle on my wound. Colin took my hands in his large ones, and looked into my eyes. I looked back, mute and dry-eyed. He just smiled. For as long as we live neither of us will forget what we had shared. The door closed behind him, shutting away the sun.
I sat with Ema for the remainder of that day.
Only once I left the room, went to the kitchen. It seemed they had not moved. They just stood there, grief like a shuka covering their faces, waiting for me to give them tasks.
I spoke quietly, thanking them for caring. I told them God had taken what He had given, and we could only bow to what we could not change. I asked them to go about their duties, and to prepare for many people. Food, drink, the silver shining, flowers in every room, in every vase. ‘Endelea na kazi. Funga chungu kwa roho, na angalia mbele. Kaza roho, na apana sahau yeye. Akuna inja ingine kusaidia mimi sasa (‘Go on working. Shut away the pain in your heart and look a
head. Strengthen your heart, and do not forget him. There is no other way to help me now’).
I looked at Mapengo. Never had I seen a more dejected face. I asked him if he knew which snake it had been. He did. A young female, caught in the game ditch a few months before. Yes, he could recognize her. I asked him then to go and fetch her. She appeared, to me, like any other puff-adder: fat, sluggish, hideous, deceptively lethargic. If she had taken my son’s life, she did not know it. Mapengo held her, begged me to let him kill her. I shook my head. It was not the snake’s fault. Still, she was not like any other snake. A wild primeval idea was forming in my mind. I told him to put her in a snake bag, and this in a small basket. Tomorrow – tomorrow I would tell him what to do.
I went to look for Sveva. She was playing quietly, while Wanjiru cried. I took her in my lap and told her gently what she should know, in a way I hoped she could understand. If I postponed explanations for too long, I might not be able to go through this again. I said that tomorrow, and perhaps tonight, she was going to see many people in the house. She asked me why. I said there would be a party. She asked for whom: it was not yet her birthday. ‘For Emanuele,’ I answered, ‘because he has gone away.’
‘Where has he gone?’
‘He is gone to Papa Paolo.’
‘Why?’ Her blue eyes darkened with surprise.
‘Because he loved him. He loved him and he called him.’
‘I love him too. Why did he have to go?’ Her small voice trembled. ‘If he is with Papa Paolo, I will never see him again.’ She knew she had never seen her father.
‘No. Not now.’ I realized with agony that I was also talking to myself. ‘But one day, when they call you, you will see them again. We are all going where they are. He is gone ahead. You know he always walked faster than us.’ I kissed her warm hair which smelt of soap, and went back to the room which smelt of decay. The world of living things was shut outside.
I lit a candle and some incense sticks. I sat with him, looking at him forever, at all the details of his young dead body. I spoke to him, and his entire life flashed back, digging deep furrows in my soul. Images of his childhood, fun we had shared, something he had told me, how he walked, how he moved. The time he had proudly given me a snakeskin.
On the bedside table was a photograph I had taken long ago. He looked straight at me with sad, knowing eyes, a small python coiled around his neck: Kaa, his first snake, a gift from his mother. When I had printed that photograph, I remembered, I had had one of my uncanny premonitions: I had seen he was carrying his destiny around his neck, and he well knew it.
The droning noise of an aeroplane: my friends were coming. Hushed voices, steps approaching: they were there. Someone came in gently, and embraced me. In Carol’s eyes there was that timeless wisdom. I knew they cared, not many words were needed.
It was now afternoon. A new, strange noise I could not place was filtering through the birds’ voices from the closed door. A thumping noise. A rhythmic sound of digging.
The dimming light outside brightened the candles: the longest day was failing fast, like yesterday. Another aeroplane was approaching in almost total darkness. A fleeting thought came and went: Aidan? Would he have heard already? He and Emanuele had liked each other. He would be shattered. He would fly up to his young friend’s burial. He would comfort me. The humming noise was now closer, lower, much lower, almost flaying the roof; the windows rattled. Only Iain flew like this. The Douglas-Hamiltons had managed to come back.
The news had spread through Kenya as a bush fire. By nightfall, the house was full of friends, mine, his. Fly-tents mushroomed on the lawn below the pepper trees. More cars. More steps. Whispers outside the doors. And they were there, coming in one by one, like shadows in a play. Young people, some unknown. They had come by car, by air, in the back of pick-up matatus. Saba and Dudu holding hands, looking down at their friend. My face was wet with other people’s tears.
Night fell, and in the silence the rhythmic sound seemed to grow louder. Closing the door behind me, I went to look. Across the doorstep, ears flattened in distress, tail limp, face resting dejectedly on forepaws, Emanuele’s dog Angus kept guard. As if respecting his son’s priority to grief, Gordon, my dog, was waiting on the lawn. A fire burned at Paolo’s grave, and we followed its light. Subdued voices fell silent at my approach. The thudding noise stopped for a moment. Faces lifted up to look at me from an enlarging rectangular hole deep in the hard soil, which smelt of mushrooms. Someone murmured,‘Pole.’ Black faces, white faces, young and old ones: they were taking turns to dig my son’s grave.
I touched the yellow soft bark of the young but strong tree which had been Paolo. I thanked them all, stood for a time in silence, and walked slowly back with Gordon to the closed room which had become a shrine. The wiry grass of April stung my bare feet.
At some point in the night Colin came in, and handed me some papers. I could see from his tired face that he had not stopped since he had left me. It was the death certificate for me to sign. I did not ask him how, but he had managed. Trying to steady my hand, I carefully marked a large cross under ‘Killed by animal or snake’. Is a snake not an animal? And signed my name. I had signed his birth certificate – I recalled – sometime in Venice, a thousand years before.
I took a blanket a pen, a wad of paper. The longest night had just begun, and I would keep vigil at Emanuele’s side, writing to him, talking to him a last time. I wrote all night. Time and again, I walked out to the fire and stood there looking at the growing hole, my caftan flapping at my ankles in the chill eastern breeze.
Colin had warned me there would be much bleeding. I had arranged a stack of Sveva’s old terry nappies on my side of the bed in preparation. When the first trickle of blood started oozing out of Ema’s nostrils, I wiped it away delicately, and went to burn the nappy in the hot-water fire. Angus his dog, I noticed, was no longer outside.
Once or twice, I thought I saw him breathing, the chest just heaving, and I jumped from the bed, put my ear to his heart, incoherently, but it had been a candlelight illusion: his poor young heart was still and cold as stone.
Alone with him for the very last time, I watched, I talked, I begged, I remembered, I tried, groping through the mysteries of destiny, to find the reason why. It was too early.
The egg hung lonely, translucent in the candlelight. It looked the same as any live egg does. Yet its life had been blown away long ago, like Ema’s life. The egg was, like the corpse, an empty shell. Was this the message? With leaden fingers I wrote my last words, trying to be brave and not to let him down.
Towards morning the bleeding stopped. All the nappies had been used. Again I washed his face. It had not changed much, but it was now as black as an African’s.
I searched my cupboard to find something to keep away the ever-present flies. There was a new bottle of an insect repellent which some friend from overseas must have left. I broke the seal and shook it. I sprayed a bit on a cotton wad to dab it on his body, and once again the unmistakable smell which had pervaded the mortuary the day of Paolo’s funeral hit my nostrils, sweetish and vaguely medicinal; exactly the same as that which had saturated the air while I had been tending Paolo’s grave. Another uncanny link. A sign. Amedeo, later, would confirm, bewildered at my sudden question, that he had used the same brand for Paolo.
Anything was possible, anything at all, if my own son could die of a snake bite in Africa. Feeling light-headed, I covered his face with a clean handkerchief. The red hibiscus on his chest was fading.
When the stars paled in the pearly sky of dawn the grave was ready, and so were my last words of requiem. The longest night had ended. I walked out and met Iain in the passage. Behind the glasses his bright brown eyes looked strained, and I could see that he had not slept either. I put my head wearily on his shoulder. He took my hand and we walked to the grave a last time. The stones and earth which had been dug stood in a dry mound. The fire was still burning. Crouched on one side, eyes bloodshot, was Mapeng
o. At his feet, his noble face a mask of canine grief, was the dog Angus. He would for months become Mapengo’s shadow.
I told Iain about my words of service, and asked him to say again, for Ema, the poem of Dylan Thomas he had once recited to me.
‘I might not be able to,’ he told me honestly. He had been so fond of Ema.
‘If I find my voice, darling, I know you will find yours.’
A silent pact was sealed. New hibiscus bloomed in the morning dew. I picked some to bring back to Emanuele.
The verandah, the sitting-room, were full of sleepy faces with puffy sad young eyes. My people, faithful to my request to carry on with their normal duties, were setting the table for breakfast, as on every other day. Ema’s place at the head of the table had been prepared as usual: only yesterday he had sat there eating eggs and bacon. I could not bear the thought of anybody occupying that place which first had been Paolo’s. On the spur of the moment, I chose a flower from the bunch, and put it on the table, where his place had been. With her impenetrable dark Nandi face, Rachel was folding napkins one by one.
‘No one is going to sit here, Rachel, in the chair of our kijana.’ She looked up. ‘Not today, not any more. You will pick one of these red flowers he loved at every meal, and you will place it on the table, here. From now on this will be our new desturi (custom).’
She nodded gravely. Young and pretty, she could neither read nor write, but this she understood instantly: in Africa, desturi was sacred, and always accepted without question. She goes on with this duty still today.
People kept coming. Cars arriving. Aeroplanes. The house, like a beehive, resounded with muffled sounds, whispers, voices. One time, broken desolate sobs and stifled murmurs approached and stopped outside the door, drowning the other noises. They were filled with such heartrendering despair that I caught my breath, opened the door and looked out. Surrounded by a group of miserable young people, crowding around her as if for a mutual comfort, there stood a girl. The boys were all wearing jackets and ties, the girls smart evening clothes, as if they had come to a party. She wore a dress of blue silk, which set off her reddish-blonde hair, rumpled as if this morning she had forgotten to brush it. Her skin was honey-coloured, her mouth full, and she was beautiful. The hazel eyes speckled with gold were red with tears streaming down her cheeks. She hugged a bundle of flowers to her young breast, as if to draw from them strength and comfort. A younger version of herself – her sister? – stood close and mute as if supporting her. I had never met her, but even before she spoke, I knew she was Ferina. She had loved him too. She was perhaps fifteen. I just opened my arms, gently saying her name, and I received her as I would a daughter.
I Dreamed of Africa Page 20