I Dreamed of Africa

by Kuki Gallmann

  I took up the pen again, and under today’s date, 14 April, I neatly wrote: ‘Today, we set free all Emanuele’s snakes.’ I closed the book. Breathing deep, I walked out in the daylight once again.

  What else could I do with all those snakes? What would Emanuele like me to do with them? We will let them all go. Today. With whoever of Emanuele’s friends had stayed behind.

  I walked to the grave, and found them there. Someone started to stir. Swollen eyes. Pale, drawn faces, lined by grief. I looked at them with pity and with affection. I had told them yesterday that they were all my children. Their suits and white shirts, their smart dresses, were crumpled. They had come dressed for a party, and I learnt later that Emanuele, a few weeks before, had asked Ferina to come to the ranch during the holidays. She said her parents probably would not let her. ‘You will come up anyway’ he had told her. ‘You’ll come up in April.’ ‘How do you know?’ she had asked, surprised. ‘You will come to my funeral.’ She had not believed him. Why should she? Young, fresh, death was a faraway, nebulous world belonging to the old and sick. She laughed teasingly. ‘What do you want me to wear for your funeral?’ His eyes were serious and unreadable, and for a moment she was afraid. ‘A party dress. This one you are wearing now. Blue suits you. You must all come dressed for a party.’ And so they all did. Ferina could not forgive herself for not having believed him then. That knowledge broke her. She would tell me this, weeks after.

  Rubbing their eyes, one by one, the children stood, stretched, and came to hug me. ‘Have breakfast. Eat something. Then we’ll let all the snakes go.’ I went, through the morning garden. On the breakfast table, at Ema’s place, was a fresh red hibiscus. Rachel had remembered.

  Ricky Mathews and Mapengo emptied the cages and the snake pit, and filled all the snake bags. Hundreds of harmless or deadly snakes were put in bags and pillowcases. The children jumped in the back of my pick-up … Before leaving, on the spur of the moment, I had picked a bunch of red hibiscus. With Iain, Oria, Carol, Aino, Sveva in Livia’s arms, and all the children, I drove down to Ol Ari Nyiro Springs.

  We parked the cars at Marati Ine. Two female waterbuck watched with liquid eyes, soft muzzles sniffing, unafraid. It was a strange procession. I led the way with Iain towards the springs. The children followed, in rumpled silks, open white shirts, carrying bags full of snakes. Sveva hung from Livia’s back, giggling at the adventure.

  In the mud and dust along the shores, tracks of last night’s buffalo. Dragonflies darted from pond to puddle, pursuing their mates, disturbing clouds of midges. White butterflies concentrated on fresh elephant dung, trembling wings like fallen petals.

  The first to go had to be Bahati, the female cobra Emanuele had revived a few days earlier. She had lived and he had not. Ricky opened the bag, and out she slid, her yellow stomach matching the rocks coated in dry mud. Slowly she moved at first, but soon she darted wriggling out of her apathy, faster, and faster, and I watched her until she disappeared through the low scrub back into life and freedom. Thoughts came and went of Ema, who had found his freedom too, disappearing in the timelessness of death. One by one all the snakes crawled away, some slowly, some jerkily, some sliding into the river. Perched on a rock, I helped to release them, and offered their life silently to Emanuele. Sleek, fast, the green grass snakes, the hissing sand snakes, the white-lips, the pythons, the egg-eaters, the house snakes, swished diving into the restless flow of the Mukutan. Last, were the vipers. Carefully, expertly, one by one, Ricky lowered them into the water.

  When the last snake swam away in the current of the Mukutan that hot day of April, on an impulse I threw into the water the red hibiscus I had been holding. Light as a feather it swirled in the ripples and touched the glistening patterned skin of the triangular head fast disappearing into freedom. The head was suddenly heart-shaped, the petals looked like blood. The sun shone on them and caught a drop of water into a rainbow.

  From the depth of time a young boy’s voice, still unbroken, said to me again: ‘Pep, one day you too will understand the hidden beauty of snakes.’

  ”You are right. You are right. I can see the beauty now,’ I told him silently.

  The last puff-adder went.

  In the hot silence of noon a noise was approaching. A small white aeroplane suspended in the sky appeared through the shade of the fever trees. It could have been anybody. It could have been Aidan. But I knew instantly that it was Mario, and my father, and my mother. The flight they had already boarded to come to the funeral had been cancelled an hour after they were airborne because of engine problems. I knew they would arrive today. I ran to my car, carrying Sveva.

  When I reached Kuti, they were already there. None of them had met for years. I could only imagine what their journey to Africa for that tragic reason had been like. My mother had loved Emanuele more than anybody in her life. She looked lost, but as ever in control of her emotions. She embraced Sveva, gently talking to her. I knew what an effort this cost her. My father looked deep into my eyes with his green ones that age had not tarnished. In the strength of our mute embrace we put all that words could never say.

  I ran towards the grave, and stopped, a few steps off. Prostrate on it was Mario. Arms and legs spread wide, hands dug into the soil and faded flowers, body shaken by heartrending sobs. I retreated in silence. He was his father.

  Soon after, a mad gallop shook the earth, frantic hooves bit the dust, and off went Mario on Emanuele’s horse, riding like the Apocalypse. He came back at night. Next day he left, and I have never seen him since.

  PART IV

  After

  35

  Walking Alone

  … the silence sank

  Like music on my heart.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner

  The worst thing was the silence where there had been sound, the memory of a fading young voice, of balanced young steps along the passage. The worst thing was his useless motorbike, daily washed, the empty place at the table where a red hibiscus was placed at every meal, the empty chair in the sitting-room where he used to sit to write his diary, the shaded windows of his closed room where all was as he had left it. The worst thing was the letters addressed to him which kept arriving from the university in the States where he would no longer go; the mute grief in Mapengo’s face. The worst thing was the newly-printed photographs from Easter which Oria brought up one day for me to see. Serious eyes watched me over flickering candles, unreachable eyes which I had closed forever observed me over a tangle of green grass snakes and a chocolate egg on a festive table. Long legs I had composed in the coffin danced again to a silent music up on the cedar beams of the verandah with Saba and Dudu.

  The worst thing was to see him going away, in a shot just slightly out of focus, taken from the back of my pick-up after the last picnic at the Springs. He overtook me a last time with his motorbike in a cloud of dust, leaning forward, half-standing, short trousers and naked young torso, riding towards a dark string of hills without turning to look back.

  The worst thing of all was the knowledge that he was dead forever.

  What remained was the unchanging magic of the landscape of Africa. The mornings began with the birds, a pale pink-purple grey sky, as in the womb of an oyster. As silver melted into gold and dew evaporated in the warmth of a new day, the clear blue light of another dawn found me awake, and ready to go. In the depth of my grief, I had the sense to recognize the healing power of the undisturbed space which surrounded me. I chose to walk. If before the snake I had loved walking tall in the bush, feeling part of it, discovering gradually its secret language as old as Earth itself, after the snake I chose to walk Laikipia day after day, treading every path I could find, as a form of therapy, as if by tiring my body I could heal my soul. My father stayed on for a few days, during which we walked together, as we had lifetimes before on other hills in Veneto. We renewed silently, through the rhythm and beat of our steps, the ancient link of my childhood, but I knew that the loss of my own son
was an experience which I could truly share with nobody.

  When my father left, I walked alone.

  In the beginning, my senses numbed by grief, I walked as if in a vacuum. I never spoke, my mind was full of thoughts and memories, voices and screams, and it groped through the tortuous labyrinth of my unresolved questions. Then, gradually, a silence descended, and my mind became quiet and relaxed: the outer sounds and the essence of nature reached it once again, and I became more alert and perceptive than I had ever been.

  I drove out before sunrise in the freshness of the promise of another new morning, and left the car in any odd place. I asked Karanja, the driver, to fetch me at a given time at a specific spot, and I walked dozens of miles – with Luka or Mirimuk – to reach it. Often we came across sleeping rhino or buffalo, feeding elephant, timid bushbuck. We stalked eland until they smelt our scent and fled, leaping high through the dry shrubs. The odours of the bush started cool and fresh, but soon the warmth of the sun dried the dew and ripened them into heady aromas of sage and exotic fruit. The scent of dust and dung and lost feathers became, with the heat, a smell of fire.

  From sunrise to sunset, I trekked up the majestic hills and down the steep valleys. Untouched landscapes are undemanding and in them all pretensions and all acting cease. Nothing was expected of me by the ancient silence of the mountains and of the mysterious gorges. In their unjudging, harmonious existence I found again my own identity, and my place.

  I understood that in Emanuele’s death I could find the key to the essence of life. A thousand thousand times I went back to those moments, re-living them and suffering them again, in the instinctive life-saving knowledge that the only way out of my sufferings was through them. I could have settled for the constant unease and malaise of the unresolved problems within myself, but they would have crippled me. I chose instead to face directly the pain of my irreplaceable loss. I thought about it, spoke about it, mainly wrote about it. I lived again those hours of agony as if they were happening anew. I called Emanuele’s name in the long lonely nights when only he could hear. I contemplated the years to come in the silence and stillness of his eternal absence, which annihilated my hopes and dreams for a future that would never materialize.

  There is a bonus in tragedies of such magnitude. You realize that there is no further to go down, and that you have two choices. You can stay at the bottom and get used to the agonizing paralysis of those depths, and use any means – drugs, alcohol – to dull the lucid pain for which you are unable to find any relief within yourself. Or you can decide to rise to the surface again, and begin living once more. This last decision requires a conscious effort, for it is the active choice, and it can only succeed if you truly face your problems directly. It needs perseverance and action to follow it up, and it means change. Once you return to the surface you are as new, you have grown and have left down there your old self like a discarded and useless cocoon; and you have discovered that you can fly. In Ema’s death I had found the key to solve the riddle. Only in changing my attitude to it, and in giving my life a new purpose, could I balance the waste and make sense.

  About a week after Emanuele’s death I heard from Tubby about the memorial service for Jack Block, to be held at his farm on Lake Naivasha. The message also said that everyone in the family would understand if, in the circumstances, I decided not to go.

  My friendship with the Blocks went so far back into the past, and Tubby and Aino had been so special to me during both my bereavements, that I did not think twice. I had also learnt how much it matters to see the people one least expects at the time of deepest sorrow, and how touched I had been by those who had taken the trouble to come all the way to Laikipia to be with me when I needed to feel I was not totally alone. And, since I had suffered my losses, I began to discover that in a strange way the pain of others touched me more than ever before, and that there is a soothing bond of human solidarity in standing in silence with our friends in the presence of death.

  I took Saba Douglas-Hamilton, who was staying with me, and left Sveva in the care of Wanjiru and my mother. As a precaution I also brought Karanja, my driver, with me as it was the first time I had driven out of the ranch since I had gone to Nairobi a couple of weeks earlier to give Tubby my condolences.

  For years the road round Lake Naivasha had been in a very bad state of neglect, and it was getting worse. Deep ruts of soft white dust seemed to swallow the car like water, and, like water, it penetrated everywhere. The thin strip of tarmac in the middle of the track was eroded at the edges and dotted with hundreds of pot-holes, as frayed lace resting on face powder. The grass and whistling thorns at the roadside were white with it.

  The green lawn of the Blocks’ house, sparkling with enamel-bright flowers and refreshed by sprinklers, was always an unexpected oasis after all the greyness. I parked my car in the shade of the acacia as I had done many times before. A normal and familiar act. But nothing was normal any more. The Blocks, subdued and united in their grief, were gathered on the verandah which looks over the lake. Fish-eagles and pelicans perched on tree-stumps along the shore, as ever, and the lake shimmered blue. Among the thorn trees, below Jack’s charming wooden cottage, rows of chairs had been arranged for a very large gathering. The glass door rattled when I opened it and all heads turned towards me. Dressed in black, covered in dust and with my recent grief written all over me, I must have looked like an eerie scarecrow.

  I was the first friend to arrive, and my unexpected appearance created a reaction of surprise and concern. I had gone without a second’s thought, taking for granted that I could cope. Now I felt uncertain, dizzy and confused. Was it too early to face the world? Perhaps it had been a mistake. Jack’s personality, warmth and compassion were known far and wide and he had been loved by a great host of people. Many of them had also been to Emanuele’s funeral. But some had not, and when they discovered I was there they came over to the tree under which Saba and I had retreated, and gave me their condolences. The past ten days had been for me a millennium. For the rest of the crowd, they were merely ten days. I had forgotten that the perception of time varies for people. The ordeal was proving harder than I had imagined. It was like living through the agony of Emanuele’s funeral a second time.

  Somehow the speeches and the ceremony ended, and in a haze, having said a hurried goodbye to Tubby, I slid away unseen. I felt drained of energy, tired beyond words, and let Karanja drive me back to Laikipia.

  A few days after Jack’s memorial service, looking through the mail which had come from Nairobi, I found two letters.

  The first was in a handwriting I recognized instantly. It was Aidan’s. I had not heard from him since before Ema’s funeral. Day after day the sky had remained empty of his aeroplane. His silence was inexplicable to me.

  I took the small white envelope to Ema’s grave, and held it a long time in my hands before opening it. I fingered it with closed eyes for some moments as if to divine its contents, as one can know the nature of a tree by the texture and veins of its leaves.

  Carefully I opened it. The handwriting was tormented and altered, his sorrow deep. He had felt close to Emanuele. His silence had been enforced by a serious personal crisis which I understood and respected. Although it was not a letter of goodbye, I could feel that Emanuele’s death had created a conflict of loyalties, and that our relationship could never be the same again. I had always seen it and accepted it, however, as not belonging to the practical world. There had been an airy and magical quality about our encounters, an unpredictability which made them out of the ordinary, and I could only accept an out-of-the-ordinary reaction as part of the odds.

  The other letter planted the seed of a relationship which would prove an exceptionally positive and healing influence on my life. It was from a woman I did not really know, but to whom Tubby had introduced me at Jack’s memorial ceremony. It was a letter of sympathy and condolence: ‘… Since the death of your son you have constantly been in my thoughts … and my son Robin was distress
ed to hear the sad news, as I know he is very fond of you.’ It was signed Berit Hollister. On an impulse I answered immediately, adding to the letter, as I had for all, a copy of my last words to Emanuele, asking her to forward them to Robin, who had written but whose address in Malindi I did not have. I knew Robin well. I had first met him at a wedding over ten years before, just after we had arrived in Kenya.

  In December 1978 he had flown up to Laikipia just to greet us on his way to Nanyuki from Baringo, where he was then working. On taking off, the engine had failed, and the plane had come down like a ripe mango. Paolo and Emanuele had been watching, horrified, but when they reached the spot they found Robin intact, close to the wreck, with his perennial smile, a briefcase in his hand, quietly searching the bush for his sunglasses. The wreck is still there today, or what remained after elephant and hyena had had a go at it, and the rains and winds of many seasons have rusted and scattered its pieces like broken eggshells. Inevitably the accident singled out Robin from other people we knew but did not see often.

  For many weeks the mail kept bringing letters of condolence from every corner of the world, some of them unexpectedly beautiful, from people I hardly knew. All expressed the feeling that there was something unusual and unforgettable about Em-anuele, and all touched my heart. I kept them in a large box which grew fuller every day.

  One day I asked Colin to come up to Kuti, and we drove out together, looking for a suitable stone to put on Emanuele’s grave. It had to be large and of a certain shape, but also, like Paolo’s, it needed to have some connection with a place he had been especially fond of. It was a weird, unreal feeling, this search for a tombstone for my son, like an ancient ritual. Now and again Colin and I looked at each other, and shook our heads. However, I could not help thinking how different it is to die in Africa and have the privilege of being buried on your own land, where your friends can dig your grave and hold your service, where no paid uncaring hand is hired to perform any part of the ceremony and of the necessary preparations, and where it is your mother, your wife, who sits with you on your last night on earth, guarding your body for the last time.