It was like this in the ancient days, and it is still so among the primitive people who are close to the land and have not forgotten how to live their lives and die their deaths with dignity.
I chose the stone finally from near Ngobithu’s Dam, where Emanuele used to practise ‘wheelies’ with his motorbike. It was a yellow-orange stone, massive, in the shape of a large pillow. It seemed appropriate for his last bed. A tractor was sent in the afternoon, with about twenty people to lift it and bring it to the garden. Sitting on Paolo’s stone. I watched the operation with a feeling of unreality. A few days after, Colin came up with his chisel and engraved simply, as he had for Paolo, just EMANUELE and the date underneath: 12.4.83. The day was very hot. Half-way through the engraving, I brought him a beer, and he drank it there, resting a while.
Next morning I took Sveva’s hand, and for the first time I brought her to visit her brother’s tomb. I had told her he was now with Paolo, and it seemed natural to her that their graves should be together, and that a small version of Paolo’s tree had been planted on Emanuele’s. She brought a handful of red hibiscus, and her favourite soft toy, a pink mouse called Morby. During the entire time I kept talking to her and answering her questions. Hand-in-hand we offered the red flowers to both our men, and I managed to keep my misery to myself.
36
The Gift of Friendship
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower …
William Wordsworth, Ode. Intimations of Immortality
Although only within the silence and solitude of oneself can one find the way out of suffering, my friends made sure I always felt the warmth and comfort of their support and love. They shared my gradual re-birth as they had my sorrow. Strong links deepened. Here, where one could still attune life to the ancient rhythms of nature, friendship and solidarity were nourished by the vinculum of our common choice of Africa.
One was, of course, Carletto. He had been in Europe when Emanuele died, but one afternoon his dusty Land-Rover emerged from the bush, and he was there. He came towards me, a scowl of concern altering the joviality of his rotund walrus face. Below his bushy moustache his mouth was not smiling, and his kind eyes glinted with an unusual shine behind the thick glasses. He opened his vast arms silently and I found refuge in them.
There was no need to recall all the memories and the shared sorrows which had made of our friendship such a strong and unusual bond. Gone were Mariangela, Paolo, Chiara and now Emanuele. We had been together when the first drama had struck, a summer night in Italy, years ago. We were here in Africa for the latest one, and the fact that we had survived and we were neighbours here as we had been in another continent, without any other connection, was so odd that we could only accept it as we did the sun and the rain.
He visited often, as he had in the past – perhaps more, now that there were so few people left around us. He always brought some edible gift of ham or rare wine, asparagus from his garden or a bottle of my favourite Greek ouzo, and always his fishing-rod. He went for black bass in the dams and filled my fridge with fish. As I had in Italy, I allocated to him a special sturdier chair on my verandah, since with his weight he flattened the delicate wicker chairs as an elephant would a basket. Despite his size, Carletto had the inner grace and measure of the great gentleman. I was fond of him, and in his warm bear hugs, which occasionally cracked the sunglasses hanging around my neck, and in his solid, loyal presence, I found comfort and peace. In some sense my company cured his loneliness.
The Douglas-Hamiltons, Carol Byrne and Sam unexpectedly came up for my birthday on 1 June. I had forgotten all about it – I had never made a fuss about my anniversary anyway. Usually it was Emanuele who went out with his horse or bike in the morning and brought back to my room an armful of flaming red wild lilies. Colin and Rocky drove up from the Centre with a few friends they had staying. At coffee time, while I sat at the fireplace sipping my citronelle, the generator beat slowed down and the room sank gradually into total darkness except for the candles and the fire. Looking up from its flame in which I had been lost in thought for a while, I realized that everyone else had left the room and I was alone. At that moment the door opened, and a procession filed in: they were each holding one or two candles, to total forty, and they were all singing ‘Happy Birthday’.
Was I forty?
Forty is meant to be a key anniversary in a woman’s life. I felt far from being old. On the contrary, an energy and drive practically unknown to me in younger days seemed to have taken over. My long walks had made me more fit than I had ever been. I felt supple in body and mind and, having come to terms with my destiny, I accepted the new challenges of my life. Together with the others, singing in the fluttering candlelight, were Simon the cook and Wanjiru, Kipiego and Rachel, the gardeners. Simon was carrying a cake in the shape of a heart, covered in red hibiscus. Emanuele’s favourite pop music flew up to the roof, and I could still see him dancing on the cedar beams where Saba now stood alone, smiling down at me a small sad smile. Long blonde hair, oblique vivacious black eyes of unusual depth and beauty, I noticed she now looked much older than twelve. Her childhood had ended, I knew, when she had looked at the lifeless body of the young man she had worshipped. I remembered my first encounter with death as a teenager in Italy, and how deeply it had affected me and made me grow.
After breakfast next day I drove them to the old airstrip, and took photographs of them and Saba – Dudu was in England – loading their luggage, a sheep I had given them, and a box of avocados. Iain’s little plane took off, buzzed over me as usual, its wings undulating in farewell. I stood with Sveva watching the plane fly away like a vulnerable bird carrying my friends over the dark gorges, and growing smaller and smaller as it disappeared over the escarpment and was lost in the clouds.
The time had come for me to go down to Nairobi, to face my house again. I had not yet been back since Ema’s death.
The drive of my house in Gigiri looked empty, and the dogs Dada and Duncan, overwhelmed with joy, escorted the car, howling their happiness to see me after such a long absence. My old Kikuyu house servant, Bitu, whom I had not yet seen, came to shake my hand gravely, murmuring ‘Pole,’ and looking at me with wise impenetrable eyes. Many of his children had died, but many were left. I had had only one son. That was, for Africa, the greatest tragedy.
The house greeted me silently, waiting, like a church. Flowers fresh in the vases, a smell of turpentine and wax. A stack of obsolete daily newspapers. Many hand-delivered letters I did not stop to open. I went straight up to Emanuele’s room and closed the door behind me.
I stood, back to the door, and looked around. A young man’s room. Nothing had changed. Bookshelves filled with rows of neatly arranged books, the desk with papers and pens, a small photograph of a laughing girl – Ferina? – the typewriter, the stereo, the collection of minerals, his shell cabinets. The snake-skins.
I opened the cupboard: all those new suits we had had fun buying when we were together in Italy on our last holiday hung there useless. I caressed a blazer, trying to remember the last time he had worn it. One by one I opened all the drawers. His socks, his shirts, his shoes. On the bedside table were displayed the photographs he had loved and chosen: Paolo and a great black marlin; Paolo and the bull shark whose attack he had survived at Vuma; Sveva and a teddy-bear twice her size; a group of friends at school; a yacht in the Caribbean, and a good shot of Mario; a younger me in a white caftan, hugging the boy he had been; he in khaki shorts, surrounded by all the Security people down at the waterfalls of Maji ya Nyoka. A huge python striking, its stomach swollen by an undigested porcupine …
I sat on the bed. The linen had not been changed. I thought I could still distinguish the imprint of his head, smell the scent of his aftershave. I buried my face in the pillow.
Faintly, through the closed doors, I heard the noise of a car stopping in my drive. Hushed voices downstairs. Footsteps coming up the stairs two steps a
t a time, like Ema’s had used to. Someone pausing just outside the door. A knock. My heart stopped. The handle turned and the door opened. I closed my eyes. A very tall figure filled the door.
It was Aidan. I looked at him through the distance of my grief. He wore long trousers, a tweed jacket. A pallor altered his sunburnt face. Tormented eyes bore straight into mine.
‘Kuki,’ he said in a husky whisper.
I stood up, uncertainly, still hugging the pillow as a shield. He took both my hands in his large rough ones, and kissed them. He pulled me slightly towards him and the wool of his lapel was rough against my tear-stained cheek.
I said nothing. There was nothing to say.
A turmoil of emotions, of contradictory feelings. The pain of being again back in the house. Emanuele’s presence, gentle, intense and fading. Then, unexpected, Aidan. I felt confused and dizzy. The joy of his presence, of realizing he cared, took me by surprise. I had not had the time and courage to face how lonely I had truly been. An overwhelming temptation. To have a man again. To feel again loved, supported, protected, looked after. To share the cares and problems … but not at the expense of someone else’s suffering, or of his peace of mind … too much, too difficult, and no longer for me. Emanuele’s disappearance had been the moment of facing all truths. One could no longer play games. I was free and I was alone, and he was neither. If there was any decision to take, it could not be mine. I had never ceased to care for Aidan. Our relationship had been more than anything a meeting of souls without any ulterior motive. This purity had been its strength. There had never been the need or the intention to change its equilibrium, and this was not the moment for action. Only time could tell.
Aidan went, and from Emanuele’s windows I watched his car going down my drive, out of the gate and down the road, for the first time in daylight since the beginning of our relationship.
I did not move from Emanuele’s room all night, and I slept in his bed, surrounded by the memories of his childhood and interrupted youth, and by the essence of his loving spirit. I slept on his pillow wetted by my tears which refreshed the smell of his aftershave. And again I dreamt that same dream which had been haunting me for months now.
The boat floated on crystal-clear water so transparent I could distinguish every pebble, every shell on the bottom of pale turquoise, standing out in every detail as in a child’s naive drawing. Only Emanuele and I were on board the small wooden craft, grown old and polished by many seasons of sun and seawater. Emanuele had been bitten by the same old viper and he was dying. Dressed in his khaki shorts as on that last morning, snake-tongs dangling from his waist, he was sprawled face up on the planks, eyes half closed, half staring. A disembodied voice –Colin’s voice? – echoed and magnified vocally the reverberations of the sun on the ripples, saying unemotionally: ‘The only remedy for snakebites is water. You must put him in the water.’ His body was as heavy as dead stone, yet with the strength of despair I managed to lift it painfully and to push it out, inch by inch and pausing to rest, until I balanced it for a few seconds on the edge of the small boat. Then it rolled overboard as if in slow motion, touched the water and sank out of my reach. I watched him sink and I could not drag him back, his arms outstretched, legs outstretched, and the ripples on the surface playing golden reflections on his sleeping face. He sank deeper and deeper, smaller and smaller, until he became one with the bottom of pebbles and the clear clean shells, and as green. My voice would not come out. Impotent, frustrated, and with all the weight of my renewed inadequacy, I watched him sink away into the unreachable.
‘He will drown. I can’t pull him out. He is too heavy. He is too far.’ I ended the sentence in broken sobs.
‘He is dead’ the voice out of the picture said. ‘He is dead; there is nothing you can do’ At this moment, as always, I woke up. The telephone was ringing.
It was Iain. There was a strange hesitant note in his voice.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked him, suddenly awake.
‘I am. So are Oria and Saba. It’s the aeroplane. I am afraid I crashed it.’
On the top of the Kutua hills the engine had failed. There began what Oria described later as a ‘silent fall’. Only Iain’s exceptionally cool head and his skill as a pilot saved their lives. He managed to spot an abandoned cattle boma in the thick bush, overgrown with shrubs and trees, and he crash-landed in the small clearing. The plane lost both wings. Saba was drenched in aviation fuel. He managed to call a ‘M’aidez’ which was received by a station standing by on the Laikipia Security network. Then the battery failed. They could see Jonathan Leakey’s aeroplane – alerted by radio, he had taken off immediately – circling, searching for them, but the wreck had been swallowed up by the luxuriant vegetation. They were invisible. It was only in the evening that a moran of the Gemps tribe found them, and ran to alert the village and the police. In typical Rocco–Douglas-Hamilton style they celebrated that night with the young warriors, feasting on the roasted lamb and avocado I had luckily given them. A police Land-Rover rescued them the next day, and drove them to Nairobi.
I immediately radio-called Colin to send our lorry down to fetch what was left of their plane, and they carried it off to their farm in Naivasha. That courageous little plane has lain there ever since, under a canvas on the lawn, like a crippled dragonfly, memento of past dreams and lost adventures.
37
Out of the Skies
On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life,
Musing in solitude.
William Wordsworth, Preface to The Excursion
Before Emanuele’s death I had commuted between Nairobi and Laikipia because of his school. Sveva was not old enough to attend nursery school, so I could now stay on the ranch.
One day I received another letter from Aidan. It was the letter of a man torn apart by his obligations and it was of goodbye. In a postscript he noted: ‘For as long as I live you will sit on my shoulder.’
I felt a desperate sense of loss, and, although I managed to write back saying that he could forever count on my friendship and on my understanding, I felt forlorn, and memories of our flying carpet and of the joy and depth of our encounters haunted me for a long time.
Emanuele’s death had ended even this dream abruptly, but perhaps this was always meant to be.
The sun kept rising every day. Sveva grew beautiful. And my life went on. If fortune had for a time deserted me, my spirit, however, never failed me. It is really our last resort, our spirit. When everything seemed to be lost, when I was standing alone in the wind over my graves, I felt this was a unique time to raise my head and with my eyes look out again at Africa.
When I was a little girl of nine or ten, one evening while we were walking with the dogs my father told me, almost abruptly, ‘The most important thing you can ever learn in life, Kuki, is to be able to be alone. Sooner or later the time will come when you will be alone with yourself. You must be able to cope and face your own company.’ I have never known what had prompted my father to tell me this, but I have never forgotten it. Now was the time to prove it if I could, as I was now truly on my own. So I learnt to live and to think alone, in the weather of my own mind, and I discovered that I was not afraid, that I could accept whatever happened to me, and that in this I was lucky.
My friends visited often, and they mostly came out of the sky. There is a feeling of unbounded freedom and space in flying over Africa. In Kenya, flying in small aircraft is the natural way of getting around, and a popular one since the early days when roads were often non-existent and distances to be covered enormous. Private airstrips are common on farms and ranches, easy to build and to maintain with adequate farm machinery, and there are no complicated procedures to follow. Flying is not regarded as a luxury, but is accepted as an invaluable way of speeding communications, doing business and maintaining friendships. One can literally land in friends’ paddocks and walk to their houses for a drink. One can have breakfast on the coast in Lamu, lunch in the Highlands of Laikipia, and dinne
r by Lake Turkana, a journey which could take weeks by car. It also guarantees speedy rescue in an emergency. From the flying doctors to most of the zoologists and ranchers in the Highlands, many people in Kenya fly their own aircraft: Wilson airport in Nairobi is the largest airfield for private aircraft in Africa. But our airstrip in Ol Ari Nyiro was twenty minutes’ drive from Kuti. Emanuele had been hoping to get his pilot’s licence, and we had planned another airstrip close to the house. I decided to carry out this plan and to build the new one almost at my doorstep, so that whoever landed could just walk home. There were other reasons for this. I never wanted to find myself again in the position of having to drive for help all those miles, as I had for Emanuele.
I went walking with Iain and Colin one day and chose the site, just outside the garden at Kuti. The old D6 Caterpillar came up in a clangour of chains and cut a scar through the bush from the hill below Kuti to the thatched huts of the labour lines. People came up to remove the largest rocks and roots by hand. The land was graded and flattened. Sveva and I planted grass seed, throwing it out of the back of a pick-up with much giggling. It would germinate with the rains. Now I had an airstrip at Kuti.
One day before the summer Richard Leakey flew me to Koobi-Fora, ‘the Cradle of Mankind’, where he regularly went to supervise the excavations and research on our early ancestors, carried out by the National Museums. ‘You need to get away,’ he said perceptively. ‘Koobi-Fora will be good for you.’ He was right. He picked me up at my new airstrip and we flew to Turkana.
I Dreamed of Africa Page 23