Nicole is cutting a line of coke on her compact mirror inside the pink Gujarati washroom. I envy the way she always seems to be completely unaffected by her surroundings and carries on living in the third world as if she’s simply browsing through an ethnic sale at Harrod’s.
She snorts quickly, holding back her curls.
“Wow! It’s such bad stuff, but what the hell…”
She watches me while I inhale my portion of rat poison, then puts on a naughty smile.
“We’ll turn Claire onto this really bad coke and transform her into an addict, that’s how we’re going to get rid of her. We’ll persecute her till she gets a bleeding nose.”
I finally laugh. The rush makes me feel warmer. I’d like to hug Nicole now, but she is suddenly looking serious.
“You know, Esmé, I never told you, but in a way I feel like I should tell you now…”
“What?”
“I did sleep with Hunter as well. Long before you came out here.”
“Oh.”
Her cheeks are lightly flushed. I drop my eyes from her face.
“I had a feeling you had,” I say. But the revelation hasn’t shocked or hurt me.
“Why?”
“Just because…oh I don’t know. Because of a certain intimacy you two always had.”
“Do you mind me telling you only now?”
“No. It doesn’t make any difference. Really.”
We pause and smile at each other. I feel my heart hammering wildly, and the sudden urge for a cigarette. But I know it must be the cocaine, not her revelation. Strangely, if anything it makes me feel closer to her. She lights two cigarettes and hands me mine. We stand, our backs against the pink tiles, inhaling smoke and scouring powder.
“I am not unaware of what you said before, you know. We are all trapped in some kind of crazy white-people’s game here,” she says in a soft voice. “I just don’t want to get completely engulfed in that kind of dissatisfaction because I don’t have any alternatives.”
“What do you mean?”
“I wouldn’t be able to go back to Europe and function at this point. That’s what made me so unhappy about sleeping with Hunter, now that I think of it. I felt he was constantly drawing energy out of me. His bitterness was poisoning me; that’s what made me get away from him.”
“Hmmm…I guess I am the one who has been poisoned now.”
We stand in silence, smoking our cigarettes.
“I’ll tell you exactly what it is that hurts, Nicole. The absolute certainty that I don’t, and probably you don’t either, have the determination, no, wait—the faith—to redeem someone like Hunter. We both would rather be poisoned than try to detox him. I never believed I had the power to make him happy. Isn’t that stupid?”
“Why, what makes you think this girl will?”
“She has that strength. She will simply drive him out of whatever hole he’s trapped in and bring him to the surface. She will love him, it’s as simple as that.”
“You love him too.”
“But she’s fearless. Young. And she will have his children.”
“Yes. She’s a breeder…”
“Right. We are not.”
“No. We’d rather snort coke in the loo.”
We pause, meditate for a few seconds. Then we do another line and go shopping.
I have to go one step back and try to put things in order. To fabricate some excuses for myself.
You have tried to leave before.
You have woken up in your bed in the middle of the winter, rain furiously pounding on the mabati roof, and felt like everything including your brain was turning to mould. You hate the idea of being so far away, forgotten by your friends at home, oblivious to the political changes in the world. You are starved for magazines, sophisticated conversation, films and good clothes. The person lying next to you is a man who was born here, for whom all that is simply nonexistent. Before falling asleep he has told you how much he loves the sound of the rain pounding on the tin roof at night, how it reminds him of his childhood. You hear him breathing peacefully, wrapped up in the blanket while you are going mad. In the morning you walk out in the garden, holding your hot mug of coffee close to your chin, your last good pair of boots deep in the thick mud. You feel as if your entire soul is going under. Everything around you has the bitter taste of decay: the mangoes rotting in the basket, the corrupted policeman at the roadblock who wants a bribe to let you pass, the headlines in the paper about new tribal massacres in the desert and piles of bodies liquefying in the heat. Suddenly the hardness of Africa reveals itself to you. Senseless and without redemption.
When you look in the mirror your face looks drained, armored, no trace of lightness left. You look older. That’s when you think there may still be time to save yourself.
You want to leave. And you believe you will never come back.
Nobody is happy to let you escape, since everyone shares the symptoms of your disease. Someone will take you malcontentedly to the airport, in full Kenyan style, still wearing shorts and sandals, opening one Tusker beer after another, hitting the cap on the door handle and throwing the dripping empties on the back seat. They will sway and swear overtaking matatu buses on the way, they will be rude with the porters who are too slow to take your luggage.
You don’t care.
You are already on the other side of the ocean, shielded by what’s left of your good European clothes, the list of phone calls you have to make tomorrow.
You are out of here.
You check in with a smile, handing your ticket to the pretty stewardess in flawless uniform, the efficiency of Europe already welcoming you behind the airline counter.
You think you will come back, sure, but just as a tourist, to see your friends and your ex-lovers. To see all the places you loved. The Chyulu hills, Lake Turkana, the beach of Lamu, the Ewaso Nyiro River.
You don’t know yet that you won’t be able to get away.
So many people have tried to define the feeling the French call mal d’afrique which in fact is a disease. The English never had a definition for it, I guess because they never liked to admit that they were being threatened in any way by this continent. Obviously because they preferred the idea of ruling it rather than being ruled by it.
Only now I realize how that feeling is a form of corruption. It’s like a crack in the wood which slowly creeps its way in. It gradually gets deeper and deeper until it has finally split you from the rest. You wake up one day to discover that you are floating on your own, you have become an independent island detached from its motherland, from its moral home base. Everything has already happened while you were asleep and now it’s too late to attempt anything: you are out here, there’s no way back. This is a one-way trip.
Against your will you are forced to experience the euphoric horror of floating in emptiness, your moorings cut for good. It is an emotion which has slowly corroded all your ties, but it is also a constant vertigo you will never get used to.
This is why one day you have to come back. Because now you no longer belong anywhere. Not to any address, house, or telephone number in any city. Because once you have been out here, hanging loose in the Big Nothing, you will never be able to fill your lungs with enough air.
Africa has taken you in and has broken you away from what you were before.
This is why you will keep wanting to get away but will always have to return.
Then, of course, there is the sky.
There is no sky as big as this one anywhere else in the world. It hangs over you, like some kind of gigantic umbrella, and takes your breath away. You are flattened between the immensity of the air above you and the solid ground. It’s all around you, 360 degrees: sky and earth, one the aerial reflection of the other. The horizon here is no longer a flat line, but an endless circle which makes your head spin. I’ve tried to figure out the trick that lies behind this mystery, because I don’t see any reason why there should be more sky in one place than in another. Yet
I haven’t been able to discover what is the optical illusion that makes the African sky so different than any other sky you have seen in your life. It could be the particular angle of the planet at the equator, or maybe the way clouds float, not above your head, but straight in front of your nose, sitting on the lower border of the umbrella, just on top of the horizon. Those drifting clouds which constantly redesign the map: in one glance you can see a rainstorm building up north, the sun shining in the east, and grey sky in the west which is bound to turn blue any minute. It’s like sitting in front of a giant TV screen looking at a cosmic weather report.
You are travelling north, towards the NFD, the legendary North Frontier District, and suddenly it’s as if you were looking at the landscape through the wrong side of binoculars. The ultimate wide-angle lens, which compresses the infinite within your field of vision. Your eyes have never cast a glance so far. Flat land that runs all the way to the distant purple profile of the Matthews Range and then, just when you thought you had reached an end to the space, right when you imagined that the landscape would close itself around you again, that you would feel less exposed, another curtain lifts up to reveal more vastness, and your eyes still can’t catch the end of it.
More land stretching obediently under your tires, offering itself to be crossed. Your tracks become the endless flag of your conquest. You fill your lungs with the dry smell of hot rocks and dust, and you feel like you are breathing the universe.
You see yourself as you are driving into this grandiose absolute geometry: you are just a tiny dot, a minuscule particle advancing very slowly. You have now drowned in space, you are forced to redefine all proportions. You think of a word that hasn’t occurred to you in years. It sprouts from somewhere inside you.
You feel humble. Because Africa is the beginning.
There is no shelter here: no shade, no walls, no roofs to hide under. Man has never cared to leave his mark on the land. Just tiny huts made of straw, like birds’ nests that the wind will easily blow away.
You can’t hide.
Here you are, under that burning sun, exposed. You realize that all you can rely on now is your body. Nothing you have learned in school, from television, from your clever friends, from the books you have read, will help you here.
Only now do you become aware that your legs are not strong enough to run, your nostrils can’t smell, your eyesight is too weak. You realize you have lost all your original powers. When the wind blows the acrid smell of the buffalo in your nose, a smell you had never smelled before, you recognize it instantly. You know that its smell has always been here. Yours on the other hand is the result of many different things, from sunblock to toothpaste.
Le mal d’afrique is vertigo, is corrosion, and at the same time is nostalgia. It’s a longing to go back to your childhood, to the same innocence and the same horror, when everything was still possible and every day could have been the day you die.
As I said, I am making excuses for myself.
I am trying to put everything on a grander scale, in order to feel that I haven’t lost all I have lost for nothing. I have been driven out of the Garden of Eden but the apple wasn’t something I wanted to eat out of simple greediness. Now I know that no human being will ever resist that temptation.
CHAPTER TWO
Fear always remains.
A man may destroy everything within himself,
love and hate and belief, even doubt,
but as long as he clings to life,
he cannot destroy fear.
JOSEPH CONRAD
I come from the Old World.
I grew up under the shade of thick-walled family houses, behind crumbling façades, among old furniture inherited from my grandparents. I went to school walking through dark alleys that opened between buildings built by Michelangelo. On hot summer nights my friends and I used to jump in the cool water springing from fountains and swim among tritons and mermaids whose tails were intertwined in frightful knots of marble. I lived my whole life in a world that testified to the extraordinary talent of the human mind. I didn’t grow up just in civilization: I grew up surrounded by beauty, which I took for granted. Mine must have been a geographical destiny.
My father was the perfect product of twentieth-century Europe: a poet. A Neapolitan poet, Illuminism coded in his DNA. Ferdinando had only one faith in his life, and that was faith in the power of words.
“We’ll sell everything but the books,” he used to say whenever we ran out of money, standing proudly, his back to the library, like a warrior before the walls of the city.
And sell we did: stereos and carpets and paintings and TV sets. There was a constant flow of items in and out of the pawnshops, which we always regarded as humorous rather than humiliating. But the books never went. No one would have been interested in buying them anyhow.
I must make some space for Ferdinando, because I wouldn’t have ended out here, and then I probably wouldn’t have been expelled from the Garden of Eden, had he not been my father.
Ferdinando was a beautiful man. Handsome in the way only passionate people are, when the energy is all concentrated in the face and radiates from their eyes. His were like the eyes of a falcon. Ferdinando looked to me like an aging medieval knight. Strong features, pronounced nose, graceful lines spreading like a thin fan around the corners of his eyes, dark thick hair, always too long, hair which later had streaks of white curling around his neck. And his hands, of course. Nervous and strong, woven with blue veins, his hands were the terminus of his brain. Words flew straight from his head into them, then slid from the pen onto the paper. Ferdinando never believed in typing, he had a very particular relation to his handwriting. He needed to see his words scribbled in his notebook, tentative words lingering for days on one corner of the page, patiently awaiting their destiny. Maybe they would go in or maybe they would be crossed out. His notebooks looked like a mad chart, one phrase here, another there, everything on standby in different positions. Poems are a bit like puzzles, he’d say. One wrong choice and nothing else sounds right. Eventually he would find the perfect sound he had been looking for and instantly that scribbled page would come alive, wipe itself of all indecision, and remake itself clean, in the form of a few beautiful lines.
Ferdinando wasn’t interested in nature. He was too decadent, too much of an atheist, a soul possessed solely by Attic furies. And, needless to say, he was an alcoholic.
Harmony and balance had no appeal for him. He was attracted by chaos, by the inscrutable disorder that rules life in modern cities. He knew degradation, he didn’t fear squalor. He could look the black bull in the eye.
He met my mother in New York in the fifties. They drank, went out to the clubs, hung out with interesting people, argued about politics, experimented with all that was available. With her red hair and white skin, my mother always looked frail, as if she was always on the verge of breaking down. I still can see her endlessly torturing her hair, biting her nails: she looked always as if she wasn’t quite there with you, but rather thinking about someone else. Maybe in love with someone else who was making her unhappy. She always seemed to be devastated by a pain that had nothing to do with you, with the life you and she were sharing.
I remember my mother as a young woman—we were living in New York at that time, in an old apartment on the Upper West Side—stretching her bare legs on the sofa, looking out the window, oblivious to the noise of her children’s games. She just lay there, listening to jazz, wrapped up in her secret obsessions, waiting. I never knew what she was waiting for. Maybe for the phone to ring, for her lover to call. But it never rang.
I don’t know what it was; I guess nobody ever knew. Maybe it was her way of playing with Ferdinando: in order to survive him she had to escape him. Every one of us watched her constantly, followed her movements around the room as if she could just vanish from one minute to the next. We were always on guard.
I was only eight and my brother was four when she died. She crashed into a guardrail
and flew off a bridge driving back from a friend’s house in Connecticut late at night. She had drunk too much, they said.
That night it was snowing. I don’t remember much else. Only how the phone had woken me and my brother up in the middle of our sleep, and kept ringing nonstop while the house slowly filled with people. I could feel their hysteria in the next room, and from the texture of their voices I knew something must have happened. Something big and dark, something frightening. Something totally new, which had never happened to us before. We sat patiently in the kitchen in our pyjamas, waiting to be told. Someone finally came in, hugged us and fed us chocolate chip cookies.
I remember pressing my nose against the window, trying to concentrate on the way the snow whirled and drifted under the orange streetlights. It’s going to be such fun in the park tomorrow, I kept thinking.
Ever since then I always liked to think that she had flown into the river just like that. Pirouetting in slow motion like a dancer, like one of those snowflakes waltzing in the night.
I don’t think it ever occurred to Ferdinando that my mother could die. After all it was he who was the dangerous one, the alcoholic, the poet maudit, he the one bound to be killed in a car crash. Instead my mother’s death had stolen the scene away from him, and left him speechless. He felt he hadn’t been cast for the role of a widower with two children.
So he took me and my little brother back to his house in Naples, where we led the extravagant life of two children tended by another older, pestiferous child.
He often overslept and forgot to take us to school, there was never any food in the house to feed us with, he never remembered to buy us new clothes. He simply kept handing me and my little brother wads of sticky crumpled cash, so that we could look after ourselves with it. But he read us bedtime stories from the Iliad, taught us how to cut open and eat the inside of sea urchins straight from the sea. He used the ruins of Pompeii as our private playground, making believe we were the only survivors of the volcano’s eruption and had been left with a whole ghost city at our disposal. We loved him, maniacally. He was our king. I went through my Electra complex without the smallest hesitation. After all, I had nothing else to hold on to. Ferdinando married again twice, he couldn’t bear to be without a woman in his life. Both his wives, in different ways, kept their doors shut to both me and my brother, as if we scared them. Or maybe it was we who preferred to keep away from them. They all reminded me of my mother: somewhat haunted, beautiful and aloof.
Rules of the Wild Page 2