Rules of the Wild

by Francesca Marciano

  All of them held back something Ferdinando couldn’t grasp and which all his life, with the fury of a hunting dog, he tried to dig out.

  I know the trick to get rid of pain: whole chunks of my life dissolve like a drop of ink in water. But I do remember one of the last times I saw Ferdinando. Not much else after that, when it was all over and all that was left was excruciating pain.

  I’m driving to the house out in the country where he lives with his third wife, Louise. It’s February, and there is that particular clear winter light just before sunset, when everything looks sharp like cut glass, as if sealed by the cold. The house sits on top of a round hill; only three cypresses break its circular outline. So unlike Ferdinando to live in such a tamed landscape as Tuscany, I can’t help thinking. But Louise couldn’t bear to live in the city. And he’s too ill now, too weak, to put his foot down and force her to live in one of his casbahs.

  As I’m slowly entering the driveway I am saying to myself, Maybe this is the last time I will see him. It sounds absurd: you are not supposed to know this beforehand, you only know it was the last time afterwards.

  Yet as I gently brake on the gravel, I am overcome by a feeling of total estrangement. This is going to be some kind of scientific experiment: I must imprint in my mind every single step into this tragedy which is taking shape before my eyes. I am not yet able to perceive it as a whole, I can only take in one small fragment at a time.

  The house looks just the same: the overloaded bookshelves, the yellowing lampshades, the faded cotton print on the sofa, the smoky scent of the fireplace. He’s sitting by the window, silhouetted against the fading light. He hasn’t turned the lights on. He has grown a three-days’ beard, his hair hasn’t been washed. He has rolled up the sleeves of his old sweater, eaten by moths. He is disheveled. As usual, he looks beautiful.

  I sit in front of him and I stare. We keep quiet like this, just looking at each other, while the room falls rapidly into the blue winter light which follows the sunset. I brush his profile, the high cheekbones, his lips, with my eyes. His fingers fiddle with a button. He’s been prohibited from smoking, and it’s odd to see him without a cigarette in his hand, without the familiar cloud of smoke floating around him.

  I think: The way he’s dying doesn’t look anything like what I expected. He stares at me, perfectly lucid, while every day another bit of him crumbles away. Only his anger hasn’t crumbled yet: I know he is furious at the idea of having to die.

  Each day the brain tumour deletes another sound from his speech. His thoughts are all there, witty, complicated and twisted as ever: it is the language that is slowly sinking. Every morning he wakes up to discover that another letter has vanished from his mouth. He’s now left with only vowels. Horrific growls, animal-like. I try to decode him, he gets impatient. He can’t stand the humiliation of not being understood.

  Louise is upstairs. I can hear the muffled sound of her footsteps on the wooden boards and the faint sound of classical music. Everyone around him has to pretend that nothing is happening. None of us is allowed to acknowledge the fact that he is dying. This is the deal we were all forced to strike with him.

  A few weeks ago, when he still was able to speak well enough, he put his arm around my shoulder and drew me close to his neck. He stared into my eyes.

  “You know this is no longer me, don’t you?” he whispered.

  That was the only time he ever said anything about it.

  The absurdity was that Ferdinando died mute.

  It was as if some karmic punishment had descended upon him. Like a Greek hero suddenly deprived of his shield by the will of an angry god and left naked before the spear of the enemy on the battleground.

  Ferdinando’s body was weak, translucently white, abused by too many cigarettes, alcohol and sleeping pills. It was a lifeless receptacle, a forgotten carcass which required no care. It had never mattered to him. It was his head that had made him invulnerable.

  Ironically, that neglected body was what betrayed him in the end. Slowly, incessantly, every little bolt and screw came undone, bits and pieces at a time, until the whole thing went to pieces and was no longer recognizable. Until it lost its dignity.

  His illness forced him to recede into the most primitive form his body ever had: Ferdinando died like an infant without language, forced to wail in order to attract other people’s attention. He died in such a way that we would all learn that the shelves loaded with books we were never allowed to sell—the Shakespeare sonnets, Dante’s quatrains, Piero della Francesca’s paintings and Brunelleschi’s laws of perspective—were of no use at all. We realized that there must be some other way to face one’s death. But not even Ferdinando, who always seemed to know everything, knew how to do that.

  When I stared into his eyes that evening, in that quiet moment of transition before the night falls, I saw something I had never seen before.

  I saw his fear.

  He wanted to know. What was going to happen? What was this thing going to be like, once the darkness fell upon him?

  I didn’t want him to know how terrified I was to see him like this, so I closed my eyes and held his hand for a long time, until we were both in the dark.

  I still don’t know about my mother.

  All I am left with are some black-and-white photos that I used to keep looking at when I was younger, in the hope they would tell me something more about her.

  There is one I particularly liked, in which she sits on a windowsill in a light crumpled linen dress, barefoot, where she has the look of a circus girl. A trapeze artist, a failed dancer. The determination and sadness about her. That strength in her calves, and the vulnerability in her eyes.

  I used to search my own body for her. I looked for those same arched eyebrows, lean feet, high cheekbones, slanted eyes. But she had gone. Even her genes seemed to have vanished like fish sliding out of the net, so that I could never claim her back.

  Many years after her death I found a note she had written to Ferdinando around the time they had first met. It was scribbled on the back of a faded postcard.

  It is not in the nature of love to be so daunting. I don’t want to have to fear you, especially when your wit can be so unkind. I’ve never been good at being afraid, and you know what scared animals are like. Stop talking, just hold me. Even better: marry me.

  That scrap of paper was the only thing I found in all these years which made my mother come alive, in the flesh, which made her real to me. She had to marry Ferdinando in order to lose her fear of needing him.

  Marry me, she had ordered him. Release me from fear.

  He obeyed. My father always showed great respect for acts of courage.

  The way Ferdinando was so clever with words gave him power to make his way into anything, and he knew that well. In that respect he was an arrogant conquerer.

  After he died it suddenly occurred to me how I had lived all my life shielded by his personality: I had been hiding behind his genius, his provocativeness, without inheriting any of his talent. If anything, I had grown weaker and weaker in his shadow, and now without him I felt stripped bare, unable to cope.

  I needed to find myself a place that wouldn’t remind me of him, a place full of emptiness, without a written history, where language had very little meaning. Because without Ferdinando, beauty, intellectual exercise, artistic talent, literature no longer made sense to me.

  Later on, as I was leaving all of it behind, I felt like it had never even existed: all I could remember was that expression of fear in his eyes, and that silent question, to which of course, I had no answer.

  In fact all his loss left me with was the realization that in Ferdinando’s world—the world where words have power, where culture means control—one can only postpone fear. All one actually is able to do, is to freeze it.

  I needed to go somewhere where my body would be the only tool required to survive, a place where I would be able to test my fear, rather than putting off the moment I had to face it.

&n
bsp; Only by going there did I feel I might be prepared for whatever happened.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Nature, Mr. Alnutt, is something we were

  put on this earth to rise above.

  KATHARINE HEPBURN,

  as Rose Sayer in The African Queen

  It is now Adam’s turn to come into the story.

  If it’s true that, as I always believed, names hold a destiny in themselves, Adam couldn’t have been called anything else.

  To me Adam was like the first man of the world, the man Leonardo drew inside the circle with his arms spread. The basic principle. In baboon language: an alpha male.

  I came to Africa with the wrong guy, which turned out to be the best possible thing.

  In the midst of a bleak April, only a month after my father’s funeral, I was shipped to this continent like a postal parcel, sedated by sleeping pills, in the company of a young man—we’ll call him P.—with whom I had had some desperate sex right after Ferdinando’s death.

  I had been crawling into his bed every night with my eyes shut, wrapping my legs around his body the way a parasitic plant strangles a tree, and with the same determination I had clung on to him hoping I’d find some sunlight at the end of the tunnel. But no.

  P. loved it, he hadn’t a clue how sick my mind was, how completely crazed I had become after my father’s death. He believed in distractions and insisted on taking me out all the time.

  P. was a yuppie with literary aspirations, tall, dark-haired, smelling of Eau Sauvage, impeccably dressed. Probably good-looking, but without a face. He had been going out with harmless girls all his life and had learned about the bad ones only in books. So he quite enjoyed my lunacy, my terror, and most of all my cruelty. He believed he was going to learn something new from me.

  He took me to Kenya on holiday and scrupulously paid for everything: money had always been his only means of having things under control.

  For all I cared I could have been anywhere.

  I lay in different beds in different five-star hotels, placated only by the soothing sound mix of air conditioning and CNN, ordering room service while P. was out exploring nature in zebra-striped vans, with a happy crowd of tourists who wanted to get their money’s worth and wouldn’t stop until they could take a good shot of a lion’s kill. They all came back just before dark, exhausted, comparing what they had managed to get in the shot, loud and proud, hungry for more.

  I hated all of them and kept ordering chicken sandwiches.

  Africa lay out there somewhere, a secret entity which revealed nothing of its nature. I could feel its vastness creeping in from the window. Something big was certainly going on out there, but I couldn’t be bothered to find out what it was.

  On day six, P. accused me of sabotage.

  “Esmé I really don’t think it’s a good idea to lie here all alone, it’ll just make you more depressed. You must make an effort. Trust me—”

  “Listen, I am perfectly all right, I’m just not in the mood to see other people, I want to rest.”

  “Sometimes I have the feeling that you are doing this on purpose. You don’t want to feel better.”

  I was lying on the bed among ashtrays, magazines, crumbs and empty plates. I looked up at him.

  “It’s all right not to feel good all the time, you know. Happiness is not mandatory on this planet.”

  P. had been a tourist all his life. He liked to browse around, take pictures, and eventually head back home. He had had high expectations about his voyage into my personality, but I guess I had disappointed him. In his mental brochure, taking the neurotic daughter of a famous dead poet to Africa must have seemed an appealing cultural choice. He had put a copy of Green Hills of Africa in the Fendi briefcase, in case he ran out of inspiration.

  Unfortunately I turned out to be a rather flat country, not much action there. Plus our sex life had come to a halt. I couldn’t stand it anymore and had asked him to move to the other twin bed. He didn’t look happy but he took it with savoir faire. After all he was a well-bred Italian and wasn’t going to claim his money back.

  I didn’t care about being a fraud. I just wanted to be left alone.

  On day seven we moved to the middle of the Masai Mara, to a luxury tented camp surrounded by more ferocious American tourists. With no CNN to hypnotise me, I couldn’t sit inside the tent all day, so I agreed to go on a game drive before sunset.

  I remember smelling the rain. I could see dark clouds heading our way, thick lead against blue sky. That incredible sky, which I was seeing at last, took my breath away. I had no words to describe it then, and don’t now.

  In the stillness before the storm, the plains opened before my eyes. The gentle shape of the acacias, the herds of zebra and wildebeest and buffalo dotting the yellowing grass in the distance: it all came alive and whatever had been dead inside me slowly started to breathe.

  Then we saw the elephants. About thirty of them. I asked the driver to stop the car and turn off the engine. I stood up through the open roof, feeling the gusts of wind blowing through my hair, and watched them slowly come my way.

  “God they are huge!” said P., clicking away. “Esmé! Look at the size of those willies!”

  “Just be quiet, will you?”

  He did.

  The elephants came closer, all in a line, very slowly, the old female clearing the way for the others. They were all around us now. I closed my eyes and smelled them, listening to the gentle sound of the grass being torn by their trunks. No footfalls: just the grass and the wind, and the smell of the rain coming closer every second. The sun disappeared behind the clouds, flashing a last green acid light on the plain. A colder gust of wind, then the sky turned black.

  It came down torrentially, with lightning and thunder, and the sound was deafening.

  Water was running down the rumps of the elephants, dripping down the backs of the muddy buffaloes. It didn’t change their slow motion; I could still hear the muffled moans of the wildebeests, grazing peacefully under the downpour.

  “We should go, don’t you think?” P. whispered nervously in my ear.

  He’s the kind of man who hates to get wet.

  I didn’t answer. I was still standing out of the open roof, water running down my cheeks, flowing down my neck, choking my nostrils, my hair stuck to my temples. Breathing, feeling the space, the rain, the smell of the animals, of the soil releasing its richness.

  Crying. At last.

  P. sighed and retreated inside, shaking his head, not happy with what I was doing.

  On day eight I was feeling, if not better, at least different.

  I sat at our luxury-camp breakfast table with determination, and proceeded to X-ray P. in the bright morning light.

  As he was helping himself to scrambled eggs and bacon I had a clear vision of what it was that I loathed about him.

  There is a vast tribe of men like P., who manage to live all their lives within their self-imposed boundaries, and are perfectly resigned never to cross them.

  They are uncomfortable at the mere idea of having to come out in the open: in fact they don’t even seem to be capable of getting out of their own clothes with ease. They seem perpetually sealed in their Brooks Brothers shirts, even when they are naked and breathing heavily on top of you. Nothing will change them, not death, nor disaster, not war, nor a broken heart. But the saddest part is that beauty will not change them either. They can’t take it in, let alone open up to it. They are perpetual spectators. They just take pictures.

  It was intolerable: the thought of being exiled from beauty, of having to look at it with the same resignation as when you look at something you know you will never have, something you are not worthy of. That really killed me.

  The possibility of yourself becoming that beauty, even if only once, simply by wading into it, letting it flow in through the pores of your skin; rolling in it, mud, dust, rain or sand, smearing it all over you—suddenly I was feeling wild—how could anyone exclude that possibility from
their life?

  Now I don’t know, but it seemed very clear then at that breakfast table, watching the Calvin Kleined troops of tourists loading their money’s worth of breakfast onto their plates, eyes fixed on the bacon, comparing it with the quality of bacon back home. They seemed completely unaltered. Whereas I had been released from the sealed package I had come shipped in only fourteen or fifteen hours earlier and was already delirious. There was no way I could climb back into my cardboard box and ignore what I had seen.

  “Our plane leaves from the strip at three,” said P., hoping that after my outburst with the elephants he had seen my absolute worst and that I would spare him more dysfunctional behaviour. “We could go for a quick game drive, come back at one, get some lunch and then pack.”

  His meticulous tiny plans. I felt like smacking him in the face. And why was this total stranger using “we” all the time?

  It was like surfing. I had been underwater so long, waiting to drown, and now—totally unexpectedly—I found myself on top of the wave, out in the sun again, terrified of losing my balance, because the thing was going so damn fast. But it was my only chance and I had to keep riding it, regardless of how frightening it was and how poorly equipped I felt. I knew I didn’t want to go back under.

  “You know, I am not coming back with you,” I heard myself say to him, brightly, my mouth full of toast. I quite liked the sound of it. “I am going to stay here on my own.”

  “Here where?” He looked frightened.

  “Here. In Africa. In the bush. I don’t know.” I waved my hand around, pointing vaguely at the trees. “Right here, maybe.”