Rules of the Wild

by Francesca Marciano

  He stared at me.

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we have a ticket which you can’t… it can’t be changed and—”

  “Everything can be changed.”

  He looked at me in disbelief. He wasn’t ready for this kind of thing so early in the morning.

  “And what about money? I mean it’s going to cost you a fortune to stay in a place like this on your own, I just don’t see how you…”

  I smiled at him and eagerly began buttering another slice of toast.

  He gave up. He was finally starting to hate me.

  “Esmé, why do you always insist on acting so strange?”

  I shrugged. It felt good to be back on the wave. I would find ways to manoeuvre and keep my balance.

  “I’ll be fine. Just lend me three hundred bucks, will you?”

  More silence, more resentful stares.

  “Listen, I feel responsible for you. Actually, I am responsible for you and I am not going to—”

  “Oh, fuck that.”

  This is how it happened. Everything had been moving very slowly inside me for months. Then my life turned around over a plate of scrambled eggs.

  ———

  I took P. to the airstrip, with the air of a scrupulous secretary seeing off her boss. He had left me five hundred dollars in cash and had paid for an extra night at the camp. He asked me “But exactly how long do you think you’ll stay on?” about a million times.

  The fact that I didn’t have a plan, that I was no longer going to act like a tourist, obediently following the orders of his travel agent, that I was going to plunge into that unknown landscape on my own and disappear from the map, seemed to terrify him. I was escaping from the tyranny of schedules and vouchers, like some mad Russian anarchist.

  “Call me as soon as you get back. I will be very concerned until I have news from you. Actually, call me collect as soon as you are near a phone.”

  I gently patted him on the back, blew air kisses on both sides of his cheeks, waved goodbye with a smile and watched the six-seater lift him out of my life.

  I felt light and euphoric as the Land Rover drove me back to camp with the latest batch of Texans. I no longer minded them, even when they anxiously asked me whether I had seen any rhinos around.

  When I got back, Adam was sitting on one of the bar stools under the thatched roof of the mess tent. I didn’t notice him right away, because I was too busy checking my latest secret experiment. Was I, the guinea pig, going to freak out, lose my grip on my surfboard and crash into the waves, or was this the beginning of freedom? Monitoring myself closely for any sign of anxiety, I sat down at the bar and ordered a shot of tequila. I needed to feel warm. I figured the best way to go about it was to take one step at a time and check my body temperature every half hour.

  The night was closing in, filling the air with its different sounds like an orchestra pit before rehearsals, each animal carefully tuning in from a distance. The shrills of crickets, the hoarse frogs, the intermittent grunt of a hippo followed by its splash in the muddy water, the baboons playing in the trees. And in the distance the muffled moos of the wildebeests, thousands of them grazing on the plain, always heading towards greener grass like an army moving camp.

  I felt Adam’s eyes on me. We were the only two people left sitting at the bar; everyone else had moved to the tables and was busy wolfing down food. He smiled.

  “Not hungry?”

  “What? Me?…Oh…well, no…not really. Slowly getting drunk on Camino Real.”

  He chuckled.

  “Can I collaborate and buy you another?” His voice was like velvet in the semidark.

  “Yes. Thank you. My name is Esmé.”

  “Adam. What kind of name is Esmé?”

  He moved closer. He smelled good. I couldn’t make out his face very well in the dim light of the mess tent, but his presence felt nice.

  “Actually it’s Esmeralda. A rather pompous Italian name. But Esmé is also the name of an appalling little English girl in a J. D. Salinger short story…my parents loved Salinger.”

  “‘For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,’ is that right?”

  “You know that story?”

  “Absolutely. The American soldier and the little English girl in the tearoom. Then he goes mad, or something.”

  It surprised me that he had read it. I must have assumed everyone in Africa would be illiterate.

  Adam spoke gently to the barman in Swahili, which sounded like some kind of children’s secret language, full of ahs and ohs and uhs, a bit like Italian in the way it sang, but not as flamboyant. The barman laughed, as if responding to a good joke, and poured two Camino Reals.

  “Are you on holiday or what?” he asked.

  I smiled.

  “A good question. Actually I don’t know what I am on.”

  The radio in the back of the bar started its raucous unintelligible sounds, and Adam leapt out of his seat and disappeared behind the counter. I heard him speak more Swahili, dropping in a few English words, like “spark plugs,” “alternator” and “starter motor,” lots of “over,” and back he was on his stool, smiling.

  “That sounded very efficient,” I said in a friendly tone.

  “I need a spare part from Nairobi for my car, and hopefully they will fly it in tomorrow.”

  The barman lit a hurricane lamp and put it on the counter. I looked closely at Adam’s face. Now I could make out his sandy hair, the strong neck, and his beautiful lips. He looked straight into my eyes. His could have been green. He looked so unexpectedly handsome that I blushed: I was not prepared to be stared at by such an attractive man. I noticed his hands around the glass. Strong and flat. I quickly downed a second tequila.

  “I have a camp just a few miles up the river. My clients left today and I’m stuck until I can fix my car. This camp has a very good mechanic, someone who used to work for me. They stole him from us, but thank God he’s still around.”

  I suddenly felt too nervous to say anything.

  “So, Esmé”—I loved hearing my own name in that voice—“what are you doing in a place like this all by yourself?”

  I gave him a brief, confused account. I told him that I had no plans, that I didn’t know anything or anybody, that I was on some kind of mission but hadn’t figured out yet what it was. He didn’t look puzzled. We drank more tequilas.

  He told me a little about his family, how he was a second-generation Kenyan, how his Scottish grandfather had had a coffee estate upcountry, then his father had been a hunter in the Northern Frontier District, and how he was running luxury tented safaris for upmarket American tourists. He bombarded me with questions, as if I was some kind of exotic specimen he had never come across before, which pleased me. By tequila number four I had completely forgotten about my surfing ambitions; I had switched to automatic pilot and was smoothly gliding into the night in the company of this beautiful stranger.

  The next morning I woke up at dawn alone in my tent, my heart racing, trying desperately to disentangle myself from seriously morbid sexual dreams. It still looked pretty murky down in those depths where my unconscious was free to roam like a wild animal. I walked out of the tent and sat in front of the river watching the hippos still asleep on the bank, one on top of the other. Such a happy family. I wished I could have had a night like that. I drank cups of coffee until I had palpitations, carefully bathed and chose something nice to wear, then set out to look for Adam.

  I found him in the staff quarters of the camp, among a busy crowd of Africans wearing overalls, Zairean music screeching from a transistor, looking intently under the hood of a big four-wheel drive.

  “Good morning.” He smiled. His hair was still wet, and in the morning light his eyes definitely were a dark shade of green.

  “You look very nice in that dress, Esmeh.” The way he pronounced my name, his velvety deep voice lingering on it, made my heart stop for a split second. It surprised me that I had alr
eady become something he could call by name.

  “Do you mind if I watch you fix the car?”

  Adam laughed.

  “Not at all. You’re most welcome to watch me,” he said, as if I had made a sexual proposition. And he was absolutely right.

  I sat cross-legged on the ground and proceeded to dissect every muscle in his body, registering the shape of arms, calves, ankles, following every nerve, contraction, drop of sweat, as if I had never seen the body of a man before. I was hypnotized by his rhythm, the careful movement of his hands, screwing and unscrewing inside the hood, gently pulling out wires, then wiping the grease on his old khaki shorts; the gentle quick way he spoke with the guys who kept handing him tools like a team of doctors to a surgeon. Now and then he would look over at me and smile, as if making sure I was still there.

  I am remembering this scene so clearly because it was a key to my attraction to Adam. His body had such a vibrant vitality, everything seemed to be so coordinated, and yet in its simplest form. Adam’s shoulders were the archetype of shoulders, so were his legs, the veins in his forearms, the solid roundness of his kneecaps.

  There are bodies—the majority in fact—which are mute, their purpose merely to transport and protect their contents. Arms and legs have no life of their own, no hints of personality or secret disposition will be revealed by a close study. The main purpose of those bodies without a character is to conceal rather than to express.

  P. had a completely mute body, which took shape and sent a message only when wrapped in designer shirts or pastel cashmere sweaters. P.’s body made itself intelligible to the world only through basic fashion-coded signals, which had to be added, like software. Otherwise his body had never developed a language of its own.

  This body here, the body of this man fixing the car—I had to sit down in order to take it all in, it made my legs weak.

  It didn’t talk to me: it sang. Every tiny bone in his wrist, the shape of his fingertips—the whole thing was like a symphony.

  Suddenly I couldn’t bear watching that body another minute unless I could blend into its music. I felt that my anxiety would finally be sedated for good only when that body embraced me and took me in. I wasn’t thinking of having sex. I wanted this man I didn’t know to make love to me. I knew that if he did there would be fresh air and light at the other end of the tunnel. I knew it by looking at his body, and I knew it by the way he had pronounced my name. Obviously I was losing it: everything was getting out of control. But the determination I felt in my folly had started to please me.

  “Esmé, what are your plans? I mean, where do you think you will go after this?” He had lit a cigarette and come to smoke it next to me while the guys in overalls were welding an obscure piece of burnt metal.

  I felt a wave of heat rise up in me.

  “…Oh, well…I’m not sure. I should…have to… leave this place today.”

  “If you’d like you can come and stay at my camp.” He kept his eyes on the welding job, making sure his guys were not fucking up. A pretty concentrated guy, I thought.

  “I don’t know what to say. It sounds great, but…”

  “The place is empty, there are five big tents. And a fully stocked bar.”

  The five-tent bit meant that we had the choice of sleeping in separate tents. The full-bar bit probably meant that there was plenty of booze to make the choice we really wanted, which was to sleep in the same tent.

  “Well, thank you,” I answered noncommittally.

  There was a pause. I didn’t dare look at him and pretended to have taken a sudden interest in his spare parts.

  “Good,” I heard him say, “we are almost done with the car. We can leave whenever you’re ready. It’s only about forty-five minutes away.”

  I relaxed and felt the heat wave cool down. There was some hope after all at the end of this manic tunnel. At least I thought that was what my body was trying to tell me.

  I don’t remember much of my first day with Adam. I kept looking at him, rather than at the landscape which he was constantly pointing out. We drove in his car all the way up the escarpment, through the zebra and wildebeest migration.

  “It looks like Genesis, day four, when God decides to add the animals to the landscape,” I said. “I can’t believe you are called Adam, on top of it all.”

  He grinned with a naughty twinkle in his eyes.

  He never tired of stopping the car to point out a Thompson’s gazelle or a zebra, or even a tiny bird on a branch, with wonderfully colored wings and a very complicated name. He wasn’t class-prejudiced, unlike those avid tourists who only cared to see the big guys like rhinos, elephants and cats, as if the rest of the animal population, being in such abundance, was working-class, peons not worthy of attention. Adam loved everything with equal passion, pointed at the light through the acacias or the shape of the hills with such pride that it was as if he had personally designed them that morning. I pretended to show interest in all that he showed me, nodding but looking at his beautiful mouth, wondering when he was going to kiss me—after sunset?

  His camp looked like the real thing: everything was well done but in a rustic way, so that it felt like a camp and not a hotel in the bush. There was a big mess tent with a wooden table and safari chairs, kilim carpets and cushions scattered around. The tents were made of thick green canvas; mine had a huge double bed in it, a charming writing table and an old wicker chair on the verandah.

  What I remember of the rest of the afternoon gets a bit confused. I think he took me for a walk, along the river, we took a nap (separately), had a shower, and while the animal orchestra was tuning in right after sunset we headed for the bar. We sat around the fire with double gin and tonics, made our way through dinner with a few beers, had an after-dinner cognac around the fire, and finally, just when I thought I had no more endurance, when I was beginning to lose hope, bliss came in the form of his arms gently pulling me towards him.

  I waded into him slowly, as he embraced me, and took me into the tent. He undressed me slowly, wordlessly, and held me and looked at my naked body. When we touched and kissed and loved each other it was as if we had done this all our lives. There were no angles, no bones, no tension: every particle of our bodies was round and soft, hands and lips like feathers. We flowed and floated into each other, and I knew this was right. I felt I had finally started to reach shore.

  And then he said my name again, looking into my eyes.

  “Yes?” I asked, my voice broken.

  “I love the sound of it,” he whispered.

  I wanted more of that. I so desperately wanted more of that love that I closed my eyes and thought, Please be good, don’t fuck this one up. Please save your life.

  I didn’t.

  But then, how does anyone learn?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Why do I travel so much

  when I am so terribly frightened of travelling?

  SVEN LINDQUIST

  Nicole and I are driving around aimlessly in my car, our shopping on the back seat. I have managed to spend an astronomical sum of money on things I don’t need. I now own a new set of espresso cups imported from France, an Italian wine carafe, a very expensive piece of fabric from Rajasthan in case I feel like making new cushions, a string of old West African beads to add to the collection, another silver Ethiopian cross, Brie, Camembert, German rye bread and a case of South African wine. I’ve shopped the world and still I could go on. We have raided Yaya Center, the open town market, the Ethiopian shop and the new delicatessen on the Ngong road in only two and a half hours.

  Someone said that in Africa one becomes avid. You always want more, it’s never enough. Your house will always look tentative, unfinished, too rustic; your closet too empty, your car too old, your CD collection pathetic. You become obsessed with what you lack in life. It’s always another repair, another essential piece of furniture, another kitchen tool, another step up the ladder before you reach inner peace. Material possessions haunt you. It could be a Wonderbr
a or a chunk of real Stilton cheese; the nature of the object is irrelevant. The object becomes the mantra on which to meditate whenever you feel your identity is starting to fade away.

  We buy three-months-old British Vogues stolen from the post office. The street vendors on Uhuru Highway push the glossy magazines through the car window at rush hour. Another display of material necessities opens before our eyes while we quickly flick through the sticky pages.

  The feature on “Sensual Bathrooms” covers six whole pages. The list of items you need in order to fully enjoy your bath is specific and extremely expensive. Scented amber candles £10, Moroccan white cotton towels labeled “Hammam” £24, rose-petal bath salts £18, a stainless steel rack designed by Philip Starck £150.

  Anything will do, in order not to turn into one of those desperate expat housewives in jogging pants and sneakers, who long ago have lost hope and keep just one yellowing jar of Pond’s night cream on the bathroom shelf. Or those diplomats’ wives running around in pretty dresses and a string of pearls, attending yoga classes and parenting courses at the Lighthouse Center, lunching on yoghurt and alfalfa sprouts, desperately holding on to some kind of routine in order to make their lives here remotely comparable to the lives of their friends back home.

  Nicole and I firmly believe in frivolity as the ultimate form of rescue. Ours is survival consumerism, at times strictly voyeuristic, an unwritten rule we observe devoutly in order to keep our sanity.

  We pull into the Karen gas station, next to the bank and the post office.

  Karen got its name from Isak Dinesen, better known here as Karen Blixen. It was here that Baroness Blixen had her now internationally famous coffee farm. In her time, it took half a day by horseback to reach Nairobi from here. Today it’s only a thirty-minute drive to the center of town, and it has turned into a rather affluent, mainly white suburb, which still retains a slight bushy atmosphere.

  The Karen shopping centre is the epicentre of our lives. We come here every day to pick up the mail, bank, shop, meet a friend at the Horseman’s restaurant, buy flowers for dinner parties, check with the mechanic, order wood or paint at the hardware. This is where we find out what everyone else is up to. A constant flow of cars pulls in and out in front of the stores: station wagons loaded with dirty barefoot children just picked up from the Banda school, neurotic young mothers in shorts who have just bought provisions for a week; Kenya cowboys in sandals loading the back of the car with beer cases and ice blocks for the next safari; decrepit couples who have lived too long in the sun, rigid as embalmed terrapins, tipping the shop boy one shilling only, in memory of the good old days.