I lie in bed, listening to the sounds of the house. Someone is taking a shower upstairs, Juma is setting the table for breakfast.
I try to think about last night’s dinner party, and to analyze the reason why I hated every minute of it. It isn’t because of Claire; it is because of me. There is something I deeply dislike about myself now, of which I had never been aware before. I have become bitter.
If there is one thing I am not grateful to Ferdinando for, it is having inherited his talent for opening people up and pinning them down with the heartlessness of an entomologist. My father, though, had his contradictions: he said he expected the most from people, but he contented himself with much less in order not to be alone. Thus, even if he had been tearing someone apart, he was still desperate to have dinner with them that night. His weakness was that he always needed an audience.
But whereas he was able to compensate his cynicism with his poetry, me, the fool, I merely learned to mimic his heartlessness without anything else with which to counterbalance it. Now all my toys lie broken on the floor and I’m left with nothing to play with. I wish I could go back to the way I felt before, but unfortunately I’ve been left with no instructions.
The children open the door of the room and storm in.
“Esmé, look, we have a rabbit!”
“Oh let me see…come here, show me.”
Toby and Natasha climb up onto my bed followed by the dog, holding a furry rabbit in their tiny hands.
“Does it have a name?”
“Ginger,” says Natasha, gravely. “Do you want to hold it?”
“Of course, thank you. Oh…it feels so sweet…”
“If you want you can hold it by the ears,” Toby adds, and proceeds to show me.
They look at me seriously, holding the rabbit, half naked and dirty like angels who have been too long in the sun.
“Come, let’s all get under the blankets, it’s so cold. We can make room for everyone…Ginger will like it a lot.”
I manage to convince them to pretend we are inside a tent in the bush, and we all squeeze together under the blankets, dog and rabbit included. I kiss them and hold them tight, feeling the warmth of their tiny bodies, smelling the sweetness of their sleep. They giggle and kick, chubby arms and legs all over me, until I feel warm enough and I have tears in my eyes.
I keep crying throughout breakfast, it’s unstoppable, tears just keep rolling down onto my buttered toast. I’m not sobbing or making any sort of noise, I’m crying quietly, in what I hope is a rather dignified way. Nena looks at me, says nothing and keeps passing me butter, coffee, sugar, more toast. Toby and Natasha look at me frozen while the rabbit happily hops on the table. Even Juma looks at me and sighs. Thank God at least Peter has gone to the office.
Nena passes me a paper napkin.
“Why is she crying?” asks Natasha in a frightened whisper.
“Shhh, now you and Toby take Ginger out in the garden…put on your shoes…hurry.”
The children keep looking at me. Toby grabs the rabbit.
“Do you want to hold it?”
“No thank you, darling, it’s okay…” I blow my nose. “You go out and play with him.”
Nena and I remain silent. She is not going to ask me anything; that is her way of letting me know she knows perfectly well what’s going on.
“One cannot always be more clever than pain, you know,” I say to her after a while. “At some point you just have to give in…”
She nods and smiles in a strange way, looking out the window.
She seems to know exactly what I am talking about, and after all why shouldn’t she—beautiful Nena with the Beautiful Children, in the Charming House with the Wonderful Husband—Nena who we all assume is not allowed to feel unhappy ever again.
It didn’t use to be like this. This place seemed the closest thing to Paradise. I should make an effort, try to remember that time, I keep telling myself while I drive home in the drizzle on the Magadi road.
Suddenly it seems so pointless to remember anything. Isn’t happiness such an uninteresting feeling, so dull to describe, once you are in pain?
CHAPTER SIX
For some the unfamiliar holds
the promise of love, of perfection.
VIKRAM CHANDRA
When I first moved to Africa to live with Adam I was astonished to discover what a great deal of fascination lies in the realm of physical objects, and what an achievement it is to obtain control over them.
In the first world I had never paid any attention to the physical mechanisms which held my life together. It never occurred to me to figure out how the flush of a toilet worked, which secret route a gas pipe actually took, what a spark plug’s purpose was. Their intrinsic nature had never concerned me, I couldn’t see any connection between a screw and a wire, a spring and a lever, a fuse and a spark: to me the inner life of mechanical objects was as abstract as a cubist painting. Mechanical objects simply worked, and when they ceased to work they were either mended by expensive specialists or thrown away and replaced.
In Kenya I learned that this was totally unrealistic. Africa is the motherland of mechanical life: in order to survive here you have to be in control of all the components which will allow you to get from A to B. If one little mechanism breaks down you have to be able to repair it. This is a place where the word “spare” has the same ring as “caviar.”
Forget improvements; life here is strictly about maintenance.
Your daily task is merely to keep things the way they are, and make sure decay doesn’t set in. Keep the termites away from the roof poles, keep the rust off your car body, keep your skin away from the sun, make sure nothing rots, cracks or comes undone.
How to fix things: that’s basically what life is all about here, a constant flow of energy aimed at preventing oneself from getting stuck again. This realization put me in a state of panic. I realized I wasn’t at all in control of the dynamics, and once more, my intellectual abilities were going to be worth zero. In other words I was stuck from the word go and totally dependent on Adam.
To begin with, I didn’t even know how to drive his car. The old Toyota Landcruiser looked to me like a gigantic hostile hound that would growl at me in the absence of its master. The mere possibility of getting a puncture and having to change a tire on my own gave me cold sweats. It was too big, too bulky, too masculine for me to master.
That was when I started to wonder what kind of women lived in this country, and how they managed. If I could just spot them and study how they behaved I might be able to learn the knack as well.
Whenever I followed Adam into the Karen hardware store, I saw him greet and kiss white girls from the neighbourhood. They leaned close to one another on the counter exchanging opinions on spanners, bolts and pipes. I felt shy and awkward. I was a newcomer and an absolute beginner and therefore I always kept two steps behind. I knew I smelled like a novice. The girls in the hardware store checked me out thoroughly and I scrutinized them with an equal amount of interest: after all, they were my future role models. Some of these girls were tough Kenya Cowgirls, all baggy shorts, strong calves and no makeup. The prospect of ending up with the same dry dykey look wasn’t appealing, but the amazing thing was that in spite of that, I still longed to emulate them, such was my yearning for competence.
It turned out that there was another breed of women, two of whom I spotted in the hardware store. These were incredibly attractive, wore Ethiopian silver bangles, old-fashioned silk dresses and sandals, had a throaty laugh and a dry sense of humour. These women spoke to Adam about drainage and electric fences, while firmly rejecting wrong-size nails and carefully selecting wood planks in fluent Swahili. They were hardware shopping with the attitude they might have had having lunch with a rock star in a trendy restaurant. I found them terribly sexy and wished to learn their language. They were of course Nicole and Nena.
Right from the start there wasn’t a trace of antagonism between us. We looked at each other and i
nstantly realized we were kin. A tribe of women who have come to live in Africa merely by coincidence. We had no inbred vocation for this kind of life.
“Do you paint?”I asked Nicole, pointing at the canvas stretchers one of the guys was loading on her roof rack in the car park.
“Yes…” She smiled and took a good look at me. “Please come around. Adam can tell you where my house is.”
I liked the way she invited me to come on my own, leaving Adam only the task of showing me how to reach her. Nena smiled. I noticed she was wearing a very dark lipstick which matched her nail polish. Rouge Noir by Chanel. Oh no, these two had not been left behind one bit.
“Will you stay for some time?” Nena asked. “We’re desperate to make new friends here, you know.”
They didn’t look desperate at all to me; still, it was good to hear that they might enjoy my company.
I had been back in Kenya for about a month, and had spent most of my time following Adam around, attempting to figure out my new life. I was starting to lose hope, but that encounter had been a crucial turning point. Those two women were the first specimens of my own breed that I had come across so far. I figured that if they had survived the climate and the hardships, I had some hope of doing the same. I watched them climb up into the battered four-wheel drive and reverse skillfully out of the parking lot.
Yes, I was going to stay and learn how to be like them.
The one thing one can’t help noticing about whites living in Kenya is how everyone is constantly busy working at their “African pedigree,” careful never to let others perceive that they are making the slightest effort to improve their skills. That’s the trick: it must look like it’s imprinted in your DNA. Everything you do here has to look as if you were simply born with it, whether it’s speaking fluent Masai, killing birds with a catapult or roping a rhino with a lasso.
When I first arrived everyone I met seemed to be from Central Casting: right car, right clothes, wonderfully adventurous. It all looked perfectly natural to me: the romanticism seemed congenital, the style innate. It seemed as if the players were totally unaware of their glamour and only the eyes of the outsider could detect it.
“I guess one could say we’re all held hostage here,” Nicole said the first time I went to see her. She shrugged. “Hostages to beauty.”
We were having tea on her verandah. It was cluttered with brushes and paint cans, seashells and driftwood, ferns hanging in pots from the rafters. It smelled of firewood and smoke, it looked poetic and bohemian, her canvases piled against the wall, an old kilim faded by the sun. We were drinking ginger tea out of a small Chinese teapot in little cracked cups.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that we are all stuck here because this place makes us look good. Nobody could live like this and have such a good time for the same amount of money anywhere else in the world.”
She pointed out her shamba boy, kneeling over the flower beds.
“We have servants, we don’t pay taxes, we go to lots of dinner parties, we play explorers over the weekend, we look healthy and tanned all year round and we can always blame it on the Africans when things are not running smoothly. It’s such a bargain!”
“Well…yes, but I suppose there’s more to it than that…”
“Of course there is. But as Hunter always says, here one does a lot of editing. You know, cutting out all the ugly shots and keeping only the good stuff in. And I think he’s totally right.”
“Who is Hunter?”
“Hunter Reed…he writes for the Independent. He was born here but has only recently come back from England as their East African correspondent. You should meet him, you’d really like him. He has an incredible brain. Which is a bit of a rarity here, if you know what I mean.”
That conversation worried me. I wasn’t ready yet to analyse why whites in Africa lived in such denial. It surprised me that Nicole had given it so much thought: since it had been the very absence of intellectual criticism that had attracted me here in the first place, I naively expected everyone else to feel the same way.
That night I clung to Adam’s body. He felt strong and hard like a tree. No, I wasn’t yearning for incredible brains. I was yearning for something much simpler than that: a way to dig a hole in the ground where I could put my young roots, so that they would grow just enough to bind me to the rich African soil.
Adam’s was a luxury camp. The logistics of providing food, adequate shelter, loo and hot shower in the middle of the bush require a lot of planning ahead and expenses. If you expect to have ice in your gin and tonic after sunset you have to pay for all the work that lies behind it. Adam had an office in town, where everything was organised by a small but very efficient group of people. They handled bookings, supplies and any other problem that might unexpectedly arise in the bush. The radio always crackled in the background, while the guys back at the camp would list their weekly requirements: a new distributor cap for the Toyota, coffee mugs, Omo powder, hurricane lamps, wax, matches, rope, towels, silverware and whatnot.
Adam picked up the clients at the airport, dropped them at the Norfolk Hotel to let them sleep off their jet lag and then drove them to camp the next day. He moved the camp around, according to the season and the clients’ requirements, but his favourite area was in the north, on the Ewaso Nyiro River, in the land of the Samburu tribe.
The clients were mostly Americans, and were always loaded. They all looked the same when they got off the plane, wearing incongruous hats, gold wristwatches, designer shades. The women had either the ferocious look of the peroxide blonde who hates to age, the glacial stare of the younger mistress or the deadly glare of the resentful wife. The men were graying, gaining weight, losing power. All they had left to impress others with was their money, so they went on very expensive holidays.
This type of client usually came from the Midwest or the South, spoke with a nasal drawl, and insisted on talking to the Samburu with that thick accent, never for a second conceiving the possibility there could be humans on the planet who didn’t speak English. They were demanding and irritable if things didn’t run as smoothly as in a five-star hotel. There was nothing attractive or sympathetic about them.
There were younger couples too. Californian record or film producers, New York stockbrokers, Miami real estate kings who had made their fortune in the eighties, had snorted masses of Bolivian coke and had now joined the New Age. They had quit smoking, drinking and drugs and had become religious about their body maintenance. Their girlfriends usually bordered on the anorexic, filled their Prada bags with expensive makeup, were determined not to expose their white bodies to the risk of skin cancer, and kept the latest holistic best-seller by their bedside table.
This latter category of clients fell inevitably into the “Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” syndrome. The girlfriends were always pleasantly surprised when they met Adam at the airport. He was so much more attractive than they had expected: such an added bonus to the exotic adventure. I could see it coming as soon as they stepped into camp. After they had spent barely forty-eight hours in each other’s company, the girl would already be ignoring her boyfriend, and addressing Adam with all sorts of questions.
“What kind of snakes live around here? Are they deadly? Are these Masai? Samburu? Do you speak their language?”
When Adam introduced me as his girlfriend I could see a hint of disappointment in their eyes as they shook my hand.
We would dine together in the mess tent, after a round of drinks next to the fire. By the third or fourth day they would usually give up mineral water and have some booze, which loosened them up a bit—not always with positive results.
Usually at this stage the women had become openly flirtatious with Adam. He had turned into the sexiest male icon they had seen outside of Hollywood. By now he had told them what to do in the remote possibility that an elephant attempted to charge. He had reassured them that it was technically impossible for a lion to attack them inside the car. He h
ad patiently explained to them which were the dangerous snakes and how it was possible to prevent the poison from reaching their bloodstream.
So far their boyfriends/husbands had been responsible for many crucial aspects of their life: their social status, their bank account, the interior decoration of the new home. But now this young, handsome man they hardly knew, was in charge of their survival.
Now, that’s very sexy. Africa is about danger, about darkness, about fearing the possibility of one’s death. And as we all know, nothing is as erotic as fear.
Actually nobody should know this better than me: I had capitulated to Adam’s manliness long before these women had, but I still liked to delude myself that I had done it with more style.
“The roaring of that lion today…Oh my God…I will never ever forget it!” the Anorexic Beauty would recall with a sigh, shaking the ice in her drink and looking at Adam in search of some kind of cosmic confirmation. “I thought…wow… this is really powerful…you hear that sound and you realise we are really worth nothing on this planet…Do you know what I mean?”
Usually the men had started to sulk by then. This wasn’t exactly what they had had in mind when they decided to take Beauty on an African safari. The whole idea of the trip was to make them look romantic and macho and glamorous. Instead they realised they were paying a lot of money for this guy to make them look inept.
“How can you live here?” the ex–New York cokehead, now living a healthier and wealthier life in L.A., asked me.
It was early in the morning and the two of us were sitting at the table under the mess tent. He had decided to skip the six o’clock game drive and work on his laptop instead. I think he needed to reestablish his authority by letting the Hong Kong stock market play its role versus nature. He sounded aggressive and was obviously in a ghastly mood. Earlier I had watched him eat his breakfast with an uncanny rapacity. I don’t think he was getting laid as much as he had been planning to.
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