Rules of the Wild

by Francesca Marciano

  That night Adam and Iris sang their Northern Territory songlines, as if they both owned it by birthright, and on and on they went, until they had sung each hill, bridge, tree, each obscure corner of the African bush.

  It was beautiful, listening to them sing it.

  “Has she been your lover?” I whispered, enveloped in the darkness of the tent. Adam and I had just made love, and he was lying on his side, smoking a joint. A useless question; I already knew the answer.

  “Oh,” Adam said absentmindedly, “yes, when we were much younger.”

  There was a silence. He felt my uneasiness.

  “You know, she’s like a sister to me now.”

  I don’t know if I liked the idea of Iris’s being his sister. If anything, it made me feel even more threatened.

  “What am I to you?” I asked.

  I felt his hand on my temple, stroking my hair, as if he wanted to brush away my doubts. I guess I must have always looked so insecure, but then I never really knew what anything meant. Was I supposed to stay? Was that going to be my life from now on? The life of a museum keeper, as that reformed cokehead had sneeringly said?

  “Shhhh,” he said and kissed me lightly. “Why is it you are always looking for definitions? You’re only satisfied when you’re given a label you can stick onto things.”

  He was right. I needed words, believed in them.

  “I love you,” he said, “it’s as simple as that.”

  He turned back to put out the joint and the kerosene lamp.

  “Now shut up,” he said.

  I smiled in the dark as he pulled me closer and wrapped his arms around me from behind. I felt his warm hand on my belly and his breath on my neck.

  No woman could wish for more. Right?

  But I did.

  You see, all my life I had been singing different songlines from the ones Iris and Adam had been singing.

  In my European Dreamtime there had been no rocks or mountains or trees to be sung, in fact nothing visible at all. I had been wandering aimlessly from one state of mind to the next, designing such an abstract world that now I was completely lost. I desperately wanted my exile to be over: but the minute I thought I had found peace, a home at last, something new would happen and I would panic again. There didn’t seem any feeling of comfort, any rest. Why?

  I had lost people all my life: my mother, my father, and now even my brother had begun to fade away. I had grown so used to the concept of losing people that I had become an expert at cutting ties quickly in order to minimize the pain. I had learned never to count on anyone who said they loved me: it felt like a bad investment. I simply ignored it, as if their love was something which was here today but could very well be gone tomorrow.

  Yet I had been blessed.

  That man Leonardo drew in the circle, the perfect specimen. He had no hidden agenda, and now he was mine and he was going to look after me. The gods had sent him; how could I not see it?

  But I didn’t.

  I kept torturing myself, thinking it wouldn’t last. My diabolical mind was already spinning at a thousand miles a minute, desperate and defensive, trying to figure out ways to survive without him in this foreign land. It was totally unconscious: like biting one’s nails, the minute you realise what you are doing, you are already bleeding.

  What can I say? Some brains come with fear built in.

  In retrospect I see how Iris’s apparition that day triggered most of what happened later. She obviously wasn’t aware of this then, and afterwards she never had the time to find out. I wouldn’t have told her anyway.

  That night by the fire, as they were singing the land where they had grown up, I saw exactly what Adam was going to confirm to me later.

  They were brother and sister, born from the same land. They belonged there, Africa was in their blood.

  I was a stranger and would always be.

  The next morning, as I stepped out of my tent at seven I saw Iris, who had been pottering around since sunrise, her hair glistening from the bush shower and smelling of shampoo, a steamy mug of coffee on the hood of her car. She was getting ready to go with her two guardian angels.

  “Here,” she said gently. “I want you to wear this.”

  She put a Samburu beaded bracelet around my wrist.

  “I’m sure I’ll see you back in Nairobi…but for the time being, keep it. A small memento. I am really glad to have met you at last.”

  “Thank you.” Her kindness had taken me by surprise. “That’s really sweet of you.”

  I knew the bracelet was a distinct sign of friendship in Iris’s language. Her gesture had been genuine, I could tell. I felt bad for having been suspicious of her earlier; it made me feel ungenerous and petty. I knew she wasn’t trying to manipulate me or control me. She hadn’t come all the way here just to prove a point or to reaffirm her ownership of Adam. That was just my paranoia. I wanted to like her now, but I couldn’t just press a button and do it, so I smiled at her as brightly as I was capable of. I watched her as she carefully poured water into her rusty radiator, the early-morning sun shining through the cascade of her golden hair.

  “Why don’t you stay here another day?” I said. Now it was my turn to make her feel welcome.

  “Thanks, but I want to get back now. I have to get on the phone, to the bank, into the bathtub. You know, all those great things you can do in the civilized world.” She smiled at me. “Having spent nearly two months in the bush I’m quite looking forward to an urban safari, if you know what I mean.”

  I thought she meant sex. Well, why not, I couldn’t help thinking, she looked like she wouldn’t have any problem scoring that.

  “Plus I am dying to develop the pictures. My entire future is inside here.”She gently patted her big camera bag.

  I knew from her previous book that her work would be impressive. Her problem was that she looked too good to be true. Her looks were her commodity and her cross, I guess. Meanwhile all the camp staff had come to the car to say goodbye to her. She spoke to them in Swahili and Samburu, tipped each one generously, cracking jokes which had them in stitches. Then she jumped in the Land Rover and drove off in a cloud of dust.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  To live in Africa you must know

  what it’s like to die in Africa.

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  Living off Ferdinando’s rights suddenly seemed wrong.

  Besides the money wasn’t nearly enough, as not many Americans seemed to be interested in my father’s poetry.

  So, after six months out in the bush I realized it was time to go back to Nairobi and look for a job. I needed something to do which would give me a purpose for staying.

  Life at the camp had been thrilling. By now I too knew how to drive a bulky car across a lugga, change a tire with a high lift jack, bake bread on a campfire, recognize the track of most animals. I had learned not to flinch if I met a snake on my path or if a bat flew in my face in the dark. I had mastered enough Swahili to have the guys laugh at my jokes around the fire. Africa had gotten under my skin. But now I had to find something to do which was entirely mine.

  While Adam came and went with clients, I settled myself in his house in Langata, a stone cottage on a green slope facing the Ngong hills. It was a cosy little house; I liked the way the dark wood floor planks creaked under my feet, I loved the warmth of the fireplace in the sitting room after sunset, the whiteness of our big four-poster bed. Wilson and Alice welcomed me shyly and looked after me with a gentleness I had never known.

  I knew I had become way too dependent on Adam. So now, even though I missed him when he wasn’t around, I felt a strange excitement waking up in our bed alone and having the whole day to myself.

  I had time now to put my thoughts into a broader perspective. I was beginning to have a vision of what living in Africa really meant. What had I seen so far?

  I had seen whites living in Africa, bathing in its beauty and its wilderness. I had seen Africans—but only as perceived by whites—ei
ther proud and noble warriors of vanishing tribes, or faithful servants who looked after their masters with care. And now I started asking myself if what I had seen so far was all there was.

  I knew there must be another side to life here, but I didn’t know how to unveil it on my own. Any fool could tell it was there, yet it was so difficult to pin down. Nobody I had met so far seemed to want to talk about this hidden thing.

  I felt Nicole knew what it was—we are hostages to beauty, she had said—but she had chosen to be sarcastic about it rather than serious.

  Looking back, I see how all this had been clear to me from the very beginning; I had simply pretended not to see it. An inner voice kept whispering “Don’t spoil it yet, just enjoy it the way it is…”

  But on my own in Nairobi, without Adam and with time on my hands, the picture was finally coming into focus.

  That’s when I started to really see the Africans.

  The Africans I was looking at now were no longer the noble warriors of the North, adorned in beads and ostrich feathers, holding long spears in their hands. What I saw now, as I passed them on the road, were the average Kenyans in tattered Western clothes: the old beggars on the corner of Kaunda street, the glue-sniffing urchins across from the New Stanley Hotel who would force their bony hands through the car window asking for a shilling, the black middle class who took their lunch break at La Patisserie, the gas station attendants in spotless overalls, the smiling maids in starched uniforms who served tea in white people’s houses, the slow herd of exhausted workmen who walked back home at dusk from the workshops or the factory, covered with grease and dust.

  Looking at them I couldn’t help thinking of Ferdinando and of his principles. I knew he wouldn’t have approved of me. How could I possibly live in the third world, enjoying my privileges as a white person, without taking the time to look around and see what was going on? What had the Africans been doing while I was on safari? What did I know about how they struggled? But most of all: Where the hell were they? Why had we never crossed each other’s paths?

  I remember once driving Wilson to the hospital where his wife had just had a baby. He looked so different without the uniform he wore in the house. In his everyday clothes, a baseball cap and blue jeans, I hardly recognised him. I must have assumed Wilson was as old-fashioned as the uniform he had to wear. It surprised me that he should carry a Walkman and that he listened to rap.

  “How old are you, Wilson?” I asked him. And suddenly felt ashamed not to have asked the question earlier.

  “Twenty-eight, Memsahab.”

  Yes, maybe that was the key. The combination of rap music and Memsahab. Maybe that was what I was failing to understand.

  I soon realised that to have an opinion about blacks was a career in itself. Nairobi was throbbing with third world specialists: UN people—UNICEF, UNDP, UNESCO—AMREF, missionaries, NGOs of all kinds, pale men in white short-sleeved shirts who worked for the World Bank. Everyone had a theory, everyone was looking for funds or running a project. The wars in neighbouring Somalia and Sudan had pushed thousands of refugees over the Kenyan borders. Rwanda was about to explode. AIDS was thriving. The Kenyan economy had collapsed. Experts were flocking in every day.

  I didn’t know where to start, yet I wanted to know the answer to a very simple question. Something so elementary, you couldn’t just ask around: How does a white person live in a black country? And most of all: Where do we stand in relation to one another? I wanted someone to explain the contradictions, to show me the obstacles, to come up with the answer. But nobody did. Everyone around me seemed to plainly ignore the issue.

  I think they avoided it for a very simple reason.

  Nairobi didn’t have a Soweto, you see. There wasn’t a history of racial tension in Kenya. There were no more whites in parliament who could be held responsible for overt injustices towards the Africans. So what was the point of crucifying ourselves, when officially we weren’t doing anything wrong and not even the blacks were complaining?

  Nevertheless whites, within the boundaries of their well-guarded homes, had kept their colonial attitudes intact towards the Africans. Newcomers proved very good at picking them up immediately, as if they had been used to having African servants all their life, whereas back in Europe they probably couldn’t even afford a cleaning lady two hours a week. It’s amazing how little time it takes for whites to learn how to bully Africans. Once they realise nobody is going to accuse them of wrongdoing, the minute they understand nobody here has ever even heard the expression “politically correct,” even the most liberal white turns into a slave master in a matter of days. Whites will forget the meaning of the word “overtime,” will refuse advances of a few hundred shillings, will raise their voices and lose their tempers for futile reasons, and sack their staff at whim.

  That’s what intrigued me. I wasn’t an expert, I had no means of coming up with a sociopolitical analysis, yet I wanted to understand why we all behaved like that.

  Expats spoke about Africans all the time: referring to the mechanic who was fixing their car, or to the middleman they were bribing in order to get a work permit, they would shake their heads:

  “You can’t really trust them. They say they’ll do it by tomorrow but they won’t, unless you’re prepared to sit there and make sure they do it.”

  They would say of the police officer who had come to investigate the theft of their camera, and of the cook who had been with them for years, who had become their prime suspect:

  “They always lie, you should never believe a word they say.”

  All Africans were either liars or thieves if they had no money, or were corrupt and unscrupulous if slightly ahead on the social scale.

  Maybe the mistrust was necessary to mitigate the guilt. The more you felt cheated by them the less you felt guilty for taking advantage. I don’t know, but it seemed wrong to live with such lack of confidence in each other.

  In the last few years Nairobi had become increasingly dangerous. At night people had to watch out while driving home in their new cars. As they flashed the headlights at the gate to signal the askari to open, armed gangs would be waiting for them, pointing the guns to their temples. Sometimes, if they didn’t get what they wanted, they left the driver dead on the tarmac as they drove off in the brand-new Pajero. Gangs of armed robbers would sneak into the white man’s house in Muthaiga at night, club him and his wife until they were unconscious, and steal their money, stereo, television. On the Mombasa-Nairobi road if a tourist minibus had a flat, even in broad daylight, very likely a small gang of hungry youngsters would appear from behind the shrubs at the side of the road and clean the tourists out, brandishing their rusty knives. You constantly had to watch out for thieves, there was nothing too old or too used for a hungry African. Not even your worn-out spare tire was safe in the trunk. People kept guns in the house and bragged that they would shoot anything that moved if a noise woke them up in the middle of the night.

  Security was a subject which never went out of fashion at white people’s dinner tables.

  “I’m not surprised. Africans have nothing—no jobs, no running water, no electricity; they live in mud huts and have five, six children and nothing to eat. They could feed their family for two weeks just with the contents of our fridge,” I said with impetus one evening while everyone fell silent around the table. “I mean, why should we expect to live in peace in a place with such disparities? They have nothing and we always have more than we need. We would do exactly the same thing if we were in their place. We just happen to be on the right side of the barricade, you see.”

  “And which side might that be, mind you?” someone at the end of the table asked with a vein of sarcasm.

  “Well, the side that doesn’t need to steal.”

  I had been invited to dinner at Nena and Peter’s. It was my first outing to the Elephant Man’s house; Adam was away and I wanted to make a good impression. But somehow the conversation had taken a dangerous turn and I was speaking too im
pulsively. A man who looked like a butcher, an Argentinian polo champion, I was told, had just described how he had managed to shoot two robbers in the legs and deliver them to the police station in his pickup truck, tied up with rope, like pigs to the slaughterhouse. The pleasure which he exuded as he described how he had wounded them, and the way he sneered recalling the fear in their eyes once he had them tied up with their wrists locked behind their backs and thrown in the back of the pickup, made my blood boil.

  “They thought I was going to dump them in the ditch and shoot them dead, the bastards.” He chuckled. “And they were lucky I didn’t.”

  I still knew nothing about the rules of an ex–white colony. I had been brought up in a country where nobody would dream of touching on the subject of guns at a dinner table. Nobody I knew had ever even owned one, let alone used it.

  I went on ranting, since everyone was now looking at me.

  “I don’t know, I couldn’t sleep next to a gun. It’s just one of those things: you use a gun, next thing you know the really bad guys will come because they want your gun. And they will use it on you.”

  “If you had children in the house and feared for their lives, then you would sleep next to a gun, believe me, dear,” said Peter, the Elephant Man, who was certainly neither a racist nor a fascist, and to whom I had looked for moral support for my peaceful argument.

  No, I didn’t have children who slept under the net in Winnie the Pooh flannel pyjamas. Therefore I had no right to inflict my liberal theories on people who had to protect innocent lives on the Dark Continent.

  Trying to understand Africa is like being sucked into a black hole. And the more one wants to search into that darkness, the less one is likely to come out of it at the other end. But, as there is no other end, people learn to stay away from it.

  When I went back to the house that night and flashed the headlights at my gate, I caught myself looking anxiously in the rearview mirror. For the first time it struck me that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to drive so late at night on my own. Next time I better take an askari with me, I thought.