Rules of the Wild

by Francesca Marciano

  “Can I make a phone call?” I ask. I want Nicole to come and pick me up.

  “Sorry, but the phone is down today.”

  “Okay, I’ll run to the box then.”

  “The whole area is down. Since yesterday.”

  He tries to start the car, shouting orders to the spanner boy, who is holding the battery cable, but nothing happens. Suddenly the main power goes off and we fall into darkness.

  “Now what?” I ask, with a hint of irritation.

  “Now we wait for the power to come back,” says Kilonzo somewhere in the dark.

  Someone lights a kerosene lamp.

  “How long will that take?” My depression is giving way to anger, the anger I know so well, when everything decides to die on you and you are stuck again, back in the deep African mud.

  “Oh come on, Esmé, how can I know? It could be one hour, four hours, the whole day.” I make him out in the dim light of the lamp: he has just lit a cigarette and is smiling as usual. “They are rationing.”

  “I can’t bear another minute of this! How can people work like this? Don’t they lose their business?” I think I am screaming. Kilonzo pours himself some tea and keeps smiling at my impatience, which he has learned to recognize. He senses it each time I ask him to fix my car with the same amount of anxiety I would have as if I was asking him to fix my life, and to fix it for good.

  “How is it possible to send a fax, to operate a computer? Do you realize that this whole place shuts down kabisa? It’s totally ridiculous! Tell me, how can one get any work done?”

  “It is not possible, of course,” he says with his polite African inflection, “but it doesn’t help to get upset about it.”

  “Yeah, sure; I just don’t have that kind of personality, I guess,” I say, furiously dragging on my cigarette.

  “Then I’ll tell you a story about your kind of personality,” says Kilonzo with a grin. I can see his white teeth shine in the dark. “When I had a shamba near Nakuru, we had a neighbour, a mzungu from Germany. He was always complaining that this didn’t work and that didn’t work, and sometimes I used to go and fix his pickup or the water pump, but you know in those days it was more difficult to get hold of spares, and the road was really bad, so sometimes things broke and stayed broken a long time. The mzungu was always in a very bad mood and blaming others for it; he always complained that his workers didn’t take proper care of things and that anything brand-new he gave them to use was in pieces in a matter of days. So one day he was building something or making a small repair, and he went to the hardware in Nakuru town and bought a red bucket. A red plastic bucket, okay? He was very happy with it and gave it to his workers, right? That evening he went back to check the day’s work and he found that the workers had destroyed the new red bucket.”

  “How did they do that? It’s not easy to destroy a plastic bucket…”

  “That’s exactly the point, you see? He came to see me, holding the bucket in his hand. ‘You tell me, how is this possible?’ he kept asking me, and he was nearly choking, that’s how furious he was.” Kilonzo laughs and slaps his leg with his hand. “‘I am leaving this country, I cannot live in a place like this!’ Oh my God, you should have seen him! And he did that. He packed up all his things that very same day, he moved out and never ever came back.”

  Kilonzo is laughing so hard he has to take off his glasses and wipe his eyes with the back of his hand, his fat body shaking.

  “Oh, no,” I say, laughing with him. “The bucket was the last straw!”

  “Yes! He left everything because of the plastic bucket! So my wife and I, whenever we’ve had a difficult day, and things didn’t go the way they were supposed to, we say we had ‘a red bucket day.’ You get the point?”

  “Absolutely. That’s what I am having today. A totally red bucket day.”

  Kilonzo cackles approvingly.

  “Good! Now you don’t need to leave the country, you see? You just get yourself a new red bucket! It’s a lot easier than packing everything and starting a new life, isn’t it?”

  “Right. But I don’t need a red bucket, so what is it I need to get?” I ask Kilonzo with the hopefulness of a disciple to his guru.

  “Oh well…I’ll have Ndegwa give you a lift to the Lenana Forest shops, you go to the hairdresser for a couple of hours, do something new to your hair and read some ladies’ magazines, so you relax a bit. You get yourself something nice to eat as well. By the time you are finished the car will be ready and you’ll be a happy woman again.”

  I follow his advice and I let Ndegwa drive me to Heather’s, the Karen beauty salon. I order a sandwich from the delicatessen next door, and I let Sheila, a plain blonde with a Cockney accent, cut my hair. I gulp down my taramasalata and cheese sandwich while devouring old issues of Hello, where I find out what everyone was wearing at the Academy Awards, learn that Jerry Hall and Mick are still not getting along, and that Pavarotti is on a diet. Sheila tells me that she has just come back from UK and the haircut she’s giving me is the latest. I close my eyes, falling back into the familiar world of girls’ chitchat, exhilarated by the smell of hair dye, nail polish and glossy magazines, the world where every woman feels at home no matter how far from home she is, and I finally relax just as Kilonzo predicted.

  Ndegwa is still waiting for me outside Heather’s when I come out, ready to drive me back to the shop. This is the only country in the world where your mechanic is willing to drive you to the hairdresser in order to relieve your tension. The absurdity of it all makes me smile again. At Kilonzo’s the power is back on and my car is ready to go. It wasn’t the pistons after all, so the bill is not as bad as I feared. What started out as a red bucket day is turning into an African success.

  “I told you: never jump to conclusions,” Kilonzo says, patting the hood. “You love drama too much, Esmé!”

  Yes I do, Mr Kilonzo, I think as I drive out of his shop, it must be the Italian genes or something.

  It keeps drizzling and it’s damp and grey. I stop to buy firewood on the side of the road and, as the guys load the logs in the back of the car, I smell damp wood, smoke and wet soil, the pungent aroma which always remind me of my life here.

  This wintery weather actually suits my mood, it makes me feel self-indulgent and cold. Now I can finally light a fire, lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling, laying out all the bits and pieces, all the memorable scenes, the fragments of conversations and the turning points, everything I can recall—like a child taking all the toys out of the box just to make sure he still owns them—all that has been happening without any apparent order or reason but which nevertheless has ended up shaping my life here. I am now the result of all these mechanical actions, which at the time didn’t seem to be taking me anywhere in particular, but which in actual fact have dragged me into a treacherous territory from which I no longer know how to escape.

  I didn’t see Hunter again for a long time. He never came to look at Ferdinando’s photograph. At first I was slightly disappointed—I hadn’t expected to be ignored like that—but after a few days I actually forgot all about Hunter Reed. Or at least I thought I had.

  Weeks passed, and around Easter the dry weather suddenly gave way to the rains. Soon after that Adam closed down the camp for the season and came home. The first rain announced itself with distant thunder one morning, and it was such a relief, after months of scorching heat and dust, to see it dancing and bouncing on the dry leaves of the garden. Everything started to breathe and come alive, thanks to the moisture. After that first day the rain never stopped and kept furiously pounding on the mabati roof, drenching us mercilessly every time we ran from the verandah into the car. All of Langata had turned into a giant mud puddle.

  In the evening the rain would stop and in the stillness of the night bullfrogs started croaking incessantly. There were frogs everywhere: black and orange ones which lived inside the pipes and peeped from the washbasin’s drain hole while I brushed my teeth in the morning.

  Adam could
n’t stop moving even under these floods: he was either repairing or welding something in the workshop in the back of the plot, running to get a spare somewhere in the industrial area, building a fence or having new tents made. I realised this man was hooked on physical activity: he couldn’t bear to sit still. But we did manage to spend time together in the evenings, watch a video, chat in front of the fireplace or go out to dinner in town, like normal people do. Our life as a couple was slowly taking shape and I was beginning to get used to it.

  Every now and then, if the wires hadn’t fallen off the trees because of the weather, or the Masai hadn’t stolen them to make jewelry, I rang Teo. As he described the coming of spring on the Amalfi coast or in the countryside in Tuscany, I could picture yellow ginestre and dark blue lavender. I found myself yearning for the fresh smell of new grass and wild roses, for the soft April light when plants and people wake up from the winter delicately stirring their limbs. Meanwhile at my end, rain kept pouring while all kinds of horrid insects were performing unsettling mating dances around the lampshades. Sometimes thousands of flying ants would cover the entire wall in just a few minutes like a thick black buzzing carpet, and Wilson and I had to literally sweep them off the wall with a broom. Nature had woken up from the dry sleepy season and was furiously mating with cruel determination, in order to survive another six months of lifeless heat.

  “Everything is so extreme here. It goes from life to death with nothing in between,” I complained to Adam.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t have middle seasons, like spring or fall…”

  “I love how you say ‘you’ as if it was me personally who was responsible for the whole African climate. We do have seasons, Esmé; you are simply not looking carefully enough. And we have beautiful seasons too, just like in Europe: the sky changes, the wind turns, the colours are different and you can smell the grass and the flowers. I’ll show you once we go to the coast.”

  At the beginning of the summer, the rains slowed down. All the expats were leaving to go to Europe for the holidays.

  “Let’s go to Italy together,” I said to Adam one morning. “I want you to meet my brother.”

  “I want to, I really do,” he said, a hint of guilt in his voice, “but I can’t afford to now. I have to go to the States and book next season. We’ll do it next year, I promise.”

  So there was a next year. A future. That pleased me.

  Adam was planning his yearly promotional trip to the States in order to hunt down rich clients for next year’s safari season, by holding a series of “bush lectures” with groups of possible clients at their local Rotary Club or whatever it was called. He was going to be away for six weeks: he would be going out to dinner with travel agents and magazine editors and coming back with the bookings. His slide shows showed not only the wilderness and how close they would come to the game, but above all the facilities his camps provided. In general first-timers on African safaris are terribly nervous about ablutions in the bush, and fear that they might have to squat behind the shrubs, which ends up being their main objection to this type of voyage into the darkness. Adam made sure to show them exactly what to expect in his very expensive “luxury tented camp.” They all sighed with relief and sometimes applauded enthusiastically when the bush bathroom en suite slide appeared in all its splendour, with porcelain tank, wooden seat and all.

  The whole thing sounded like a nightmare to me.

  “I have to do it,” he said with a shrug, “otherwise the company just goes dead. Everyone else does it, and believe me, it does work.”

  In a way he was like an actor going on tour to give a sneak preview of the show, showing just the teaser of the film to sell the plot and the good looks of the main character. Everyone wanted to buy the Out of Africa dream, but nobody wanted the dust, the warm beer, or to have to take a crap in the bush. Adam with his itinerant slide show was there to prove that it was possible indeed to buy one without the other. Knowing how reserved Adam was, I realised how much he must hate doing this, and at the same time I was surprised at how much he was ready to put up with. On the other hand, he made very good money.

  “I can’t do this much longer,” he said. “I just need the money to buy myself some land, and then I’m out of the business. I want to enjoy the bush without having to explain it to people with videocameras. I want to sit around the fire and be silent.”

  I guess the reason why I could afford to be a snob and keep away from the hideous rich couples in full Banana Republic safari gear was that I didn’t have to make my own money. I had chosen a luxurious dependency on Adam’s income and my father’s posthumous recognition.

  Before he left for the States Adam and I decided that the two of us were to go on a safari and planned a trip to the coast, where his family had a house near Mombasa. His parents were spending most of their time there now, even though they still kept a small farm upcountry near Rumuruti which was run by Adam’s older brother Brian.

  I had never met Adam’s parents, and I was nervous. It felt kind of official to go and stay with them, but after all he and I had been living together for almost a year now. I had heard their voices on the phone whenever they called to talk to him.

  “My parents are cool, just relax,” said Adam as we were driving south on the Mombasa road. “We are just going to swim and get a tan, it doesn’t mean we’re getting married, you know.”

  I jumped in the seat. The sound of the word kept buzzing around my brain as we dived down from the higher lands into the plain and crossed Tsavo National Park, lush and covered in blue wildflowers.

  “See?” said Adam triumphantly. “This is the African spring. Can’t you smell it?”

  Married. I’d never even conceived of it before. But now, looking at Adam driving next to me and sniffing his beloved African spring, I thought it could actually be possible. He had taken such good care of me, he had healed me. I never wanted to go back to my earlier state, to the fears and the loneliness which awaited me back in Europe, not to my mother language or my way of thinking. Adam put his hand on my knee, and I brushed it lightly with mine, feeling a wave of tenderness. Once again we were traveling in the midst of nothing, flying in empty space, feeling the vastness all around us, and inwardly I said yes, I could live with this man, marry him and have his children; with so much emptiness around us it was a comforting thought to one day become a small group of people who felt close and safe together.

  That was what Africa seemed to be doing to me: putting things back into place, probably where they should have always been but never were. In a place where to love seemed finally necessary and to trust a relief, a place where it seemed pointless to fight to be in control, because it was clear you couldn’t control any of it. A place where having children and marrying a man didn’t sound like a middle-class choice.

  A place where Ferdinando would probably have gone mad.

  Adam’s parents’ property was south of Mombasa, near the Tanzanian border. It sat on top of the coral cliffs overlooking the Indian Ocean, in a staggering cove which for some mysterious reason had been left behind by the fast and furious development of the last fifteen years. Their property bordered on a kaya, the Swahili word for sacred forest, which allowed wild game and indigenous plants to thrive all around. It was a magical place, one of the last to be spared by mass tourism. His mother, Julia, was a landscape gardener and had a nursery of rare plants and palms in the back of the property. She was tall and lean and pretty in that plain English way which I had become so familiar with since being in Kenya, a kind of beauty that brought to mind the particular daintiness of movie stars of the late fifties. Women of Julia’s generation, who had lived on their fathers’ coffee farms most of their lives, didn’t seem to have gone past Doris Day or Joan Fontaine. They had all slid happily out of fashion forty years ago, still wore pastel cotton prints and sunglasses which made them look like a faded Kodak ad. Her husband, Glenn, was a big man, with the same strong physical presence as Adam. His face
was pleasantly wrinkled after too many years in the sun. They kissed me warmly, as if they had already known me a long time.

  “Come, there is tea on the verandah,” said Julia.

  “How about a serious drink, Mum?” said Adam. “I’ve been driving all day in the heat.”

  “That’s a much better idea!” said Glenn. “Esmé, come sit down, you must be exhausted. It’s such a hellish trip from Nairobi. I always hated that road.”

  He put his arm around my shoulder and led me through the house, to the verandah overlooking the sea.

  The house was old and charming: a whitewashed Swahili style A-frame with a thatched roof. Inside the furniture was sparse and simple: Lamu four-poster beds, old hardwood tables and chairs, white curtains flowing in the breeze. The bookshelves were loaded with old editions of Graham Greene and Daphne du Maurier, ancient issues of National Geographic, and damp-smelling leather-bound volumes. Some impressive trophies hanging in the living room testified to Glenn’s younger days.

  “The biggest impala ever shot in East Africa,” he said proudly, pointing at a gigantic head. It was bizarre, seeing all those dead bush animals at the sea.

  “Aliiii!” called Julia in a high-pitched voice. “Tafadhali, lete drinks na barafu!”

  A young man, barefoot, dressed in white, appeared with the drinks tray. He yelled with excitement when he saw Adam. They patted each other’s shoulders and shook hands with affection. Soon the rest of the staff turned up to greet him: all had been with the family a long time and had known Adam since he was a child. I took an immediate liking to all of them. Rajabu the cook was a stunning mzee with a white beard and almost green eyes. He was a bit of a witch doctor, Adam said, and his knowledge of local plants for medicinal use was amazing.

  I had felt exhilarated from the moment I stepped out of the car, I think it had to do with finally coming down from five thousand feet. My whole body stretched, the pores of my skin opened to the warm moisture in the air, everything smelled sweet and rich, like frangipani and rotting mangoes. How could I have stayed away from the sea for so long? It seemed that nothing cruel or desperate or mindless could ever happen at the ocean.