Rules of the Wild

by Francesca Marciano

  “Yes, why not?”

  “Maybe you want to spend time alone there. And I think it would be easier if it was only you with her parents. They’ve known you since you were a kid, you’re like family to them.”

  “Oh, but…”

  “I think you should go alone. I’ve already said my farewell. Really, I mean it.”

  He knew I was right.

  That night, as we lay in bed, I could feel the weight of his pain, somewhere deep inside him where I couldn’t reach. I held his hand in the dark.

  “Fuck,” he said, “I’m really going to miss her.”

  It’s so difficult to admit, it feels demeaning. But I couldn’t help thinking that now there was no space left in him to mourn the loss of our child. He’d said nothing to me about it since he had come home. I knew that for him, being so far away, it had been an abstraction. A phone conversation.

  But for me—it had been inside me, it had changed the shape of my body. Nothing could have been more real. And there I was, competing with Iris’s death for his attention. I was making a stupid mistake; nobody can win such a battle.

  Now I see it more clearly: everything was happening at the same time, there couldn’t have been a worse moment to be demanding. But in the last ten days I had lost a child and a friend. The harder side of Africa had slapped me in the face and I was deeply wounded.

  Very early the next morning, barefoot and clad only in one of his shirts, I stormed into the garage where Adam was checking the car with one of his mechanics before taking off for Maralal.

  “Will you come inside for a minute? I need to talk to you,” I said rudely. He looked at me, surprised, and followed me into the bedroom.

  As we sat on the bed I burst into tears.

  “Oh God, Adam, I have had it. I don’t know, but I think I want to go back. I am so tired of this.”

  “Back where?”

  “Home. To Italy, away from here.”

  I had begun to sob.

  “Hey!” He pulled me closer, alarmed. “Hey Esmé, what’s wrong? Please tell me.”

  “You…you do these things all the time—”

  “What do you mean, I do these things…like what?”

  “Driving, fixing things, rushing here and there…I can’t stand it anymore.”

  He looked at me in shock. He had no idea what I was talking about.

  “You know,” I went on, “where I come from, in my family, people use words to describe their feelings. And—guess what?— it does make a difference. After all that’s happened, all you do is check if the radiator has a leak. It’s barbaric, it drives me fucking nuts.”

  “I’m sorry.” He let the air slowly out of his lungs, then raked his fingers through my hair a few times and looked intensely into my eyes. “It’s just that I feel so bad too, I don’t know how to—”

  “You never say anything,” I interrupted him.

  “True. You’re so much better than me, that way.”

  He fell silent.

  “I wanted that child, too, Esmé.”

  Suddenly I felt ridiculous for throwing such a tantrum. I wiped my eyes.

  “I know that.”

  “Good. You bear that in mind, will you?”

  I nodded.

  “I love you,” he said.

  I looked at him with a blank stare.

  “I…love…you…Esmé,” he repeated slowly, as if he feared I no longer understood English.

  “I know.”

  “I don’t know how to show you in any other way. Please don’t get upset like this.”

  When Adam came back from Maralal a couple of days later, I was feeling calmer and he looked himself again.

  “I want you to come with me on safari,” he said; “you look like you desperately need to get out of here.”

  He wanted to find a new site for his camp before the season started again. He’d come back with lots of bookings, and business looked very good.

  “A lot of clients from last season have booked again. I want to take them to new spots, where no one’s ever been.”

  “No one, ever?”

  “You’d be surprised how many parts of this country have never been visited by man. You’ll see: we’ll to be travelling on some pretty godforsaken tracks.”

  We got ready for a rough safari. Electric winch, serious tool kit, car spares, maps, guns and ammunition. I bought the most extravagant provisions: oyster sauce, Thai green curry and lemongrass in brine, just in case one felt like stir-fries, chocolate syrup and all the imported crackers I could get my hands on.

  Adam was inhabited by a strange fury. I could see that five weeks in the “civilized world” had made him restless, like an animal in a cage. But beyond that, I sensed that he needed to get rid of something—pain, frustration, I can’t say what it was. He needed to wrestle, and not having an enemy to vent his anger on, he set off on safari with the resolution to defeat any obstacle that came his way.

  Nature took up his challenge and showed us its teeth.

  Only one day’s drive away from Nairobi we entered a flat country which seemed to stretch for ever and ever. It was rocky, dry and dusty. There was nobody in sight, not even a child looking after his goats. It was like going into a furnace. Every track we took disappeared into nothing, but Adam never once turned back the car. He just went on, unrelenting. We had to literally rebuild with a shovel bits of road which had been washed out by the rains. We winched the car out of dried riverbeds, cut the bush with a panga when it got too thick for the car to go through, pushed stones and branches under the tires to pull the car out of the sand. Every day we worked like slaves to gain a few miles into virgin territory. And the deeper we waded into the bush, the harsher it got. It was a thick thornbush, impenetrable and stifling. The river, which I had been so looking forward to reach, was muddy, crawling with crocodiles and infested with mosquitoes.

  “No one has ever been here before,” he said with pride, as we sat under the stars, when the night finally gave us a break. “Isn’t this beautiful?”

  No, it didn’t look beautiful to me. It looked harsh, eerie, hostile. There was no peace or bliss among those spikes. My skin was slashed and cut; flies buzzed around the sores; I felt exhausted and filthy. The meat we’d brought rotted in the heat, and we ended up feeding fillets to the crocodiles.

  One night after dark, as we were collecting firewood, we nearly stepped on a huge snake moving slowly through the grass, close to our tent. The snake was startled by the torchlight and sat dumbly in the grass. It was enormous.

  “Don’t move,” said Adam and he left me there, frozen, to frame the snake with the torch beam. He ran back with the shotgun.

  “What a fucking monster”—and he shot it.

  It was a puff adder. The biggest he had ever seen, he said, shaking his head. I had never seen anything remotely like it in my life. It must have at least been five feet long, as thick as a boa constrictor, and weighed more than ten kilos. Full of deadly poison. We slashed its head off with a panga and threw it into the fire, where it sizzled, spreading an acrid smell. Adam set off into the bush holding the headless snake, which kept wriggling in spasms.

  “Where are you going?” I asked faintly.

  “I want to put this as far away as possible from camp.”

  “Why, do you think the hyenas will come and eat it?”

  “It’s possible; they eat everything. I just don’t want to sleep close to this thing.”

  It was the first time that I’d heard Adam express not fear, but revulsion for something.

  At night the baboons kept me awake with their spooky human cries.

  “They’re just baboons,” said Adam in the dark of the tent, “you’ve heard them a million times.”

  “No. These sound like screaming children; they’re horrible.”

  I knew the bush was snarling at us this time. I could feel it. But Adam would never admit something like that. He was determined to seek salvation in the perfection of nature, and wasn’t going to let n
ature turn its back on him like that.

  I studied him as he washed himself in the muddy river. He looked so strong and handsome standing naked in the soft evening light. He smiled and stretched his hand.

  “Come,” he said, “it’s so beautiful.”

  But the water looked too murky, the riverbanks too slimy, to bring me any relief. What Hunter had said about himself and Iris suddenly came back to me: I couldn’t help thinking Adam and I also had started to see things differently now. The realization that this might be the beginning of a distance between us deeply disturbed me.

  We moved from the river at last and started climbing up into greener country, into the hills. The air got cooler, the palms gave way to ferns and tall grass. We met herds of impalas, kongoni, elands. We saw them run on the ridges and scatter among the grass. The freshness in the air was a relief, but more than anything it was exhilarating to see open country and sky again, after the oppression of the thick bush.

  It took us a whole day to climb to the top of the range. It was an incredibly hard drive. The track to the top was so steep we felt like we were fighting against gravity. We climbed up agonizingly slowly, in low gear, the wheels of the Toyota fighting to hold their grip on the rocks. We jolted, leaped and tossed. Night fell and we were still driving. We stopped talking, each wrapped in our own silence and tiredness.

  We drove into the night, bathing in space, like a spaceship entering a new galaxy. We became conscious that our headlights were piercing the darkness and were visible for hundreds of miles. When we had almost reached the top we could make out the dim light of a campfire across the plain below us—the only sign of human life in the vast land which stretched at the foot of the hills.

  It was probably a camp of Masai Morans, where they had had an olpul, the slaughtering of a goat. By now they were probably slowly eating the whole animal by the fire after having drunk its blood. This was what Moranhood prescribed: to sleep and eat only among Morans, away from the eyes of women and children. Almost as if they—having reached the status of demigods—could not be seen performing human tasks such as putting food in their body and giving it a rest. I thought of Lenjo and his tales. I missed his assuredness, his gentle smile. Suddenly I longed to be sitting around that fire with those Morans in the plain, in the midst of their smoky scent, to be lulled by their husky language, which is lean and fast, which leaps and falls like a Masai when he dances. I knew that those Morans this very minute were staring up at our distant beams. They probably knew it must be some crazy wazungu. Nobody else would head in that direction at night.

  But Adam loved to be as far away from humans as possible, no matter what it took.

  As we approached the top in the stillness of the night, our tracks leaving scars on the fresh grass, we both felt conscious of violating the integrity of those remote hills.

  At last we pitched our tent, stumbling in the fierce wind, and crashed directly to bed, too tired to eat.

  When I awoke at dawn, it was freezing cold, and my bedroll was damp. From inside the tent I could make out Adam next to the fire, a mug of hot tea in his hand. I waited for the sun to pierce the clouds before I could face the temperature.

  The view was staggering. As the mist slowly lifted, we could see Kilimanjaro perfectly silhouetted against the sky and make out the snowy streaks on its top. Below us, soft and full like women’s breasts, the round hills rolled and gently sloped down into the vast plain, like a sea of green. It was like sitting on the very top of the world.

  “The Green Hills of Africa. That’s it!” I said. “This is where Hemingway got the title, right?”

  “Except he never saw them from up here, for sure,” Adam said. “Nobody has ever enjoyed this view before, I can promise you.”

  He kept his eyes on the plain below, slowly sipping his tea, remote and exultant, like a child who has proved something which matters only to him.

  But he was wrong. Someone had, and not long before us. Somebody not so interested in the view.

  We had gone for a walk the next morning. Adam carried the shotgun because the place was swarming with buffaloes, and high-altitude lions were known to be nasty. We walked carefully and in silence. Suddenly the wind changed, and the smell hit us like a slap in the face.

  “What is it? A lion’s kill, you think?” I asked.

  We walked slowly towards a patch of trees in the grassland. The stench became unbearable, I had to cover my nose with my shirt. As we drew near the trees we heard the buzzing. It was as if a million bees and flies were at work.

  “Shit,” Adam said, pushing a handkerchief over his mouth. “I think I know what this is.”

  Inside the thicket was a gigantic shape like a small mountain, some black thing twitching and throbbing as if it was still breathing.

  Then I saw that the twitching was caused by a thick layer of maggots, worms, flies—millions of swarming insects—buzzing about the decomposed flesh of a carcass. It was a huge elephant.

  The poachers had carved away the tusks and fled.

  It looked like an eerie totem, something out of the worst Lord of the Flies nightmare. Something humans were not supposed to lay eyes upon.

  My blood froze, and I was overwhelmed by an irrational fear—as if we had stumbled upon some terrible omen. I had to escape, and without uttering a word to Adam, I ran, clenching my fists, all the way back to camp, not worrying about the buffaloes or lions hiding in the grass.

  Once at camp I warmed a bucket of water on the fire, then stripped naked in the grass and washed, pouring water on me out of a tin mug. It was still fairly early; the air was crisp and the green hills were imbued with a warm golden glow. A family of impalas across the valley stared frozen at my bush shower. But all I could think of was that throbbing black shape.

  I was sitting in front of the fire with a cup of strong instant coffee, drying my hair, when Adam appeared at the top of the hill. He walked slowly, his shoulders slightly hunched.

  “Don’t run away like that,” he said, putting the shotgun across the armrests of a safari chair. “It makes me nervous to lose track of you up here. Okay?”

  He did look worried.

  “The poachers must not be far,” he said, scanning out with the binoculars. “They shot him with machine guns.”

  “Great,” I said. “You mean it could be us alone with a bunch of crazy poachers armed with AK47s?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You mean we could be raided?”

  He didn’t answer that either.

  “We must go down and report this to the KWS people,” he said.

  “Let’s go.” I instinctively stood up.

  “Wait. We can spend the night and go tomorrow morning—”

  “No,” I interrupted him, “I don’t want to spend any more time up here close to that thing. I want to go. Now.”

  He sighed.

  I was happy to take the responsibility for our defeat.

  We broke camp and drove down into the plain to the nearest park gate, and told the Kenya Wildlife Service rangers how to find the elephant.

  We sat in the car next to the gate, sipping hot Fantas. Adam had spread out one of his old maps over the dashboard and was absorbed in its mysterious symbols. A naked child stepped out of one of the tin sheds provided for the KWS staff. I heard him cry, desperately, as he stumbled into the blinding noon light.

  “Let’s go home,” I said. “I want to sleep in my bed.”

  Adam looked startled.

  “You really want to go back to Nairobi?”

  I knew I was disappointing him. I didn’t care. I had depleted all of my physical and mental energy.

  “Yes, we could be there by six. We’ll have a hot bath, have a pepper steak and red wine at the French restaurant at the racecourse. Please. It sounds so good; say yes.”

  He sighed and looked out the windshield. The child was still crying, his skinny little body covered with red dust. Adam folded the map and slipped it into the glove compartment.

  �
��All right. If that’s what you want.”

  Then he reversed the car, a bit too fast, and headed towards the north.

  I was relieved: it seemed plausible and simple that once back home we could shut out whatever had burdened us since he had come back. That disturbing sensation of ominousness, that indecipherable pain. Whatever that feeling meant, it would be easier to hide it within the four walls of our house than under that glare.

  Looking back now I can see that it was probably that moment when we began to withdraw and to lie to each other. Ever since then we’ve chosen to keep our eyes shut tight, even though the poison started dripping—slowly, drop by drop—as we pretended to have quietly fallen asleep.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In beauty, may I walk

  On the trail marked with pollen, may I walk

  with grasshoppers about my feet, may I walk

  with dew about my feet, may I walk

  With beauty, may I walk

  With beauty before me

  with beauty behind me

  with beauty above me

  may I walk

  ANONYMOUS, FROM THE NAVAJO

  “Esmé? Hunter here,” a voice said into the telephone. It was before eight; the ring had woken me up. An operator had asked for my name, giving it the most imaginative pronunciation, and put me on hold, switching to unnerving Muzak.

  “Hunter?” My heart skipped a beat.

  I had not heard from him again since that night at my house almost two months earlier; he had completely disappeared. Back to Rwanda, back to Somalia, back to Zaire. Back to wherever the bad news was.

  “Yes, Hunter Reed,” he said, formal as if we were back to being just vague aquaintances. “Listen, I’m in Kinshasa now; I’ll be in Nairobi tonight.”

  “Yes…” I said obediently.

  “I was calling to see if you could give me a hand. Are you free tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow?” I tried to sound suspicious. “Um…yes, I think so. What do you need?”

  “I have to run a story on this Italian missionary priest who lives in the slums. I’m told his English is not fluent, so I thought maybe you could, you know, give me a hand with that.”