Rules of the Wild

by Francesca Marciano

  In the distance, like figures out of Dante’s Inferno, one could see men crouched under the weight of huge sacks, moving against the smoke. They were the garbage collectors.

  We stood still, looking at one of the men who slowly moved towards us. He recognised Marco and they exchanged a few words. The man raised his head from under the heavy load, and we saw his eyes. He had the crazed stare of someone who has gone beyond any reasonable experience and will never come back.

  “When you spend the whole day amid filth and waste, it’s very difficult to retain your dignity,” said Marco as the man went off, bent nearly horizontal under the weight. “At the moment these people are outcasts, the lowest of the low. But you know, they can make their way back up the ladder. Garbage collecting can become a way to earn decent money. It’s a dirty job to collect scrap metal, but it’s a beginning.”

  We walked slowly back to his shack. Hunter asked Marco how long he planned to stay on in Korokocho.

  “As long as I hold out. My lungs are very bad. And as long as they let me stay here. The government is not very happy about what I’m doing. They send informers to church when I say Mass. They claim I incite revolt in the ghetto.”

  “Do you?” asked Hunter jokingly.

  “Of course not. I am just trying to explain basic political principles to these people. Like, for instance, that the government has to allot us the shacks we live in. We are squatting on government land, you see. They keep threatening to evict us. Now, even in the favelas in Brasil, or in Soweto, people own their shacks. Nairobi is the only place in the world where—”

  “Oh, then you are inciting the ghetto!” Hunter interrupted him and laughed. “They are bloody well right to want to get rid of you!”

  Marco smiled, amused.

  “Do you speak good Swahili?”

  “Good enough,” said Hunter. “Why?”

  “Then come to Mass on Sunday and listen to my sermon. We’ll discuss the eviction problem.”

  “Sounds more like a party cell committee than a religious gathering to me.”

  “Yes. Except I act on behalf of the Party of God.” Marco grinned.

  We shook hands, and promised to come back. Hunter said he’d send him a copy of his article. Marco kept my hand in his and smiled.

  “Torna presto, e comportati bene. Ci vuole coraggio, sai, per capire.”

  “Lo so. Grazie davvero.”

  We got back into the car and drove out of Korokocho in silence, anxiously checking the expression of every black face which bent down to peep inside the window, holding our breaths until we reached the church and the roundabout; and suddenly there we were again, reemerging on the familiar roads of Nairobi, at a petrol station where the black attendant smiled courteously as he held out his hand for the car keys. Back in the world of Memsahab and Bwana.

  “What did he say to you in Italian?” Hunter asked me.

  “He said ‘behave.’ And then he said one needs to be brave to acknowledge it all.”

  Hunter fell silent for a while. Then he shook his head.

  “Africa is the one place which makes you want to believe in God. I guess it’s the only way to accept this amount of despair.” He turned to me with a faint smile. “But unfortunately no member of the Western press is allowed to fear God’s wrath. It would undermine our ability to lie.”

  I smelled my clothes, my hair. The sickly sweet smell of putrefaction had glued itself onto me and was making me nauseous.

  “Let’s go to your house and take a shower,” I said. “I have to get rid of these clothes fast.”

  “It’s not an easy smell to get rid of, I warned you. I’ve got used to it by now. All of Rwanda smells like this, ten times stronger.”

  The rotting victims of the Hutu madness, the rotting carcass of the elephant, the rotting mountain of waste and desperation. The same smell of death, the same buzzing of flies.

  “Why did you take me along today?” I heard myself ask aggressively. “He spoke fluent English; you didn’t need my help.”

  Suddenly I was angry. Why had he dragged me into such hopelessness? Writing stories was his job, he was rewarded for it. But, what was in it for me, other than a slap in the face? And why me, of all people?

  “Because I wanted to see you again,” he answered, keeping his eyes on the traffic light, perfectly cool, almost annoyed by my petulance. As if that was the obvious and only answer.

  “You could have asked me out to lunch instead,” I said, trying to sound unimpressed by his revelation. Trying to keep to my point while my heart had started skipping beats again. “I mean, you could have said—”

  “I didn’t want to say anything,” he interrupted, still not looking at me, “I just wanted to see you. And I also wanted you to see Korokocho. I thought you ought to.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why? Because you live here. Because of what Marco just said to you: it takes guts not to avoid it. Maybe I think you have the guts it takes.”

  “Sounds more like you want to share all this pain with someone else.”

  “Yes. Maybe that too.”

  He shrugged, as if I was beginning to make him impatient. He pulled his hair behind his ear. It looked so thick and lustrous, I felt like touching it.

  “It doesn’t make much difference why.” Then he looked at his watch. “Listen, I really need some lunch, how about you?”

  “I…I…”

  “If I don’t eat I won’t be able to think,” he said grumpily, keeping his eyes on the road. Then glanced at me, a worried expression on his face. His eyes were a dark grey.

  “Christ. You are much more beautiful than I remembered.”

  Hunter said the paper would pay for lunch and we agreed we needed a treat. We sat across from each other at a table on the perfectly manicured lawn of the Safari Park Hotel, enveloped by the sound of the waterfall trickling down the rocks of the Japanese garden. All around us the reassuring presence of waiters in starched uniforms, and tourists in their childish fluorescent outfits, snapping pictures of each other eating hamburgers. Neither of us commented on the contrast, only five miles away from Korokocho; it was too obvious. We ordered lavishly. The waiter kept at a distance while taking the order. I saw him whisper something to one of his colleagues. They looked at us.

  “I bet he just told him we smell,” I said.

  Hunter didn’t answer. I feared his mood might change again and he would snap out of what he had started in the car. Which instead was all I wanted to know. Had he really been thinking of me, as he had written in his note? Or was he just saying things at random, throwing out these astonishing lines merely to catch me off guard? Was there a thread, an organizing principle, a reason for him to act like that? What was his volatile behaviour supposed to mean? Was he shy, or was he playing a game with me?

  He was looking around with an absent gaze, not paying any attention to me. I had to resort to cliché.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  I wanted to shake him and pull him out of whatever distant place he was sinking back into.

  “It’s funny, what you said earlier in the car,” he replied, “about my wanting to share my pain with someone. That’s probably a very appropriate way of putting it. I think I have always felt very lonely in the way I perceive this country.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because I have always been in a very different position than anyone else; I never really fit anywhere. There was never anyone who shared my situation, and in retrospect I think I found that very unfair. Especially when I was younger.”

  “Why do you say you were in a different position?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Tell it.”

  I was eager to hear him disclose something about himself, stop behaving like this undecipherable mystery.

  He lit a cigarette and leaned back on the chair, fixing his grey eyes on mine. He started telling his tale in the patient tone one would use with a child.

  “When we
went to live in South Africa, I was about ten, my mother and father split up. My mother had fallen in love with another man. Back in the sixties that was bad enough, but what my mother did was even worse. Because the man she had fallen in love with was black. And if that was not enough, not only was he black, but he was a militant activist in Black Consciousness, Steve Biko’s party, which saw all whites as their enemies without exception. So you see, my mother did the worst thing a white woman could have done back then and there.”

  “Oh. How did you feel about that?”

  I had to fake my look of surprise. I didn’t want him to know that I had gathered this information earlier on.

  “My brothers and I were told only much later. At the time of the separation we didn’t put two and two together. We knew she saw lots of Africans; it was part of her job. She worked for BBC radio—both my parents were working for the press and had always been extremely liberal. But in those days of course in South Africa it was illegal for a black man to have sex with a white woman, they could have gone to prison if they had been found out, so they had to keep it very secret. Even from us. The odd thing was that he had to keep it secret from his people as well. It was totally against Biko’s beliefs that a black man would have anything to do with a white woman. To them whites were all equally bad, no matter how liberal they professed to be. A lot of white liberals called Biko’s party black racists. So in a way they both turned into social outcasts by falling in love with each other.”

  “But how did you feel when you did find out?” I insisted.

  “In a way I had always known. It was one of those things we just never talked about. Then one day Simon, the man she was in love with, was arrested. My mother lost it, she thought she’d never see him alive again. So she told me. I guess she needed some moral support, and felt that I was mature enough to give it to her.”

  “Were you?”

  Hunter remained silent, pondering my question. Then he nodded.

  “Yes, I think I was. It made me sad to see her like that. Rejected by her own people, rejected by his people, left only with a young boy like me to turn to. But it wasn’t easy. I remember the secret police coming to the house with search warrants, raking through my mother’s papers. By then my younger brothers and I knew exactly what was going on; we always feared they would put her in jail. We hated the secret police. We knew they were after us as well now. Our life changed overnight. Our white neighbours looked at us with contempt. We started receiving anonymous calls in the middle of the night, then threatening letters. So in a way I think I resented my mother for jeopardizing our life. Ultimately when you are a kid you want to be like everyone else, have the same life as your classmates. You didn’t want to be the child of this mad woman in love who believed in the revolution, especially if you lived in Johannesburg. Everywhere we turned there was this incredible hatred. The whites hated the blacks, and hated my mother as well; the blacks hated my mother and hated Simon. We all suffered, in the name of love. It was ironic, really. So I grew up with such mixed feelings of guilt and hostility, of love and fear, all intertwined.”

  “What about your father? Where was he when all this was going on?”

  “My father eventually remarried in England. He always respected my mother very much and has always spoken very highly of her. You see, at the time when they went to live in South Africa they were very young and idealistic. I think my father especially, he was in love with the black resistance, with the ideals of freedom and justice…”

  He smiled, with a mocking expression, and took a sip of his cold beer.

  “He loved the idea of being a white liberal democrat truly in love with Africans. It made him feel like such a hero.”

  “And what about your mother? Didn’t she also—”

  He interrupted me in that manner he had, almost as if my physical presence were insensible to him, as if by now the logical sequence of his narration had become more important to him than my listening.

  “But in fact what had happened was that my mother completely outdid him: she physically loved an African. She actually fucked one.”

  He stretched out the word, as if he needed to emphasise the outlandishness of her act. As if he needed to make it sound obscene, unpleasant to hear. I sat frozen by his intensity, while the waiter delicately placed our avocado and shrimp salad in front of us. Hunter continued, unaware of the food.

  “It was no longer a cause, it had become an individual, you see. That’s much more concrete, such a reality to contend with. She had trespassed a boundary where my father could no longer reach her. I think he knew he couldn’t win her back. So he left, defeated. I gather he realised my mother had a strength he would never have. To really commit herself, not just to play a role which looked good back home.”

  “And to face the consequences as well,” I added sotto voce, to let him know I was getting the point, that he hadn’t shocked me.

  “You bet. I mean, I always admired her for that. She went ahead and did it, nobody could have stopped her. Not apartheid, not her own children. She was possessed.”

  I could tell he wanted to sound magnanimous. As a matter of principle, yes, he admired her. As her child, it must have been tough.

  “And what happened to her and Simon?”

  “Eventually Simon was released from jail, but it was obvious that they were not going to leave him alone ever again. That he, like all his comrades, would be imprisoned and tortured numberless times. That was the fate of all those black militants. Plus, Biko had been killed. So my mother finally persuaded him to leave with her for England. She managed to make him leave South Africa. I think he has always wondered whether that was the right thing to do. To leave his country, his brothers, to be forever in exile. For this white woman.”

  I remained silent. There was so little I could say. The more Hunter revealed himself to me, the more terrified I was of him. He seemed to come from a world where everything had been drawn in extremes.

  I tried to eat, but the food stuck in my throat. Hunter looked at me as if he didn’t know me, as if I had turned into some stranger overhearing his conversation on a train. He kept talking as if to an imaginary friend.

  “Now they are this middle-aged couple living in the country in England. They go to Johannesburg every now and then, and whenever they go they have tea with Mandela and stuff like that. They are treated like celebrities”—he chuckled—“Romeo and Juliet woken up from sleep thirty years later. They make very good press for South Africa, now.”

  He smiled wistfully and looked into his plate. He decided after all it was time for the avocado salad.

  “Would they go back, now?” I asked.

  “No. What for? They have a perfectly organized life in England. They both find Jo’burg way too dangerous. If you saw them at the local supermarket on a Saturday morning, pushing their cart, you’d never know these two are the same people. It’s funny what age does; it dilutes everything.”

  “I guess one becomes tired of fighting. And it would seem they’ve had their share.”

  “Yes, I think they’re tired. One can change sides in politics, one can change one’s husband or wife, one’s country or religion, but one can’t change race. Class struggle, Buddhism, socialism, Catholicism—nothing has been invented to solve that problem. All one can do is get as far away as possible from its source.”

  He looked up from his food at me with a strange vacancy, as if he had just woken up.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” he said gently, glancing at my full plate.

  He looked wonderful to me then, his long black hair falling over his quicksilver eyes.

  And I was in love with him. One, two, three. Just like that.

  “No…yes…I was listening to you so I forgot to eat.”

  “Do you want me to shut up so you can eat?”

  I felt the tenderness in his voice. Yes, he could be tender and warm, not only terrifying and drastic. And I wanted desperately to feel more of that tenderness, to draw it out of him, and I
prayed he wouldn’t withhold it from me. I wanted to find the warmth and tenderness deep inside him. I needed to be certain it was there, now that I had reached that frightening place where the winds meet—admitting to myself I was crazy about him at last—and I knew there was no turning back.

  “No. Please talk to me. I’m much more interested in you than in the food. I couldn’t bear it if you were silent,” I said impulsively.

  The intensity of my voice startled him. He pushed away his plate.

  “As a matter of fact, I’m not hungry anymore either.”

  There was a pause. Then he said:

  “Shall we go?”

  “Yes. Let’s.”

  So we left, silently. And we drove to his house in silence, as if quietness had descended upon us like snow, to cool and shroud the ground, to disguise our tension and muffle our thoughts.

  I didn’t go there lightly. I knew even then that this was the beginning of something very hard to reverse. But I couldn’t do otherwise now: I too was possessed.

  At his place we took long showers by turn. I scrubbed myself under the hot water, but the smell still clung to my hair and skin. It no longer bothered me. Instead, the sight of my naked body under the shower worried me, because I knew that in a matter of minutes, maybe, he was going to look at it and touch it.

  I entered the living room with my hair dripping wet on my dress. He was sitting at his desk, his hair wet and ebony black. The house was wrapped in silence.

  I sat across the desk from him. We studied each other for a minute or so. Then he raised his hand and lightly touched my cheekbone with his fingertip. Slowly his hand went over the planes of my face.

  “What are you going to do now?” he asked.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “You know what I would like you to do.”

  I didn’t stir. I closed my eyes and felt him move away from me. He wouldn’t push me, he obviously wanted me to be fully aware of what I was getting myself into. I hated his taking his hand from me.

  “Why are you like this?” I said, almost angry again.

  “Like what?”