Why shouldn’t I?
I wanted to know what it was like.
EVERYTHING BUT THE GIRL
Yes, everyone does try to have a go at history here.
Maybe it’s because we live so far away from the action, and the only payoff is to sell our lives as monuments back in the first world to make our time here worthwhile.
Even though wilderness as such no longer exists anywhere in the world—save maybe for the Arctic—our prestige depends on the assumption that this is the last outpost of wilderness and we are the last batch of Romantic Heroes. Most of us have built our careers around this assumption, and now entire families depend on it.
Yes it’s true, cheetahs in the Masai Mara have changed their hunting habits: now they stalk their prey in the heat of the day, when the tourist vans are back at the lodges for lunch and they can be left in peace, without hordes of paparazzi following them. Large areas in Tsavo and Amboseli have been so seriously scarred by the cars’ tracks that they have had to be shut down in order to heal. Masai and Samburu cattle herds have died because their only reliable water hole in the dry season now fills up the swimming pools of the lodges in the parks where they are no longer allowed to graze. Many Morans go as far as the coast to find a job to survive. They will be employed as watchmen in the cheap packaged-tours hotels; soon they will end up escorting older women from Frankfurt or Milano and will learn to wear designer jeans and mirrored shades.
I had discovered that a lot of people in Nairobi were suspicious of Hunter because he seemed obsessed with shattering the precious assumption that we lived in Paradise and showed pleasure in doing so. He always knew facts and figures, so that it was hard work to contradict him, unless of course you were in the field. He had become a prophet of doom, and not everyone liked having him spoil their view of the future.
“Why doesn’t he go back to South Africa, then?” Peter the Elephant Man had once said. “He’s a political animal, he has a passion for humanity on a War and Peace scale. Marine turtles and rhinos to him are simply not worth the effort.”
Now my heart sank whenever anyone pronounced his name.
He hadn’t called me after the day we had spent together. At first I had been relieved, because I was terrified of what had happened. That day I had gone home to find Adam smiling and cheerful, ready to have a drink with me by the fire. Instead I had zoomed past him, muttering something about the squalor and hopelessness of the slum, as an excuse for my aloofness and lack of concentration. I desperately needed a bath before anything else, I said. I wanted to be alone in order to go over what had just happened and pull myself together. I lay in the tub for an hour, praying that this new lunacy would dissipate with the steam.
But it did not.
Soon Hunter’s silence started to oppress me. As I had foreseen, I stopped having a life of my own and began a life of waiting. I found the wildest excuses to stay home as much as possible in the vain hope the phone would ring, I would check my mailbox obsessively, grill Wilson on whether anybody had left a message while I was out. I couldn’t stop thinking of Hunter: he had invaded me, his day had become my day. I kept trying to guess where he could be and what he could be doing, as if I had a parallel watch on my wrist. I knew he was still in town, I kept track of his moves via Miles or Nicole, but I knew he wouldn’t be much longer. Rwanda was about to swallow him back.
What his silence meant, I told myself, was either that I was the one supposed to make the next move or that I had simply vanished from his brain again. I couldn’t decide which hypothesis terrified me more.
One morning I saw his car parked outside the Horseman’s Restaurant. The thought that he was there, just behind the gate and the ferns, gave me a rush and I broke into a cold sweat like an ex-junkie who has spotted his old drug dealer.
I’ve got to see him now, just to talk to him, nothing more, I told myself.
I walked up the path lined by lush plants along the small pond and stepped under the thatched roof of the open restaurant. It was early, and almost all the tables were empty. My heart sank when I spotted Hunter sitting across from a woman who had her back to me. As usual, he was totally absorbed in a conversation, gesticulating animatedly. I couldn’t make out who the woman was, but before I could turn and run, he saw me and called me over.
His date turned out to be a fifty-year-old German reporter, an old acquaintance. They both insisted I join them. The woman seemed friendly and pleasant.
“Ulla,”he explained to me, “is writing a story on the Goldenberg scandal.”
“Really?” I tried to feign interest, not having the faintest idea what the Goldenberg scandal was. About which, needless to say, Hunter had the minutest details. I sat back with a frozen smile and pretended to follow their conversation.
I had no will of my own, no desire except to intercept his movements across the table and try to get in his way, to steal an opportunity to touch his knee, brush his hand, smell his hair as we were passing each other lighter, cigarettes, menus. I could only concentrate on keeping the level of our sexual tension charged by constantly feeding it with my body language. Nodding like a moron whenever Ulla made a significant comment or he said anything I gathered was seeking approval.
By the end of the meal I was furious with myself; I’d never known I had this in me. The sight of my own passivity—animal subjugation, almost—frightened me. I’d never thought I could become so naked and exposed, so oblivious, as if nothing else mattered, nothing and nobody. All I could feel, all I had become, was this pulsating sexual energy—carnal, raw—which had taken control of me to the point that I had to get away from it, physically. I literally needed to walk up the wooden staircase which led to the washroom and look at myself in the mirror.
“Stop this. You are pathetic,” I commanded my own reflection.
I walked downstairs again determined to regain control of myself. Hunter meanwhile seemed perfectly relaxed, not in the least emotionally altered to see me. Why did I have to fight these titanic battles completely on my own whenever I was around him?
The whole thing was hopeless, and I was behaving like a neurotic. This needs to stop right now, I ordered myself. What I hated most about the situation was his adamant concentration on the Goldenberg case, as if nothing was more important to him than proving his theory about who was most corrupted and who had made more money at the expense of whom, for Ulla’s article.
I was starting to loathe his self-righteousness. He would say the same things, with the same fervent passion, to anybody who came along, just to hear himself being outraged or passionate about an issue. Only a few days earlier he had talked to me with the same intensity about his childhood, his mother and father, had made me feel like he’d chosen me because I had something special. And there he was, his hands flying, looking at Ulla like he’d never had an object in his life other than the Goldenberg scandal. Suddenly I found myself detesting everything about him—his furiously bitten fingernails, the way he held his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, even the colour of his shirt. I’d been right from the beginning: there was a priggish narcissism about him that one didn’t really want to put up with.
I looked at my watch.
“Hunter…I think I’d better get going—”
“No, wait,” he said in a flash, and his hand landed on my wrist like a handcuff. “We’ll go together in a minute; just let me give Ulla these contacts.”
As he scribbled phone numbers of people who would spill more beans on the Goldenberg scandal, he firmly locked my ankle between his feet under the table.
All my hatred instantly melted like mist in the sun. I sat back, watching him hand his notes to Ulla, a besotted grin on my face.
He wanted me. He wasn’t going to let me go.
And then and there I was back to being the happiest woman in all of Karen.
Later, at his house, after we had made love again, he said:
“I missed you, I kept dreaming of you.”
“I missed you too.”
“I was hoping you would come here. I waited for you.”
“Did you?”
“Of course.”
“I was afraid of coming back.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Oh. Well”—I stared at him—“you know…”
We said nothing more. There was very little either of us could say, after that. Neither of us wanted to get into the details that revealed the pettiness of our situation. Neither of us wanted to face what the situation demanded. But I knew it had to be me; I was the one who was living with another man. I was the one who had to lie and deceive. And it was up to me to say what I was prepared to do.
But I didn’t want to say anything, yet. I wasn’t prepared to say that what we were doing was wrong and had to stop right away, nor that it was what I most wanted and that I couldn’t live another day without it.
Instead I turned to him and kissed him slowly. I felt the warmth of his body. I slid my fingers inside his shirt and caressed his lean flanks. I lied to myself, thinking that if I could make love to him just one more time, I would go home fullfilled and satisfied.
I knew I had trespassed into the illicit, but the junkie in me said, You can get off the stuff whenever you like. Just take another hit now, and you won’t think about it again. You’ll be fine, you won’t get hooked on just one more hit.
The junkie in me is such a devious liar. By the time I was back in my car I knew I was hopelessly intoxicated. Yet I realised that I could survive the addiction only if I pretended it was just physical. I couldn’t let it slip into falling in love.
Thus, equipped with all these custom-made lies, tailored to fit what my situation required, I believed I had managed to get on top of the situation once again. I went home, proud and elated, as if I had just learnt a really good trick.
CHAPTER SIX
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
W. B. YEATS
Cassandra lay asleep in the temple.
Apollo appeared and offered her the gift of prophecy, in exchange for lying with him. She accepted at first but then went back on the bargain. Apollo begged her for at least one kiss, and as she agreed he spat in her mouth as revenge, so that nobody would ever believe her prophecies or go near her. Nobody likes the company of a doomsayer. I’ve always sympathized with Cassandra. Especially since I’ve been spat in the mouth by Hunter.
So let’s see. I’m going over and over the story looking for at least one redeeming factor hidden in its folds. Maybe my storytelling is a bit like sifting river sand hoping to find at least a handful of gold.
But so far all I’ve managed to see is how we have reached the point where the paradise is decaying faster than our decadent minds.
We, who thought Africa was going to turn us into better human beings, more wholesome and in tune with our instincts, seem to have instead progressively showed our basest nature. But in fact I am convinced that we who live here end up looking more ruthless, narcissistic and deceitful only because this place has fewer distractions and diversions, and very little available camouflage. So Africa only turns out to be a higher observation point, where it’s possible to cast a wider glance at human nature.
I knew exactly what had happened: I had so much time to think and brood. The analysis of why I was so desperately attracted to Hunter and so incapable of leaving Adam had become my favourite pastime.
Yes, each name contains a destiny, and only now I see how Hunter stalked me from the very beginning, as if he could smell the Ferdinando genes in me. He knew right away I was an escapee, a renegade from the coldness of intellectual control seeking refuge in a purely sensual life. He picked me out of a crowd and said, Stop disguising yourself, I know where you come from, you are not one of them. As he said that I likewise recognised the familiar traits of my own tribe in him. And I followed.
Ironically, between Adam and me it had worked the other way round. It had been the distance I felt from him which had made me trust him. I knew that even if I showed myself naked to Adam, he wouldn’t be able to really make me out. Such a deep understanding wasn’t necessary, because our attraction was founded on a completely different principle: it sprang from instinct, an animal chemistry. But then I had failed in the logical consequence of that principle: I had failed to be an alpha woman and have his child.
So I was instantly flattered by Hunter’s recognition—for whatever reason, he wanted me because of my mind, he wasn’t remotely interested in the breeder in me—but I knew that once I’d shown myself naked in front of him he’d decipher me to the minutest particle. And that scared me.
Therefore I quickly had to learn how to lie, not only to Adam but to myself, pretending that all we wanted was quick sex and soon we’d have had our fill of it. I escaped to see Hunter whenever I could, while Adam would dash out of the house every morning before eight smelling of shaving cream, leaving yet another scribbled list of provisions to buy for the camp and things which needed fixing.
This is what lovers do in the stillness after they have made love.
They say I love this bit of you.
Which?
The nape of your neck.
And I love this, right here.
Why?
Because it’s so soft, so vulnerable.
What else?
Your shoulders. I’ll never forget when I saw your bare shoulders for the first time.
What is it about them?
Hunter touches the roundness of the muscle, then the hollow over the armpit. I feel his finger trace the line of my collarbone.
I don’t understand what he means, don’t care. He is kissing my bones, laughing. I never want it to end.
“I want to take this away with me,” he says, cupping my shoulder in the palm of his hand.
“What a boring part of my body to take on a trip.”
“You have no imagination. There is much more to anatomy than you think. Let me show you.”
As I drive home in the dusk I hold you in my head: the image of your eyes—such a strange shade of grey—as you look into mine while making love. I never thought it would be possible to fix a single image in one’s mind for so long. The sound of your voice as you whisper:
“You. You.”
You don’t even dare pronounce my name.
This is what I go home with almost every day now.
For the first couple of weeks I had felt almost brave in being able to lie to Adam. I found it easier to feel cold rather than ashamed. But it didn’t last.
The mornings were the most difficult. That’s when Hunter would come back to me most vividly, in fragments still tangled up in my dreams. It was like reemerging from under water, enveloped in his scent, specks of him still sticking to my skin like weeds. It was so hard to extricate myself from it, and that’s when I felt most vulnerable under Adam’s gaze.
“Why don’t you move to the camp for the season?” he asked me one morning out of the blue as we were having breakfast.
“What? For the whole season?” His question took me completely by surprise. I could feel myself blushing. His eyes were inspecting me, testing.
“Yes. You could help me manage the camp.”
“I wouldn’t…I mean I don’t think I would be able to, really. I’m so useless at keeping accounts and stuff like that.”
“Come on, Esmé, you’d just have to play hostess with the clients at dinner, make a bit of conversation. You wouldn’t have to keep the books or manage any of the business. You’d be great.” His voice held an insistence which worried me.
“Would I? I’m not so sure,” I said feebly.
He poured himself some coffee and stirred it a while too long. I felt tension creeping up my spine.
“It’s a real job. I mean, the company would have to pay you for it,” he said without lifting his eyes from the cup.
“Come on, it’s not a matter of paying me. It’s—”
“Otherwise we’ll be apart too
much of the time,” he finally admitted. And he looked at me with an open stare which meant much more than he was prepared to admit.
I started inspecting my fingernails, pretending to be evaluating the offer. I knew that Adam was asking me to leave town, to leave whatever was keeping me away from him.
“It’s so beautiful up there now, so green and lush, full of game—”
I knew it would be beautiful. But I wasn’t interested in the beauty anymore. I had entered a different realm, where that beauty would have driven me insane.
“I don’t know,”I said. “I’d like to think about it. It’s a bit of a commitment.”
He looked at me and suddenly I felt he knew everything. He must know, I thought, how could he not?
“Yes it is,” he said, “it is a commitment.”
East Africa could be the worst place on the planet to have a secret affair. No out-of-the-way restaurants, no movie theatres, no romantic hotels or cosy cafés where they wouldn’t know you or your lover.
So Hunter and I didn’t attempt to hide, but simply pretended to have become really good friends, which allowed us to be often seen together having lunch or hanging out without raising particular suspicions. That we had become so close didn’t surprise anybody.
“You two,” Nena once said to me, “are both so cerebral.”
“What do you mean?” I said, alarmed at the mere fact that she had thought of us as a pair.
“Well, you know, Hunter has always complained there was never anyone around he could talk to. I think he loves your company, the way you two always exchange opinions, how you can go on and on about ideas for hours. It’s so rare here.”
“Come on, you have opinions about things too. You read a lot.”
“Only cosmetic labels, lately.” She shrugged. “Anything else feels like too much effort.”
It was amazing how nobody saw the obvious. Which was that we were made for each other. That it wouldn’t have been possible for us not to be lovers. At the time I couldn’t see it clearly myself. Probably, like every other junkie, I was in denial.
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