Rules of the Wild

by Francesca Marciano

  “I know you are.”

  I took his hand and held it in mine.

  “It’s madness. It’s like a nonstop cocktail party in that hotel: every night new reporters check in from all over the world, they all know each other, they’re thrilled to meet again in Goma. In the dining room all you hear are glasses tinkling and corks popping. And let me tell you, you’ve never seen any of these guys in Rwanda before. Three months ago they were probably covering the Cannes Film Festival. So now they’re all in seventh heaven, sexing up the story because Goma is easy, no risk of getting killed and you have Pulitzer-quality footage right outside your hotel door.”

  “But isn’t it always like that? Why are you so outraged, as if you didn’t know how the press worked…”

  “Because with all their cameras and satellites they’re twisting the facts in a way I will not contribute to. We didn’t have any images of the killers in Kigali when they were clubbing people to death, we didn’t have cameras rolling when they slaughtered thousands in the churches. We don’t have the genocide on film, so in a way it’s never been real. People believe things have actually happened only if they can watch them on television before supper. The dying Hutus are becoming the real Rwanda tragedy now, only because they are getting this incredible media coverage. Suddenly everyone’s concerned with their plight, humanitarian organizations flocking in, everybody happily making a million bucks a minute, while the murder and the genocide slowly slides out of focus. It’s already wrapped in fog.” He shook his head. “I won’t do it. I’m out of here.”

  I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how I felt. I could feel a wave of panic about to submerge me, and I fought back with as much strength as I could muster. I couldn’t believe he was leaving like that.

  “When will you be back?”

  “Back? You don’t understand, Esmé. This is like a major crisis with the paper. They don’t like it when someone pulls out of a story and I don’t think they’re going to send me back to Africa for a while. I’m replacing their correspondent in Kabul only until the end of December and then we’ll see.” He shrugged and looked out the window. “They may post me back in London as far as I know. If I keep the job.”

  Then he looked at his watch, impatient and uneasy.

  “Listen, I have to have something to eat and I have to have a bath. I have very little time left to do a million things.”

  He was already far away, his brain focussed on the logistics of airline tickets and what to pack.

  “I’ll run you a bath and see if there’s anything to eat in the house.”

  We became very quiet and mimicked a domesticity we’d never had. I sat on my bed and listened to his body moving in the water through the bathroom door. I didn’t dare go in. It would have disturbed me to see him lying in the tub, enveloped in steam, like I’d seen Adam so many times. No, we’d never allowed ourselves to feel that intimate and tranquil, and it would have felt like a sacrilege to let it happen now. I sat on my bed and waited.

  At last I realised what had always scared me about Hunter: he could do without me in the name of a principle. Nothing and nobody could have held him back now. He was prepared to go away, the lone wolf again. Africa meant something to him. His life had been shaped by it, like his mother’s, and he would leave it rather than betray it.

  I didn’t have that. I was a weak, selfish and self-obsessed creature who had adjusted an immense African tragedy to her petty needs. I lacked his strength, his rigour, and ultimately—for that very reason—I didn’t believe someone like him could ever love, trust or need someone like me.

  He came into the bedroom, his hips wrapped in a towel, and sat beside me on the bed, his hair dripping on the sheets. The proximity of his body threatened me. I wanted him to get dressed as fast as possible.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  I looked at him incredulously.

  “Where?”

  “To Kabul, to London. Wherever.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “You don’t have to live in Africa.”

  “Hunter, it’s impossible.”

  “Why is it impossible? You could make it very possible if you wanted to.”

  “What makes you think I could leave, just like that?”

  “I don’t know. My ego, in the first place.” He smiled, but I could see he was feeling vulnerable.

  “And in the second place, I think Africa is just an escape for you. But you’re not like everyone else here, Esmé.”

  “What am I like?”

  “This won’t ever be enough for you. You’re more complicated than that.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “Adam won’t ever be enough.”

  I stiffened, I didn’t like hearing him say Adam’s name in our bedroom. I didn’t like him half naked in my house giving a label to my life.

  “What do you mean, enough?” Suddenly I felt angry. Angry at him for leaving me, angry at myself for letting all this happen without foreseeing the consequences.

  “You don’t measure people like that. And what do you know about my relationship with Adam, anyway?”

  I thought that would close the subject. But he didn’t seem to be afraid of losing now that everything was at stake:

  “I think he’s making you feel secure and loved. But I don’t think you are in love with him.”

  I shot up and away from him. It drove me wild that he would discuss Adam and me like that, sitting on our bed, as if he’d come to officially take over.

  His sudden resolve scared me. All we had silently agreed to ignore and conceal up till now, all the words which were never said, he was now calling up one by one and giving each one of them its name. I knew this was a dangerous game: once you give things their name, they refuse to go back into Pandora’s box.

  Words flew out of my mouth like desperate, blind blows.

  “So what,” I asked bitterly, “do you think I am in love with you?”

  He stood up and began to put on his shirt. He looked drained.

  “You are very acrobatic, Esmé. All these pirouettes and somersaults you do in order never to say anything, bouncing back questions like a juggler. You should have been English, it would suit you much better.” He looked at me defeated. “I’m not the one to answer that for you. You are.”

  I could have turned my life around in thirty seconds. I could have said Yes, I love you. I’ve been in love with you since the first three seconds I saw you. And even though you ask so much of me, even though it scares me to follow you so blindly wherever you go, I’ll come with you because otherwise I’ll spend my life regretting it. Here I am, Hunter Reed, it’s as simple as that.

  But I didn’t.

  I stood speechless by the door and watched him put on his clothes, paralysed by the fear of losing him, hypnotised, like someone leaning over the rail of the Empire State Building, down into the void. If only he could disappear now, it would be like having a leg amputated. The whole thing would be over and done with. Then maybe, once by myself, it would be easier to deal with the pain.

  CHAPTER NINE

  This is my black. I alone

  Am the authority, and I know no further

  Than I’ve got, if that be anywhere.

  I inherited no maps.

  U. A. FANTHORPE

  The next day I took off from Wilson Airport after five.

  I sat in the copilot seat of the Cessna next to Peter, the Elephant Man. He was in the midst of his elephant-counting survey and for the last three weeks he’d been giving me lifts to Adam’s camp. We didn’t talk much during the flights, but these little trips had created a kind of intimacy between us. It was nice to be just the two of us in his small plane. He would gently tap my elbow and point down at game, and he glided over the plains, tilting his wings in the wind like a ballerina. Usually he played opera as he flew low over the long grass, and I couldn’t resist singing along to Verdi in a poor crescendo as we floated above the jumping herds of zebras and wildebeests. I l
oved the way he always made our flights such an exhilarating transition.

  But that afternoon I was mute, sunk, drained. Dead. I think Peter detected the hollow note in my silence and he didn’t even try to get my attention as we flew in the golden light.

  I kept my eyes on the small plane’s shadow as it lifted off the ground until there was no more surface to reflect itself upon and its silhouette vanished among the clouds. Such a liberating feeling, to unbind and let go, almost weightless, without even your shadow to pin you to the earth. I exhaled deeply, as if I needed to get rid of the air inside my lungs.

  It felt good to take off. I needed to lift myself out of it, pierce the clouds and see it all from above. To see it all from up high so one could learn to love it again.

  Yes, it was good that Hunter had had to leave like that. That we had been brutally forced into this unexpected separation. That we’d also managed to show each other how ugly it could turn between us; our unpleasantness had helped ease the pain of having to part.

  The night before, he had rung me from Kenyatta airport where he was about to get on the midnight British Airways flight.

  “Since I doubt that I’ll ever see you again, I thought I’d let you know what I’ve learned from our last little rendezvous, Esmé.”

  He had been drinking, his voice was strident, menacing. He was as wild and dangerous as anyone who has nothing left to lose.

  “Hunter, don’t. There’s no need to make this more difficult than it already is.”

  “Difficult? You’ve just solved it brilliantly. In fact, congratulations.”

  “Please—”

  “Here’s what I learned,” he recited. “Some men can’t ever be husbands. They’ll always be lovers.”

  “.….”

  “Are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s extraordinary, you know. That you should think of yourself as this romantic, passionate character”—I heard his bitter, husky laugh—“the Poet’s Daughter.”

  “Hunter, will you listen to me for—”

  “Considering that instead you have the nature of an insurance agent, I’d say you suffer from delusions of grandeur. The way you evaluate all the risks, the costs, the consequences, I mean, you should sell policies, Esmé. Nobody could resist you.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Yes. But I see everything very clearly through the vodka haze.”

  He coughed and cleared his throat.

  “Seriously, now. It’s going to work really well for you. Adam is your friend. He’ll probably become your husband. You’ll eat fish cakes and chips in front of the telly. Whereas I, Esmé…” —he paused, emphatically—“I may never be your friend, but at least I’ve been your lover.”

  His voice ended in a slur:

  “Whateverthassupposed to mean.”

  “All right then,” I asked angrily, “and what do you think that means?”

  “I don’t know yet. That we were only meant to fuck and then get fucked in the end? Dunno. I’ve got to go now.”

  “Wait! You can’t go like that.”

  “Of course I can. I have to. They’re calling my flight.”

  I lost it.

  “This is so fucking unfair! To call me just to be mean, as you’re boarding a plane, so I can’t even—”

  “I’m afraid I’m too drunk to evaluate the consequences of this phone call, sweetheart.”

  “Hunter, wait!”

  “Ciao bella.”

  He hung up.

  The land stretched out under my eyes, rich in its red colour, unending. As we flew over the Rift Valley I felt a longing to be back with Adam in the way we used to be. I was tired of the hopelessness and the despondency Hunter had infected me with. Being in love with him had only meant insecurity, nostalgia, fear of losing him. All my feelings towards him had pivoted around what we couldn’t have.

  Suddenly it all seemed luminously clear. Love had very little to do with fear and emotional sabotage; love had to do with trust.

  I longed to be back with Adam in the beauty of Africa because I needed to believe in it again. After all, there is truth in beauty as well as in despair. Perhaps I could finally learn that.

  It was a boys-and-cars world again up at the camp; I’d almost forgotten. When I arrived Adam was lying under one of his trucks, surrounded by greasy spanners and tools neatly arranged on a piece of green canvas. All around him the usual circle of guys in overalls, the lean Turkana and Samburu staff who’d been with him for years, with whom he spoke in incomprehensible tongues and cracked mysterious mechanical jokes. I could see only his legs and part of his bare back caked with black grease and dust sticking out from under the car. His body looked fit and fresh, his skin soft and lightly tanned. Even dirty and sweaty he still smelled like a snowflake.

  He looked up from under the body of the car. A glimpse of his green eyes. He eased himself out and rubbed his forehead with the back of his greasy hand. I felt his hot sticky skin through my shirt. His lips quickly on mine.

  “You got in early.”

  “I came with Peter.”

  “I’m nearly finished with this. Go have some tea and I’ll be right with you.” He smiled, amused. “We had this huge lioness roaring right in the middle of camp last night. It was excellent. The clients went mad. Had to give one woman a couple of Valiums.”

  It was like watching him for the first time all over again, like I had that evening a long time ago, me in the role of the Lonely Crazed Surfer and he acting the Beautiful Stranger.

  I looked at his clothes scattered around the tent. His threadbare khaki trousers falling to pieces, his old mended shirts, his worn-out boots. Everything had been moulded by his shape and said something about his body, his good smell, his manliness. I studied his handwriting on a pad, I picked up the book by the nighttable, shuffled through his music. He had been listening to the Chopin sonatas. I checked his toothbrush, his shaving cream, the joint butts in the ashtray. I took in all the small details which had something to say about his life without me in that tent. It felt to me now that we’d spent only fragments of time together in the last few months, to the point that by now I seemed to know too little of what he did all day. And suddenly it seemed like such a waste that we should have been apart, and that I should have stopped looking at him with the attention I once had and which had made my life so full. I felt as if I’d come to reclaim my happiness, like something precious I’d left behind in a store.

  He came into the tent as the light was fading. He quickly stripped naked, chatting about the lioness and the clients under the shower in the rear of the tent.

  I wasn’t really listening. I watched as he vigorously rubbed his head and skin under the water. His strong hands were much browner and harder than his lean white flanks. Those secret parts of softer skin of his body I used to know so well, millimetre by millimetre, which I used to kiss slowly in the dark.

  The insides of his wrists. The back of his neck. The palms of his hands.

  I’d worshipped every inch of his skin and muscle, every curve or bone or nerve, I’d known it like one knows his way home in the pitch black. Bit by bit, step by step.

  Adam’s body, this body which sang, lately had lost its arias and hidden melodies and had gone back to be silent again. Had I been the fool who’d slowly turned down the volume? Obviously yes. I longed desperately to hear it sing again.

  He held out his arm and I handed him a towel, which he wrapped around his waist, and he briskly walked past me. I went to kiss him, I wanted to smell the fresh water on his lips, but he went on looking for a clean shirt and gently pulled me away.

  “You’re going to like these clients, they’re from New York, pretty cool people. The husband deals in art, big auctions, something like that. If say you have a Rembrandt or a Velázquez, he’ll flog it for you. It’s such an amazing world, total spy book material. The wife is much younger, very good-looking, I think she’s involved in publishing, and they have these two incredibly clever kid
s in their early twenties. I wish we’d always have people like that around, it would make everything so much more amusing.”

  I looked out the tent. The camp felt very quiet.

  “Where are they now?”

  “I sent them on a game drive with Morag, they’ll be back any minute.”

  “Who is Morag?”

  Adam looked at me hesitatingly, then waved vaguely.

  “Morag is this hunter from Tanzania who’s been hired to cull zebras at the Copelands’ ranch.”

  “Oh, okay. I never heard of him.”

  “Because she’s been down there only in the last two months. Shooting every day.”

  “She?”

  “Yeah. Morag is Scottish for Mary. She’s a huntress, to be exact. Quite an amazing shot, as a matter of fact.”

  I watched him as he brushed his hair with his fingers and tied his old leather belt around his hips. I felt alarmed.

  “And how come Morag takes your clients on game drives?”

  “Because she often comes into camp once she’s done her daily zebra quota and she’s perfect for the clients, they love having a girl like that show them around.”

  “You mean she’s working for you?”

  “No. She’s only doing it because she enjoys it. She’s shooting and sitting all day in a huge pickup truck filled with smelly bloody animals and flies. I promise you it’s not a lot of fun. Here she can relax, have a drink, listen to good music and have some interesting conversation. She takes them on a drive in the evening, they seem to have lots of fun together, and that gives me a break if I have things to do back here.”

  “Right.”

  It sounded like a great arrangement. Yet this Morag and her killing skills worried me.

  “It’s a pretty amazing job to kill ten zebras in one day and be finished before tea, let me tell you,” said Adam, trying to make me like her and creating the opposite result.

  “Yeah. I bet.”

  The micropause which followed seemed to stretch out a little too long. Then, thank God, we heard the car come down from the hill. Female giggles and male laughter, brakes on the rough surface and the solo sax from “Walk on the Wild Side” blasting from the stereo.