Rules of the Wild

by Francesca Marciano

  “Oh, I’ve missed you so much,” I said in a small voice, and suddenly realised how insane it was to have been away from him all that time.

  It started pouring. Roofs leaked, cars got stuck in the mud, phones went down, power got cut, it was one red-bucket day after another, but I couldn’t care less. I had my ticket: all I was dreaming of was a fresh European spring, away from the darkness, the snails and the frogs.

  I hadn’t asked Adam to come with me and meet my brother, as we had planned the summer before. I needed to go alone now. I wanted no witnesses.

  He drove me to the airport. I detected a hint of apprehension in him as he saw me to the check-in counter: he could only vaguely imagine what Italy looked like, let alone Teo, my other friends, my whole life there. As he saw me gabble in Italian with the Alitalia staff, my foreignness must have suddenly startled him.

  “Don’t stay away too long,” Adam said when we kissed goodbye.

  Only at the passport control did I realise how long I had been broken.

  How much I wanted out, how I needed to be healed.

  “I want you to come back soon, all right?” he whispered.

  And it was strange, but as he said that I felt that I could very easily disappear, slip out of that life and never come back again.

  ———

  The plane was full of tour groups avid to show their tans at the office on Monday, with nothing else to thank Africa for.

  It was the basest company you could conceive of for leaving a place you loved. Nothing felt right: not their accents, not their clothes or the emotions they expressed. It was like travelling with criminals.

  When you leave Africa, as the plane lifts, you feel that more than leaving a continent you’re leaving a state of mind. Whatever awaits you at the other end of your journey will be on a different order of existence.

  The Italian tourists hadn’t a nanosecond of feeling for what they were leaving behind. That was the advantage of travelling with criminals: their heartlessness prepared you for the lack of emotions ahead.

  At the other end of the tunnel, thank God, there was Teo in a crumpled white shirt looking like an archangel who had just been woken up. He was leaning sleepy-eyed on a rail in the arrivals hall among the waiting crowd, looking so different than everyone else. He held a long shoot of wisteria which he must have cut from a garden wall on the way. There was still a small leaf on his shirt. I picked it off, mechanically, as he hugged me and I smelled his familiar scent: what was it? Damp wood, ferns, rain?

  “You’ve changed,” he said smiling as we got inside his old Beetle.

  “How?”

  “You’ve lost weight. But it’s more like you’ve lost a layer. Now it’s the very essence of you.”

  “And what does that look like?”

  “It’s scary. You look feral, like you’re mad or something. But it’s beautiful.”

  I laughed and squeezed his arm. It felt good to be back with him, speaking our secret language. He had changed too, or maybe I just didn’t remember how much he reminded me of Ferdinando. Suddenly the unbearable fact hit: I was home but I would not see him or hear his husky smoker’s laugh again.

  We drove into the center of Rome to Teo’s flat near Via Giulia, past marble palazzi and fountains and tritons and cupolas and pigeons, across the green river and through the busy flower market, into the baroque piazzas, skirting the outdoor cafés. I saw pretty girls on bicycles who’d just bought flowers, sexy boys on scooters on the way to deliver groceries, older couples walking their dogs, nuns from the order of Santa Brigida rapidly crossing the square, children playing football in the courtyard of an old building covered in ivy, carpenters and carabinieri and thieves and beggars. I smelled lime tree blossoms and moss and freshly baked bread and rotten river. It all felt wonderfully tamed and graceful. To think that it had all continued to be there while I had been under that glaring light, the alleys and the spurting fountains and the pretty girls on bicycles and the nuns and the thieves, all these parallel lives, seemed incredible, nearly science fiction.

  Would there be room for me now, for my animal-like madness, would my body adjust again to these perfectly sculptured corners and intricate labyrinths? It looked magnificent, but it looked crowded.

  And it looked small.

  The first few weeks I felt like a beast trapped in a cage. Everything seemed so fragmented: the flow of conversations, all bits and pieces, always interrupted, phones ringing nonstop, sounds overlapping, everything and everybody endlessly crossing and bumping into each other.

  I wandered the streets and into the shops. There was so much of everything, I didn’t know where to start. I devoted hours to staring at different shades of lipstick, and flicking through hundreds of CDs and books. Each title sounded better than the next. I couldn’t decide what I needed; I needed everything because I had come back with nothing, but the options confused rather than attracted me. I invariably gave up and walked out of the store empty-handed.

  I would try on masses of shirts, dresses, shoes. Each time my image in the mirror of the shop struck me as new. Yes, I had changed: under the bright lights of the dressing room, unlike in any mirror in Africa, I saw at last how my hair had bleached, my skin had darkened, my eyes had sprouted thin wrinkles all around. I had been too long under the sun.

  The expensive, well-cut shirt didn’t blend with this new me; it stuck out, in all its freshness and composure. I invariably handed it back to the salesgirl.

  Yet it was heaven to be back with Teo, like being put on an IV drip of some magic substance. Every day his presence infused me with a sense of belonging, not to a place, but to a way of being. It was like finding Ferdinando again through him.

  Every morning he’d wake me up with a cup of tea, and sit on the edge of my bed.

  “Get up, Esmeralda,” he’d say playfully. “Let’s go look at beautiful things.”

  We’d peer inside small churches, he’d show me statues I had never even heard of.

  “Never seen the Ecstasy of Santa Teresa? You must be joking! Come on, hurry, the light will be perfect only for a bit longer.”

  He’d take me into a museum only to show me that one painting. One particular Judith Holding the Head of Holofernes by the school of Caravaggio, her face lit sideways with that unmistakable light.

  “The rest you can skip, it’s all boring stuff”—and from the wonderful penumbra of the Galleria Corsini we’d dash out into the sun again.

  “That’s the therapy,” he said: “you’re only allowed to look at beauty—well, at whatever is left of it, and you must ignore the rest.”

  I rang Adam a couple of times and attempted to describe what I was doing, what Rome looked like, but I knew I failed to convey my real feelings. It was as if I took for granted that he wouldn’t know what I was talking about.

  “What’s going on in Nairobi?” I would ask.

  “We haven’t had this much rain in twenty-five years. It’s a flood. All the fields have been drowned upcountry. All the bridges are washed out. You can’t even reach Nanyuki. It’s amazing.”

  The fields, the river, the bridges. We had these farmerlike conversations.

  “Anything else?” I’d ask.

  “I miss you.”

  “Me too.”

  I wasn’t sure it was true, but it felt good to say it.

  After about a week Teo and I drove to the Amalfi Coast, in a childish Kodachrome mood. We blasted old James Bond music in the car and belted out “Goldfinger” as we sped along the road that wound along the edge of the precipice over the sea. We’d rented the old house where Ferdinando used to take us in the summer when we were children.

  We sat on the eighteenth-century terrace propped on the cliff, looking out to sea. It all came back, the scents and colours of my childhood. The smell of dampness exuding from the thick walls, the vaulted ceilings over the shady rooms, the crumbling stuccoes, the cracked blue tiles. The whiff of jasmine at night. The wild fennel sprouting from the cracks in the terrace f
loor.

  “It’s so completely settecento napoletano,”I said to Teo, as we sat on the terrace after sunset.

  He seemed amused by such a discovery.

  “But of course,” he said with a smile.

  “Strange. I grew up in this and I never saw it.”

  I looked down at the cupola of the church covered in old tiles which, as a child, had reminded me of the green scales of a snake.

  Now that I had come back with the greedy eyes of the exiled, everything I saw touched me and tore me to shreds.

  “I feel so broken away from it all,” I said in a whisper.

  Teo leaned closer. It made him sad that I should say that.

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s the feeling of being back in a place where you belong which is no longer yours. The more you rediscover it, the more you see how you’ve lost it.”

  We sat bathed in the soft light of dusk which in Italy, unlike Africa, lingers on and on.

  “Perhaps after all it’s not good for humans to live in more than one place at a time,” Teo said. “I think we were designed to be territorial.”

  “Yes. Perhaps one should never have more than one home”—I paused, and something made me smile wearily—“and certainly never more than one love.”

  Once back in Rome we often ate in the old trattoria where we were not allowed to pay the bill, and drank with Ferdinando’s old friends. When they asked me about Africa I never knew what to say. I couldn’t think of a single image to deliver. It was as if Africa had vanished from my speech, it had become untranslatable, too private to be shared with strangers.

  I did talk about it to Teo: I knew he would understand me.

  “It’s in your face,” he would say, “all that space. It has deranged you completely.”

  “But what is it?”—and I would look at myself in the mirror. All I could see were my eyes, the same wild stare as Judith’s as she brandishes the head of Holofernes.

  “Ferdinando would have loved to see you like this.”

  “I don’t know if he would understand why I want to go back there. He’d think I was being melodramatic or something silly like that.” I imitated his sarcastic drawl: “He’d say ‘Stop acting like you’re inside a Russian novel right now!’”

  “No he wouldn’t. After all you are simply trying to do what he always did, I think.”

  “Which is?”

  “Being bigger than life. Except you have been able to do it in a purely geographical way. He had other ways of doing it. I mean, he was a living Russian novel, for Christ’s sake. He only pretended to be cynical.”

  I didn’t say anything for a while.

  “And how do you manage to be bigger than life here?”

  “Oh. I don’t,” he sighed. “I just fall in love.”

  Teo had a lover, Pascal, a dark-eyed, slender dancer. He was French, but originally came from Algiers. They had met at some music festival a year earlier, after I had gone.

  Pascal would come with us sometimes, and he was so quiet one would almost forget he was there. Yet, even though they hardly spoke to each other in front of me, I knew there was more than just sex between them, there was a deep bond of tenderness and love. It was very simple and beautiful to be around. I envied what they had.

  “I wish I could be like that,” I said to Teo one evening after Pascal had gone. We were lying at opposite ends of the sofa, our legs stretched out under the yellow light of the lampshade, each trying to read a book.

  “Like what?”

  “Like you and him. I wish I could love someone without having to get into his head with a can opener and take inventory each time I’m in there.”

  “What a frightening concept.”

  “But you know, that’s what I wanted to have with Adam. I thought for once I could be in love without my head. It was such a relief. Just the physical aspect of things.”

  “It’s never just physical. That’s such a cliché. It’s always more complicated than that, for everyone. Even for me and Pascal, you know.”

  “All right. Maybe I mean that I see how love can actually be easy. And I wish I—”

  “But you’ve never liked easy, Esmé,” he interrupted me. “Why don’t you stop trying always to be someone else? And then”—he propped himself up and gently pushed my book away with his toes—“go ahead and do something about this unhappy love life of yours, instead of moaning about it. You have become such a bore.”

  At the end of the day everything softened again, because I always dreamed of Africa. It would come to me every night. The space, the silence, the sky, the crisp morning air. While asleep that feeling of being voraciously alive bit into my heart, filled my lungs to the brim and pumped blood in my veins. For a few minutes every morning I was shocked not to find myself there, to wake up in the soft white light filtered by the mosquito net of my bed.

  But then, as time passed, the dreams became fainter, like a memory which slowly fades away, and it made me sad to be left alone in the city without them, as if along with the dreams I would lose the glow.

  Then one night Teo tapped lightly on my shoulder and woke me.

  “Telephone. For you.”

  “Who is it? What time is it?”

  “Late. Around two.”

  “Oh God. Who—”

  “Hunter. It’s Hunter Reed.”

  My heart stopped. I leaped out of bed like a wildcat and grabbed the receiver.

  “Hunter?”

  “Did I wake you?”

  “Yes…no, it doesn’t matter. Where—”

  “Listen, I’m on my way to Rome tomorrow, I thought I’d stop and see you, if it’s all right.”

  “.….”

  “Esmé?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would it be all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Hunter.”

  “Yes?”

  “I can’t believe it’s you.”

  “You better believe it. Give me the address.”

  “No. I’ll come get you at the airport.”

  “No, give me the address.”

  “It’s impossible spelling, you’ll get lost, let me come and get you.” Sudden panic seized me. What if he couldn’t find the house?

  “No”—I was annoying him already—“just spell it for me and I’ll get there.”

  “What time will you get here? Where are you anyway?”

  “Moscow.”

  “Moscow?”

  “Why don’t you just give me the address and stop asking all these questions?”

  I did. I spelled Via degli Orti d’Alibert three times.

  “Hunter.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t wait to see you.”

  “That’s good.”

  Beep. He was gone.

  I howled, I screamed, I jumped, I smoked a pack of cigarettes, I laughed hysterically until Teo had to give me a sleeping pill.

  “You are fucking mad.”

  “No, you don’t understand! I thought I’d never see him again.” I seized his arm with violent energy. “I thought he had started to hate me, that he would never want to see me again, and now the gods are giving me a chance. It’s like winning the lottery, one chance in a million.”

  “Well, you better not blow it this time,” Teo said, disentangling himself from my grip.

  I spent all the next day on the phone with every obscure airline that could possibly fly into Rome from Moscow, in an attempt to track down Hunter on a passenger list. I couldn’t make myself do anything else besides stare at the telephone or at the door, waiting for either of them to ring. I kept rehearsing lines out loud, then looking in the mirror while delivering them, trying on different clothes, sighing, smoking, laughing, driving my brother nuts until he had had it.

  “I am leaving you here. I’m leaving you the whole house”— and off he went.

  When Hunter finally walked through the door eighteen hours later—by which time I’d d
riven myself crazy with terror, envisaging his plane crashing or being hijacked by terrorists—the reality of him shocked me. I felt like I was seeing him for the first time: his dark hair cut short now which made his eyes look brighter, his long skinny legs in the old khaki pants hanging loose at the waist, his full soft lips, his old military boots. He threw the bags on the floor and held me for only a second. We both felt shy of each other physically now. New rules had to be established, new boundaries had been marked. We no longer knew where we stood in relation to one another.

  “Shall I get you a drink?” I asked him. Maybe alcohol would make us more relaxed, I thought.

  “Yes, please”—then I caught him staring at me—“I had forgotten what you looked like, Esmé.”

  “Oh”—I smiled—“that’s terrible.”

  We exchanged a long stare and our eyes shone.

  I feared he might remind me of our last bitter words to each other. But in typical Hunter style, he seemed to have forgotten all about that. And most probably he had, considering how drunk he had sounded at the time.

  We sat out in the terrace, overlooking the Gianicolo hill. It was one of those Roman evenings blessed with a rich golden light: all Pompeian red façades, swallows cutting the air and distant church bells. Hunter pointed to the lush gardens below us.

  “What’s that? The Villa Borghese?”

  “No. These used to be the gardens of Christina of Sweden. She lived in that palazzo over there”—I pointed at the light pink façade of an imposing seventeenth-century building. “She was a big patron of the arts, and supported Michelangelo and Raffaello. They say she was a lesbian. Now her park has become the botanical garden, and her palazzo is a…how do you say pinacoteca?”

  He nodded, amused.

  “It’s interesting to see you here. A lot more of you makes sense”—he waved towards the view—“in this.”

  “Yes?” I smiled, trying to look enigmatic. “But you know, I’m longing to go back to Africa. I miss it already.”

  “So when will you go back?”

  “Soon, next month maybe.”

  We paused. I was afraid to say anything more. I sipped my drink slowly and made myself wait.