Rules of the Wild

by Francesca Marciano

  But I know he must be walking around this town with a very similar scar to mine under his clothes. I do not want to see it. I am not allowed to see him naked ever again.

  “Claire will arrive next Friday.”

  We were standing in front of the petrol station. Hunter and I. Barely a week ago.

  “Oh.”

  We paused, I felt terribly nervous. I was holding a bunch of pale orange roses I had just bought. Having the flowers in my hands made me feel strangely vulnerable. As if they had been a gift for him, something he’d refused to accept.

  “I’ll be in Kampala. I leave the day after tomorrow.”

  “You mean she’s not going to find you when she arrives at the airport?”

  “No. There’s very little I can do about that.”

  “I’ll go get her.”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “I know. But I can.”

  “Why you, of all people?”

  “It’s all right, Hunter. I guess it’s all part of the process.”

  “Which process?”

  “I mean…I have to get used to a lot of new things around here. Since I’m going to meet her anyway I may as well do something useful.”

  He looked down at the roses I was holding, as if seeing me again had punctured all his energy. I was plucking nervously at the flowers and unconsciously pulled one out of the bunch, as if to offer it to him.

  “Come on. I’m not going to bite her. I’ll just take her to your place and make sure there’s something for her to eat in the fridge.”

  “She knows nothing about you.”

  “She never will. Don’t worry about that.”

  He stared at me. I was suddenly aware of the temperature of his body next to mine. Too close. My internal alarm started to flash its red light.

  “All right then,” he said and clenched the orange rose from my hand, “it’s the British Airways morning flight. Next Friday. I’ll tell her what you look like.”

  I smiled.

  “Right. But you better not tell her how beautiful you think I am.”

  And I ran away fast, a whirl of petals falling from my arms.

  So I’ve taken you full circle, and now we’re back to where I started.

  It’s nearly five in the morning in Nairobi, I’m coming home from the Mud Club, still pretty high on tequila. Peter the Elephant Man is driving me. He’s been dancing all night with lots of girls and he’s had a few drinks too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so out of control. Not sloppy or anything, he’s simply loose, more boyish than I’ve ever seen him, as if the alcohol has thawed the veneer which usually protects him.

  “Why didn’t Nena come tonight?,” I ask.

  “We had a hideous fight.”

  Peter is driving with a smile on his face, swaying slightly. He’s never said anything so private to me before.

  “Did you? I hope it wasn’t too serious.”

  “Well, I guess I’m supposed to say it wasn’t. But the truth is it was pretty bad.”

  Then he adds:

  “I hate to tell you, but I think we may have to split up.”

  “What?…Shit, Peter. I always thought you and Nena were…Slow down, darling, we’re going to fall in the ditch.”

  “Don’t you worry, I’m perfectly capable of driving. Yes, I really think we are going to split up. Does that shock you?”

  I can’t believe he wants to discuss his marriage with me at five A.M. But he obviously does. So I take the bull by the horns.

  “Is there anyone else?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “Because usually married people with children split up only if they are in love with someone else.”

  “You mean you don’t think it’s worth breaking up a marriage just to be happier and feel alive again, on your own?”

  “No, wait, I do. But most people don’t. They think they alone are not worth all that trouble.”

  “Hmm, that’s an interesting theory. You’re saying a lot of people stay in an unhappy marriage because of what the shrinks call low self-esteem.”

  “Something like that. And fear, of course. Fear of a leap in the dark. But if you have an object of love, well then, you have an objective, right? That makes everything easier.”

  He nods pensively. Then he turns to me, brisk and sober.

  “Listen, do you really feel like going home now?”

  “What’s the alternative? I mean, it’s daybreak, Peter.”

  “Why don’t we go somewhere beautiful and have a cup of coffee?”

  “Fine, somewhere beautiful. Except I can’t think of anywhere beautiful where we can have coffee right now.”

  “I can. We must hurry, though, before it gets light.”

  He wheezes off down the Langata road, into Wilson Airport’s gate.

  “I’m going to fly us somewhere beautiful and see the sun rise.”

  “Peter that’s terribly grand, but are you sure you’re not too drunk to fly?”

  “Stop worrying about my alcohol intake for a minute.”

  He parks the car in front of the Africair hangar. It’s still dark. There are a couple of Africans in overalls inside a tiny office behind a glass window. Peter honks lightly and they wave at him.

  I don’t know what it is about Wilson Airport, it must be a combination of the hangars, the small planes, these tall men in old-fashioned overalls, but it instantly puts me in a black-and-white movie mood.

  Peter rummages in the back seat of the car and emerges holding a flask.

  “Go in and ask those guys to fill this up with Nescafé. I’ve got biscuits and sugar in the plane. Do you like Hobnobs?”

  “I love Hobnobs. It’s just what I feel like eating.”

  The sun on the equator always rises at six. No matter what.

  Peter and I have flown over the Rift Valley in the first light of the day, to the sound of the Brandenburg Concertos.

  Suddenly the tequila fumes have vaporized, and with them my sadness. We have flown low over Lake Naivasha, skimming the water with our wings, and then brushed the tops of the yellow fever trees as the first rays of the sun touched their bark and turned them gold.

  I am suddenly mad with happiness.

  How can I explain this? Why is it you can never hope to describe the emotion Africa creates?

  You are lifted.

  Out of whatever pit, unbound from whatever tie, released from whatever fear. You are lifted and you see it all from above. Your pit, your ties, your fear. You are lifted, you slowly rise like a hot-air balloon, and all you see is the space and the endless possibilities for losing yourself in it.

  “This country was created to be seen from the sky,” I shout to Peter. “Everyone here should have wings.”

  “Why not?” He laughs. “We should all have the right to be angels, since we live in Paradise.”

  Peter has managed a landing in the grass without too much jolting, and we’ve walked to the top of a boulder with our breakfast and a blanket. Now we are sitting on a flat rock, hundreds of kilometres from Nairobi, looking down at the early-morning view and sipping our Nescafé. You can cast your glance all the way into another country: Tanzania is on the left, behind those deep purple mountains. Mount Kenya is coming out through the clouds, we’ll be able to make out its tip very soon.

  The plane is right below us, it looks like a dragonfly. Something out of a children’s book. A magic toy in a fairy tale.

  “You know, you could fit the length of Manhattan at least twice between here and those mountains,” Peter says. “The whole island, with all its cars, and offices, and telephone cables and faxes and electric wires.”

  “With all the people, all the noises they make, all the problems, the sex, the crime, the business.”

  “And the banks, the books, the art, the shops, the furniture, the clothes, the gadgets.”

  “Imagine. The amount of stuff.”

  “Unbelievable. The concentration per square metre.”

  “And
instead, from here to there, there’s absolutely nothing.”

  “Us two, and a few animals.”

  “Fucking amazing.”

  The sun is still low and radiates an orange light on the plain. Impalas and gazelles graze in the distance. They will shortly come to the water hole below us. Its surface is perfectly still like a mirror, doubling the sky above us with an amazing sharpness.

  “Thank you, Peter, I couldn’t think of a better place for a cup of coffee. It puts everything back in its right place.”

  He nods and sips his coffee. He lights two cigarettes and hands me one.

  “I’ll tell you what it is about this place,” he says. “It sentences you to freedom.”

  “Yeah. It can be a sentence, rather than a liberation, can’t it?”

  “Sure. A lot of people can’t take it, it frightens them. That’s why a lot of people drink so much in Africa, it’s one way to smooth the vertigo. But you know, for those who can bear to ride the wave, I think what happens is that here you are constantly reminded of what it means to be free and to be alive. And then it becomes very difficult to settle for anything less than this. You want to live with that awareness all the time. You want to be able to sit on this rock at dawn and feel this happy over and over again.”

  He pauses, lost in his thoughts.

  “That’s why sometimes I need to come and look at things from here. It puts everything back into perspective, somehow. This I mean, look at this. Frankly I’d find it very hard not to feel happy in a place like this.”

  “Yes. But it can also be very cruel. I’ve been incredibly desperate here. I felt exposed as nowhere else.”

  We feel the warmth of the first rays touch our skin. Peter fills up my cup with steaming coffee.

  “You know, Esmé, when I first saw you,” he says gently, “I thought: She’s going to be thrashed.”

  “Did you?”—so surprising, that he should say that.

  He nods.

  “Come on, Peter. Did I look that naive?”

  “No. You just looked like someone who wouldn’t put up any resistance. Someone who had come intentionally unarmed. But I knew you’d come out the other end.”

  “Have I?”

  “Yes, I think you have. The difficult bit is over.”

  He knows everything about me. Doesn’t everyone here? But he’s been gentle, he’s been watching me with care. I’m touched by his attention.

  I raise my head, impatiently, as if driven by a residual ripple of anger.

  “Sometimes I think I should leave. Sometimes I think I won’t be able to bear all of this”—my arm sweeps over the plain below us, over the grass swept lightly by the wind—“on my own.”

  I want him to reassure me.

  “You’ll be all right. You don’t have to leave.”

  But I need to insist.

  “I feel like I’ve lost everything now.”

  He shakes his head. He’s smiling.

  “No you haven’t. That’s the point I’m trying to make. You think you are here because you are in love with someone and then maybe because you fall in love with someone else. But what you don’t understand is that you’ve been here all along for a different reason. It has nothing to do with people in your life, but with your ability to feel.”

  He looks at me, waiting for me to say something, but I can’t. I lower my eyes to the ground because his gaze is making me uneasy.

  “Are you no longer in love with Nena?” I ask him quickly, in a whisper, as if the answer will bind us forever in a secret it scares me to share.

  “Love.” He pronounces the word as if casting it down from where we sit, listening to it slide in the silence. “Of course I still love her and I always will. But Nena and I have stopped feeling for each other. We’ve been slowly clipping each other’s wings, one could say. It happens a lot, to people who spend many years together. You erode each other.”

  I take another sip of coffee. Incredible how I never paid close enough attention to Peter. Somehow, I had always taken him for granted, as if he needed no further investigation: The Elephant Man, Ideal Husband and Ideal Father, No Further Desires. Rather presumptuous of me.

  “You know, Peter, very selfishly, in a way it makes me feel better to know that you and Nena aren’t this perfect couple, and that your life is still going through changes. That you too are …”

  I can’t find the appropriate word.

  “Struggling,”he says. “Hey, isn’t it what we are all doing?”

  We sit in silence, listening to the breeze gently shaking the grass.

  Then these birds come forward, in a perfect V formation, and glide over the water hole. The shimmering surface reflects their choreography like a mirror, and for a moment it is impossible to distinguish how many they really are. They drift very low, like dancers, and in the perfect stillness we can hear their wings flapping. The sound in this light stops the heart.

  “Look now,” says Peter, as we hold our breath, feeling that any second one of them will break the surface of the water.

  And there it is, the sound of feathers against water, the ripples, and the sky now breaking in whirls, all its soft purples and pinks in overlapping motion.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” he says. “And it’s always like it’s happening for the first time.”

  I see it now, and I don’t think I will ever forget it.

  In a way everything here always happens for the first time.

  How the birds fly, the clouds move, the sun rises. Each time it’s like watching a miracle happen.

  You will never get used to it.

  It will always be new.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are many people I need to thank, who have helped me during the writing of this book. I am in debt to all of them for their support, and for the inspiration they have given me.

  To Dominic Cunningham-Reid, Anna and Tonio Trzebinski, Emma Marrian, Judy Walgren, Mark Huband, Carlos Mavroleon, Sue Fusco, Saba Douglas-Hamilton, Stefania Miscetti, Pasquale Plastino, Clare Peploe, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Melissa North, who have all, in different ways, contributed to this book.

  To Simon Evans and Kerry Glen, for the perfect writer’s retreat at Ol Laro Camp. To Mrs. Nancy Camm, for her wonderful house in Naro Moru. A special thanks to Ali Masumbuko, Ali Mwyini and Mzee Salimu, for putting up with me and always making my life a lot easier.

  To my agent, Toby Eady, for believing in the book right from day one, and to Robin Desser, my editor at Pantheon, whose indomitable wit and passionate enthusiasm have carried me through.

  Copyright © 1998 by Francesca Marciano

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Vintage Books, Vintage Contemporaries, and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Harvard University Press: Excerpt from poem number 273 from The Poems of Emily Dickinson edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  New Directions Publishing Corp.: Excerpt from “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” from The Poems of Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1939 by New Directions Publishing Corp.

  Peterloo Poets: Excerpt from “Descent” from Neck-Verse by U. A. Fanthorpe. Copyright © 1992 by Peterloo Poets.

  Sony/ATV Music Publishing: Excerpt from “Heart with No Companion” by Leonard Cohen. Copyright © 1985 by Sony/ATV Songs LLC. Excerpt from “Wrong” by Ben Watt and Tracey Thorne. Copyright © 1996 by Sony Music Publishing U.K., Ltd. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

  Marciano, Francesca.

  Rules of the wild / Francesca Marciano.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

&
nbsp; pr9120.9.m36r8 1998

  823—dc21

  98-10963

  CIP

  eISBN: 978-0-307-55949-4

  Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.0