I Dreamed of Africa Page 11

  The small Shimoni Fishing Club, a few cottages in a garden of baobab and bougainvillea overlooking the channel of Pemba, was a favourite cove of local fishermen. Shimoni was dear to Paolo as the fishing was excellent. He spent much of the months of February and March there, and often I went too. Personally I am not fond of deep-sea fishing, and I used my time in Shimoni reading and writing poems, walking on the beach looking for shells, and waiting for Paolo and Emanuele to come back in the evening. Maia Hemphill, the wife of the owner, sat by the radio in the garden of creamy frangipane, day after day, listening to the news from the fishing-boats, and knitting unending little sweaters for her grandchildren. It seemed that time had stopped in Shimoni, or was of no consequence. The waves shimmered on the coral reef, every new day had the colours and rhythms of the tides coming in from, and receding to, the high seas. Fishermen went at sunrise and came back before sunset with large fish, which were weighed and carried away in soggy pick-ups. In the evening I walked barefoot in the coarse grass, looking up at the first stars blinking over the mysterious baobabs of silver. At night I slept under mosquito nets in damp beds whose linen had been washed in salty water. Days slid into weeks and life went on, almost without me noticing, towards the moment of truth which I would have to face, and which perhaps coincided with the end of my youth.

  Since he was a little boy, Emanuele had been attracted by reptiles. He had collected chameleons, captured the odd house snake. At Pembroke his passion began to develop. And when he was ten, it was I who gave him his first legal snake.

  It was a hot afternoon of January, like many others in Kilifi. The little Snake Park, down at the jetty, is a ramshackle affair of bamboo, rotten slabs, and makuti thatch. In the dark cages, miraculously intact despite the many patches, strange reptiles sleep away their life, occasionally waking up to be fed rats or birds, goats or rabbits, depending on their size. There are a couple of tame pythons, which visitors can handle for a fee while photographs are taken. It was the day before Emanuele’s birthday, and we had delayed our return to Nairobi for a few days. There was nowhere to buy a present in Kilifi. The only duka was a dark cave selling flour with weevils, sugar, kimbo, onions, beans, orange squash, spices and little else. At the market on the north side of the creek you could get limes, eggs and mango, dried fish, coconut and chillies – hardly what a ten-year-old boy would want for a birthday present.

  ‘You must wait for your present,’ I told him, ‘unless you can find something here you would like.’

  We had visited the Snake Park many times over the years. The attendant, Mohammed, greeted us like long-lost friends: time flows slowly in Africa and memories reach further. When Emanuele took Ali, the smallest of the two pythons, and let him crawl over him and round his neck, I had a first premonition, so strong that in the evening I wrote this in my diary: ‘… my stomach contracted as if I had looked down into a obscure and threatening depth …’

  The snake had coiled sleekly around Emanuele’s thin neck, sliding down the shoulder to rest his head easily on his hand. Emanuele looked up at me, a moment frozen in the timelessness of memory. In his velvet brown eyes a question, and the serious determination I had grown to respect.

  ‘Pep. I know what I want for my birthday.’

  Dry mouth. ‘Not a snake.’

  ‘Why not? You promised.’

  Any escape. ‘They are not for sale.’

  ‘No harm in asking.’

  Buying time. ‘No. Of course not.’

  Peter Bromwell owned the Snake Park. Better known as Bwana Nyoka, he lived in a strange house, once grand and now dilapidated, on the creek at Taka-Ungu, just next to the one which had belonged to Denys Finch-Hatton, and later to the Coles. They were built on opposite sides of an old Muslim cemetery, at the mouth of the creek. The area, like many along the coast, had a reputation for being haunted. It was said that ghosts were seen at night, wailing amidst a clangour of chains, or silently drifting in mid-air and gathering, in the nights of full moon, below special baobab trees which local people regarded with awe and fear. The coast was the place where Arabs came to get slaves to carry off to the Gulf. They kept them hidden in the natural caves on the creeks along the shore, and bore them away at high tide in the holds of their dhows, together with spices, ivory, coconuts, skins and rhino horn, sliding out in dark waters bathed by the moon.

  Bwana Nyoka’s house had been built by his father-in-law, a man of refinement. It was made of coral blocks, and had a garden of flowers, terraced down to the creek, planted with frangipane, jasmine, and purple-pink bougainvillea. In the old days, servants in white kanzus, red fezzes and embroidered waistcoats used to serve drinks on the patio from silver and brass trays, or in rooms decorated with exquisite Lamu furniture, precious carvings and unexpected authentic Chinese vases. Long narrow mirrors of all sizes were placed at strategically unpredictable angles along the walls of every room, as in certain supermarkets today: they served the same purpose, as the man was deaf and was haunted by the fear of being robbed and murdered. The mirrors gave him a kaleidoscopic view of every corner of his rooms. The house was veiled in mystery and cobwebs, and very few people visited it in my day. I had only been there once, to fetch my younger stepdaughter Livia who had been invited to spend the night with the daughter of the house, a blonde fey girl called Winkle, who lived alone with her ageing parents and never went to school, but knew all secrets of the tides and of the reef. The house, an incredible mixture of extraordinarily beautiful objects and shoddy neglect, exceeded the expectations of my curiosity. Sand blown by numberless monsoons carpeted the floors, where tortoises and snakes nested. Bats and swallows roosted on the carved beams, and scrawny kittens peered from the delicate Ming dynasty vases, whose patterns were obscured by dust and guano. Impeccably pedigreed goats bivouacked on the threadbare Arab carpets. A large rusty refrigerator stood open and useless in the large dining-room, where the sand had been wiped from the corner – just– of the long table set for three with exquisite, if chipped, porcelain, and piled high with wonderful-smelling, exquisitely prepared food … a place unreal, like a film set, and of intriguing contrasts.

  Bwana Nyoka had been bitten many times by the poisonous snakes which he captured along the reptile-infested sand dunes of the coast, and it was rumoured that he would not survive another bite. He was a slim, bearded man with glasses, of undecipherable age, usually dressed in shorts and sandals, often with no shirt to cover his suntanned torso, unexpectedly muscular and younger than his face. A sure place to find him was at the bar in the Mnarani Club from 6 p.m. onwards, when with his wife, a faded fierce beauty, he always occupied the first two stools on the right, next to the entrance. To keep my word with Emanuele, I caught him there. I had hoped he would refuse, but even before I asked him, I felt it was written that he would agree.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘selling snakes is my job. I will not give you one of the tame ones, though. Those are for visitors. I have a new young one I have just caught. Should be easy to tame, with patience. About three feet, fifty shillings a foot. Quite a bargain.’ Less than ten dollars for a python, less than cloth, I surprised myself thinking.

  The small snake was handsome and sleek. I forced myself to touch it when it coiled defiantly around Peter’s arm, guarded, ready to strike. The thought that it was probably more afraid than I was crossed my mind quickly: cold and dry, smooth, powerful and deadly. Non-poisonous. But the constrictor’s strength, darting black tongue, expressionless glassy eyes, were a symbol of danger, and I was repelled and afraid. Emanuele was happy. When he looked at me, his first snake coiled around his fragile young boy’s neck, an uncontrollable shiver shook me for a moment, and, for the second time that day, a dark premonition closed around my heart.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I whispered hopefully. ‘Perhaps you should still …’

  ‘I will call him Kaa,’ was Emanuele’s answer. He had always liked Kipling. ‘You will help me to tame him, Pep? When I am back at school? You must handle him every day so he gets use
d to us. Please promise. See? It is easy. He is gentle.’

  That night, sleep was hard to come by. I felt we had entered a new era with that first snake. I knew there would be more and I had agreed to look after that sinister, mute, sleek little horror. He had to be fed. To be cleaned, handled, exercised. Tamed. I had promised to do it for him. Emanuele’s last words going back to school had been about Kaa.

  ‘Don’t you think he is beautiful? No? One day. Pep, you too will understand the hidden beauty of snakes.’

  So many times over the years he was to repeat that phrase. For years I tried and tried to conquer my instinctive horror. I could finally handle harmless snakes without fear, but it was only at the very end that just once I saw the beauty.

  Too late.

  20

  The Egg

  The music, yearning like a God in pain.

  John Keats, Endymion

  Paolo and I had decided not to have children, as his girls and Emanuele got on well together and we did not want to break that fragile equilibrium. Furthermore, I was not particularly tempted to go through all the performance of having another baby. There was so much to do and to discover. Emanuele, Valeria and Livia were growing up and I was freer to join Paolo in his expeditions and travels.

  In the early summer of 1979, however, Paolo was involved in an extraordinary adventure, which made us think again. He had just returned from Europe, and after one day with me in Nairobi he had decided to go back to the ranch. He left at night after dinner, although one should not travel after dark in Kenya where the traffic is extremely dangerous. But Paolo liked night-driving: it was more relaxing, and the road after Gilgil was, in fact, rather quiet. In the car, his Venetian music at full volume, Paolo drove fast towards Laikipia. There were many thoughts in his head. The ranch, problems to solve, the pleasure of being back in Africa. Past Gilgil, past the turning to Wanjohi, just before Ol Kalau, a car overtook him at full speed, spun around in front of him, and blocked the road. From the new blue Volvo a smiling young man, smartly dressed in a suit and tie, emerged and came towards him. Not for a second – Paolo maintained later – did he have any suspicions. He thought of plain-clothes police or something of the sort. The man approached Paolo’s door and greeted him politely. But an instant later, a gun was pointing at Paolo’s head and the man was saying: ‘Get out, this is a robbery.’

  From the other car a barefooted gang now erupted: Paolo counted seven men, dressed in rags, looking wild, carrying pangas and simis. There was no choice: he got out into the night air, which felt and smelt good. It was a starry night, cold, in June.

  They took his watch, his shoes, and all his clothes apart from his underpants and a turquoise silk scarf I had given him. One of them sat in his car at the wheel. It was the car they really wanted: the one they were driving had been stolen too long ago to be safe at road blocks (it had belonged to a university teacher who was found next day, tied to a tree in Langata). They opened the boot of the Volvo and tried to push him in, yelling in Kikuyu. Paolo refused … and then he noticed there was someone else in the boot, an African all curled up, half-covered with a blanket. He was not dead: the fingers moved slightly, as if pleading; on the spur of the moment Paolo entered, he was locked in and the car moved off.

  Some music by Grieg was playing at full volume, and kept playing on and on with the auto-reverse no one had cared to or known how to stop; the boot of the moving car was flooded with the northern music of fjords and snowy valleys. The tune kept his courage high. Paolo attempted in vain to get out. Groping around in the darkness, he managed to find – stroke of luck – the tool box. With a spanner, he tried to force the lock open. The car by then had left the tarmac and was bouncing at a mad speed over the rough and bumpy road, skidding on the mud of recent rains, towards a black, unknown, sordid death. During that time, Paolo believed he was going to die, and prepared himself. He descended into the depth of his soul and the reason for life. While still attempting to open the lock, jolted and tossed in pitch darkness, in the company of a stranger who, paralysed by shock and terror, lay mute and motionless, Paolo tuned to the music of Grieg and the discovery of the secret of life, which is the discovery of the mystery of death. Blind in the night, Paolo’s awareness grew in that car, as if he had lived many lives and died many deaths in a few hours.

  The lack of a watch, the lack of sight, meant that time was measured only by the heartbeats of his emotion. Memories came and went, fears and regrets … then the car, and the music, stopped abruptly, and time came to a halt. Doors opened. Steps approached the boot and he could feel the hostile closeness of the bandits through the thin, hard metal. The key was put in the lock, to get them out and kill them. The key was turned and turned, again and again, but nothing happened: in his desperate attempts to get out, Paolo had jammed the lock.

  Voices consulting, talking; finally agreeing in Kikuyu to leave them there, where nobody would find them for weeks, to a certain death, the car abandoned on a deep forest track. The noise of his own car reversing, leaving, far, further, then silence.

  Slowly, he worked with invisible tools for countless drops of time, unscrewing bolts, pushing, forcing, and at last he succeeded in getting out … in being born again, like hatching from an egg … and out was Paolo, ‘a riveder le stelle’.

  He looked up at the cold clean stars, breathing deep the balsamic forest air, seeing everything with fresh new eyes … a true rebirth. Reassured, the man in the boot suddenly revived, and Paolo was shaken from his contemplative mood by a gigantic bear hug which made him lose balance; they both rolled in the wet grass, the man crying, ‘Ndugu yangu!’ (‘My brother!’), his new-found voice exultant with relief. They walked together side by side, following the muddy tracks through the forest, and reached the main road at sunrise. The rare cars did not stop at the weird scene of two almost naked men standing at the side of the road, asking for a lift. When finally one car did, they managed to reach the police station at Ol Kalau.

  After this incident, I often came home to find Paolo standing, his back against the brass wedding chest he had once given me, the room vibrating with that same music by Grieg, or with his favourite Albinoni Adagio or Boccherini Quintettino. A new light seemed to have sprung in his eyes, that hypnotic quality of depth of one who has gazed beyond death and has come back to life for a time. He spoke frequently afterwards, but not morbidly, about his own death. He gave instructions. He chose the music for his funeral. He told me again and again that he knew this was the last escape destiny had allowed him. ‘I have run out of lives,’ he used to tell our friends. And to me: ‘I would like you to hold my hand when I die. But I know I will die alone. Remember the music. Promise you will remember the music of Venice.’ He wanted to be buried on the ranch, under his head a small cushion I had once embroidered for him with the date of our wedding and his name. The choice of the place was mine, ‘but from where one can see the hills’.

  More and more frequently, after the accident, Paolo took to visiting the Pokot wazee down at Churo. The men sat around a large gnarled acacia, their wrinkled old torsos matching the tree’s grey trunk; perhaps they were the same age. They smoked strange grasses, chewed strong tobacco and sniffed at an acrid sort of snuff which Paolo liked, and which made them sneeze. They drank a heady brew of herbs and fermented honey, and ritually ate strange seeds which they went to find in the bush. These came from the pod of a leguminous plant which grows after the rains. Only the old people have the right to partake of them, as they create hallucinations which can blow a young man’s inexperienced mind, and give weird and prophetic dreams.

  Their faces were like masks made of shiny old wood, darkened by the smoke of many fires. These old men all looked different. Only the shape of their headresses was the same rounded brilliant blue. To obtain it, they used the azure blue powder which, diluted in hot water, is normally used to sparkle up the white in yellowed linen. Some of them sported crude earrings of glass beads or bones. One of them was blind, and his white eyes stared unsee
ing and aloof in a haggard face. One had painted a pair of bright yellow glasses across his nose and around the eyes: a true old wizard. Paolo went often to sit with these old Pokot people. They accepted him, and he gained from those times with them a different outlook which was part of the new awareness he had acquired.

  Once he was offered one of their seeds, and he ate it. The flavour, he told me, was bitter and grassy, and in an odd way he felt sick; but soon his mind seemed to clear, as if a window had been opened suddenly on a weird landscape, and he felt lifted into another dimension in which a strong wind blew hard. The grass of the savannah around them seemed phosphorescent, and on it two sinewy leopards, glowing silver, advanced slowly side by side. He felt suddenly transported high and beyond his body, like a bird, soaring high like a vulture, and with his bird’s eye he clearly saw my car driving up the road from Nyahururu, small down there on the red murram track, towards Ol Ari Nyiro. He had not expected me that day, and he drove slowly home to wait for me. The effect had not lasted for long and he told me the story. He showed me one of the seeds, silky and as large as a pea, covered in a white and lustrous skin. He gave it to me, cautioning me not to try, and although I was much tempted I obeyed him. I kept it for years, until it became frail and brittle, and I never managed to discover from which plant it came. The Pokot whom I asked pretended to know nothing about it: the seed was, after all, no medicine for women or outsiders, and I respected their privacy. Even Philip Leakey, to whom I once showed it, had never heard of it and could not recognize it. Eventually I planted it, but life had dried in it and the secret plant never sprouted.