I Dreamed of Africa Page 2

  ‘Kuki!’ he would call from the hall. ‘Come and choose a book.’ With a great sense of anticipation I would run to meet him. From an open suitcase, assorted volumes supplied by a dealer in secondhand books, whom he had once cured of kidney stones, spilled out on to the grey marble floor.

  My father always gave me first choice, and once I had picked up from the scattered pile the books which most interested me, he told me something about the content, the story, the style and the author. He allowed me absolute freedom to select whatever I wanted, regardless of my age. Thus I accumulated, without any effort, a vast, if unmethodical, knowledge of literature and poetry, at an age when most children are concentrating on comics or novels. From Edgar Allan Poe – in translation, as were all the non-Italian writers – to Boccaccio, from Mark Twain to Victor Hugo or Ibsen, from Hemingway to Machiavelli, from Sappho to Saint-Exupéry, Byron, Tolstoy, Leopardi or Lamartine, my late childhood and early adolescence were spent devouring any book I could lay my hands on. My father’s only condition was quality, and I shall always be in his debt for moulding my taste to his high standards. Many of his friends were writers or artists, and our house was always open to them. I loved listening to their conversations.

  I loved poetry and was fascinated by its harmonious rhythms. Often my father and I recited classic Italian poems in duet, reading from the same page. We both enjoyed those unique and inspiring times, and verses still live dormant in my subconscious, often to emerge as quotations to underline a moment, a feeling, a particular event. Those are among the happiest memories of my childhood, and in every man in my life perhaps I looked for a reflection of my father.

  He had a passion for archaeology. Together we would explore caves in the hills of Montello, probing the walls with torches, discovering bones and teeth of neolithic cave bears. He taught me to look for pointed arrowheads, chipped out of pink and grey stone by some skin- and fur-clad ancestor. We found Roman coins in recently ploughed fields, and amphorae in drained river beds. We would visit abandoned country cemeteries, or I would follow him up steep mountains, aiming for some cloud-covered peak.

  Many times in later years I asked myself how it all began. I had sometimes this urge to find the link, the reason why, and when people ask me why I decided to come to Africa, the answer lies in the days of my childhood.

  A bird’s nest hung grey in a corner of the verandah in my grandfather’s home in the country. That nest had been there for as long as anyone could remember. During autumn and winter it was empty, crumbling fragments of dry mud. Then the skies of May once again filled with darting birds, screeches and chatters animated the twilight, and in a flurry of activity the nest was renewed and inhabited. The swallows were back. Where they came from, how they knew how to find again exactly this spot on the Earth, puzzled me for years. I realized later that they could not for ever be the same swallows, and that it was an ancestral memory which guided young birds to the place chosen by past generations.

  The desire to go to Africa seemed to have been an obscure yearning to return, a nostalgic inherited need to migrate back to where our ancestors came from. It was a memory carried in my genes. The urge to fly home, like the swallows.

  One day, the subject of the essay was: ‘Io, tra ventanni’ (‘Myself twenty years on’). My paper was returned without being marked.

  I was twelve, and my marks in composition were usually good. I did not understand what had gone wrong this time. I had put my heart into the effort of explaining what I wanted to do, where I wanted to be in twenty years’ time.

  The teacher, a middle-aged lady with dark mahogany hair, looked at me over her spectacles: ‘It is well written, as usual,’ she said, ‘but it is totally absurd. You should have described something possible, as your friends have. You certainly must have some feasible desire for your future? Like being a … teacher, or a doctor, a mother, perhaps a writer … or a dancer, with your long legs … something you can do right here where you were born, where your family and friends are, something normal. Why did you have to write about Africa?’

  I can still remember the day: a cold, foggy November. Months of school and winter lay ahead. Until the summer I had my books and my dreams and I clung to them as to the only light; my fantasies of a hot land of unending horizons, herds of animals in the savannah, and a farm in the Highlands where I lived with my family, riding in the early morning through hills and plains, camping out at night on a river bank … where dark-skinned people lived who spoke strange languages I could understand, and were still close to nature and knew its secrets … dusty red tracks in the thick bush, ancient lakes with flamingoes, lions roaring in the vast darkness and snorting buffalo … sunsets of gold and fire, with silhouetted giraffe, drums in the night …

  ‘But I do want to live in Africa. I do not want to stay here all my life. One day I shall go to Africa. I shall send you a postcard from there, signora, in twenty years’ time.’

  Twenty years later, I did.

  When I was about thirteen years old, my father’s voice suddenly changed, and became a hoarse, raucous whisper. A surgeon, he recognized the symptoms as being serious, and the tests confirmed his own diagnosis: he had cancer of the throat.

  Although we were never told anything, both my younger sister and I felt there was something different in the house. Conversations were hushed, and a cloud of gloom hung over it on the day of our father’s operation. They explained to us that he simply had a benign growth in his throat. But I knew that this was a lie, and that he might be dying, and for nights I stared at the ceiling of my room, crying hot tears of desolation. My father survived his malignant cancer, which, diagnosed at an early stage, was successfully removed, together with a vocal chord. His beautiful voice never came back. I missed his stories and the flair of his enunciation. I felt his infirmity as crippling for me as he must have felt it: but soon his spirit took over and his voice gradually became stronger, although it never found its music, and it was to remain hoarse for the rest of his life.

  He began, in those days, to talk to me about Africa and the nomad tribes of the desert, which fascinated him. Soon he started travelling there regularly, beginning a love affair with the Sahara which will live as long as he. I joined him a few times. The Tuaregs of the desert rode tall fast camels, their lean bodies were wrapped in flowing blue robes, fastened at the waist by belts inlaid with silver. They moved like shadows, leaving hardly a track. In the chilly nights of stars, around the fires we shared stringy goat stews laced with pepper which made my mouth smart, and sweet mint tea in glasses small as thimbles. Black ganduras sheltered them from the wind and turbans protected their slit eyes from the fine penetrating sand. Lost jackals whined their sadness to the waves of barren dunes unending like the sea, and the night listened.

  But it was not my Africa.

  2

  Mario and Emanuele

  Emanuele’s eyes: ‘an old and secret sadness …’

  I met Mario when I was barely out of school, during my first year of Political Sciences at university, and I fell immediately and totally in love with him. Within a few months we were married, and I never finished my university course.

  Mario came from a wealthy half-Sicilian and half-Piedmontese milieu, and the mixture of Arab and northern blood had resulted in uncommonly good looks: his straight hair was brown and his almond-shaped eyes glinted gold; the olive skin set off gleaming even teeth and a perfect sensuous mouth below a slightly aquiline profile. Although only a few years older than I, he had the self-assured and chivalrous manners of good breeding, and of an unusual culture. He knew deeply – and loved with equal passion – art and music, antiques and racehorses, fast cars and beautiful women. His savoir-faire and aesthetic sense were far more developed than in any of his contemporaries, and he had the irresistible gift of making the teenager I still was feel like a woman. He was my first man, and he swept me off my feet.

  My father, who loved me and knew me well, was strongly opposed to our marriage, as he felt it could not
last, and only agreed to put his signature to the document permitting his under-age daughter to marry because he respected me, and felt the decision was, after all, mine. I was nineteen. Although there was no bigotry in my family, in the early sixties in Italy there was no way a girl could live with a man without being married.

  It was with Mario, a couple of months before the date set for the wedding, that I had my first serious accident.

  It was 7 January. Our son Emanuele would be born two years later on the same date. Mario did not stop at a crossroads, and the side of his black Jaguar was hit by a passing car. The door on my side opened, and I was flung out. My feet were trapped, and I was dragged face down on the tarmac, until the swerving car came to a stop.

  It was a horrible, if brief, feeling of total impotence, being pulled suddenly, at such speed, by my legs, like a lifeless rag doll. My face hit the tarmac once, but, as I was conscious, I used all my willpower to contract my neck and lift my head from the road, to avoid being grazed all over. I was wearing a fur coat, and this, which was shaved bare by the friction, protected the rest of my body.

  My left leg and shoulder, and my face, were partly tattooed with minute black tar particles, and the burning pain was excruciating. But there were no major cuts or lesions, and, all in all, I regarded myself as lucky. It took some months of treatment and dressings for the scars to heal completely, and to this day some tiny fragments of tarmac from an otherwise forgotten road in Conegliano Veneto, are still embedded, barely visible, in my shoulder and below my jaw. Mario, who was driving and naturally clung to the steering wheel, was shocked but unharmed.

  Whatever the omens were, we were married one day in April. My father gave me away in a church packed with friends and peach blossoms. I wore white and a long veil, but somehow something was lacking from the very beginning. Perhaps it was the magic which purifies and blesses all things.

  Two years later I gave birth to a son. We called him Emanuele. He was born in a cold night of rare snow in Venice, in the old Hospital of S. Giovanni e Paolo. In winter Venice, always an enchanted town, is at her most subtly charming when, the tourists gone, it remains to the Venetians, the pigeons and the cats.

  There was nothing in the long, high-vaulted ancient corridors, in the greys of the first silent dawn after he was born, which could anticipate the golden freedom, the sunny landscapes which, in a few years, would be the background to Emanuele’s extraordinary childhood and youth.

  From the beginning, he was a quiet, serious and solitary little boy, with intelligent brown eyes and a small aristocratic nose like his father’s. He inherited my smile and, I think, my physique. From a very early age he could speak a varied and correct Italian, uncannily able to converse with adults on their own level. At four he could read fluently and had already developed an unusual knowledge of what was going to be his abiding passion: animals. By the time he was six he had accumulated a remarkable collection of dozens of books and wildlife encyclopedias. He read them all in a methodical and scientific way, remembering the characteristics, the habitat and Latin name of every animal. Like Mario, Emanuele was a born collector, and like my father he was gifted with a remarkable memory. But what was most noticeable in Emanuele were his eyes. In them there was a wisdom and a strange sadness, as if he knew more than his years could allow.

  Our marriage lasted just over two years. My lack of experience and my love for Mario could not disguise my intuition that our relationship could not stand the test of time, and I felt that the pain of an early separation was better than the unavoidable bitterness which wasted years of youth would one day bring. So, soon after Emanuele was born, with a heavy heart one evening of Mozart I spoke to Mario in the quiet of our library. Still in the dawn of our twenties, we agreed to separate amicably, and for the child’s sake, we remained for years very good friends. Another stage of my life ended that night.

  My parents chose this occasion to separate also. My mother for years now had concentrated on her interest in the history of art and had gone back to learn, and then to teach, at the University of Padova. My father was absent more and more often in Algeria, Niger and Sudan, and spent most of his time writing about his adventures.

  I went to live with my mother in a large old villa on the river Brenta, to whose cool banks, shadowed by ancient trees and beautiful formal gardens, Venetians – who only moved by boat – would traditionally escape the steamy summers of the lagoon. The Riviera del Brenta was the fashionable retreat of Venetian society some two or three hundred years ago, and its Palladian villas, now mostly museums, still stand to witness these departed grandeurs.

  In this somewhat rarefied atmosphere, in a world mostly made of women and dogs, in an unusually large but gloomy garden, Emanuele spent the first years of his life.

  3

  Friends in Veneto

  They are not long, the days of wine and roses …

  Ernest Dowson, Vitae Summa Brevis

  Near my mother’s house lived Carletto Ancilotto and his wife Chiara, whom I had known since my childhood. He was a count, and their country place on the Laguna was always open to friends. There I met Paolo, who was married to an artistic and intelligent woman, Mariangela, and they had two small daughters, Valeria and Livia. It was impossible to ignore Paolo. He radiated energy; his aura of intense liveliness and awareness was extremely attractive. He had a special way of walking tall and straight, and of giving his interlocutor the undivided attention of his direct, intelligent and arresting blue eyes. Paolo had a doctorate in agriculture, and was interested in and successful at farming. Like most country gentlemen in those days, he enjoyed fishing, hunting and shooting, passions which he shared with Carletto.

  Paolo’s father had left Switzerland, where he was born, while still in his teens, to live in the southern United States, where he had learnt all there was to know about cotton; he had later settled in India and had dedicated himself to this prosperous trade. Paolo’s maternal grandfather had been a pioneer in the world of aviation, and, at the beginning of the century, had founded in Italy the famous Macchi aircraft factory. His mother had studied at the Conservatoire, and had become an accomplished violinist. From his mother, Paolo inherited a passion for music, and from his father, a love of travel and a fascination with the tropics.

  As soon as he finished university, Paolo took a year off and travelled by ship to Africa. He arrived in Mombasa one day in 1959: it was the beginning of his love-affair with this continent.

  There he made friends: particularly with the Block brothers. Jack and Tubby, from the pioneering family who controlled the hotel business in Kenya, and with the Roccos, an extraordinary clan, half Italian half French, who lived on a farm on the shore of Lake Naivasha. During his peregrinations Paolo discovered a farm on the Kinangop, at the foot of the Aberdare Mountains, with a river full of trout running through it. It was for sale, and he set his heart on it. He went back to Italy, married Mariangela, the girlfriend of his schooldays, and returned to Kenya with her, having persuaded his father to acquire the farm.

  Kenya in 1960, just before Independence, was still under the spell of the Mau Mau. People in isolated farms still went to bed with their guns. It was a very different life from that of Milan, and Mariangela found it difficult to adapt to it. When she realized she was going to have a child, she persuaded Paolo to return to Italy.

  They returned to Europe and settled in Veneto, in a property on the lagoon, Cavallino (‘Little Horse’), teeming with wildfowl and fish. Often the Blocks, or some of the Roccos, came to visit them, and rekindled Paolo’s nostalgia for Africa.

  They were adopted immediately by the community of landed gentry in Veneto. I saw them often, and got on extremely well with both. Paolo’s intelligence and culture, his agile mind, and his way of telling stories of Africa, were fascinating to me. Often in the summer, our group of friends went out to dine in various open-air trattorias, famous for their food and excellent wine.

  One night like many others, with Carletto, Chiara and severa
l other friends, we decided to try a new fish restaurant on the shores of the river Sile. Fatally, that day Paolo had lent his car to Dorian Rocco, who had come from Kenya on holiday, and the one belonging to his wife was being serviced. Carletto and Chiara collected them in their car at the jetty on the mainland and I went with them.

  The food was excellent and our spirits were high. Afterwards we split up and changed vehicles, since Carletto and Chiara had decided to go home and all the rest of us wanted to go dancing. The night was balmy and luminous with fireflies. We laughed and talked in the car, unworried by the fact that a lorry was approaching us at full speed, headlights ablaze.

  A bang, some screams, the noise of broken glass and screeching metal. The feeling of being torn apart, pulled backwards violently in a powerful vortex towards a dark tunnel from which there was no return. A lock of my blonde hair, plastered with blood, hanging on the smashed back window.

  The fireflies kept dancing, unconcerned.

  Through the tragedy I had shed what remained of my youthful naivety. Wrapped in heavy plaster like in a giant chrysalis, for over eight months I lay horizontal in different hospital beds. My multiple fracture was complicated by the discovery that I was already suffering from acute anaemia: before the accident I had simply been extremely thin.

  One afternoon they lifted me laboriously on to a stretcher and wheeled me to another room where I watched bewildered on a black-and-white television screen the first tentative steps of a man who seemed himself weighed down by clumsy plaster, on the luminous surface of the moon. Later that evening I lay in the darkness, catching in my hand-mirror the silver moonlight which man had conquered, but which was so far from my bed that summer.

  I learned to drink and to eat with my head barely lifted, and not to feel humiliated by being totally dependent on nurses for my physical needs.