I Dreamed of Africa Read online

  During the unending hot summer nights, when the peculiar silence of hospitals breathing with suffering strangers closed upon me, I stared at the white aseptic ceilings, patiently waiting for my body to heal, aware that what happened afterwards was largely up to me.

  The key to my future was Paolo. Through operations and blood transfusions, through physical pain and the agony of soul-searching, I started to look forward to his visits. He began to represent the link with a different world, the hope of change and of a new life.

  His legs were not affected, and his fractured jaw, ribs and spine could not confine him to his bed indefinitely. Paolo could never stay still. He brought with him a sunny aura of adventure. He sat close by my bed, and through clenched teeth he started talking of the place where he had once lived, and to which he felt he belonged beyond explanation or reason. Lean and straight, and with a perennial suntan, his sparkling blue eyes full of suffering but also of invincible energy, Paolo evoked for me images of unbounded freedom, of wild open horizons and red sunsets, of green highlands teeming with wild animals. His presence lit the hospital room with golden light; I could smell the dry grasses of unknown savannahs, the first rains on the dust of a long drought, and feel the wind in my hair, the sun burning into my skin. The dream of my childhood revived through his vivid stories.

  He told me once about the eels which leave the canals and rivers where they are born and swim back through the perilous seas to breed and to die in the Sargasso Sea, thousands of miles away. And of the baby eels which swim their way back to the same rivers and canals their parents came from. I remembered the swallows.

  We never spoke, in those days, of what had just happened and changed our destiny for ever. We both needed, in order to heal our deeper wounds, and to forge ahead, to look forward to a completely different existence, where shadows of the past would not hover, where memories would not haunt us, and where we could discover again the sense of life. We both instinctively knew that this could only happen in a place where we could start again from the beginning. Somewhere far away, somewhere where everything was still practically unknown. His enthusiasm totally besotted me. My enthusiasm warmed him, and gave him new hope. We were bound together by the same vision of this faraway continent beyond the sea, and by the will to survive.

  By the time the weather grew cold and foggy, and the trees again lost their leaves, we were in love.

  ‘You must get better. You must walk again. Then I will show you Kenya.’

  I could not wait. I exercised my muscles constantly under the heavy plaster, to be as fit as possible when they finally could free me of that shell.

  When they did, Paolo was there. He helped me to sit up in the bed, and I could look out of the window at a grey winter sea. But when I tried to stand, I could not. My leg was not just weak, it was shorter, twisted. I was a cripple.

  4

  Africa

  I speak of Africa and golden joys.

  Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV

  It was as a cripple that I set foot for the first time in the country where I had dreamed I would one day walk tall, looking out at the breathtaking spaces of the Great Rift Valley.

  I was pushed to the plane for Nairobi in a wheelchair, but on board I was helped by Paolo. From the moment I saw his lean suntanned face shed all the night tiredness as the African dawn lighted up the sky, I knew we had arrived. He was peering out of the aeroplane window with intense concentration, smiling. It was as if a light had sprung up in him, and for the first time since Mariangela had died, I saw his genuine self return and take over.

  There was a new spring in his long easy step, a glorious progression, as if he walked again on safe territory where he felt he belonged and ought to be living, a land he was familiar with and which he understood; where he could be at his very best. He showed me Kenya as I had always known he would, with the enthusiasm of one who only there had been truly happy, and who had never wanted to leave. Even if it had to be with crutches, this was Africa at last. Kenya in February 1970 was at its hottest and driest. The yellow grass and the first acacias on the way from the airport; a gazelle – perhaps an impala – grazing in the long strange grass; the African faces of smiling porters; women in bright cloths balancing baskets on their heads: these were my most vivid impressions, after the fog and dampness of Venice.

  The strange tropical plants enchanted me. I was astonished by my first jacaranda in full bloom, in a glory of blue. Here was a totally different continent, where every physical stimulus was accentuated, strong and almost aggressively beautiful, as if painted by a sure and powerful hand. The subtle watercolour gentleness of sophisticated and waning Europe now seemed more alien to my nature than the burning, merciless, splendid sun which welcomed us.

  We drove straight to Nairobi. Our room at the Norfolk Hotel, the gem of the Block Hotels group, looked into an internal courtyard with cages of exotic birds. I could not sleep. A large bush of red hibiscus, Paolo’s favourite flower, grew just outside our room. It was ten times the size of the one I had tried to grow in Italy. I limped out into the sun, and observed the large scarlet flowers, their sharp yellow stamens crowned with red dots. Dew drops, like jewels, were trapped in their silky throats dusted with luminous pollen. I inhaled the subtle perfume. From the first breath I felt a new energy and an extraordinary sense of well-being, but it was from Dorian’s aeroplane, I think, that I discovered that I, too, was in love with Africa.

  The first morning, as we arrived at the Norfolk Hotel, Paolo decided to phone Dorian Rocco immediately. He was told Dorian had gone to Wilson, the private-aircraft airport of Nairobi. Paolo decided to go straight there to find him, driven, I knew, by the desire to renew contact with Kenya and his past life there. Dorian had been staying with Paolo in the Venetian lagoon at the time of the accident. Dorian’s parents had come to Kenya in the thirties, walking their way through Africa. His mother, Giselle, belonged to a French family and was an artist. His father, Mario Rocco, called Pappi, was Neapolitan. They settled on a farm on the shores of Lake Naivasha, where they built an unusual Italianate villa of great charm, with an avenue of tall cypresses, like those in Tuscany, striding down to the lake. They were an unconventional and adventurous family, constantly involved in exploits out of the ordinary. Dorian had two younger sisters, Mirella and Oria.

  Dorian was flying to the coast for the weekend, and invited us to join him. Without a moment’s hesitation we accepted. Paolo’s eyes sparkled as he tried to fit my crutches in the back of the little plane. I had nothing with me but the clothes I wore, a pair of jeans and a khaki shirt, and the bursting desire to fly high above Africa in a small aircraft. Nothing else mattered. Before we took off, Dorian said: ‘Lower your heads while we taxi in front of the tower. I haven’t got a licence to fly passengers yet.’

  I lowered my head, to see the tarmac sliding fast through a hole torn in the tattered floor. Then, blurred burnt grass and blue sky. There was no going back. We were airborne.

  Nairobi National Park is just outside Wilson. Soon the first herd of giraffe ambled, long-necked and graceful, just below us. Dorian steered the plane deep into a nose dive. They ran as if in slow motion, kicking away the dust. Feathery thorn trees on a river bank barely hid some sleepy buffaloes. I shouted with delight. I was intoxicated with the heat, the noise of the plane, the incredible feeling of my first flight in a small aircraft over the African plains. Dorian seconded my mood as only a Rocco could. We circled over herds of elephant when we reached Tsavo, and followed lazy rivers looking for hippos and crocodiles. I took in the vegetation of low bushland and savannah, the small groups of Grant’s gazelles with twitching tails, troops of baboons running away down yellow fever trees, Doum palms with fan-shaped balanced branches, and the first amazing, silvery, gigantic baobabs.

  Then a tented camp appeared, bright green canvas in neat rows on a river bend where a black rhino drank placidly, a grass airstrip close by. ‘Oh, let’s land, please!’ I pleaded over the engine noise.

  ‘Tomorr
ow,’ Dorian said, ‘tomorrow we will land for tea. We are really late.’

  We were.

  The sun seemed still high and bright to me, but I was not yet familiar with the sudden sunsets on the equator. Soon the sky was tinged with red and purples, as if a vast fire had been lit just below the horizon. The rare clouds became rimmed with gold, while the sun, orange and round like an incandescent coin, moved lower and lower and was gone. I had time to see the uncanny indigo expanse of the Indian Ocean, flat as a mirror, rippled only around the coral barrier. Palm trees darkened fast, car lights appeared on the thin tarmac road, and it was night.

  I was not prepared for the tiny airstrip among thick palm groves and huge baobabs where we landed in almost total darkness, having first circled low over a group of thatched cottages to signal our arrival. We taxied on the bumpy, sandy strip, escorted by a dozen bare-chested children who screamed with excitement as they ran in front of us, and finally we stopped in what looked like a car park, in front of a dimly lit, pleasantly old-fashioned door, on which was written: ‘Mnarani Club’.

  ‘Here we are,’ Dorian said. ‘We’ll spend the night at Mirella’s.’ An open Land-Rover approached and my door was opened. A heavy scent of frangipane and warm spiced sea air enveloped me, and I found myself looking into teasing, bulging blue eyes. It was a man with his long fair hair in a ponytail, his skin deeply tanned, and skinny bare feet emerging from a flowing turquoise caftan.

  ‘I am Lorenzo Ricciardi,’ he said in Italian. ‘Welcome to Kilifi. I’ll drive you to my house.’

  Overwhelmed and dizzy with all the new sensations and discoveries, already totally won by the incredible beauty of this country, and intrigued by the exotic, unusual looks of our host: ‘You look like a pirate!’ I could not help exclaiming.

  Lorenzo grinned. ‘I am,’ he said.

  Lorenzo was married to Dorian’s sister Mirella, a famous photographer. Her book, Vanishing Africa, had recently been published and I had a copy. It was an extraordinary book, the work of an artist who knew and loved Africa and had managed to capture the elusive yet haunting quality of the landscape, and of a people still living in the past, and their traditional culture. I was curious to meet her.

  Mirella was more than just beautiful. Green eyes and full lips, curly hair in a halo, dark skin, a slim figure swathed in colourful cotton kangas and arms dangling with silver bracelets were the first things one saw. But her husky voice told more. Her Italian was heavily but pleasantly accented, her manner direct, almost masculine, and she gave the immediate impression of being an original and gifted woman with the courage and drive to live her life as she chose. Paolo knew her from the old days. Her approach was natural and uninhibited, and she shared the plans, memories and adventures of her unconventional life with me as if she had known me always. I felt welcome and completely at home.

  Her house right on top of the cliff was open to the evening winds and the sea was as close as if we were on the deck of an Arab dhow. Bright cushions lined the walls, and straw mats covered the floors where one could only walk barefoot. There was a magic about that house, and the fact that I was not destined to sleep in an anonymous hotel room on my first night in Kenya seemed like an omen. I already belonged.

  That night, in the large carved Lamu bed, with the windows open to the breeze from the ocean, the mosquito net gently moving, I lay listening to the noise of the surf mixed with the new mysterious voices of the African night – bushbabies and nocturnal birds. Paolo held my hand, and for a long time neither of us spoke. Only one day separated us from the cold European winter, but it was more than time and distance. I knew I had already crossed a barrier into a new world and that this was going to be more than just a holiday.

  If my first day in Africa was virtually spent in the air, on my second I discovered the true heat of a merciless equatorial sun burning deep into my skin, the warmth of the salty water alive with a thousand creatures, the whiteness of the sand, the glory of colours and smells, the surprise of a school of dolphins playing out on the shimmering reef.

  In the early afternoon we took off again, and I could see this time how close to the Kilifi creek we had landed the night before.

  Dorian kept his word. ‘Let’s go for tea at Cottar’s Camp.’

  The green tents squatting on the river bank appeared again out of the parched bush, Dorian circled low, reached up, steadied the plane pointing to the grassy strip, and we were landing.

  The grass was taller than we had realized, and concealed a large pig-hole. Before we knew it, one of the wheels had sunk into it, the propeller hit something, and a baobab at the end of the airstrip came closer and closer. Paolo’s eyes were on mine, his fingers dug deep into my arm.

  ‘Hold on, we’re crashing,’ said Dorian unemotionally, and with a terrific noise of broken branches the plane came to a halt, tilted to one side. ‘Jump out! It might catch fire.’

  It was not easy, with my crippled leg. Paolo propelled me out and I limped away as fast as I could, hanging on to his arm, my crutches abandoned.

  The plane did not catch fire. We stopped, breathless, to look back at the contorted wreck. There was a smell of freshly mown hot hay, of dust and resin. Insects buzzed around us and the inevitable African children had already gathered in a silent, bare-footed little group, staring. Paolo took both my shoulders in his strong gentle hands to steady me, the dizziness cleared away, and I smiled back. ‘We made it.’

  There had been no time to think. My African adventure had begun, and I could only accept whatever came with it.

  Across the airstrip, a strange couple was approaching from the camp. A thin elderly man with a beard, short khaki trousers, a pipe hanging from his mouth. A rotund woman in a flowered frock and rubber sandals. The managers. We must have looked weird – dishevelled, covered in dust and twigs, with the mangled wreck of the plane behind us. The man came forward unperturbed, as if nothing unusual had happened.

  ‘Do you have any luggage?’ he asked in clipped English. He did not wait for the answer. ‘Come and have a cup of tea.’

  ‘That’s what we came for,’ I said, and we were all laughing.

  Rather than radio-calling Nairobi for another aircraft, we decided to spend the night there. This was going to be my first night ever in a tent. We sat outside in the mess tent, sipping sundowners and watching a rhino drinking on the other side of the river. In a few years this would become an extremely rare sight, but then I did not know it.

  After putting out the paraffin lamp, I lay before sleep listening to a far-away hyena, giant croaking toads, strange rustles. A lion’s sudden deep-throated roar, swallowing all other noises, was so startlingly close that the canvas seemed to vibrate at the sound. It was only my second night in Africa, yet something had begun to grow inside me which I could not stop, as if my childhood dreams had finally found the place where they could materialize. I had arrived where I was always meant to be. I did not know how it could be practically achieved, but I was certain beyond any shadow of doubt that it was here that I wanted to live.

  Much had to be done before it was possible, and the crutches at the foot of the bed were the first reality. I did not want to, nor could I, be here as a cripple. I would need strong legs, to run if need be, and to walk straight at Paolo’s side on the land I hoped we would one day find for ourselves in Africa. This meant, I knew, more operations, more hospitals, more pain and patience. It would take time. But I would make it. Yet again I could see with great clarity that a will is a way, and that having a worthy goal is what truly matters. Another bond tied me to Paolo now. I, like him, was in love with Africa.

  ‘I must walk,’ I murmured to Paolo before sliding into the best sleep I had had in months. ‘I must learn to walk and run again, however long it takes.’

  It took three more years.

  5

  To Walk Again

  We have to change our patterns of reacting to experience. For our problems do not lie in what we experience, but in the attitude we have towards
it.

  Akong Rimpoche

  Venice was covered in yellow fog when we landed and our dark glowing skin and sun-bleached hair seemed incongruous among the pale crowd at Tessera airport. A little boy with a blond fringe, dressed in a dark blue coat, ran ahead of the small group who had come to meet us, and I kneeled to hug him. Every day, for the time I had been gone, I had sent him at least two postcards with photographs of animals, as I knew he would look forward to the arrival of the postman ringing his bicycle bell, and to little messages from across the sea assuring him that his mother cared, and thought of him constantly. The only thing I had been really looking forward to during the splendid two months abroad was to be reunited with Emanuele. He was four. He had been left in the care of his nanny, and of course of my mother, who adored him more than anyone else in the world.

  Sitting at his bedside in his blue room, the first night I was back, I told him of Kenya and of the places I had visited, of the animals I had seen and the people I had met. He listened in silence, absorbed in all the stories. In his face there was that concentrated, focused look beyond his years and experience, which always made me think. Without having planned it, I heard myself saying, ‘One day, we shall live there.’ There was no surprise in his eyes, and he said quietly, ‘Yes.’

  When I told my mother, she thought I was mad. Yet she knew me well enough not to contradict me. ‘You know nobody there. You speak no English. You hate driving. You … cannot yet walk,’ she protested.

  ‘I will learn. It is the place where I want to live. If Paolo asked me, I would go tomorrow.’ In the end, I was to ask him.

  As we were landing from our second Kenya holiday, I said to Paolo, ‘Supposing that instead of living in Italy and spending our holidays in Kenya, we did the opposite?’

  I had timed my question to match the gloom lining Paolo’s face at the prospect of going back to a life for which he had lost his enthusiasm, tuning it to the changed sound of the engines. I knew that, once said, there was no taking my words back, and that with them I had decided to help my destiny on the path which I was always meant to tread.