African Nights Page 4

  Although he had remained inexplicably unhurt, something had happened to Mwtua’s head. He wandered around absently, with a beatific expression painted on his face, and nothing seemed to move him. He smiled more than ever, muttered to himself, played with the new puppies a great deal, and sat outside his house in the staff quarters, in a sort of inertia. Tended by his wife, who had come to look after him from the village, he just stared ahead as if contemplating mysterious images within himself.

  The doctors suggested that he should do some easy work, and Wanjiru allotted him simple repetitive tasks, like cleaning silver or shoes. He agreed with great enthusiasm, but he held the shoes upside down, polishing the soles, and we soon gave up.

  Mwtua went back to his village in the end, where he looked forward to playing with his grandchildren and resting in his shamba as becomes an elder.

  I was sorry to part with him. But when he came, dressed in a coat which had been Paolo’s, to say his long, laborious farewells, shaking my hands and Sveva’s again and again as if he did not want to let go, and promising he would come back as soon as possible, we noticed, with amazement, that he had completely lost his stammer.

  6

  The Bull Shark of Vuma

  The old man knew that the shark was dead, but the shark would not accept it.

  Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

  Out in the Indian Ocean, off the north Kenya coast, between the fiords of Taka-Ungu and Vipingo, are the shallows of Vuma.

  They are banks of flat, submerged prairies, covered in long seaweeds growing out of old coral gardens. Restless underwater currents constantly stir the pale green-grey blades of the plants. They shudder, tossing languid manes, like savannah grasses bent by the invisible fingers of the Highland wind. Large shoals of fish of all descriptions come to graze here from the black depth of the ocean, like the gazelle and antelope on the Enghelesha plains.

  So, too, come the predators.

  The waters of Vuma are notorious for the abundance of sharks, which lurk in the darkness around the shallows, emerging swift and deadly to prey on the foraging herds. Like all carnivores and scavengers, they are attracted by the jerky, uneven movements which reveal creatures in distress, and by the smell of blood, carried through water in thick clouds of livid red, like a scent on a breeze.

  Vuma had acquired a sinister reputation when a number of dhows had sunk in a series of storms, and the shipwrecked crews had been devoured by sharks. Such stories were invariably told when someone mentioned the place.

  Fast-swimming fish, minor predators, like cole-cole and tuna, were known to favour Vuma, and large rock cod lived in coral caves along the edges of the submerged highlands. In a curious way, Vuma was a sea equivalent of Laikipia with its plateau perched on the edge of the Great Rift Valley, and it was naturally irresistible to Paolo, who often went out there from Kilifi with his spear gun, on his rubber dinghy.

  He sometimes took a friend or two, but mostly he went with Ben.

  Ben was a local fisherman of the Swahili tribe and, like most of them, he followed the Muslim religion, and always wore a tiny embroidered cap. The Swahili, with their Arab blood, distinguished themselves from the Giriama, the most common tribe in Kilifi, of purer Bantu descent.

  Ben was small but muscular, with large shoulders on his compact body. Above his short black beard and flat, pointed nose with wide nostrils, his tilted eyes were intelligent and mischievous. He radiated a complete faith in the excellence of his seafaring skills. The arrogance of a race which is noble and proud of its traditions, accompanied a certain roguish indolence which one condoned, as it was mellow, like most coastal sins. It went with the rarefied climate of the coast, the ripe smells of vegetation and humid sands, fruity mangoes, coconut milk and frangipani, korosho nut roasted in the evening, fish dried in the sun, spices and damp monsoon. Ben was part of Kilifi, and seeing him meant we had arrived.

  With the African’s uncanny gift of knowing without being told, and of appearing unexpectedly at the right time from nowhere, within less than an hour of our car arriving at Kilifi, Ben’s voice could be heard from the kitchen, greeting my Nairobi staff in his sing-song coastal Swahili. Then the shuffle of his naked feet approached and he appeared, hand stretched out in greeting, calling out our names, asking for a cigarette. We liked him.

  Often, his eyes were glazed, his manner slower, dreamier, and the aroma of a reefer drooping from his lips disclosed that again Ben was smoking bhang. This habit which, he maintained, made his sight sharper and helped him to see fish better under water, was accepted as part of him, and won him the nickname of ‘Bhangy-Ben’.

  He was an excellent, natural fisherman, with a genuine passion for the ocean. More than anything he enjoyed going out looking for marlin, and he was unbeatable at spotting the shoals of sardines signalled on the shimmering horizon by fluttering flights of feeding seagulls; they were infallibly followed by hungry bonito tuna, and these often by sailfish or marlin.

  He knew the secrets of the tides, and the habits of fish, rather like the trackers of the Highlands knew the game they were stalking.

  In fact, I always associated Ben with Luka, our inimitable Tharaka hunter and Paolo’s companion of countless adventures, who knew how to think like the buffalo. He could find them in thick bush just by listening for the tick bird, just, one might have thought, by sniffing the air with his sensitive nostrils.

  Both had the same self-assurance which came from the total mastery of their skills and complete understanding of their background, the Indian Ocean and the Highland savannah. Each in his own way believed his presence to be – and possibly it was – indispensable to any of Paolo’s expeditions.

  Ben had presided over most of Paolo’s fishing adventures: the time of the giant rock cod, and the time of the black marlin which Paolo caught without fishing chair or belt, standing for hours in a rubber dinghy oscillating on the ocean’s swell, and which won him his first fishing trophy.

  The house where we stayed in Kilifi belonged to an Italian friend who lived in a hacienda in Argentina. He had only been there once in ten years, while it was being built. With Latin generosity he gave us the unlimited use of it, and we regarded it as our home at the coast.

  The garden was an unruly profusion of bougainvillea and solanum, with some palms and the most magnificent baobab, a giant of perfectly harmonious proportions, with which I felt great affinity. I gave it a soul, like all trees, and a soul that I liked. I spent many hours each day sitting with my back to it, thinking my thoughts, writing my diary, waiting for Paolo and Emanuele to come back from fishing. It was a time of peace, in which I managed to catch some intuition and hold some passing verses before they flew off with the wind.

  Like Ulysses in other seas, and all the sailors ever, Paolo and Ema so often had an adventure to tell. The giant cod harpooned with Lorenzo Ricciardi; the dolphins who had joined in an ocean dance; the sailfish which had gone with the bait; the upupa that had flown from nowhere and landed on Paolo’s hair.

  And then there was the time of the bull shark at Vuma.

  Paolo had gone fishing for cole-cole at Vuma one morning of January, with his brother and a friend. It was still the time of his passion for spear fishing. Without bottles, with only his mask and snorkel, he dived confidently and deep. I feared always that his lungs would burst; but he would come up after what to me seemed ages, not panting at all, with a fish on his spear and a blue look of triumph on his tanned face.

  Ben could not go out that day. He had come in early to announce that another of his children had been born in the night to his sweet Swahili wife, another boy; amongst Muslims this was a serious matter and cause for much ceremony and celebration. As he could not go, he advised that everyone should stay at home, or join me in my planned shopping expedition to Mombasa harbour.

  Ben did not like it when he could not go out fishing with Paolo, and always made sure everyone knew of his disapproval – as if his presence were essential for every adventure to be fault
less, and unknown evils would befall the boat and its occupants in his absence.

  He often spoke of the capricious djinns who fly with the sea winds, to bring mischief and to create chaos amongst the incautious, the unfaithful and the unaware. He boasted often of episodes when, in his opinion, only his presence had exorcised dangers. Once the boat had not capsized when he and Paolo caught three marlins in quick succession; only they had succeeded in getting enough bait that day, and in finding the yellow-fin tuna in August, when the fishermen who are worth their salt never venture too far to tempt fate beyond the coral reef – because the monsoon blows with such rage that all fish seem to disappear, and only the giant squids of the depths remain, and the lobsters which have no soul.

  Unworried by these predictions of gloom, Paolo and his friends went out happily, leaving Ben still standing in the doorway, shaking his head and mumbling. I went to Mombasa to buy kangas and baskets at the bazaars.

  When I returned I could feel something had happened even before I got out of my car; no one came to greet me. There was nobody around. From the empty kitchen door a cat looked at me impassively. It was a strange cat, which I had not seen before. The friend who owned the Kilifi Plantations, and was a true mine of all coastal legends, had told me the Giriama never chase away a stray cat begging at their door, as they believe it is the returning soul of a departed person. With this thought in mind I went to look over the cliff.

  Down on the beach, I could see a small crowd gathered on the shore. Surrounded by the children, our friends, the staff and quite a few passers-by, Paolo was crouching close to the biggest fish I had ever seen. Its white upturned belly offered to the sun was interrupted by the ugly line of a mouth like a trap, set with curved teeth. A triangular fin protruded from its grey back. Defenceless and inert, it still appeared dangerous.

  It was dead and it was a shark.

  And so came the story.

  From the depth of Vuma, after a full morning of fishing, Paolo had swum back to the surface, his prey, a cole-cole, still alive and moving, tied at his belt. Before emerging, the instinctive alarm which saves the life of the hunter warned Paolo to look down; and below him, from the ink-black darkness, a fish was approaching fast, looming bigger and bigger, as if magnified rapidly by an invisible lens.

  When it was a few yards from Paolo it stopped and shivered, collecting itself before springing to the attack with a jerk. The snout slid back like a mask, exposing horrid long fangs in two circular rows; the small round eyes focused on Paolo, cold and expressionless.

  It was a bull shark, of the kind which attacks more often than any other. The one known to eat sailors.

  Too late to climb out of the water, too late to let his wounded fish go. In the blue, alone with the shark, Paolo had lost no time to think. He grabbed his loaded spear gun, placed it between his legs, and pointed it straight at the shark’s head. At the moment it was about to strike, he let the shot go.

  The head of the spear penetrated the shark’s forehead at a right angle. The shark stopped, writhing, and with overwhelming relief Paolo watched him sink. He sank like stone, growing smaller and smaller, almost now out of sight in the depths, pulling with him metres and metres of rope and the floating balloon attached to it.

  Elated, adrenalin pumping high, safe, Paolo climbed into the boat, from which his friends had been watching in breathless alarm. Together, with great difficulty, they hauled in the huge rigid beast. He was almost as long as the boat, heavy, his snout still contracted, his glassy eyes expressionless. They forced his mouth open exposing the fangs, and fingered them, exclaiming at their size. Roping the shark to the boat so they could tow him back to show us, they prepared to start the engine.

  As for buffaloes and for lions, there is always another life for a shark. Before the engine sputtered and ignited, a long shiver shook the fish. The wrinkled snout relaxed, and he struggled to loosen his bonds. Then he started to swim off with immense strength, pulling the dinghy, and Paolo, and his friends with him. A scene out of Jaws.

  Here Paolo paused, looking around for effect.

  On the Kilifi beach at high noon, with the reef shimmering and sparkling on the horizon, the tiny waves of low tide gently lapping the shore, and the palm leaves rustling in the breeze, we could have heard a coconut fall on the sand. Paolo’s audience waited without breathing.

  He continued. In the fragile rubber dinghy, pulled wildly over the sea, pandemonium ensued, as we could all imagine. Finally, with some difficulty, they managed to recover themselves; the engine sprang to life, gained momentum and pulled the boat in the opposite direction.

  Weakened, gradually the fish gave up. Dragged backwards, the water entered its gills and it drowned. It took them hours to drive back on a sunny, tumultuous sea, with their heavy cargo not quite dead and their boat made of rubber.

  Nobody could tell a story better than Paolo. In his words the adventure took on the colours and sounds of an epic sea saga; Homer and the sirens of myth paled beside this real-life drama. The crowd and I hung from his lips, spell-bound.

  Finally the shark was heaved laboriously on to the back of a pick-up and driven in glory to the Mnarani Club. The fish scale there, good for marlin and sailfish, proved to be too small, so with a cortege of supporters Paolo and his friends went on to the farm scale at the Kilifi Plantations.

  The shark weighed 532 pounds. Someone took several photographs, one of which appeared in the East African Standard, with the caption: ‘Mr Paulo Gullman, a fisherman from upcountry, with a 532lbs man-eater Bull shark.’

  ‘Quite remarkable,’ commented one of the orthodox fishing club members, mumbling into his pipe. ‘What a shame he did not use a rod. It could have been an all-Africa record.’

  This adventure became the talk of Kilifi for weeks.

  The only person who did not seem impressed was Ben. ‘Kama mimi alikua huko nikushika samaki, hio papa awessi kukaribia,’ he grumbled, tossing his cap. ‘If I had been there, that shark would have never dared to attack.’

  Nobody cared to deny it, and perhaps he was right.

  7

  Langat

  When we build, let us think that we build forever.

  John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture

  A woman approached on the road at noon, old, bent, dressed in rags. She walked up to me with slow shuffling steps, bare knotted feet covered in dust. It was dry and hot at Kuti. Again we had missed the rains.

  I looked at her: haggard face, colourless handkerchief tied around her grey head. Long earlobes, all her teeth virtually missing. Yet perhaps she was not that old. She greeted me. I answered and waited.

  ‘I am hungry,’ she said in halting Swahili. ‘I come from far.’

  ‘Who are you?’ I reached into my pocket.

  A vague reminiscence stirred, of eyes which were once brighter, a lost twinkle, a pride, the dignity of being married to a good man.

  ‘I was Langat’s wife.’

  The memories came back, like running children.

  When we decided to build the house, Paolo called up the fundis, and I went to meet them.

  ‘Here is Arap Langat,’ he said; and I found myself looking into clear, grey and unblinking wise eyes.

  Langat was short and almost plump. His cropped hair was very white, his dark face round, with a small nose, wide cheekbones and even white teeth untarnished by age and chewing tobacco. His earlobes had been stretched – in Nandi custom – and hung down to his shoulders.

  What struck me most, apart from his unwavering eyes, which looked straight, piercingly into mine, as if to measure me up, was his air of self-assured dignity, and the composure which emanated from him. I learned later that this came from the knowledge of his competence and the versatility in his job, which he liked and in which he took great pride.

  Nguare and Lwokwolognei were his assistants. Nguare was a middle-aged Kikuyu, whose speciality was woodwork. His name – inappropriately, as he was a quiet, serious man with slow feet, usually awkwardly wrappe
d in ill-fitting clothes – was the Swahili word for francolin, an alert, scuttling little creature, always dashing into the shrubs at the side of the road. Extremely slow and precise in his work, Nguare had the peculiar habit of repeating always the last word of a phrase. He had a pale brown-yellow face in great contrast with the deep ink-black of Arap Langat and of Lwokwolognei.

  Often one finds in an African features that are startlingly similar – but for the shade of his skin – to a European equivalent. Nguare was the practically identical brown version of a long-lost friend in Veneto, Alvise: and the African’s smiling face never failed to remind me of that other, surrounded in the dreaminess of my memory by the drifting fogs of the Laguna.

  The trio was completed by Lwokwolognei, junior, and still an apprentice at that time. With the vertiginous thinness found only in Turkana, he had a lean lustrous face, in which the only eye shone with a doubly vivid light, as if to compensate for the other, lost we never knew how. The eyelid perennially closed over the empty socket, gave him, when seen in profile, the melancholic look of a secretary bird. Lwokwolognei did a bit of everything, from masonry to carpentry, but his real passion was wood carving, at which he excelled, displaying in it a rare imagination and a naive artistry.

  He had a bright young wife called Mary, industrious in embroidering goatskins with intricate patterns of beads and shells. But one day she died in childbirth and Lwokwolognei was seldom seen to smile again.

  We had moved from Italy to Kenya a few years before and only recently acquired this vast piece of land in the Highlands, on the edge of the Great Rift Valley. It was still early days here in Laikipia, when everything had yet to be learnt, yet to be built, and we were trying to give physical substance to the shape of our dreams.

  Constructing our house was one of the first steps, and as Paolo, in this new venture, had so much else to attend to, the task of deciding what we needed and of supervising its construction was left largely to me.