I Dreamed of Africa Read online

  Paolo fixed his luminous blue eyes on mine, and seized my wrists. ‘Thank you,’ he said simply. ‘Now we must get married.’

  The law permitting divorce had recently been passed in Italy. I had been legally separated for years, and it took only a few weeks to obtain the divorce.

  The institution of marriage had no particular appeal for me; no contract drawn up to legalize it would add to my love for Paolo. Yet it would be simpler, living in Africa, if we were married. Moreover it would give a sense of security and identity to our children to know that we had committed ourselves to each other, and thus, indirectly, to them.

  The months and years which followed were of preparation.

  I will not talk about the operations, the hospitals, the new doctors, the tedious hours spent in unending exercise. I feel I must, however, give a word of praise to the surgeon in Berne, the greatest in his field, who, with rare patience and skill, fractured my leg again, twisted it back to the right angle, lengthened it and set it once more: Professor Müller. He was the best, and I was lucky. From the first visit, when he took away my crutches and asked me to walk up and down the room in front of him, and I caught an unprofessional glint of pity in his eyes at my awkward limping, a relation of total trust was established between us.

  ‘I can make you walk as before, but you must help me. You will have to work hard. You must be patient. It will be worth it. You are too young to be a cripple.’

  Several operations were needed, and time to heal in between, but I had absolute confidence in him, and he kept his promise.

  He used to come to my room in the early afternoons of yet another short European summer spent in a hospital bed. He sat at my bedside, and we talked. He spoke French, the language of my grandmother, and, as all the nurses spoke only German, he was the only person I could talk to. As Paolo, in Italy with his daughters, could only come for short visits, and Emanuele was away with my mother, Professor Müller was my one friend at the Lindenhof.

  He, and the birds. I had once fed the birds crumbs from my breakfast, in the hope that they would come again. Soon they started to arrive first thing in the morning, before the fräulein came to pull the curtains, pecking with their beaks sharply at the glass windows to wake me up. I looked forward to their goodmorning, and when I left I worried for weeks about them flying to my window as usual and finding me gone, and I hoped the next patient would befriend them too. At each return for the next two years, I found new birds to feed and to keep me company – or were they the same ones? – and this taught me that small things can often make big things bearable.

  6

  The First Fire

  … burnt-out ends of smoky days …

  T. S. Eliot, Preludes

  We were married by the mayor of the small village where my mother lived. I wore a white dress printed with red strawberries, the children were dressed in a matching red pattern and Paolo sported a red silk tie. In all the photographs I have, we are smiling at one another, and we look happy.

  Only a week before, I had come back from Switzerland, where the last piece of metal had been extracted from my leg. It was perfectly cured and of exactly the same length as the other. Professor Müller had kept his word. Only that very morning I had discarded for ever the stick I had used in recent months. The luggage was ready, and so were our tickets for Nairobi.

  For our wedding lunch we went by boat to the small island of Burano, where the famous fish restaurant ‘da Romano’ had prepared a glorious feast of delicacies from the lagoon.

  Wind in our hair, smell of seaweed, screams of seagulls, and the island fading like a mirage in the wake of the boats.

  There was one more thing to do before leaving. From the age of twelve, I had kept a diary. Almost every day I filled page after page with my impressions and emotions, facts and events. The pleasures and doubts, questions and answers of my adolescent awakening were diligently recorded. During my convalescence, during the long nights in hospital, I had found refuge and solace in writing about my feelings, my hopes and my fears. My diary was to me what a psychoanalyst might be to others: a healthy way of getting things out of my system, pouring them out on the blank, unjudging, tempting pages. I kept the two dozen volumes in a green travelling trunk. When the decision was taken to leave Europe and live in Africa, I thought for weeks about what to do with those journals – all my life so far. Now that way of life had come to an end, a new page, literally, had been turned. I could not take that bulky trunk to Kenya, where we had as yet nowhere to live, and where it might well take years to find a home. I could not, however, leave my diaries behind. They contained nothing particularly secret which would have embarrassed me, but they were my private account of my past, and of all the people and events which were part of my story so far. Even if I locked the trunk and left it in the care of my mother, I would not feel at ease knowing that I had left a part of my life unguarded and vulnerable to the possible curiosity of people unknown. I regarded going to Africa as a rebirth, and I had learnt from my accident that for a new plant to sprout, the seed pod must crack and die. Holding on to the old was no way of progressing. I decided to burn my diaries.

  At the back of my mother’s large garden, on my last afternoon in Europe, with Emanuele’s help I gathered a pile of firewood and placed my diaries on it as if on a ceremonial pyre. I poured some paraffin on them, and lit a match. The paper began burning at once, sending up waves of heat in the clear July afternoon. I sat on the grass, yellow and blue with buttercups and forget-me-nots, watching my past burn away for ever and go up in smoke before my eyes. Seeing the smoke, my mother came out in alarm. She stood petrified, realizing what was happening, for she, like the rest of my family, had known about my journals. All that was left was a small mound of papery ashes and glowing wood. I reached out to poke at the embers with my walking-stick. Some pages rose, half charred, flying up with the heat like leaves in a bush fire. A blackened shape appeared, smouldering still. My mother gasped. A human shape, a torso, a stretched leg … I grinned at her reassuringly: it was only my discarded plaster, and beneath that the melted plastic and blackened aluminium of my crutches. I stood up and threw my walking-stick in the fire. I was ready to go.

  The following day, with Paolo’s daughters and my son, and a great deal of luggage, we took off from Venice airport, bound for Africa and our new life.

  PART II

  Paolo

  7

  A New Life

  A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.

  Chinese proverb

  We had planned to look around for a place to buy, where we could settle. Paolo had thought of a ranch, where he wanted to raise cattle, but more importantly where wildlife had to abound. We knew it was not going to be easy, but we were determined to try. One thing was clear in both of our minds: we were not coming here to seek our fortune. We were choosing a way of life.

  The children were excited at the idea of moving to a mysterious and different country, where summer lasted all year round. Emanuele fell in love with Kenya immediately, and with a passion which never left him. It was the place which embodied his dreams, where the animals lived which he had learnt about only from books, and his life in Kenya was, from the very first moment, a glorious and joyous adventure.

  In the beginning, our main contact was Paolo’s sister-in-law. Paolo’s older brother had come to Kenya a few years earlier, drawn by Paolo’s enthusiasm, and had bought a prosperous coffee farm close to Thika. It was still the time of big-game hunting, before the pressure of poaching and the destruction of the environment had made this sport anachronistic and, eventually, forbidden; still the time of the famous white hunters, of the grand camping safaris not very different from the ones celebrated by Hemingway.

  One evening at Voi, in a hunting block near the coast, Paolo’s brother shot an elephant in a herd and killed it. Instead of running away, the other elephants went for him. He was found next morning in a pool of blood, the dead elephant beside him. A tusk had pene
trated his groin and he had bled to death. Three months later, his infant son, who had been staying with the grandparents in Italy, died in his sleep; the cause was never discovered. His widow chose to stay in Kenya. She eventually remarried a much older man, and it was they who took care of us in Nairobi in those early days.

  We had arrived in July, one of the coolest months of the year in the Kenya Highlands. We stayed first at a quiet hotel in Nairobi which had rooms opening on to a large wild garden overlooking a river. The first morning Emanuele, who had been up exploring since first light, burst into my room flushed with excitement, an unusual occurrence, for he was usually very calm.

  ‘Pep,’ he said breathlessly, using his favourite nickname for me, ‘Pep, I have seen a snake. I am sure it was a Naja nigricollis. I must check in my book.’

  His book confirmed he had been right: the snake was a cobra.

  Many years, many events later, during the longest night of my life, when the most unexpected and forgotten details came back to my tortured mind like clues for solving the absurd puzzle, I remembered this incident: the first animal Emanuele had seen in Africa had been a snake.

  As it would take time to find what we wanted and we could not live in a hotel for ever, we decided to buy a house in Nairobi. We found a pleasant two-storey house in grey stone, set in about three acres of garden with many indigenous trees, in an area called Gigiri, close both to Muthaiga, where many of our friends lived, and to the school where the children would go to learn English.

  For my own English, I decided to read books written in the language. I prefer biographies, history, the classics, poetry, philosophy or religion, but I certainly could not plunge head first into these subjects in a foreign language, so I chose something I seldom read: novels. With a dictionary on my lap, I went through endless novels written in impeccable English. I learnt about scores of governesses, younger daughters of vicars or of teachers, usually orphans and penniless, who went to teach scores of spoilt and/or unhappy noble brats in grand gothic manors in Cornwall, and who inevitably fell in love with the widowed, darkly handsome and sinister master of the house. The plots were similar, and after the final pages of suspense, they ended – predictably – happily. Paolo, who spoke faultless English, was amused, and used to tease me about my choice of textbooks, but, always inquisitive, he became interested in these sagas and I ended up having to tell him most of the stories. I acquired many old-fashioned words like ‘petticoats’, ‘becoming’, ‘duenna’, ‘philanderer’ and ‘bombazine’, but I finally managed to master a decent vocabulary. I was now able to read what really interested me, and, mostly, to understand what people said. Once I could enjoy word-play and make jokes as I did in Italian, I felt I had won my battle with English.

  Swahili was less difficult. Like Italian, Swahili is written phonetically. With no problem in pronunciation and a decent memory, I found it easy to master. We had chosen Kenya as the place to stay. It was inconceivable for me not to learn at least the principal language of my new home. I embraced it as I had the new country: with curiosity, interest and love.

  8

  Friends in Kenya

  Friends are all that matters.

  Guy Burgess

  In our love of Africa we were not alone.

  The people of European origin who lived in Kenya by choice, not as part of their career like diplomats or managers of international companies, formed a tightly-knit community. They had either been born there, of early settlers or pioneer ancestors, and had decided to stay on, or had chosen Kenya because, like us, they had fallen in love with it. This was the shared base from which the bond grew: we could fit in happily nowhere else; we were haunted by this country, and in different ways we felt we had to make the most of it.

  Paolo wanted me to get to know his friends of earlier days, and we spent the first weeks visiting these people, some of whom I had already met, and most of whom lived up-country. One of the first places Paolo took me to was Lake Naivasha, about one hour’s drive from Nairobi along a panoramic road overlooking the Escarpment. The Blocks had a place, Longonot Farm, on the south shore, and the Roccos had a villa on the opposite side. Their farm D.D.D., ‘Dominio Di Doriano’, had been named after our friend, their son.

  One reached D.D.D. by way of sweeping steps which climbed in a gentle curve through palms and fig trees. Pappi Rocco and Giselle spent most of their days in the spacious, high-ceilinged rooms on the ground floor. It was permeated by the Art Deco atmosphere of its design, its murals, Giselle’s paintings and sculptures. In the panelled library, black-and-white photographs lining the walls and every possible shelf unfolded the unusual story of their daughters Mirella and Oria. I met Oria, and her Scottish husband Iain Douglas-Hamilton, first in those photographs. There was Oria on her wedding day, a gypsy air to her long dress and fringed shawl, against the background of a windswept island off Scotland. Iain stood beside her, long fair hair on a velvet coat with a lacy jabot, horn-rimmed glasses and the inevitable kilt. There was a wide photograph of an entire herd of elephant in Lake Manyara, closer to the photographer than one would think possible for safety. Oria’s naked child reached up from an ant-hill, touched the outstretched trunk of a peaceful matriarch. A group of slight, naked Rocco children, hair glowing light around the darkly tanned faces, played with lean, naked African children: their bodies plastered with mud, they drew strange arabesques on each other, and were transformed into living clay sculptures.

  The old Roccos had a way of telling stories with great flair, making them sound like legends.

  The intriguing combination of aromatic Neapolitan food and French cuisine, concocted by old Kimuyu, was served by red-fezzed servants on the panoramic terrace guarded by tall cypresses. During one of these lunches, the noise of an engine approached from the sky and a small aeroplane appeared, aiming – or so I thought – straight for us at full speed, like a mad kamikaze on his target. The china seemed to clatter on the table, the wheels seemed to miss the roof by inches. I almost spilled my wine, the children cheered, the old Roccos looked not at all perturbed. ‘Iain and Oria,’ they commented casually. ‘Good. They have made it for lunch.’ That is how I met them, and their angelic little daughters, Saba and Dudu.

  Like Mirella, Oria was dark-skinned and feminine, colourful and exotic, with a deep, low voice, lively eyes, and a ceaseless drive to achieve the unusual. Iain, of aristocratic Scottish descent, had written his D.Phil. for Oxford on the elephant of Lake Manyara in Tanzania, where they had lived for years. This choice, like all choices, was to influence the rest of his life for ever, and made of him, in time, a famous and respected elephant expert. They were a handsome, happy and original family of intelligent people, a mixture of Italian creativity and spontaneity, French flair, and Scottish determination and love of adventure and challenges. I knew at once that they would always be deeply involved in something stimulating and interesting. I was instantly drawn to them, and over the years our friendship naturally grew and our lives became inextricably involved. The warmth and culture of the Roccos made me feel welcome and at home, and I always looked forward to visiting them, for nothing obvious or boring could ever be found within their aura.

  On the southern shore of Lake Naivasha was Longonot Farm, called after the crater which dominates the lake above the haunting gorge of Hell’s Gate, today still teeming with antelope and giraffe, and it was the Blocks’ domain. Their father had arrived from South Africa at the beginning of the century, his only wealth a sack of seed potatoes; and from this he created an empire. The Blocks’ hospitality was renowned. Friendship was important to them and in their house you always met a mixture of talented and outstanding people from all over the world. For all their polish and social commitments, in different ways both Tubby and his Swedish wife Aino loved nature, and the peace of country life. Tubby adored taking you round his impeccable vegetable garden and the luxuriant orchard, going from plant to plant to taste a fruit, with a naive delight and a rural pride unexpected and refreshing in a man of the wor
ld. He had the gift of being happy with simple things. He adopted us, and became the staunchest and most dependable of loyal friends. Aino was an elegant and sophisticated hostess. But there was a side to Aino that few people knew, and as she once shared it with me it created a strong bond between us, which made her very close to me. She had lost her much-loved first-born boy of a few years to an incurable disease, and the way she explained her experience at that time was unforgettably touching.

  Their house looked over the lake, where Paolo liked to go fishing for black bass with Emanuele in Tubby’s boat. It skidded on the calm water through waterlilies and carpets of the infesting salvinia, barely missing some sleeping hippo. Pelicans, fish eagles and a breathtaking variety of water birds circled in the air and called from half-immersed tree stumps. These idyllic weekends at the Blocks’ became a feature in our early days of search for our own Eden, and when we returned to Nairobi, the car bursting with fresh fruits and vegetables, the memory of Aino’s desserts of meringues and strawberries lingered for days.

  Other guests came to stay at Longonot Farm, and there we met the Rubens. Of the same Russian-Jewish background as the Blocks, old man Ruben had also come to Kenya at the turn of the century as a small boy, and at the end of the First World War, starting with two donkeys, he founded Express Transport, later a giant in the transport business, with fleets of lorries and hundreds of employees. Monty Ruben was a zoologist, with a passion for photography, medicine and gadgets. There was a strong base of loyalty and generosity in Monty, a sensitivity and a deep love for the country, and like Paolo, he felt himself very much an African. In the African tradition, he eventually adopted me as extended family, and I learnt that I could always count on him for advice and constructive help. Temperamentally, his wife Hilary was his absolute opposite. Spiritual and living in a world of her own, she loved beauty and culture, poetry and mysticism, music and nature. She combined this with compassion and caring for others. I found her company enriching and inspiring. Hilary and I had a spiritual affinity which created a common intuition of the meaning of what really mattered, and in this was the root of our friendship.