African Nights Read online

  When I went home I looked for the pendulum, but I could not find it where I had left it. I searched everywhere, for days, combing the house and all possible hiding places. The pendulum seemed to have vanished.

  It was only recently that I met his widow for the first time: a good-looking lady who could still not believe what had happened. She wanted to write a book about her life and hoped I could help her with publishers’ addresses. She knew I had known her husband, but no more.

  At one stage in our conversation, I could not resist asking her about his passion for the pendulum. I was about to tell her that he had given it to me, that I had been very honoured, and that I was now shocked because I could not find it, when suddenly she said:

  ‘About his pendulum. I threw it into the Indian Ocean. It was the only right thing to do.’

  The beach, again, was left only to seagulls.

  11

  A Bed Like a Vessel

  Give me the life I love

  Bed in the bush with stars to see.

  Robert Louis Stevenson,

  Songs of Travel, I, ‘The Vagabond’

  Even if, in the West, we no longer normally believe in the truth of auguries, they are part of Africa and of its traditions. I have chosen Africa, and have grown to accept and to respect its rituals and beliefs, as they are rooted in the very nature of its people and in their simple lives, still close to the source of all things. They are, in their essence, indistinguishable from the instincts which allow tribes to survive in harsh conditions, or migrate periodically to other grazing lands, and which protect them from predators, or guide them to water.

  There have been occasions in my life when I have been especially close to the depth of the African spirit, and have felt, with humbleness and pride, that Africa has accepted and, in its inscrutable way, has chosen me too.

  Like the time when the Pokot women came to offer me a special wish.

  It was the afternoon before Christmas Eve in 1983, when Paolo had been dead three years, Emanuele had followed him a few months before, sent to the country beyond by a snake which could not know what it had done; Sveva, our baby, was about three years old. I was in the kitchen, preparing some complicated chocolate log with my cook Simon.

  Rachel, the Nandi maid, had come to call me: ‘Kuja! wanawake ya Pokot iko hapa. Unataka kuona wewe.’ ‘Come! The Pokot women are here. They want to see you.’

  I wiped my hands on a cloth, took my baby on my hip, and went out, licking the chocolate from my fingers.

  I could see them all from the verandah, some already squatting, at ease below the fever trees, some standing, some dancing round like long-limbed ostriches lifting their legs high. There were old women, covered in soft skins, their hair in dark greased ringlets, toothless, their craggy lined faces worn like ancient wooden masks. There were the girls, and it was they who sang. They were so young, so frail, like birds who have not grown feathers: stick-like legs, thin arms, gleaming with brass bracelets, and their little round faces on pert necks, plastered startlingly with a mixture of white ashes and chalk in ugly patterns. But their merry eyes, glinting with mischief and teasing anticipation, denied the very purpose of their disguise. They each held a long ceremonial stick which they had gone to cut for themselves from some special shrub in the forest; they oscillated them now in rhythm with their voices.

  They sang; and when they saw me, their song gained strength, momentum, as if a sudden wind had given it new wings. It was a shrill, high-pitched lament which sounded like the call of a bird at noon. It ran through them like a shiver as they sang in turn, rippling them into a frenzied, yet curiously composed ritual dance.

  It was the song of the girls who have been circumcised, and have borne the pain and the ordeal of this barbaric but accepted tradition with courage and dignity, knowing that they were now free to enter in their role of mature women, and to allow a man to find them, and pay their bride-price of cattle and goats to their fathers. It was the song of the women of Africa, a song of courage and mutual solidarity, of hope of children and proud resignation to an unchosen, yet time-proven fate.

  They spat on their hands before shaking them with me one by one. They giggled, shyly. Some seemed so pitifully small, still almost children, the white of their eyes and teeth standing out in their tribal camouflage, intended to make them repellent to men for the duration of their recovery. In a few days, healed and ready to be seen by all eager young males, they would wear their traditional costumes of bright orange, brown and yellow beads. Their round cheeks would be greased provocatively in red ochre, their hair dressed in complicated tresses, their little breasts bare. Their skirts of beaded calfskin long in the back and gathered in front would reveal their agile legs, tinkling with anklets.

  From now on, in the years to come, I would recognize some of them, surprised at the turn of a track, while they tended their goats and weaners, their stomachs bulging with their first and second and subsequent children, year after year, for all their fertile lives.

  Suddenly that day, when all the greetings had been exchanged, my symbolic offering of tea and sugar had been passed on, and the ceremony seemed to be drawing to its end, one old woman came forward, proffering in her hands a long object. An instant hush descended on the small crowd like a last layer of leaves after a sudden storm subsides.

  All the other women gathered and surrounded me in suspended silence, their faces alert in anticipation. I understood that this was really the major purpose of their visit, and the core of this ceremony. Murmuring guttural words in Pokot, the old woman offered me her gift. It was a wide belt of soft skin, smeared with greased ochre and goat fat, and beaded in a simple pattern with small grey money-cowries like shiny pebbles. Before I knew it, with endearing giggles, they fastened it around my waist, and asked me something I could not understand, with a happy, pressing, even demanding note in their voices.

  ‘Nyumba yako ya kulala. Hawa nataka kubeba wewe kwa kitanda yako.’ ‘Your bedroom. They want to carry you to your bed,’ Simon interpreted for me, appearing at my side like a protecting shadow.

  My bed. I remembered the day when I had sat on the floor of the room which would be our bedroom, watching Langat and his assistant Nguare carrying in the trees that would become our bed.

  Building a bed is like building a vessel to carry us through the delights and nightmares, surprises and follies, pauses to rest and deliriums of fever during the varied travels of our nocturnal life. Our bed is the most important piece of furniture we may ever use, for so much happens in it to influence our waking hours. A bed is a habitaculum, a home in itself. Our sleeping body entrusted to its protection gathers with abandon the strength, the glory of tomorrow’s daylight.

  Our bed was a four-poster that I had imagined and built of simple and irregular, but polished posts, linked by smaller beams and with a sensational head and foot made from offcuts shorn of their bark, to reveal the sinuous curves of their long woody muscles. This bed, where I still sleep and will for as long as I live, was shaped in a few days inside the room. Tall, massive and unique, it can never be moved out through the small door.

  We built it together, Langat, Nguare and I, and when it was ready, I gave them a beer, to celebrate that receptacle of dreams and sorrows. We stood together, admiringly, contemplating the result of our work, and turned to each other to shake hands on it, grinning with the pleasure of recognizing our achievement. The trails that insects had carved laboriously in the surface of the wood created a subtle, inimitable filigree, a delicate fossil memory.

  One day – I was then yet to know – Paolo would climb on to the bed and hang from its central beam an empty ostrich egg, to puzzle my soul with the unrevealed oracle he had concealed inside it. I would spend sleepless nights watching that egg after Paolo died, while his baby daughter would nurse and play on the hyrax cover. A few years later, I would lay there, for his last night on earth, the tortured teenage body of my son Emanuele, and I would spend the wake, curled up on my side of the bed, rolled into col
d blankets, writing for him my last song.

  Show the Pokot women to my bed? The request was so odd and unexpected that I had no time to demur. With a nod, I indicated the way, and amongst cries of triumph, I was suddenly lifted high, above those heads in ringlets, by dozens of strong, skinny hands grasping me tenaciously through my khaki clothes, while a new song was being sung.

  They carried me, snaking their way in circles through the garden in a live brown stream, like a procession of harvester ants carrying a large white insect to their secret pantries; before I knew it, my room was full of them, swarming at once and all together.

  I was finally thrown, as gently as possible but still roughly enough, on to my bed, amidst howls and giggles from the youngest women, while the older ones proclaimed in a half singsong their prophecy, or their wish. One by one, they all fell silent, until only the oldest one spoke. Hovering over me, searching my eyes with her shining gaze, in guttural bursts she pronounced her sentence. They all chorused the last word, clapped their hands and, one after the other, spat on me their blessing in convulsive sprays of fine spittle. Then I was brought up and out again, dazzled, smeared with ochre, to see the sun.

  They explained to me eventually that theirs was a special wish for me, that I should again be happy on that bed which had seen such sorrow – happy, and loved, ‘but no more pregnant’: the best wish they had to offer, which I accepted gratefully.

  And some while after, like all authentic spells, it came true.

  12

  The Rhino That Ran Fast Enough

  And the experience has left me in some doubt whether a rhino has such poor sight as it is commonly believed.

  Vivienne de Watteville, Speak to the Earth

  It is often difficult, in Africa, to surprise animals in the open, as the lush vegetation or thick shrubs provide a myriad of hiding places, into which the wild creatures, alarmed by the noise of an approaching car, the crack of a twig under clumsy feet, or a whiff of your smell carried by a change of wind, can quickly dive and disappear.

  Often have I caught, out of the corner of my eye, a furtive movement at a bend in the track, the shape of a tail or flickering ears in the tall grass, and a shadow has dashed away faster than my mind could register it, leaving an impression, only, of the passage of some elusive life that challenged my imagination. Yet, if I stopped to search, scanning the sand or the dried mud of the game trail, I would find the unmistakable imprint of a large hoof or of a paw, like a signature unwillingly left by fugitive feet.

  The element of chance involved in crossing a path at the very same moment as a rare or shy animal, and of seeing it for an instant still in the sunshine or trapped in the car’s headlights, before the savannah grass or the night swallows it, has never failed to puzzle me. A few seconds earlier, or later, and the scene would have been missed forever.

  I can recall countless such episodes, but perhaps the most extraordinary of all was an amazing encounter, witnessed with the same sense of wonder by four pairs of eyes. It resulted, through its perfect timing, in the fortuitous rescue of a very rare little creature in distress.

  One July morning in Laikipia, when Sveva was about five years old, I drove her down to Centre to fetch her young friend Andrew, Colin and Rocky Francombe’s son, to come and play in our house at Kuti.

  The air was still and hot, and the sky hung close, the colour of lead, as it is during the season of the rains, when the Highland winds stop blowing for a time, and the only movements are the tremulous flights of white butterflies, migrating westward in endless clouds of palpitating wings. They go, like waves, incessantly in the same direction, as to a rendezvous they cannot miss at the far end of the horizon. The golden air seems full of the snowflakes of an improbable summer storm, or of petals from a creamy bougainvillea scattered in gusts by an invisible breeze.

  The transformation the rains brought to Laikipia was always breathtaking. My car skidded in the fresh red mud. The tufts of new grass at the sides of the track were emerald green, and clusters of frothy flowers covered the carissa shrubs, mixing their intoxicating jasmine scent with the sweet and warm perfume of the flowering acacias. The wild animals seemed to be reborn, well fed, glowing with health – frisky impala, shiny waterbuck, fat zebra and placid elephant foraging unhurriedly from the taller branches. The red dust which had been dulling the bush like clinging rust had vanished, leaving shining grass leaves and fresh buds. With the children chatting in the back, I was driving slowly back to Kuti, concentrating on the beauty and bounty of the wet, sumptous African landscape.

  It happened so suddenly; I was so unprepared. A small grey something darted across the road, almost running straight into the car; a strange little creature like a cut-out cartoon, invading by some trick of imagination the real world around us.

  It was a baby rhino, no taller than a dog, dashing in front of me with amazing speed. Alone. Its eyes were fixed on the track ahead, but on perceiving my car they turned towards it and, for a fraction of a second, I could read in them, with great surprise, a look of pure terror. For whatever reason, the baby rhino was scared to death, and I realized that he was running for his life.

  He passed inches from my bumper, and in a moment he was gone. I slammed on my brakes, and the car came to a halt, skidding. In the very same instant, another car, coming from the opposite direction, stopped in front of me. In Karanja the driver’s face, I read the same astonishment. We looked at each other, and I jumped out of my car to see.

  There, standing in the middle of the track, a few metres behind my car, was the smallest black rhino I had ever seen. His skin looked soft and smooth, like a rubber toy. On his nose only an insignificant protuberance indicated where his horn would one day grow. His eyes were tiny, porky, and concentrated on me or, rather, on my car. Absurdly, but surely, I caught in them the reflection of my own surprise, which had wiped off what had been his expression just seconds before: unmistakable, overwhelming terror. And then a definite look of relief, oddly of recognition, of joy almost, flooded into his piggy eyes, as if the encounter had in some weird way comforted him.

  An instant later, quite unexpectedly, he began running towards us, aiming straight for my open car door. I did not move, but suddenly my scent was brought to his sensitive nose by a change in the breeze, and human scent meant danger. Startled, looking betrayed, he came to a sudden halt. His head went down, a snort came through tiny nostrils, a comic determination born of instinct took over. He charged and, before I knew it, he knocked his embryonic horn against my bumper. It was so funny that I burst out laughing, and so did the children, whose bewildered faces, with mouths opened in amazement and round eyes which had missed nothing, were pressed to the back window. The noise startled the rhino; and in one movement he turned on his heels, swerved suddenly and trotted off faster than ever through the undergrowth.

  Only the bush was left and the empty road, where a faint cloud of dust soon settled.

  I turned to Karanja, my other witness, to comment on the event: his mouth, too, was agape, and his eyes widened incredulously. There was more to it than had met my eye. He had been driving a tall land-cruiser and, as the scope of his vision was much wider than mine, he had seen what I could not. His fat hand came out gesticulating excitedly and indicated a point on the side of the road I could not see. I noticed that he had difficulty in finding his voice.

  ‘Simba!!’ he screamed at me finally. ‘Lion!’

  ‘Iko simba uko nafuata hio mutoto ya faru.’ ‘There is a lion there following that rhino child.’

  That explained the desperate fear. I turned, stood on my tiptoes, and sure enough, through the tall grass and low carissa shrubs, I distinguished the yellow shape of a stalking animal. A moment, and it was gone, leaving the tracks of its claws embedded in the hard soil.

  The rhino had disappeared too. His hour had not come yet. Our presence at that precise point in the road at that very moment, had, by some arcane design of fate, saved his life, just in the nick of time. I wondered for how l
ong the chase had been going on. Where was his mother?

  Karanja had the answer: ‘It is the rhino child whose mother was killed by poachers.’

  Why had he run towards me? I thought about it for weeks, and asked all the animal experts I came across for an explanation. Surely he did not come to me to protect him. He was a wild rhino who was not accustomed to humans. But I had been driving a low off-white Subaru, splattered with mud.

  Its size, its colour and its shape were familiar to him.

  My car was the closest thing to his mother the rhino child had ever seen.

  13

  Fifty Guineas’ Pike

  The seamed hills became black shadows … sounds ceased, forms vanished – and the reality of the universe alone remained – a marvellous thing of darkness and glimmers.

  Joseph Conrad, Tales of Unrest, ‘Karain: A Memory’

  ‘Next full moon, I would like to show you and Sveva Fifty Guineas’ Pike,’ said my friend Hugh Cole. ‘The sun will set and the moon will rise, and we will watch from the most fantastic kopje. The view is terrific. Pack some sandwiches. I’ll bring the fishing rods. Yeah.’

  He grinned. I found his Antipodean accent quite funny for a Cole.

  I liked Hugh Cole. He was a true friend of mine, since the old days in Laikipia. The Coles lived, then, on Narok Estate, a large and efficient ranch situated east of us at Ol Ari Nyiro and, by Kenyan standards, they were our neighbours. Often Hugh and our friend Jeremy Block appeared with the specific aim of going after a buffalo with Paolo. They would be out all afternoon, and in the evening we would sit talking until late round the fire.

  Hugh was not much older than a boy then – perhaps nineteen or so – and he had dreams, like boys have, and grown-ups too, sometimes.