The Other Language

by Francesca Marciano

  It took a surprisingly short time for sixteen years of marriage to come undone. Later, neither one of them was able to recollect how the sequence had unfolded—which phrase had prompted the next, nor how it had been possible that a mild irritation, an unpleasant remark, had unveiled truths that had seemed impossible to reveal until that moment.

  The feeling they both had was of a tidal wave that kept gaining speed and had crashed upon them before they could take shelter. Just like any natural calamity, it happened without foresight, while they were having tea on the small terrace of their room, looking at the peaceful river bathed in the morning light. It is possible that during the night they both had been prey to the kinds of dreams they’d had since coming to India—dreams of unusual intensity—and were still under their spell. In any case, seconds before it started, neither of them had the perception that they were about to hack to death their marriage, nor could they foresee how quick and (apparently) painless this hacking would turn out to be. Everything had seemed possible, in that moment. Possible that they could put an end to their marriage, that they could go different ways (he would stay on, she would go back). The decision had sounded final and conclusive, as though both of them had been toying secretly with it until it had become so familiar that it no longer frightened them. Oh no, now they were both looking forward to what would happen next, when they would be without the other. It didn’t deter them to think they would have to move out of their comfortable apartment, close their joint bank account, file for divorce, find a new place to live, maybe even move to a different country. Suddenly they were ready for change. In fact they’d never felt more euphoric.

  They had to say things to each other that would make turning back impossible, and they obliged. I don’t love you anymore. I haven’t been in love with you for years. I am still young, I want passion. I need to feel inspired again. I want my life back, I have lived only in your shadow. How odiously clichéd it all sounded, and yet—at that very moment—so utterly real, so satisfying. It was as though with each phrase they were shedding years of dissimulation. They grew lighter, younger, more desirable, now that they thought they were about to take their lives back.

  Before leaving the Fort, Ushma had given him her number and the name of a simple hotel he could stay in outside Bubaneshwar, not far from where she lived. He told the prince he would stay a couple of more days at the Fort, then he might go back to Orissa to look at the temples again. Plans were still uncertain, but he didn’t mind, he said.

  She booked her flight online and in two hours was packed.

  He didn’t bother to ask his wife why she was flying to Paris instead of Rome.

  When, a few weeks later, they met again to discuss the details of their separation, their enthusiasm had already subsided (both their romantic fantasies had turned out to be unrealistic or disappointing) and they were faced only with the practicalities of dismantling what was left of their life as a couple. They were disoriented and afraid but also unable to repair the damage done.

  Later, when they tried to explain to their friends why their marriage had fallen apart, within “l’espace d’un matin,” she’d said, they admitted they weren’t quite sure how it happened.

  They both, separately, used the same expression.

  It was like being in a dream, they said. A strange dream, which seemed so vivid until it lasted.

  The Club

  Soon after her husband’s death in 1995, Mrs. D’Costa moved from the big Mombasa house overlooking the Mtwapa Creek to a small cottage by the ocean, farther down the coast. She had lived happily in that house for more than forty years with her husband, a well-respected Goan doctor, and their three children. They had met in the fifties in Edinburgh, where they both went to college, and at the time young freckled Anne Munro could never have imagined that one day she’d call herself a white Kenyan and that she’d never set foot in Scotland again.

  She had given most of her furniture away to the Salvation Army—her long teak dining table with its eight chairs, beds, lamps, paintings, the two old armchairs she and her husband used to sit on after dinner to do the crossword, various knickknacks of no value—and took with her only the strictly necessary to fill the two-bedroom cottage—whatever she couldn’t live without. That included her cook, Hamisi, now gray at the temples, who had been with her for twenty-five years, and her aging Jack Russells, Pickle and Chutney, fond of biting strangers.

  Among the things that had appealed to her about moving away from the city was the fact that two old friends of hers, Prudence and Lionel Wilton (she a former actress with the Little Theatre Club company in Mombasa, he a brilliant architect originally from England), had retired twenty years before to this remote stretch of coastline, on the edge of a thick forest that ran all the way down south. The forest was a sacred place to the local Digo tribe and it had been designated a national monument. Rare species of plants and wild animals still thrived in its thick shade, and the Wiltons claimed they’d had leopards cross their land up until fifteen years back. They lived on a leafy ten-acre property overlooking the ocean, in an airy white house Lionel had designed in a simple Frank Lloyd Wright style. Not far from their manicured garden that gently sloped toward the beach, one could see the remnants of other crumbling houses probably built in the forties and fifties, barely standing under the shade of gigantic flame trees, half hidden beneath the tangle of creepers and ancient bougainvilleas. Wild fig trees had sprouted in the cracks of the floors, their roots blasting the walls with their violent push. Their original owners had all left for mysterious reasons and had never returned, so for years now Prudence and Lionel had been the only residents—that is to say white residents—in that area other than the fishermen and their families who lived in thatched huts scattered in the bush at the back of the property.

  The Wiltons were eager for their friend to become their neighbor. Now that they were reaching their seventies, they were beginning to feel lonelier and were longing for a bit of company. When he heard that her husband had passed away, Lionel immediately called Mrs. D’Costa and told her about the empty cottage next door to them.

  Without thinking about it twice, she’d enthusiastically agreed to move there. Actually she was relieved to let go of the big house and its happy memories now that her children had married and gone off to England, Australia and Durban. She had always tried to see change as a good thing and not to be afraid of it.

  Her new landlord, a Mr. Khan who owned the hardware store twenty miles down the road, had agreed to have some work done to the cottage, since nobody had lived in it for a very long time and it was in a state of disrepair. He was quite relieved when Mrs. Anne D’Costa showed up at the store, inquiring if he’d agree to rent it to her. Though what she could afford to pay was minimal, he was happy for the income, and that someone would occupy the place. She asked him to replace the thatch roof with tin, to whitewash the walls and have one of his workers cut the mangle of weeds and bushes that strangled the trees. He was pleased to find out that Mrs. D’Costa was an easy tenant with few demands. She didn’t expect him to replace the old pipes or the haphazard wires that were snaking from the walls, nor did she seem to mind the yellowing Bakelite switches and fuse boxes dating back to the fifties. She had done enough maintenance while running a household of six, and now that she was alone she didn’t feel like being fussy about housekeeping anymore.

  The Wiltons had welcomed Anne on her first night in the cottage with a strong vodka tonic. They sat on squeaking plastic chairs out on their veranda just as the full moon was about to bob up from the horizon.

  “Welcome to our private paradise, my dear!” said Lionel, raising his glass. “You must come over for sundowners every evening!”

  He still wore faded khaki shorts, knee socks and desert shoes, just as he did when she’d met him right before Kenya Independence, and he still combed what was left of his sandy hair on the side. But his body had shrunk and shriveled since then and his liver-spotted hand trembled slightly when he held u
p a glass.

  “We’ll see about that, Lionel. We’ll see,” Mrs. D’Costa said jokingly. “I am not going to inflict my presence on a daily basis, I wouldn’t want you to get sick of me too soon.”

  “That’s an order, Anne! I won’t compromise!” Lionel said, adding a generous splash of vodka to her glass.

  Prudence poked him lightly with her elbow.

  “Lionel, please let poor Anne be. She’ll do as she pleases. You’ll scare her away if you insist.” She shook her head and poured herself another drink.

  “Don’t pay attention to him, Anne. He has become such a bully, this husband of mine.”

  Prudence had put on quite a lot of weight since her days at the Little Theatre, but her roundness seemed to lend her a more youthful air. Men used to fall in love with her all the time, Mrs. D’Costa remembered. She had a lovely figure and a quirky taste in clothes back in the Mombasa days. Gamine, charming: that’s how people described her whenever Prudence came up in conversation. And quite rightly; she had been a lovely girl indeed.

  Now Prudence wore Bata plastic slippers and large caftans that helped conceal her frame. She had cut her thick hair short and let it go white. She had spent too many years in the sun, and her face was a web of wrinkles. It didn’t matter, Mrs. D’Costa thought with relief: they had all aged in the sun and at the same pace so why should any of them mind the way they’d changed? They had known one another for so long, shouldn’t they be like family by now? And besides, as far as she was concerned, she believed she looked better now than when she’d just met the Wiltons. She had been a flat-chested, mousy girl with thick glasses, just twenty-one years old. An alien, really, who had just landed in the heat of Mombasa from the Scottish fog.

  When Anne and her husband, Victor, met in college at Edinburgh, it was almost love at first sight. Victor D’Costa was a handsome, quiet young man. His family was originally from Goa, but in the thirties his grandfather had migrated to Kenya to work for the railroad company.

  In those days in Edinburgh it was rare to see a student with brown skin on a university campus. Anne felt a bit of an outsider herself; she didn’t have many friends either, coming as she did from a poor, uneducated family in Glasgow. She noticed how the rest of the students either ignored Victor or plain avoided him, and was drawn to him exactly for this reason. As she got to know Victor, she grew more in awe of his impeccable manners, his kindness and wit. Actually she found him far more sophisticated than most of the students who snubbed him.

  In 1952, right after their wedding (a small affair, neither had money to spend on the ceremony), the couple had sailed off to Mombasa to stay with his family. She’d immediately agreed to follow him there; she wasn’t leaving much behind anyway: a stuffy rented room that smelled of cabbage, her father’s drinking and her mother’s dreariness. There was also a surly brother she never got on with.

  She wasn’t ready for so much brightness.

  The East African light was blinding as their ship approached the coast; even at eight in the morning the air was redolent of cloves and sweet flowers. She could smell water in that heat. The clothes clung to her skin.

  “It feels like sitting in a warm bath,” she said, leaning into her husband, minutes after touching land at Mombasa port. They had been at sea for seven days.

  “Is it too much, dear?”

  “Oh, no. This is lovely. Lovely,” she said with a mirthful laugh. “I feel like taking my shoes off and running barefoot on the road!”

  He clutched her hand and his eyes welled up slightly. He had been so worried that she might find the climate too harsh.

  Her in-laws and her husband had decided it was better to take some time “to adjust” before getting a place of their own, so for a few months they’d lived with his family in the old town, in a big house full of relatives and children. Mixed marriages were a rare thing then, but the D’Costas immediately took her in as one of their own. It did help that they were Catholic Goans and they could all go together to church on Sunday, but in all respects Anne felt truly welcomed from the very first day. Now she saw where Victor’s kindness came from.

  Her new family was right, she did need time to get used to her life in Africa. Her head was spinning with fear and delight every time she walked out the door of her new home. Not only had she gained a whole new family, but there was a new language to learn, new smells, colors, noises and very different rules to get used to.

  She asked Prudence whether she still liked to play mah-jongg.

  “Mah-jongg? Oh dear, I haven’t for ages, actually. But guess what? I must have that same old set we had in the Bamburi house somewhere, remember? Shall I retrieve it from wherever it’s buried? We sure could play again on Sunday nights, like the old days. That would be so jolly.”

  Prudence’s enthusiasm reassured her. It had been a good decision, to reunite with the Wiltons. They were such warm and lovely people.

  Mrs. D’Costa and Prudence had met before Independence, in 1961. They’d been hired as typists in a British trading company’s office on Kilindini Road, which was then called Prince Charles Street. But after only two months Prudence had left her desk to join the Little Theatre company, where, thanks to her charm and her looks, she’d been offered a much more exciting career—as well as a more rewarding payroll. Soon after, Lionel—a dashing architect from London who had designed several hotels on the south coast—had spotted her onstage playing Vera in Ten Little Indians and had immediately fallen for her.

  That first night at the Wiltons’ Mrs. D’Costa walked back home escorted by their night askari, Saleem. He flashed his feeble flashlight along a small path that cut through Prudence and Lionel’s garden, skirted one of the crumbling houses standing in the plot right next to theirs and cut through the back of Mrs. D’Costa’s compound.

  The night was scented with frangipani and the full moon peeked through the rustling palm fronds, leaving a silver trail on the dark surface of the ocean. It reminded Mrs. D’Costa of an advertisment from the forties for cruises in the tropics. She wished good night to old Saleem and sat on her veranda with a nightcap before retiring to bed. She was certain she’d sleep soundly on her first night at the cottage, and she did, lulled by the sound of the surf breaking on the reef in the distance.

  Only two weeks after Mrs. D’Costa had moved into the cottage, Prudence and Lionel’s ancient Land Rover was hit by a truck as they were heading to Nairobi to visit their daughter, and they died on the spot.

  It was a terrible shock, and for days Mrs. D’Costa avoided taking in the enormity of what had just happened by keeping herself busy. When the Wiltons’ five children congregated in the airy house from different parts of the world with spouses and children, it was she who took charge of the situation. Without even asking permission to do so, Mrs. D’Costa supervised meals, went shopping for supplies and took care of logistics with military precision, as one does whenever a tragedy strikes and everyone else is walking around in a daze.

  Now, with Prudence and Lionel gone, she had been battling her loneliness in various ways. She’d started working daily in the garden—she had landscaped most of the garden at Mtwapa herself—and now with Hamisi’s help she dug a small pond that they filled with papyrus, water lilies and tiny fish. She attempted to teach English to some of the children living in the bush behind her property and had gone to great lengths to organize a Sunday class in her house. Only a couple of them showed up, brought by their mothers, who squatted outside on the floor of the veranda while Mrs. D’Costa sat at the table with the children. She gave them notebooks and pens and started her first lesson conjugating the verb to be. The children—who had never sat at a table before and had never seen a house like hers—looked terrified. They were unable to follow what she was saying (despite the years she had spent in the country, her Swahili was still poor and too heavily accented), and as soon as one of them started crying, the other followed suit. The mothers apologized. The children were not used to wazungus. They were shy and they “had fear�
� of her.

  That same year, during the monsoon, Anne spent endless afternoons under the pounding of the rain against the tin roof. She played solitaire over and over, reread cover to cover most of the yellowing paperbacks on the shelf—old thrillers, a couple of Daphne du Maurier novels, The Field Guide to Birds in East Africa. In between the daily power cuts she’d listen avidly to the BBC World or talk to her dogs, and one afternoon she finally resolved to teach Hamisi gin rummy so that they could play it together after dinner. He wasn’t as engaged by the game as she’d expected he would be, so she let him win most of the time in the hope of luring him into playing another hand and then another. It was essential that she keep spirits high and not indulge in dark thoughts. It was too late to turn back. And besides, even if she’d wanted, there was no other place waiting for her to turn back to.