Rules of the Wild

by Francesca Marciano

  This was the South, and like every other south in the world it was softer and gentler than its north, had an ancient and more sophisticated culture. When Adam took me to Mombasa I felt completely at home: it reminded me of my own Italian south, it had such a Neapolitan soul. It was hot and noisy and crumbling, but it was vibrant, cosmopolitan, and every single old man sitting cross-legged among his heaps of vegetables in the shade of the fruit market had the face of a Sufi philosopher or a sultan. You felt right away that this place had a history, and a written one at that. The coastal tribes were so different from the tribes of the central provinces, like the Kikuyus, the Kambas or the Luos. Their blood had been mixing with Arab, Portuguese and Indian blood for centuries; their ancestors had sailed between Zanzibar and Oman, Lamu and Mombasa, Karachi and Pemba, trading ivory, hardwood, slaves and spices on their dhows. These men still dressed in white and wore embroidered Muslim caps as they sat under the shade of a tree in the evening, sipping tiny cups of cardamon tea. The old wazee still greeted you in the most wonderful old-fashioned ways, whispering the loveliest salamas as you passed their way.

  “Shikamuu…”

  “Maharaba…”

  “Salam alekum…”

  “Salama sana…”

  Every morning Adam and I took long walks on the beach, and watched the fishermen lay their nets within the reef and clap the water all around to trap the fish inside. Their silhouettes dotted the horizon, and one could hear the sound of the distant clapping coming from every direction. The dogs always came down with us and ran after crabs and birds while we sat in the shallow pools at low tide, and talked for hours. I realized how little time Adam and I ever had to talk. I knew so little about his life before we met. During that week, his childhood on the farm and at the coast slowly took shape before my eyes. He showed me all the secret places where he used to play as a child; and every rock and tree and waterpool was still there, just as he had left it. He showed me the ruins of the old mosque hidden in the thick of the kaya, where he used to hide and play in the afternoons when the sun would filter through the foliage and light the ruins like an illustration from an adventure book. He took me to the “swallow pool” below the cliffs, where the birds always nested in the cold season and filled the air with chirping sounds. One could swim there even at low tide, and snorkel over the most amazing collection of brightly coloured starfish which lay on the white sand like a scene from Fantasia. We would snorkel next to each other, and I loved the feeling of our bodies underwater, the shimmering light reflecting on our skin, my long hair floating like seaweed and brushing his arm. I loved the taste of salt on his mouth when we kissed.

  Before sunset we always walked to the point, where the reef reached the shore and the surf pounded against the cliffs. There was always wind, and the sea spray covered us in mist as we stood on the edge of the cliff looking out at the view of the bay. It was heaven.

  “Why don’t we come and live here?” I asked. It seemed so logical and so easy to do.

  “This is exactly where I want to buy land,” Adam said. “That’s why I need another year or two. Then we can build our own house, right here.”

  Never before had anyone said anything so simple and definitive to me. Never had anyone dared make such plans with me. Buying land, building houses. I had only heard such lines in one of those movies where Henry Fonda plays a pioneer. I held Adam’s hand in the wind, incapable of replying, feeling slightly guilty, as if I had taken someone else’s role by mistake and they were just about to come and throw me off the set.

  But another part of me, deep down, knew that even if it had been a case of mistaken identity, I had grown to the point where I was becoming that other person, and it was time to stop worrying: nobody was ever going to find out. My old self had been buried long ago and far away. Nobody would ever trace the body. I was going to be fine. I smiled and thought, Yes, I am going to be happy ever after.

  I like to think I got pregnant that same night. My body felt such a wave of gratitude and trust, I let myself go so completely, like someone who is willing to drown, that I remember thinking as we were making love, yes, yes, yes, here I am, here I come, I will not hold back ever again.

  I remember closing my eyes and falling asleep to the distant sound of the ocean breaking on the reef and thinking that I felt just like those waves: after such strong currents I had come to break against the coral barrier and was ready to turn into still water.

  That night, nestled in Adam’s arms, I dreamt of our bodies diving close together into the green. My limbs felt fluid, my skin smooth like a dolphin’s. As the water turned a darker shade of blue, I looked up towards light at the top. But I no longer needed to reach the surface: I could hear my slow breathing underwater.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Well, that was the river,

  this is the sea.

  THE WATERBOYS

  Ferdinando had once written a poem called “Sirena.” It was about a woman—nè carne nè pesce—a creature of darkness with a cold stare. A mermaid who smelled of algae, pulsed and wriggled like a fish. The siren was a hybrid of warm flesh and cold blood, animal and human, sex and death, yet condemned to be neither—not fish nor flesh, nor old nor young—forever caged in its sexless fish tail, never allowed to breed.

  For some strange reason I had always believed my mother had been the original inspiration of the poem, probably because of that cold stare she had, the long red hair against the whiteness of her skin. There was something obscene and desperate in the concept of a woman siren, and I always felt fascination mixed with horror at the idea of her sexuality trapped in the fish scales.

  “Your mother?”

  I remember how Ferdinando had raised his head from the book he was reading and had tipped his glasses further down his nose as he looked at me. It was a late summer afternoon. I must have been sixteen or so, a skinny teenager sitting on the parapet of the terrace across from him. I hated the way he was able to read like that for hours, completely unaware of others around him.

  But my question had amused him, because he put his book down.

  “Why not? She would have liked that. She quite liked the idea of being dangerous.”

  “But why is a siren always dangerous?”

  “Because she will possess you not by bearing your child but by taking you down in the deep and never releasing you again. She’s sterile, you see, and sex with a siren bears no fruit, is an act against nature.”

  “But Mother had two children.”

  “True. But she was a siren at heart. It’s a mental category.”

  He paused, then he looked at me.

  “You are one too.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I can see it in you.”

  I frowned.

  “I don’t think I like that very much.”

  “Well, you are wrong. It’s meant to be a compliment. At least from my point of view.”

  “I think it’s morbid, it sounds so sick.” I suddenly felt irritated.

  “It’s not sick at all. You are just being puritanical.”

  “No, it’s awful.” I raised my voice, now I really wanted him to take it back. “It’s like being an outcast, some kind of monster.”

  Ferdinando sighed. I knew how much I bored him when I was like that. He never liked it when I wanted to be like everyone else. So he tipped his glasses back up and opened his book again.

  Looking back on it, there wasn’t anything particularly puritanical in my not wanting my father to associate me with the idea of ruin, rotting algae, dark murky water, let alone my mother. I didn’t like to feel doomed. But I couldn’t help thinking of that poem as my very personal curse: neither fish nor flesh, cold-blooded, sterile. Taboo.

  What I now think Ferdinando meant then was that he didn’t see the breeder in me. He saw the same restlessness, the same torment which persecuted him and the women he had loved. On the other hand, he never believed peace was something worth pursuing to begin with; he didn’t think it
was realistic to seek happiness and fulfillment. He found it a rather dull and useless task and had no sympathy for those who strived at it.

  But my body didn’t turn out to be a siren’s after all. I had secretly wriggled out of the fish tail and had been walking on dry sand for a while, out of the murky water and breathing fresh air.

  Usually I feel like keeping myself at a safe distance from tight family clans. I never know how to fit in; I simply lack the experience. I never baked biscuits in the kitchen with my mother, or went shopping with her, or on picnics, never had candles to blow out on birthday cakes. On Christmas day Ferdinando would take us to a restaurant, preferably Chinese, since he hated all religious traditions with a passion.

  But Julia and Glenn had been so open and welcoming towards me that I surrendered to their warmth. They insisted that I should come visit them even on my own, whenever Adam was away with clients and I was bored with Nairobi. It was their way of showing me that I was now part of the family.

  “They loved you,” Adam said proudly as we were driving back to Nairobi. “My dad especially, he’s crazy about you.”

  “Really? Do you think so?”

  He nodded.

  “He took me aside as I was packing the car and said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t let her out of your life, son.’” He shook his head with a smile. “Typical of my father, he loves making that kind of patriarchal statement.”

  We laughed. But I knew now that his parents’ approval had meant a great deal more than I might have expected.

  After our trip to the coast I felt suddenly unprepared to be without him again. I dreaded the time we would be apart in a way I never had before. When, only a week later, he had to leave for the States, I drove back home from the airport and found myself crying like an abandoned child. It was ridiculous, but I couldn’t bear to be left alone any longer.

  One morning I looked at my waist, felt my breasts, and had a distinct feeling that something completely new had been happening inside me for God knows how long. It was time to check. I sat on the edge of the bathtub holding the pregnancy test tube in my hand, and looked at the bright blue colour in astonishment, my heart pounding, sweat breaking out under my armpits. I was going to have Adam’s baby.

  “I can’t believe it,” said my brother Teo from the other side of the world. “Please stop crying; this is so beyond my reach. Please darling, don’t be in such a panic.”

  “I am in a panic, I can’t help it,” I sobbed from my side, feeling the Indian Ocean pounding mercilessly inside the cables which connected my phone to Teo’s. “I have absolutely no idea what to do.”

  “You mean you don’t know if you want to keep it?”

  “Of course I want to keep it! I just don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I never thought I could be a mother.”

  “Neither did I”—I could feel him smile at the other end—“but hey, maybe it’s time you stopped being the child. You’ll stop thinking about yourself all the time. Sounds great.”

  “Please, this is not funny. You have no idea how this feels.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. But I mean it. I wish I had something else to think about other than me, me me. Really Esmé, I envy you.”

  “It’s as if your body has taken over your brain overnight and from now on will be in charge of everything. It’s like a coup d’etat. You can’t stop it from doing what it’s doing. It’s scary, I promise you…”

  I put a hand on my belly. No, there was nothing I could talk my body into doing any longer. It was going to produce another human being regardless of whatever advice I was willing to offer. I didn’t particularly feel better equipped for turning into a parent than, say, Teo did. But being a woman implied that my body could go ahead and carry out what I had merely fantasized while holding Adam’s hand on the cliffs.

  “Stop being such a control freak, Esmeralda,” Teo said. But I could tell he was moved.

  “But nothing will ever be the same! You realize that?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly the point. That’s why people have children: to move on. It’s wonderful. You’re no longer the honorary boy.”

  The more he said that, the more I sobbed. I wasn’t unhappy, only terrified at the idea of change with no return ticket.

  “My whole body has gone haywire: there’s this incredible amount of activity going on inside me nonstop, my hormones are in a frenzy. I feel hot, cold, nauseous, tired, hungry, weepy, it’s insane,” I said, dragging hard on my cigarette.

  “Go see a doctor. He’ll explain it all to you. And you are still smoking, I can hear it.”

  “Yes, like mad.”

  “You better quit and sign up for one of those breathing classes fast.” He giggled.

  If having a baby meant no more turning back, on the other hand, since I had first arrived here, I had always wanted to blend in, belong, grow roots. Now I was going to have a child in Africa and make Africa his or her home. So what was the point of crying? Unexpectedly, I felt lonely in my trip into motherhood. Not only was I leaving Teo—I knew he would never be an adult, he didn’t need to—but I was leaving behind Ferdinando, his poetry, his way of looking at things, in other words my own tribe. Now that I had buried my earlier self for good, it felt scary and completely insane to have done so.

  But my panic proved only temporary. It vanished—miraculously—as soon as I heard Adam’s voice later that same day.

  He was in Santa Fe. It felt like millions of miles away.

  “Should I come back?”He sounded awestruck, like a little boy.

  “I’m perfectly all right, don’t be silly.”

  “I…I…” He struggled for words. “I can’t wait to see you. I want to hold you.”

  “You will.” I found myself beaming, proud as a hen.

  I had finally done something. And it was going to be ours, forever and ever. Even Adam was overwhelmed by it.

  I had proved Ferdinando wrong: I was not going to be another doomed marine monster who lures men into her dark waters. I was going to be a mother, a breeder, under the bright African sun. And it felt like deliverance.

  I sat in Dr Singh’s waiting room holding a leaflet in my hand: “Prenatal yoga classes, every Thursday at the Light House Center.” It showed a picture of a pregnant woman in the lotus position. I sighed.

  I scanned the room and carefully examined each of the women sitting around me, immersed in old issues of Cosmopolitan. They all seemed confident and relaxed, most of them well advanced in their pregnancies, their full round bellies concealed under flowery frocks, their legs slightly swollen, all of them Aryan white. I felt that irritation come back again: why was it always like that in Nairobi? Why did mzungu women all share the same hairdresser, gynecologist, dentist, aerobics instructor, masseuse? Why did we huddle together in these waiting rooms like a flock of retarded sheep, joined in a common effort to avoid any African hands touching our Sacred White Bodies? We did this all the time and never even noticed.

  I had gotten Singh’s number from Nena.

  “He’s very good,” she had said to me. “He’s a Sikh. I went to him when I was pregnant with Natasha. You’ll like him.”

  I waited hesitantly for extra reassurance. Which came in the form of:

  “He studied in Oxford. Moved back here only a few years ago.”

  Oxford. How soothing that sounds when it comes down to letting some stranger mess around with your body in a faraway country.

  So there I was, herded into the flock of young white mothers-to-be, waiting to blow up like all of them into a giant pudding, slip into the same hideous dresses and get to know them all by name at the Thursday evening yoga classes. I felt a pang of anxiety as I envisaged them as my future buddies.

  “You are in perfectly good health,” my newly acquired doctor said. Dr Singh was cool. He displayed a confident charm which would have made him fashionable among the New Age Hollywood crowd. In his mid-forties, a golf champion as shown by the several cups on the shelf, he wore a neatly pleated red turban and a blu
e blazer, turtle-rimmed designer glasses, Italian moccasins. He scribbled something on a piece of paper.

  “Here. This is the address of the lab for the scan. It’s in Lavington, near the BP petrol station. They are the best in Nairobi, I recommend them.”

  “Great.”

  “After eight weeks we should be able to detect the heartbeat. So go anytime after the next ten days. We won’t be able to see much before then.”

  I liked the “we.” Singh and I had instantly become a team, a twosome aiming for the same result.

  “Should I do anything in particular?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know…like not driving, not smoking?”

  Singh smiled. He must have been so used by now to paranoid mzungu mothers assailing him with their fears.

  “Basically you can do everything you feel like doing. With measure and caution, of course.” He grinned. “You will be just fine.”

  How amazing that this perfect stranger—from a faraway land, different religion, foreign language—suddenly had turned out to be my guide in the most intimate, revolutionary journey of my life.

  I walked out wishing dead every mother-to-be in the waiting room. I wanted Singh to concentrate exclusively on my case. If we were a team, and this mission was major in my life, how could he devote equal time and attention to all those insignificant, freckled, overweight, uninteresting UN wives?

  It’s extraordinary what pregnancy does to you. First you become incredibly selfish and mean. I think it happens because all of a sudden you feel extremely vulnerable, easy prey of medical malpractice, malaria, snakes, mad matatu drivers, giant potholes. You soon realize how fragile a receptacle your body is, how thin and immaterial the layer which separates your floating dormant creature from the dangers awaiting outside. You find yourself ready to scream for protection at every corner but determined to rip apart anything which could threaten what is going on inside you.