Rules of the Wild

by Francesca Marciano

  ———

  Meanwhile Hunter came back from Rwanda each time more distraught. As time went on I could feel that he was about to break down. It was as if something inside him had slowly given way, and now was bent beyond repair.

  Those afternoons after we had made love, he always started to talk in that particular way of his, almost to himself. We were on his bed; he was lying sideways, resting his head on his arm, as I was slowly getting dressed and ready to go.

  “The incredible thing is that while you are there, witnessing the horror, you persuade yourself that as soon as you file what you have just seen the whole world will come to a halt, and everyone will jump on a plane and come to help to stop the slaughter.”

  He looked away from me, as if he didn’t want to see me getting ready to go.

  “But instead nobody gives a damn. Nobody is even willing to call it a genocide.”

  He got up and quickly crossed the room stark naked. He wrapped a kikoy around his waist and sat at his desk, his back to me, and started to roll a joint.

  “It’s so fucking hopeless. People wrap up their china with my articles, and eighty percent of the foreign-news-page readers still don’t know which one is which. You know”—he faked an American accent—“who are the bad guys, the Hutus or the Tutsi? Can’t get these African names straight.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed, suddenly feeling desolate.

  “You must feel I’m so far away from it all.”

  I could see him lick the edge of the rolling paper. But he still didn’t look at me.

  “You are. But not in the way you think.”

  The room fell silent.

  When he spoke again his voice had softened:

  “Actually I’m lying. We never think of the readers when we’re there.”

  He lit the joint and turned to me, waving away the thick smoke.

  “We go to those places, right? Miles, Ruben, Bernard, me. We see those things. It’s not even for the excitement or the danger, why we want to go.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “I don’t know. Isn’t it weird?” He shook his head with a vague smile. “It’s like…we all have this secret.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He took a deep drag and passed me the joint. Then he looked away from me again.

  “I think at heart we put ourselves in those places because we are lonely.”

  “Lonely?”

  “Yes. I think that’s what the secret is: we go because we live other people’s wars, we’re involved in other people’s pain. We can forget about our own, that way.”

  We smoked in silence. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t. I just sat there feeling impotent. And guilty, because of my impotence.

  I looked at my watch. It was getting late. I stood up to go.

  I walked up to his chair and we stared at each other without saying anything. I remember thinking, Me too, I am your loneliness, you want to forget about me as well, don’t you?

  But I couldn’t make myself say it.

  He touched my shirt, lightly. And slowly undid the buttons one by one, keeping his eyes fixed on me.

  “Hunter…I really need to go,” I whispered, imploringly.

  My shirt slipped lightly onto the floor.

  “No.” He slid his fingertips on my naked shoulders. “I really need to make love to you. Now.”

  I knew he resented the way I always had a watch to obey.

  But I resented with equal passion the way he disappeared from one minute to the next, just like that. How he never said he was going to miss me. Or when he would be back. Maybe we both secretly wished one of us would get rid of the other so we wouldn’t have to feel any more of that anger.

  ———

  “Why is it that everybody around me always has more important things to do than brood and pine like me?” I asked Nicole.

  We were having cappuccino in the French Café in a brand-new shopping mall in Westlands. Housewives’ paradise: the best butcher in Nairobi, the German bakery and a health food store all under one roof.

  “Because you should start doing something meaningful with your life, you fool,” she said. “Having an affair is not what I call an occupation.”

  “I know. And it takes up all of my energy, besides.”

  I had told her everything about me and Hunter and she had begged me to be careful. She didn’t want anyone to get too hurt.

  “Then I guess I should accept the job at the camp and work with Adam, shouldn’t I?” I said gloomily. “I really can’t go on like this, it’s too demeaning.”

  “I don’t know about the camp,” said Nicole hesitantly. “Can you see yourself putting up with the clients and all that?”

  “No. I would do it only because I feel guilty.” I sighed. “In fact I’d much rather do something on my own, completely apart from any man I’m involved with.”

  “I agree. That would make much more sense.”

  Nicole blew on her hot cappuccino, lost in her own thoughts. Sometimes I feared that my nonsense might be starting to get on her nerves. But she wasn’t like that.

  “There’s this postproduction company in town, Right Track it’s called,” she said. “They do news for KTN, all sort of freelance work, some advertising. I know they’re looking for somebody to manage the place. You should go talk to them. I think you could get a pretty good salary. Jason Winters, this filmmaker who moved here from London, he works with them sometimes. A seriously bad city boy, for a change.”

  “Sounds like fun,” I said, trying to sound excited.

  But the conversation had sunk me into a dark mood again. I nibbled at a piece of croissant and put it down.

  I was quiet a moment too long. She suddenly broke the silence.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked me. “You can’t keep this up much longer.”

  “I’m going to have to stop it. It’s hideous having to lie to Adam.”

  “But why don’t you tell him the truth? You’re not married, you don’t have children. I mean, nobody’s marriage is going to—”

  “No,” I interrupted her vehemently, “you don’t understand. I love Adam. Between Hunter and me it’s only this…this…”—I struggled for the word. “Mad attraction. I could never have a life with him.”

  “But why?”

  “Because he’ll hurt me,” I said without thinking. And wished I could take it back.

  “What do you mean he’ll hurt you?” Nicole shook her head. “Good God, Esmé, sometimes you are twisted!”

  “No, it’s just that…oh I don’t know how to explain this.” I sighed, and looked through the glass door of the Uchumi Supermarket, at the people on line for the cashier.

  “Hunter somehow…he scares me. He does something to me, I don’t know what it is, I think he did it to Iris as well. He makes me feel like I’m drowning. Like we could never be happy.”

  Nicole raised an eyebrow.

  “I think you’re being unfair to him.”

  “Why?”

  “He may hurt you only if he can’t have you. And you’ll do the same to him.”

  “Great,” I said impatiently, “then we’ve been locked in the wrong position right from the start and we’ll never get it right again. It’s too late now.”

  I hadn’t met Jason Winters yet; he’d moved to Kenya only two months earlier, on a whim. A true Londoner, a pure Notting Hill Gate swinger, he’d given up his status of struggling director in the video clip industry in England to become the trendiest director Kenya ever saw. He tied his bright red hair in a long ponytail, wore only Agnès B linen shirts and jackets, outrageous Jean Paul Gautier suits, and red or emerald green cowboy boots. Every advertising agency in Nairobi wanted him.

  Nicole asked him to meet us for lunch the next day at Leone’s, an Italian deli in town. She reckoned he’d be the right person to help me get the job. Jason emerged from a silver 1960’s American car with tailfins and a complicated array of taillights, wearing shades and a black
beret.

  “Sorry I’m late, girls, but I went to sleep at six,” he excused himself. “All-night editing.”

  He turned to Nicole with a conspiratorial grin.

  “Thank God our friend Boniface has just been successfully shopping in Lagos.”

  The same coke dealer: that’s how they had met, I figured.

  Jason proceeded to order the most expensive white wine on the list, fussed until he obtained a sufficiently chilled bottle, and had us completely drunk by the time the antipasto arrived.

  “You’ll get the job no problem, Esmé,” he said, picking a sun-dried tomato with the tip of his fork. “If anything, you’re overqualified.”

  “To be honest with you, I’ve never worked in films in my life.”

  “That’s not the point,” he said, waving the tomato in midair and spraying oil onto my shirt. “You have style, which is what the film industry always needs.”

  When I did get the job with Right Track, thanks to his introduction, and told Jason I had no clue what postproduction really meant, he said:

  “Who cares? You’re not a technician. They pay you to run the place, to be the hostess, to make everyone feel a tingle of Hollywood.”

  Right Track Productions was a tiny studio on the tenth floor of a glass tower in town. Two rooms, neon lights and lino floor; the only concession to Hollywood a Casablanca poster. Their main feature was a brand-new Avid machine which was state-of-the-art equipment for Kenya, and drew a lot of customers: correspondents from foreign TV news desks, local advertising agencies and so forth. Sometimes the occasional journalist would pop in and cut some Rwanda or Sudan footage in a rush, sometimes it would be a mzungu director like Jason who had just shot a local ad for underarm deodorant or aspirin. I sat at the reception desk, took the bookings, chatted with clients, made sure things got done according to schedule, and soon even started learning how the equipment worked.

  It was absurd. To live in Kenya and be shut up inside a dark room all day listening to the maddening sound of cereal jingles, or to the hypnotic sound of the president’s official speech inaugurating a fertilizer factory.

  I loved it when Jason booked the Avid for one of his silly ads. We would have eggs Benedict and Bloody Marys sent up from the Norfolk bar. Jason’s continental charm made up for the job’s lack of glamour, but above all he provided an escape from my extremely polarized life. He had no idea what was going on in the bush or in Rwanda, and didn’t particularly care. It was refreshing to hang out with him. He had the flavour of London, film festivals, art galleries, seriously good restaurants, new books, European gossip. Whenever I spent any amount of time with him, Nairobi instantly became a very simple place to live.

  Adam was about to leave for the camp with the first clients of the season. My decision to stay and pursue my new career in an office building rather than follow him to the freedom of the bush had puzzled him.

  “People pay thousands of dollars to come on safari and escape from jobs like the one you just got,” he said shaking his head.

  “Exactly. I don’t want my life to be like an expensive holiday.”

  “The camp is not a holiday. It’s your home,”he said, and then looked away, out the window.

  A home? Was the camp my home too? The idea struck me as odd. I’d never thought of it that way, but somehow I knew it was a mistake to feel always so removed from him and never able to accept completely what he had to offer me.

  “Adam.”

  He turned towards me. There was distance now in his eyes.

  “Please don’t misunderstand me,” I said. “I need to do something which is entirely mine. It doesn’t matter what it is; I just need to be proud of myself for having done something on my own here.”

  And as I said that I realised how true it was. My absurd job in town had not only released me from the feeling of dependency, but it had created a space—however small and insignificant—where I wasn’t just passively surrendering to my emotions.

  “I know,” Adam said, forcing a smile. “It’s just that I’ll miss you and I’m being selfish about it.”

  “But I’ll come and see you whenever I can,” I said. “I’ll miss you too, you know.”

  We kissed, as if to seal a newly made pact. But I moved away from him a bit too soon, and I think he noticed my slight impatience to get our parting over and done with, to go on with my life and my new arrangements without having to discuss them ever again.

  I think that’s when Adam sensed he had lost me. He didn’t yet know to whom or to what, but he was aware of my withdrawal from him. He wouldn’t force the issue, it wasn’t like him to do that, and I knew it only too well. His inability to express himself with words worked to my advantage now.

  I did visit him every weekend like a dutiful wife. I would get on a small six-seater every Friday afternoon and fly to the camp. The pilots were all friends with Adam so I hopped in as if on a bus and got a free forty-five-minute lift to the airstrip, where Adam or one of his drivers would be waiting for me.

  I had it all worked out. By the time Friday came I was always ready to see Adam. Our time together was always perfect: I gave him all my attention, I was always in a perfect mood, my guilt was so strong that our sex life turned out to be revived by my betrayal. But the thing is that I did love him.

  I loved him even more than before for having accepted my loss without making claims of any sort. Now I know that he was not just passively giving in, he was only waiting: he knew that only by being strong and patient could he eventually win me back. And now it is so clear to me how I too wanted him to succeed. Since I could no longer find my way back to him on my own, I needed him to be the one to break the spell. In fact we had been silent accomplices all along, both pretending that nothing was happening, that by saying nothing about it, the thing would simply go away as it had come.

  Our obliteration of the truth had a psychological and financial payoff as well.

  The clients at the camp invariably left saying how they envied our lifestyle. To them Adam and I were the incarnation of the perfect movie cast, a romantic, adventurous and good-looking couple. And to us they represented the perfect audience: always happy to pay the ticket price, invariably thrilled with the show, always asking about a sequel.

  Nobody wants to see such a good story end.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Touch me,

  touch the palm of your hand

  to my body as I pass,

  Be not afraid of my body.

  WALT WHITMAN

  I remember this.

  A beautiful day in September, Sunday lunch at the Dawsons’ farm on Lake Naivasha. Children running around on the lawn, grown-ups slowly getting drunk around the long table laid with hibiscus flowers.

  Nena has put one in her hair and looks like a Spanish dancer.

  I catch Hunter looking my way across the table. I’m wearing a sleeveless dress and Adam’s hand rests for a few seconds on my shoulder as he smokes a cigarette after coffee. The bare shoulder Hunter once said he wanted to take away with him. The shoulder he loves to kiss.

  His part of my body.

  Feeling Hunter’s eyes on me, I immediately have to stand up and walk away from the table. I move away with such unnecessary energy that my chair falls over.

  “Sorry. Oh, sorry.”

  Adam picks it up and looks at me.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. Just feel like moving.”

  These are the moments when the hideous pantomime is forced upon us. These are the moments when I realise how impossible it is not to hate it.

  Heather Dawson had taken me and Nicole for a walk around the farm before lunch, had showed us the rare species of birds, the gazelle droppings, the resident giraffes. In Africa people don’t show you their interior decoration; you don’t have to sigh with admiration when your hostess flings the door open onto each new room and expects you to congratulate her on her colour combinations. Here your hosts show you animals.

  My giraffes
, my buffaloes. And we also have a leopard. He was here last night, came right to the doorstep. Come over here, see these tracks?

  Oh God, isn’t that wonderful.

  When we came back from the walk Hunter was sitting around the table with the others. He had turned up unexpectedly.

  “Hunter, what a marvellous surprise!” Heather Dawson hugged him. “This beautiful man no longer shows his face. He used to come around so often a few years back. You and Iris, remember?”

  Everyone remembers Hunter and Iris. There is a history of them as a couple in this country.

  The history of Hunter and Esmé on the other hand—already two months old—is still sealed inside a bedroom. Nobody will remember the two of us together, nobody will ever have seen us.

  It felt so wrong, suddenly, that we should have this secret. That we should hide it from everybody. That it should stay underground and never see the light.

  I suddenly felt like shouting We are lovers, we are mad about each other, I make him very happy.

  Instead I kissed him chastely on the cheek.

  “Hello Hunter, good to see you.”

  ———

  Hunter got rapidly drunk and unpleasant at lunch. He started a furious argument with Peter the Elephant Man on the subject of lifting the ban on hunting. Adam sat sphinxlike at the end of the table, keeping his eyes fixed on Hunter. He made it obvious he didn’t want to be dragged into the conversation. He sensed that Hunter’s rage was directed at him.

  “Ranchers have been culling game anyway, so it’s just a matter of calling it hunting and letting a client pull the trigger instead. At the moment they make about four thousand shillings per zebra once they sell the meat and the skin. If you had the same animal shot by a client you could make six, seven times as much.”

  “It would be the beginning of the end, you just have no idea,” said Peter, irritated.

  “It would be a way for the African landowners to finally make a buck from wildlife. It would give them a reason to look after it, instead. It’s such hypocrisy.”

  He turned to me. Sneeringly.

  “Come on, let’s hear a woman’s opinion on this.”