Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness (13 page)

“Then why did you go back?” I ask.

“Well,” Mum says, “we still had those Rhodesian dollars in the bank from the Lytton-Brown settlement—a few thousand or whatever it was. That was one thing. And it was Africa, that was the main thing—we wanted to go back to Africa. We longed for the warmth and freedom, the real open spaces, the wild animals, the sky at night.”

FOR THEIR JOURNEY my parents packed up the two dogs, Mum’s collection of books, the two hunting prints, linens, towels, the bronze cast of Wellington (now missing its stirrup leathers) and the Le Creuset pots. Because of international sanctions against the country, Rhodesia had to be reached circuitously. Dad flew ahead via Malawi to find a job and somewhere to live. Mum followed on the SS
Uganda
from Southampton to Cape Town. “Oh, it was a wonderful little ship,” Mum says. “There were blue leather chairs in the wood-paneled smoking room and deliciously evocative oil paintings on the walls. And on either side of the chimneypiece, there was a set of enormous elephant tusks, a gift from the king of the Baganda to his country’s namesake ship. It was very romantic.”

And if that was not enough, Mum befriended the most glamorous passenger on board. “Paddy Latimer was en route to join her husband, who had a farm in South Africa. She had three little girls, one little boy, she was pregnant and she still looked simply gorgeous.” As the two women waved good-bye to England at Southampton, they realized they both had dogs. “Which was a tremendous bond, of course, so that was it,” Mum says. “We did everything together after that. Well, almost everything.” Paddy was the daughter of a ship-building family, “so she would swan up to eat at the top table with the captain and I’d be stuck with the rest of the povo.” But for breakfast and lunch and for the rest of the day, Paddy joined Mum.

In the mornings, the two women walked their dogs on the deck. They read, they wrote letters, they sunbathed. After lunch, they took languid siestas beneath the shade of days-old newspapers. Then in the afternoons they lazily plotted the world’s easiest costumes for the inevitable, dreaded Fancy Dress Party into which they reckoned they had to enter at least one child each. “Fig leaves,” Mum says. “What could be easier? So her little James went as Adam and you went as Eve, and you were terribly sweet, toddling hand in hand, fig leaves over your bits and pieces. I think the judges were quite impressed until James swiveled his leaves around—one on each hip—and started to engage in seriously unBiblical behavior with whatever was left hanging out.”

The farther south the ship sailed, the more Mum rejoiced. As Africa swelled into view, she pinned herself to the railings of the deck and felt the dampness of the last three years lift from her shoulders. When a hint of shimmering purple ribbon on the horizon bespoke Kenya, she held her face to the west and tried to inhale the perfect equatorial light. And as the ship veered around the tip of Africa, Mum held me up to the earthy, wood-fire-spiced air. A hot African wind blew my black bowl cut into a halo. “Smell that,” Mum whispered in my ear. “That’s home.”

Nicola Fuller in Rhodesia: Round Two

Bo’s children on a visit back to southern Africa. Great Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe, 2001.

T
o begin with, there are these scattered and unattached recollections: a snake in the honeysuckle creeper behind our house; Vanessa perspiring in her school uniform, valiantly persisting in her refusal to read; a rustling carpet of dead insects being swept off the veranda each morning; a lamb being slaughtered in a kraal under some eucalyptus trees where I hear, for the first time, Afrikaans being spoken; the taste of roasted maize in the compound where the language is Shona. (And words from both Shona and Afrikaans breaking into my everyday English: nyoka, lekker, maiwe! voetsek, huku.)

But my first consistent memory is of a farmhouse outside the small town of Karoi. “A lot of rooms strung together under a hot tin roof,” I say. “And wasn’t it flat and very dry, and the lawn was full of paper thorns?”

Mum puts down her teacup. “Well, yes. It wasn’t much of a house, but the farmer who owned the place was very kind and generous and he let us stay there rent free.” Mum gives me a look. “
And
he used to have terribly wild parties, something to do with blowing a feather across a sheet until all your clothes were off. We never understood it because we were very innocent, weren’t we Tim?”

“What’s that?” Dad says.

“INNOCENT,” Mum shouts, “WE WERE VERY INNOCENT.”

Dad lights his pipe. “Oh yes,” he says. “That’s right.” A cloud of smoke wraps around his head. “Absolutely.”

The three of us are sitting under the Tree of Forgetfulness on a Sunday afternoon one recent May, in what passes for autumn in the Zambezi Valley. I’ve chosen this time of year to travel from Wyoming to visit my parents because although it’s still hot, it’s not unbearably so. Between the extremes of the seasons (the earth neither flooded nor parched), their farm has taken on a genuinely bucolic air: geese and sheep cropping rhythmically around the fish ponds; an occasional cockerel from the nearby village hollering to his hens (the sound reminds me of childhood afternoons, waking up after a heat-drugged siesta); birds squabbling at the fruit feeder in Mum’s garden. “Look at that,” she says, “a black-collared barbet.” She cocks her head and talks to him, “Too-puddley, too-puddley, too-puddley, too-puddley. . . .”

And then, as if still addressing the bird, Mum returns to her memories, “Well, we never planned to stay in Karoi anyway. It was already too taken, too settled for us, wasn’t it, Tim? We wanted land that came with a swath of wilderness, somewhere a bit more out of the ordinary.” So on Sundays Dad brought the weekly newspaper home and my parents laid the classifieds out on the dining room table next to a map of Rhodesia and they searched for a farm the size and shape of the dream they had in their heads.

By 1930, all Rhodesia’s land had been officially apportioned by the colonial government. Unsurprisingly, designated European areas coincided roughly with the high-rainfall, fertile areas; Tribal Trust Lands lay more or less in the dry periphery; and the tiny allotment of Native Purchase Areas were farther away in the oppressively hot, tsetse-fly–prone zones. European settlers gave no sign that they considered their allotment as either immoral or dangerously unsustainable. For one thing, there was a very strong sense that God had given the settlers two holy thumbs-up (“Onward Christian Soldiers” was a popular enough hymn to wear out the relevant keys on Protestant church organs across the country). For another thing, many whites considered blacks so childishly inferior that taking their land was considered a justified occupation of virgin soil. “I don’t wish to be unkind,” Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith said in 1970, “but sixty years ago Africans were uncivilized savages, walking around in their skins.”

Smith and his followers seemed determined to deny the country an African history prior to the arrival of Europeans. They rejected, for example, the evidence of what the Rhodesians called Zimbabwe Ruins, a complex of conical towers and massive stone walls in the southeastern part of the country concluded to be the royal enclosure of a medieval Shona empire. Undulating over eighteen hundred acres, it is the largest ancient structure south of the Sahara. Archaeological excavations uncovered shards of pottery from China, and Arabian beads pointing to an undeniable level of civilization. To get around this awkward fact, Smith’s government put enormous pressure on archaeologists to deny that the structures could ever have been constructed by black Africans. At least one prominent archaeologist, Peter Garlake, was forced to leave the country when he refused to do so.

Nor did the Rhodesian government appear to register the irony that, for such avowed anti-Communists—“The war against Communism is ultimately a religious war in which the very thing that makes life worth living is at stake”
²
—their policy of land allocation put much of the country, namely, the Tribal Trust Lands, into communal ownership. By default, this forced millions of black Rhodesians into massive collectives where their every move could be monitored and controlled by an increasingly militaristic and paranoid government. Still, most of the two hundred fifty thousand or so white Rhodesians were unwilling or disinclined to question an official government policy that gave them preferential treatment over six million blacks, instead preferring to believe that theirs was a just and justifiable life of privilege. Critics accused these whites of belonging to the Mushroom Club: “Kept in the dark and fed horseshit.”

SO, “SHANGRI-LA!” Mum announced triumphantly one Sunday, stopping her finger on its way down the real estate page. She read aloud, “Robandi Farm; seven hundred acres for sale in the Burma Valley.” She named the price—reasonable enough—so together my parents looked at the map. From what they could tell, Robandi was a handful of miles (as the bird flies) from Umtali, a small city on Rhodesia’s eastern border with Portuguese-controlled Mozambique. “Oh!” Mum cried. “Portuguese wine, stinky cheese, piri piri prawns! We must have this farm.”

Phone calls were patched through various telephone exchanges until at last the line crackled with the voice of an estate agent in Umtali. He told my parents that the farm’s executor was an Italian farmer by the name of John Parodi—he lived in the Burma Valley and he could give my parents a tour of the place if they were interested. “Interested?!” Mum cried. “Of course we’re interested.” She hung up the phone and turned to Dad, her eyes shining. “Italian!” she cried. “I do think that shows the proper romantic spirit, don’t you?”

A day or two later, my parents left Karoi before dawn and drove across the country. Along the way, in preparation for meeting the farm’s executor, Mum dusted off the handful of Italian phrases she had picked up over the years. “Ciao, come stai?” she attempted as my parents drove across the Angwa River. “Il mio nome è Nicola,” she practiced as they skirted the Inyanga Highlands. “Arrivederci!” she cried as Christmas Pass faded into the rearview mirror and the car dipped into the jacaranda-lined main street of Umtali.

“For heaven’s sake, Tub, are we going to buy a farm, or are you planning to run away with this chap?” Dad asked.

Mum shot Dad one of her ravishing smiles. “We shall see what we shall see,” she said.

At the southern end of Umtali, Mum and Dad stopped for a cold beer and a plate of eggs and bacon at Brown’s Hotel. As they were leaving, they asked directions to the Burma Valley from the handful of diehards at the bar. “Oh no! No, no, no, you don’t want to go down there,” a man said. “They’re all wife swappers, drunks and madmen.”

Dad raised a hand. “Two for the road then, please, barman,” he said.

MY PARENTS DROVE out of town through the second-class district, where the Indians had their warehouses, tailor shops and stores; under the railway bridge; past the paper mill, pungent with the scent of freshly peeled pine; and around the knot of hills surrounding Umtali (Kumakomoyo, the local Manyika called it, “the place of many mountains”). The tarmac ended and my parents bumped onto a dirt road in the Zamunya Tribal Trust Land, with its bony cattle, its ribby red earth and its goat-shredded trees. Then they crossed an enormous cattle grid and suddenly the barren world of Zimunya lifted away. What took its place were a rich, humid bowl of jungle and a wide basin of deeply fertile farmland.

“We loved the valley instantly,” Mum says. “That jungle as you dropped down into it, those huge trees with wonderful birds clattering away in the canopy.” My parents stopped the car at the bottom of the escarpment to let the brakes cool. To the north lay the mist-shouldered Vumba Mountains. To the south ran the distant Chimanimani range. And opposite them were the hot, buffalo-bean covered Himalaya Hills (the actual Himalayas having been seen by the first white settler of Burma Valley, a
pukka
-pukka sahib from India). “It was all so lush, so picturesque, so life affirming,” Mum says. She threw her hands above her head and spun around and around to the chorus of tree frogs and the shrilling of insects. “It’s perfect!” she cried. “Yippee! Hurrah!”

It was almost noon by the time they found John Parodi’s farm. “A little piece of Italy in all its details,” Mum says. An avenue of Mediterranean cypresses led up from the tobacco barns; dairy cattle grazed in knee-deep pastures on either side of the road; a bright bay horse was attended by white egrets; the whitewashed farmhouse was topped with a red tile roof; Ionic columns held up the veranda.

My parents were greeted in the brick-paved courtyard by a maid and shown into a large sitting room, at the center of which was a gurgling fountain. Ferns spilled off the bookshelves and pressed against the windows, creating filtered green light. The whole house was redolent with olive oil and freshly baked bread. “Che bello!” Mum cried, and at that moment John Parodi strode into the room. “Oh, you know what he was like,” Mum says. “Those shoulders! That passion!”

So I picture John on that steaming October morning, oxlike in his khaki bush jacket with his salted black hair combed back to expose a sun-burnished forehead and formidable winged eyebrows. He embraced my parents, kissing Mum on both cheeks, pounding Dad between the shoulder blades, shouting English with a thick Italian accent. “You must sit! Sit!”

My parents sat.

John poured glasses of liqueur—“all different colors, like liquid jewels,” Mum says—and they drank to one another’s health.

“Cent’anni!”

“Mud in your eye!”

Then my parents were led from the seemingly subterranean sitting room to an airy, high-ceilinged dining room, from which French doors opened onto the veranda, where dogs lay curled in the shade and cats cleaned themselves under potted orange trees. “Just like in Roma,” Mum observed happily. Lunch was served, Portuguese wine flowed out of basket-covered bottles and more liqueurs arrived. John raised his glass and roared that the world was both beautiful and heartbreaking. My mother bawled back her hearty agreement. They became drunker, they yelled louder and Mum acquired an intensely strong Italian accent of her own.

“He told us over lunch the many tragedies of his love life—two or three at least. Things are a little vague, I’m afraid—those liqueurs were
very
alcoholic—but I think his first wife might have died. Or maybe she ran away—something like that.” So John apparently sent to Italy for Elsa, the striking and spirited daughter of his unrequited first love. “I’m not sure but I suppose Elsa and John must have fallen in love and maybe Italy after the war was dreary. I really don’t know.” In any case, Elsa came out to Africa, and shortly afterward, she and John must have been married. In due course they had two children: a daughter, Madeline (a couple of years older than Vanessa), and a son, Giovanni (my age). “And it should have been happily ever after except then Elsa fell for the handsome, charming tobacco farmer next door.” What my mother doesn’t say, but we all know, is that Elsa and the handsome tobacco farmer were caught in the tobacco barns one evening, in flagrante dilecto. “Can you imagine?”

“The bloody bitch and the bloody bastard!” John bellowed, waving his fist in the direction of the offending neighbor, the straying wife. “I shoot them!”

A clap of thunder broke above the house, and an afternoon storm rolled across the valley. “Amore!” Mum shouted, raising her glass to the sky.

“Amore!” John replied.

IT NEED HARDLY BE SAID that by the time my parents finally climbed into John’s pickup and bumped across the valley to be shown Robandi Farm they had begun to see the world in distinctly rainbow shades. “The whole place was freshly washed in rain. The flamboyant trees on the driveway were in bloom,” Mum says. “The Persian lilacs were dripping nectar.” And the garden, lightly soaked, gave off the scents of frangipani and red earth. “We told John we must have the farm,” Mum says. “He agreed that it should be ours. That was it. I think we signed some sort of agreement on the spot.”