The Other Language(27)
“Andrea? You are not going to believe this. It’s Stella.”
“Hi, Stella, where are you?”
He sounded wholly unfazed.
“I’m in Dar es Salaam. Not too far from you.”
“What are you doing in that horrible city?”
“I am a speaker at an international conference on biodiversity.”
“Sounds like you got your Ph.D. after all.”
“I did.”
Silence. I thought maybe the line had been cut off. Then I heard him clear his throat.
“Come see me. I haven’t spoken Italian in so long.”
“I was thinking I actually might do that. I could come for three or four days. If that would be okay … I mean, if you are not too busy.”
“Just come.”
There was another pause. I then tried a more familiar tone.
“Andrea? It’s wonderful to hear your voice again. It’s been such a long time. How are you?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you.”
Naturally Carlo Tescari sits next to me during the short flight on our tiny plane and continues with his entire life story and his future business plans. Apparently our shared nationality gives him the right to treat me like an old friend and there is very little I can do to fend him off. So I learn the real purpose of his trip. On the east side of the island where the main village is situated, the coast is just mangroves and muddy shores. But on the northwest side, beaches as white and as soft as talcum powder stretch for miles and miles. He surveyed the coastline from a Cessna a couple of months back. He opens the briefcase and shows me a map. On a half-moon-shaped cove he plans to scatter a few thatch-roofed huts (he calls them bandas), with a larger common area built in natural materials and to be exquisitely designed by a Dutch architect. A minimalist, ecological, yet stylish and highly comfortable retreat for people seeking complete privacy in the wilderness. Of course he’ll need to bring a road and water, but he doesn’t think it’ll be that hard.
“Building the road is going to be the most work of all, but I think I can get some politicians involved,” he says. “Hopefully your friend can give me some advice as how to oil the right people.”
From the sky the landing strip looks like a narrow slit cutting through the dense foliage. I close my eyes and hold my breath till we touch ground. The ride in an ancient blue taxi corroded by rust is just as bumpy as our landing; the roads on the island are packed dirt scarred by large ruts. It’s baking hot, the earth is a deep vermilion and there’s a film of orange dust shrouding the trees lining the way. I keep my eyes on the window, looking straight ahead, while Carlo Tescari goes on and on about the difficulty of dealing with old-fashioned Muslim politicians who don’t welcome foreigners.
As we approach the town, an ugly tower looms over the tops of the trees. Its concrete structure is covered in blackish mold, the plaster is flaking, the window frames have rusted badly and have come off in places. Strings of faded laundry adorn the squared balconies of apartments that look as though they were intended for the Russian working class. The tower—designed in the seventies by an architect in Leningrad? A gift from the Communist party to the president of this corrupted republic?—is rotting away in the sticky weather. We keep on driving, past the town on a winding road snaking through coconut and banana trees, random patches of vegetable gardens, ugly cinder-block houses. Women carry yellow plastic buckets on their heads sloshing with water. I intercept their corrugated brows and suspicious looks as they peek at the white people inside the car without smiling.
So this is where he has been all these years, while we, his friends, fell in love with other people, moved to different cities, got our degrees and found jobs. Some of us had children, some of us died in car accidents, some overdosed, some became famous, others did nothing with their lives.
In the beginning, when he first left, we often wondered why Andrea had stopped answering our letters. Then, as the years went by, we ceased to think about him, as though it were pointless to keep track of his existence: he’d simply gone too far and had fallen off the radar. If we mentioned his name, it was always only to say how lucky he was, to be living in such an exotic place, to have fled from our pasty, predictable, urban lives.
Funny, how we assumed the island he’d escaped to should be a setting out of a Graham Greene story: we pictured a small colonial town on the edge of a harbor in a lush, tropical landscape, its narrow streets winding through a lane of wooden buildings with lacy balconies, latticed verandas, with a touch of romantic decay.
He’s waiting for us on the porch of the house—another no-frills cinder-block box with a blue door and small windows—standing erect, with arms crossed, in an assertive posture that demands respect. He’s wearing a starched white kanzu and a kofia and, because of his dark hair and tanned skin, he doesn’t look that much different from the local businessmen I flew in with. He’s put on some weight and grown a short beard. He’s quite stocky, actually, and his curls are gone, though his green eyes flicker for a moment when he sees me and that flash of mutual recognition gives me a jolt in the stomach. I feel a light resistance from him, a rigidity, when I fling myself into his arms. He moves his face slightly to the side, so that I miss his cheek and end up kissing air. He steps backward and smiles shyly.
“Hey, Stella” is all he says.