The Other Language(62)
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.