A Man in Africa Read online

  A Man in Africa

  Lara Blunte

  © Lara Blunte, 2016

  Contents

  A Wedding

  The Fallout

  A Secret in a Temple

  A Long Trip

  Dr. Burton, I Presume?

  The Impenetrable Forest

  Adroa

  The Hospital

  An Intimate Dinner

  A While Longer

  Learning

  Eva

  Happy Together

  An Invitation

  The Lodge

  Safari

  Paradise

  Genes and Chemicals

  Moving In

  A Dress

  Homeland

  The Prodigal Son

  The Biggest Bully

  The End of Something

  The Exorcist

  The High Place of Sacrifice

  Apes and Angels

  A Wedding

  2013

  My marriage ended on the day of my wedding.

  I was twenty-eight and marrying the man I had been with for six years and still loved. It seemed that he loved me as well.

  Our friends were almost envious at times: Roberta and Clive, Roberta and Clive, they would chant. We were both attractive, intelligent, cultivated, well-traveled. We both had interesting jobs and interesting lives.

  I was Italian by birth, but had lived in England since I was fourteen, so there was no great culture shock between us: just enough to make things lively. My parents had died in a car accident four years before and my sister Ornella had moved to Australia with her husband. In a way, my family was Clive.

  His mother came to stay with us in London and asked, "Do you really get along that well, or is this for my benefit?"

  No, we really got along that well.

  Of course we had fights, passionate fights sometimes. He didn't like some of my excesses and I didn't like the slight tendency he had of telling me what to do: don't drink any more, don't eat that, you'll feel sick, don't sleep so late. He was fun, an enormous lot of fun even, but was disciplined. I could not describe myself as such, except at work.

  I did like excess, every now and again, but I think it was harmless excess: I liked to finish a bottle of champagne with a friend, or buy a lot of things in one go, or watch two films, one after the other, or binge on six episodes of either a very good or a very stupid TV show on DVD.

  We decided that I would have my excesses alone, or with my friends. These times apart were great and we would be glad to get together again. He would laugh at how much I smelled like champagne, or how my makeup was running from laughing; he would ask me what I had done, if I had been flirting with any men?

  I hadn't been flirting with anyone. I was a very faithful woman.

  We had what everyone in the world hoped for. We were absorbed in each other, always touching, always laughing. We had the same goals: to be good at our jobs, to learn things, to be happy. Neither of us wanted children, both wanted a certain degree of freedom. We slept holding hands after making love and we could see a road stretching ahead of us for many years without having to think about it.

  We had it all.

  Then we decided to get married. He said we ought to, because he had money, properties and a very good job at the BBC. He wanted me to have that protection. I demurred, saying that a paper would somehow spoil everything, that it was wonderful to wake up every day and every day decide that we wanted to stay together. We were so happy as we were, why change?

  He bought a ring, surprised me with it and swore nothing would change. And I ended up saying yes. Yes, why not?

  Our wedding was meant to be a quick trip to the justice of peace, to sign something and then have lunch with a pair of witnesses, but our friends wouldn't let us; they wanted a party, even a small one. On my side, I had journalists and writers used to traveling, on his side TV producers, directors and actors. They all wanted an excuse for us to meet somewhere great and have fun, so we shrugged and went with it.

  We got married in Umbria, where the streets smelled of truffles and the landscape looked like a Renaissance painting. It was a cool wedding; I was in white, because it was summer and I like white, but it was a sheath dress that I could really have worn anywhere and my peep toe shoes were black. There were no suits, no bouquets, no cake. We went to a cute old building to sign the papers and then we were all together in the villa, all beautiful people laughing, dancing and having fun.

  It was a strange wedding without older people, without his parents, who had not wanted to be in a loud party, without children. The DJ had been told what we loved and we never stopped dancing. He played a hodge-podge from all sorts of eras, the best of Tom Waits, Billie Holiday and The Who, among a lot of other stuff. Clive pulled me to dance Slave to Love cheek to cheek and then we made a drunk conga line to the tune of My Brown-Eyed Girl up and down the garden.

  Though I am a photographer as well, I didn’t take a single photo. I wanted to live the day and not look at it through a lens. Even without an album, I thought we would remember this night forever. Every now and again we threw each other a look and smiled. He even smiled naughtily at me, as if saying, Wait till we are alone!

  And then, through the crowd dancing, I saw him talking to Ursula. She was a friend of mine from work and was a bit the worse for drink, swaying on her feet, looking down at the ground. Clive was talking to her: he seemed to be trying to convince her of something, almost urgently.

  Then she looked up at him: there was misery in her eyes and there was tenderness in his. He shook his head slightly and then I saw his finger hook around her pinky very quickly.

  I saw it.

  I saw it and I understood what it meant.

  They say that when something bad happens the world slows down and it does. Apparently some chemical is thrown into your system to allow you to process what is happening. Then you have to make the decision, fight or flight.

  The world had slowed down and the people around me were dancing in slow motion; the loud music seemed to have disappeared and was just a ringing in my ears. I felt icy cold and my digestion had been cut off. All the champagne and wedding food was just sitting there, ready to come up again, or to choke me.

  I am supposed to make a decision, I thought through the haze.

  I could go to Clive and ask him what the hell was going on? Or even walk straight up to Ursula and grab her by the hair screaming, what do you think you are doing with my man, as if I were in a reality show, The Wives of Such and Such.

  I did neither. I stayed in a world that had become very slow, dark and cold. I smiled and danced. My feet moved up and down and I can still remember looking at them, wondering if they were something separate from me, wondering how they still managed to move to music I could no longer hear.

  I went through more dancing and I even danced with Clive. At one point he moved back to look into my eyes, as people in love do and, strangely, he didn't see the horror there.

  But then again, why would he see it? It was becoming clear, through the fog in my head, that he had never seen me at all and that I had never seen him.

  What a horrible thing, I thought as we all finally retired at seven in the morning, what a horrible thing that we are in a house full of people celebrating our wedding and that I must investigate what is happening, like a detective who finds a corpse at a party.

  And I did find out: much, much more than I had bargained for. My new husband went into the bathroom to take a long shower, probably to refresh himself so he could make love to his wife and I picked up his phone. This was something I never, ever did, because I never thought I had any reason to.

  Not when he seemed to love me so much.

  And that is why he didn't really cover his tr
acks. I first read the text messages between him and Ursula. She was under Frank, DoP (director of photography), a very slight attempt to disguise their affair, since there were so many messages between him and Frank, and so recent, that it could not be Frank. There were almost a hundred messages in the last few days, messages from a woman scorned, asking a man how he could do what he was doing, that he didn't love me, that he had told her he loved her. She was coming to the wedding, everyone would see, how would he have the courage to go through with it?

  There were his messages to her, saying he did love her, he loved me with a different love, we had been together a long time, she needed to understand, not to come to the wedding and make it so hard on him, he didn't want to see her suffer, he cared for her.

  It was like swallowing knives to read these things, but then, for some reason I realized there would be more, that this was not it. He had not had a passionate and irresistible affair, he did this all the time.

  The phone felt almost heavy with the stuff that was in it.

  And sure enough, there were dozens of women under false names and he was telling them all what he would do with them as soon as he got rid of me, as soon as I was off with friends, or on a trip for work, or as soon as he went to their town. He also wrote to them after he had just seen them, remembering their smell, their taste and parts of their body.

  There were emails that went back a year, two years, to women he had kept as mistresses. There were texts that were cut and pasted from one to the other and ─ I even laughed ─ the name was changed, but it remained in a different font than the rest of the paragraph. These women could not have been very clever, as they did not seem to notice and instead answered in just as passionate a vein.

  Over and over again: I can't wait to be with you...

  Some sort of admiration was growing in me for the skill of this man, able to juggle so many women in so many places and a full time relationship at home. Of course I had helped, I had aided and abetted, never suspecting him, never questioning him, never looking through his things.

  A friend of mine who habitually looked through her husband's computer and phone once told me she was doing so for the good of the marriage. "Of course they will do all sorts of shit, if they can get away with it!" she had said. "I also want to do all sorts of things, who doesn't, after a few years? But I control myself and I make sure he freaking controls himself as well!"

  I had argued that I didn't want to live like a warden, tossing a prisoner's cell all the time to make sure he wasn't hiding anything. I argued that if people wanted to, they could cheat while pretending to go buy the milk. We needed to trust the people we loved.

  She had laughed. “Good luck with that!"

  Good luck with that, I thought as all the texts and emails showed me the life of betrayal and lies my now husband had led for years. It was a remarkable number of women and he had not wanted to just have sex, he had wanted them all to stay in touch, to tell him how beautiful and wonderful he was. Every now and again he would send a prod, Are you thinking of me as I am thinking of you?

  Cut and pasted dozens of times: Are you thinking of me as I am thinking of you?

  He came out of the bathroom smiling, ready to play, a towel around his waist. He was a beautiful man, dishonest to the marrow.

  Clive stopped when he saw my face and then froze when he realized that the phone in my hand was his.

  "What the fuck are you doing?" he asked me. I am sure he was cold inside, that his digestion had stopped and that the world had slowed down.

  I said something that I had heard before in bad films, but it was truly the only thing I wanted to know: "Who are you?"

  The Fallout

  I also lied, after about five hours. I couldn't take any of the highly improbable explanations anymore, and he was so desperate that I could not get him to stop spouting them

  Early on in the conversation I had realized that he was trying to gauge how much I knew, what I had seen, what I had found out for sure, so that he could swear to it only having been that.

  So I let him say it, that it had only been Ursula, that it was at a time when he was low, that it just happened, that he had tried to break it off so many times, that he felt bad about her but he only wanted me, that I had to forgive him, that he had never really liked her, that it was only me, that he had married me.

  Then I let out that I knew about someone else and the panic was back in his eyes and he started again on the same tack, that at that time he was feeling this and that and etc.

  Then I said, what about the one in Moscow?

  The panic in his eyes was growing, but by now I was almost playing. I wanted to see him wriggle.

  Of course I was devastated, but I also felt almost clinical, like a psychiatrist trying to diagnose a pathology in a patient.

  “Don’t look at me with those cold eyes!” he begged me, all of a sudden.

  I had no other look for him; he was suddenly, as suddenly as a death by accident, no longer the person I loved. All our years together and the alleged happiness in them would return later to confuse me, but now I was beginning to smile as he turned one way and another, sweated, cried, begged, lied.

  I was so stunned at the enormous quantity of women and lies that I couldn't even get angry, scream and throw something heavy at his head with the intent to kill or seriously maim. I am not, in any case, that kind of Italian woman.

  He hung on to me, begging me to listen, that he would tell me everything, but that I must listen to him. I promised that we would keep on talking, that we would act as if nothing was happening to our friends and that I would give him a chance to explain.

  As if you could explain Stalingrad, or Verdun, or any massacre.

  I agreed we would keep talking and no one would know, when in truth I was going to leave him with the debris of our wedding and I was going to get the hell out. There is nothing else to do when an atomic bomb makes a huge crater where before there had been a city, a state, a country. People who want to survive just drive away at high speed.

  I wasn’t going to fight, I was going to flee.

  I told him I needed to take a shower and he ought to go down to breakfast because there would be guests there already. I knew that he wouldn't dare to disobey me. He didn't try to kiss me or take my hand either, he understood he would have gotten the classic Don't touch me!

  When he was gone, I called Pete's mobile. Pete is my boss at Qultura, the magazine I write for, but also a good friend and he was at the wedding. His gruff voice told me he had been sleeping and probably had a good hangover.

  "I have to come over to your room and talk to you," I said. "It's serious."

  "Shit, did Clive have a heart attack?"

  "No, idiot. I am coming over."

  "OK, OK!"

  He received me in his robe, a coffee by him and a cigarette already in his hand. I went to the window and opened it. It was the most beautiful day imaginable, with a heavenly light in the sky that cut me like a chain saw. It was a lovely backdrop to my misery.

  Pete sat down, smoking and frowning. "What the hell is going on?"

  I put my bag on the table, as well as my camera bag. Then I took a cigarette from his pack and lit it, though I don't smoke, and poured myself some coffee in a glass. I was still in my white sheath dress and I knew that my hair and makeup must have made me look as if I belonged in a heavy metal band.

  "I need to go. Do you have any assignment you can send me on?"

  "What the hell?" Pete repeated.

  "Ok, here is the short version of the story, I found out that Clive has been sleeping with just about everyone, including Ursula."

  Pete's face said everything: the downturned corner of the mouth, the sigh, the raised eyebrows.

  "You knew?"

  He must have seen I was near the edge of something: a breakdown, violence, hysteria. So he made a gentle movement with his hand, like some Jedi knight trying to get me to keep calm.

  "Not exactly about Ursula. I thought
it might be her. Or Patricia, or Pavarti. Or all of them."

  My mouth was open as the cigarette burned between my fingers. "You thought he was sleeping with all my colleagues and didn't tell me?"

  "Maybe all his colleagues as well. How are you going to tell someone that?" he asked me, showing the palms of his hands to indicate helplessness.

  "How are you NOT going to tell your friend that?"

  "First of all, I didn't have any proof, it's just that in general it's thought..."

  I covered my face, almost burning my hair with the cigarette. Pete took it away from me, but I just lit another one. Clive would certainly have said, "You don't really want to smoke another cigarette..."

  Pete was still talking, "And also, most women hate the person who tells them that and then stay with the bloke anyway, so..."

  I was outraged.

  "What? Do you think that I..."

  He shrugged. "You are one of the most brilliant people I know, but if you have been with a man like Clive for years and you haven't seen or suspected anything, then it's because you don't want to see. I thought it was either that or that you didn't care!"

  "How am I not going to care? He has like a freaking United Nations of Women out there! I need to go get a blood test in the next ten minutes!"

  "Well, I mean that maybe you knew but you thought he was worth it anyway..."

  "Does everyone know?" I asked, now covering my eyes and in danger of setting my eyebrow on fire.

  Pete still shrugged helplessly, then he opened his mouth to speak but I spoke first, "All right, listen, if you knew stuff before and didn't tell me, don't tell me now. Before I actually got married to him it would have been useful information, now it's just gossip in reverse. I need to get out of here and I need to be far away from him so I can digest what happened!"

  He raised his eyebrows again, as if thinking that what had happened would be indigestible. I ignored him and went on, "Do you have somewhere you can send me?"

  His eyes became sharp very quickly and he said, "Cambodia!"