Leaving Before the Rains Come Read online

  MADNESS IN PRESCRIBED DOSES

  But when I first met Charlie at the Marco Polo Club in Lusaka, Zambia, in June 1991, he seemed to me to have perfected the art of knowing how to live. He was nearly thirty-three, an American in Zambia, running rafting and canoe operations on the Zambezi and Luangwa rivers. We nominal foreigners—those who had lived in Africa for a few generations—usually gave actual foreigners a wide berth, especially Americans. They tended to wear socks with sandals and outsized safari hats, and they stood with legs akimbo, as if they needed a little more real estate than the rest of us just to stay upright. Also, we envied and disparaged them for their habit of bringing their own supplies with them; loo roll, candy bars, little bottles of hand sanitizer and sunscreen as if our rough lavatory paper, boiled sweets, germs, and ingrained sunburn were offensive to them, brands of an inferior way of being.

  Charlie didn’t look like the run-of-the-mill American-in-Africa, though. He seemed seasoned in the unruly, bearded way of an outdoorsman. Attracted to the country by our rivers, he had been living in Zambia on and off for years, camping out in a sweltering warehouse near Victoria Falls, subjected to the major inconveniences of malaria, crocodiles, and dysentery. I guessed he had long ago recovered from the minor inconveniences of our socialist-era toiletries, our dearth of Snickers bars, our cavalier attitude toward diarrhea and melanoma. And although he wore sandals, his were the sort worn to paddle a raft through whitewater, not the orthotic-support kind used by Bible-wielding Baptists to tramp through supposedly heathen villages.

  I was barely twenty-two, in my last year at a Canadian college, majoring in English for a bachelor of arts. “BA stands for Bugger-All if you ask me,” Dad said, before reconfirming his suspicion that education was wasted on women. “So is giving females the vote, while we’re on the subject.” But Charlie appeared to believe higher education wasn’t wasted on women any more than it was on men. He seemed to take the cause of universal adult suffrage for granted. He declared himself genuinely impressed by my English major. “Have you read The Vampire Chronicles?” he asked, which I thought showed refreshingly eclectic taste. And, most endearingly of all, he genuinely believed—or pretended to believe—I could actually play polo, which I considered a gentlemanly disregard for my obvious shortcomings.

  Charlie told me he had taken up polo for the adrenaline. I was fascinated and a little in awe. Most people I knew, myself included, had been saturated with enough of that hormone by early childhood to last a lifetime. Like whitewater rafting, it seemed noble and romantic to take up a sport for the sheer, pointless thrill of it. I thought it was, in a minor key, like Robert Falcon Scott slogging off to the South Pole, or Laurie Lee striking out for Spain on foot from England one midsummer morning. Although unlike Scott or Lee, Charlie’s gestures toward adventure were grand without being necessarily death-defying, and they came with the understanding of built-in conclusions. Twenty-eight minutes of polo; a day, a week, a month of boating; a few weeks on a mountain, and then—“Cut!”—an end to the action and a helicopter or a Land Rover arrived, cold beers were served, wounds were salved. We Zambians, on the other hand, lurched from one unplanned, uncelebrated escapade to the next; misadventure without end.

  Which was why we didn’t need polo for the thrill of it, but for the contrary sense of normalcy we gained from the game. Under President Kaunda’s nationalist-socialist ideology, polo was as close to robustly bourgeois as we could get without alerting the unwanted attentions of petty government spies and accountants. Most of us weren’t very good at the game, or even at riding horses. Charlie was good at both. He was instantly put on a team with the few real players and his handicap went up. I was put on a lucky packet team with a combined handicap of an almost impossibly low minus eight. Besides myself, my team included an enthusiastically bumbling Zambian, a mad Irishman, and a wild Indian who terrified everyone, including himself, with his unpredictable and untrained mounts. “Make way! Coming through! Oh, God protect!”

  When I told people in the States that Charlie and I met playing polo in Zambia, it took me a while to understand why they reacted the way they did. Then I went to a polo match in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and saw the Texan patrons with their five-goal-apiece Argentinean professionals, riding their matching strings of ponies with their color-coordinated bandages and custom saddle blankets. After that, I would always add, “Which sounds more glamorous than it really was.”

  Because in those days—nearly three decades after the end of British rule—the polo grounds in Lusaka were little more than a dusty expanse in front of the Italian Club. The club itself had none of the aggrieved nostalgia of, say, Nairobi’s Muthaiga Club, and none of the pioneering grandeur of the old Bulawayo Club in Zimbabwe. It was just a rather ordinary-looking socialist-era brick building with a large bar, a decent-sized veranda, and a dining room that local Italians had converted into a restaurant with a decidedly un-Mediterranean menu: slabs of tough salty meat, peanut oil, cabbage, and whatever else was in season.

  During the week our polo ponies were exercised on the abandoned racetrack adjacent to the polo grounds. Aside from the narrow path the horses followed, the track was now mostly overgrown and used as an open-air latrine by pedestrians cutting through the agricultural grounds to and from the Great East Road. The whole place was still beautiful in a wounded sort of way, a Garden of Eden gone to seed; it wasn’t uncommon to spot the odd snake in there, or a surprisingly fruit-laden tree, or an incongruous pair of discarded lacy knickers flung into the shrubbery. But it wasn’t by anyone’s definition glamorous.

  It was Charlie who gave us cachet. While we lounged on rusty buckled bleachers between chukkas he told stories about whitewater rafting in Siberia, discussing Cold War politics with officers from the old Red Army, helicopter skiing in the Rockies. He had walked with gorillas in Rwanda, he had guided clients up Kilimanjaro, he had climbed in Yosemite. There had been a documentary made about his descent of the Bashkaus River for the Discovery Channel, Bashkaus: Hard Labor in Siberia, and an American magazine had featured him as its cover story: “Charlie Ross: Mr. Adventure.”

  By contrast, although we had all lived inarguably interesting lives, few of us could afford exotic travel, and, surrounded by enough unbidden chaos on a daily basis, we didn’t go in search of it in our free time. No one had written much about us or made movies about our adventures, in part because there was no beginning or end to our undertakings, no way of knowing the arc of our narratives. We were less the authors of deliberate derring-do than victims of cosmic accidents, political mishaps, mistaken identities. “Must’ve thought they were someone else,” Dad said by way of explaining the murder of an elderly farming couple found shot to death in their house on the Great North Road. What Dad really seemed to be saying was that none of us seemed important enough to kill on purpose.

  Within hours of meeting him, I already imagined it might be safe to invite Charlie back to our farm; he seemed to have the experience to manage my family. So far, neither Vanessa nor I had had a potential boyfriend survive the ordeal. For a start, we lived hours of rough road from the nearest city, or even the nearest safari camp where eligible men might be found. Because of this, a trial cup of coffee or a test drive over dinner was out of the question. Anyone who showed any interest in us had to be prepared from their very first date to meet our parents and spend at least one night in our temperamental farmhouse with its rats in the ceiling and ill-behaved plumbing. Most men wisely balked and sought closer, easier, more conventional dates.

  But even if we could lure men back to the farm—Peace Corps volunteers, Save the Children employees, and aid workers from Continental Europe—they would encounter first my unimpressed father, or sometimes our crazy, armed-to-the-teeth Yugoslav neighbor—“You take our women, we kill you!”—then they would be treated to Adamson’s hit-or-miss cooking, and finally they would be subjected to my mother’s military-tribunal-grade interrogation over a bottle or two of brandy. “When you say old American family, do you mean your people came over on the Mayflower, or do you mean you’re a Red Indian?” Or she would pretend not to understand their perfectly intelligible Dutch or Danish or Norwegian accents and begin speaking to them like a Nazi prison officer out of the old war movies she had enjoyed as a child in Kenya. “Let me try that again. Sprechen Sie Englisch?”

  My family was an undertaking, an endurance test, for which no person could be expected to train. Most of the men would flee a day after arriving, sunburned, alcohol-poisoned, savaged by the dogs, and crippled with stomach cramps. “Nerves,” Mum said. “Weak constitutions. No wonder they lost the war.”

  “What war?”

  Mum rolled her eyes. “Oh, you know what I mean.”

  The one man who had seemed a likely tough enough candidate—the Englishman with a proper accent, reasonable pedigree, and unwavering stiff upper lip who drove from Malawi to Zambia in a 1962 Land Rover—and who seemed able to endure any amount of undercooked chicken, flea bites, and cheap South African wine, ended up falling for my mother instead of for either of us. “Well, what do you expect, if you and Vanessa will sit around picking your spots and saying nothing interesting?” Mum said. Our father only shrugged unsympathetically and lit his pipe. “Your mother’s boyfriends are no business of mine,” he said. “Anyway, the chap has very good taste if you ask me.”

  I planned for a life of spinsterhood. Vanessa at least was working in England when she wasn’t home on holiday, and she was magnetically beautiful. “The face of the eighties,” a modeling consultant at her London finishing school had called her in her twentieth year. Plus, she had made an early decision to cultivate a demeanor of dumb acquiescence that had a devastating effect on men, although I knew her expression to be
complete fakery. She was really just temporarily dormant, ready to blow up and smother everyone around her with ash and molten lava anytime the need arose. But London traffic screeched to a standstill if she floated into a busy street; men fell over themselves to carry her bags; if she put an unlit cigarette anywhere near her lips, a pyre of matches appeared; one of Dad’s posh English relatives reported seeing her drifting aimlessly and barefoot up Elizabeth Street. “Smoking a cigarette and kicking up the leaves,” Auntie Pammy said, and we could almost see the Vaseline on the lens of that image. We assumed she would marry early and well.

  Meantime, I had inherited my maternal grandmother’s timeless expression of Highland Scottish suspicion, my mother’s startlingly unfiltered outspokenness, and my father’s gift for easy profanity. “You were a pleasant enough child. Do try and make yourself more agreeable,” my mother would occasionally plead, which I thought was rich coming from her.

  For my sixteenth birthday, she bought me The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook: How the British Upper Class Prepares Its Offspring for Life by Ann Barr and Peter York. I was fairly certain that any other parent buying this book for a daughter had done so as a joke. Not so Mum. She had done so in lieu of responsible parenting. The cover instructed, “Why it really matters to: wear navy blue, eat jelly with a fork, read Dick Francis and the FT, giggle in bed, cry when you sing carols, not cry at funerals, kill salmon, drink seriously, put the ‘Great’ into Britain and the ‘Hooray’ into Henry, and live in the country.”

  I objected: I didn’t want to put the “Great” into a nation I barely knew or the “Hooray” into some Eton-educated bon vivant; I wanted to live in the wild African bush, not in some denatured bucolic English field; I admired the full-throated Zambian way of mourning the dead with shaved heads and ululating lamentation; and pearls and navy blue were all wrong for a Southern Hemisphere summer. Also, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook featured Princess Diana on the cover, the supposed epitome of Sloanedom, but she was a terrible advertisement for British upper-class insouciance. Even two short years into her marriage to Charles, she looked tragic and barely breathing, as if the killed salmon had got its revenge and a tiny nonfatal but obstructing fishbone had wedged in her throat. Mum agreed, “Yes, Di is a bit of a drip. They should have put someone outdoorsy and horsey on the cover.” She paused and then added without any degree of subtlety, “Now you, for example, Bobo, are very outdoorsy and horsey.”

  But for me, there was no going back, no skipping the African years and reabsorbing into Britain as if Rhodesia’s bush war and tough boarding schools and the giddy freedom of living on outsized ranches and the “whole of bloody Africa to play in” hadn’t lodged like hardy parasites in my English/Scottish blood. And regardless of my mother’s idea that marriage to the proper person was an acceptable career choice, I was never going to marry a Tory aristocrat with deep pockets and a pile in the country. “I don’t blame you, Bobo,” Dad said, uncharacteristically taking sides. “I think all the decent chaps died out with Churchill and that other bloke.”

  “What other bloke?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, but there must have been at least one other.”

  No one thought to tell me that it was all right to make a career choice that didn’t involve having a husband, although from the start Dad had been clear that I had to be able to stand on my own two feet. But the specifics of what that meant seemed to elude him—if I could change a flat tire, shoot a gun, and ride a horse, I think he thought it was enough. Also no one thought to let me know that my British passport, while a useful way to get off the continent, was no way to stay. And if anyone had asked what I wanted—if it had been my choice—I would have given up my British passport without a second thought and exchanged it for a Zambian one.

  I was accidentally British, incidentally European—a coincidence of so many couplings. But I was deliberately southern African. Not in a good or easy way. There is no getting around the fact that there had been so much awful violence to get me here; my people had engaged in such terrible acts of denial and oppression; I so obviously did not look African; and yet here I still was. That seemed to me to prove a point. Someone had planted me in this soil and I had taken fierce hold. And although I had no illusions—this land wasn’t mine to inherit, none of it belonged to me—I couldn’t help knowing that I belonged to it.

  When I was finally taken back to the UK on holiday, I felt panicked and unknowable and unknown there. I wasn’t British. I didn’t sound British. I didn’t feel British. I sat at lunch with relatives and old family friends, miserable with the choice of utensils. Why invent such a test? Who needs so many ways to get food into their mouth? It made me want to eat with my fingers. It wasn’t that my parents hadn’t taught me what knife and fork to use in the event that more than one of each be presented, or that the correct response to “How do you do?” is not, “Fine, thanks,” but rather a nod of the head. I knew what to do and say, but to me it was like a foreign language. The moment I was tested, all I could remember was that there were conjugations and rules, and beyond that I froze. I knew the vocabulary of British behavior, but its syntax often caught me out.

  I was rooted in 1980s Zambia with its dearth of suitable men and zero birth control. The AIDS epidemic was burgeoning, our silent war; you could see the walking dead everywhere, smell disease on the rapidly diminishing bodies of the victims. And in spite of the foreign press dubbing it “the gay disease,” we knew different. It would be a quarter of a century before we knew that twenty-five million people in Sub-Saharan Africa were living with the disease, but we could see it coming. Men, women, and children were struck down seemingly without discrimination, as if an odorless, invisible toxic gas had fallen over our world. One day a man would seem healthy and virile, and two weeks later he would present at the kitchen door with boils and lesions. In a month, he would be dead of malaria, or diarrhea, or a blood-spewing cough, and six months later his wife and mistresses and half their children would be dead too.

  Since having a Zambian boyfriend seemed suicidal for all sorts of reasons, and overseas men had to run the life-threatening Fullers-of-Central-Africa gauntlet to get anywhere near me, I split the difference and took up for a while with a Zimbabwean woman. “Double ouzo, hold the Coke,” Mum ordered at the Mkushi Country Club bar, during spanakopita night. “My daughter’s a lesbian.” The Greek farmers blinked at her uncomprehendingly. “Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. You bloody people invented it.”

  However, in spite of its built-in conveniences, lesbianism hadn’t stuck with me. And although I had moved in with a Canadian boy at university—generous and caring from a steady middle-class family—I could not imagine Joey surviving afternoon tea with my family, let alone a summer vacation or a lifetime of get-togethers. Even from a distance, Mum reacted badly to the news that I was sharing not only a bed but also kitchen appliances with a man from the New World. “Double brandy, hold the water.” Mum slapped the bar at the Mkushi Country Club again. “My daughter’s gone off with a bloody Canadian.”

  But I couldn’t see how anyone could object to Charlie. True, he wasn’t British, but his other virtues more than offset this otherwise serious deficiency. He seemed accomplished in the manly arts, rubbing shoulders with Eastern Bloc military, powder skiing in remote European mountains, smoking cigars; Dad might at least think twice before setting the watchman on him. He could ride horses and he had moved to Zambia with his dog; that was likely to endear him to Mum. He seemed enthralled with me, finding me funny and clever; Vanessa would hate that. But before I could ask Charlie back to the farm, he asked me to go canoeing on the Zambezi River with him for a week.

  “We can camp below the wall, after the bridge, at the confluence, in the park.”