Big Island, Small Island
The swallows keep darting back and forth across the roof like shooting arrows. I think they must be playing a game—a kind of hide-and-seek—because they don’t seem to get tired of it. I am not used to seeing birds fly through airports. It’s quite a stretch to call this thatched roof standing on pillars an airport and I’m worried about the size of the plane we are about to board. If this is the size of the airport of the Big Island and we are going to the Small Island, how big can the next plane be?
I look around at my fellow passengers. We are not more than ten and that worries me too. There are large men clad in white kanzus (I’m already using the local language thanks to the Teach Yourself Swahili booklet I bought in Dar es Salaam) and kofia, which I just learned is what their finely stitched cap is called. Judging from their potbellies and thick gold watches they seem rather affluent. A couple of them have small-sized wives sitting next to them, wrapped in the black cape they call buibui. The men talk loudly, mostly among themselves or on old-fashioned Nokias—only a few have smartphones—whereas the wives don’t flinch. They are as still as pillars of salt surrounded by hefty bundles and boxes. I can see baskets brimming with mangoes, cartons containing some household appliances, an electric fan, a kettle, a DVD player. They must’ve been shopping on the mainland; I didn’t see any shopping opportunities for such items as kettles or fans on the Big Island. Just a few gift shops and a desolate, half-empty supermarket. A crackling voice on the intercom speaks in Swahili, and the man next to me shakes his head with disdain.
“Delay,” he says, meeting my eyes.
“How much?”
“One hour.”
It could be worse, I think, so I pull out my book.
I’ve been to Africa before—to Egypt and Morocco—but never south of the Sahara and never to such a remote place. During my travels I rarely ever mix with the locals, sealed as I am in my work bubble, always surrounded by colleagues. We end up spending most of our time inside conference rooms, in line at those ghastly buffet lunches, or in our anonymous hotel rooms watching the news. Since I’ve been on this particular detour I’ve been feeling more vulnerable but also more adventurous. I think I’m beginning to get the hang of traveling solo. For instance, whenever I am the only white person within a contained space, I find that reading is the best thing to turn to. It’s actually an act of courtesy, I realized; it allows people to stare and even point at me if they need to—usually it’s the women who find something ridiculous about my clothes and tend to giggle with hands over their mouths. My reading gives them total freedom to examine me without creating unnecessary embarrassment.
“Are you Italian?” a voice asks me in English.
I lift my eyes from the book. Sitting across from me is a man in his early fifties. He’s clearly been looking at the cover of my book. He must have just sat down; I hadn’t noticed him earlier. He wears a white linen shirt, nicely tailored cotton trousers in a shade of ocher, Ray-Bans and soft loafers without socks. This last detail, more than anything, tells me he must be Italian as well. Those are expensive car shoes, the kind Mr. Agnelli made famous. Only Italian men wear loafers without socks with their ankles showing this much beneath the trousers.
“Si,” I say, and I shake the hand he’s already holding out.
I am not sure whether to be relieved or disturbed by this chance encounter. He lights a Marlboro and begins to chat amiably in Italian, ignoring my desire to read on.
His name is Carlo Tescari, he’s been living in Tanzania for the last ten years. He’s built a couple of luxury safari camps near Ngorongoro. Before that he lived in Kenya, where he built more luxury camps and sold them for a fortune. Twenty-five years in East Africa, he says, as though it’s a record of some kind. Funny, because he looks as if someone had just lifted him from the Via Roma in Capri and landed him in this tiny airport on the Big Island, on his way to another, smaller island not many people have ever heard of.
“Are you with the NGO?” he asks me.
“No.”
“Just visiting?”
“Yes.”
“There are no hotels, you know. Not even a guest house.”
“I’m staying at a friend’s place.”
“Are you?” He looks at me with a hint of suspicion. “Is it an African friend?”
“No. An old friend from Italy. He has been living there for fifteen years.”
“Is this the man who works for that NGO?”
“Yes. That’s him.”
“I thought so. Someone at the embassy in Dar suggested I see him to get some advice. I’ve got his contacts somewhere.”
He opens his leather briefcase and flicks through his documents.
“Here it is. Andrea Nelli, right? I spoke to him last week on the phone, he’s expecting me. Well, that’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”
I nod, politely.
“Then I’ll come along with you to his place. We can share the cab. If you don’t mind.”
“No, I don’t,” I say, even though I do, actually.
“I just need to ask him a few questions, it’s not going to take long. He’s the only mzungu that lives on the island, other than Jeffrey Stone. I’m staying at Jeffrey’s, I know Jeff from Nairobi. He’s the local veterinarian and hates it there. Apparently your friend has been on the island for, what did you say, fifteen years?”
“More or less, yes.”
“Jeffrey has been there only three months and he’s desperate to leave. Not much company.”
“No?”
“No. And it’s a dry island. No booze. The death of an Englishman. Very traditional Muslim community.”
That, I’m aware of. Andrea has instructed me over the phone “long sleeves and no bathing suits. You can swim in a dress if you really have to.”
Carlo Tescari seems eager to extract more details about my host.
“What’s he like? He wasn’t very forthcoming on the phone.”
“I haven’t seen him in ages. Since he moved out here.”
“I see.”
He takes a good look at me.
“So is this a happy reunion?”
“Yes.”
“A sort of ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume’ moment.” He chuckles, then adds, “I hear your friend has become very local.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised, given that there are only locals, as you say. Except for your unhappy vet, of course.”
He grins, showing a crown of teeth so white they might even be false.
It troubles me, to arrive at Andrea’s house in the company of this man. I had envisaged a completely different scene when I decided to track him down a couple of weeks ago. And now, after such a long journey, I am nearly at his doorstep, about to show up with exactly the kind of person he will loathe.
This part of the journey, from the Big Island to the Small Island, was a last-minute diversion from my original itinerary. I’d been invited to attend a conference in Dar es Salaam on ecosystem disturbances and the management of protected forests. It was only once I was on the plane to Tanzania, while perusing the map of East Africa, that I realized how close I’d be to the place where Andrea had disappeared. Not exactly close-close, but certainly closer than I’d been in all this time, when it seemed he had vanished somewhere unreachable and exotic, never to be found again. None of us—not any of his friends—had ever heard of this tiny island in the Indian Ocean, which at the time of his disappearance was mentioned only in passing in guidebooks; later, when we’d all become expert Internet surfers, all I could find online in relation to the island were a couple of blurred photos of the ruin of a mosque, as though no travel writer had ever cared to explore it.
I’m a biologist with a doctorate in agriculture and food sciences and my specialty is biodiversity in Central European forests. At the conference in Dar I spoke at length to a sleepy audience on the effects of atmospheric pollution on lichens. Afterward, in the half-empty conference room, a mix of scientists from different parts of the world exchanged mild comments about my talk over watery coffee and stale biscuits. Before I could say anything they had already switched subjects, and were discussing the heat, the malfunctioning of the air-conditioning in their rooms and the poor reception on their phones. Once in my hotel room, instead of giving in to my resentment, I decided I still had a chance to give this exhausting trip a more significant purpose. To finally get hold of an ex-lover I hadn’t heard from in ages seemed a much more rewarding task than introducing rare species of lichens to my colleagues. I Googled all the local airlines till I found a connection that could take me to the island where Andrea supposedly still lived. From Dar I’d have to fly to the Big Island and from there the only way to the Small Island would then be to get on a rusty ferry that takes a day and a half. The Indian Ocean tends to be choppy—at least that’s what I read on Trip Advisor—so I opted for a twelve-seater plane. Before I bought the tickets I Googled Andrea’s name in various combinations with the island name till I found a number for an NGO. Someone picked up the phone after the first ring. It was him. I gasped.
“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.