We drive for almost an hour in his battered Toyota with the NGO’s logo painted on the side, heading north through a thick forest and then turning west, toward the setting sun. We walk on a sandy path through the bushes and suddenly it’s as though a curtain has been lifted. Miles and miles of open view, of deep blue sea and sand lined with the vibrant green of the forest. The sand is as fine as talcum powder and snowy white, just as Tescari’s brochure described it. I fill my lungs with the salty air, exhilarated by the open space. We sit, and watch the sun go down. It’s low tide and the water has just started to retreat, its rivulets are sculpting wavy furrows in the sand, the crabs running obliquely on its translucent surface.
“This is beautiful,” I say.
The sun looks like an egg yolk ready to plop into the sea. I stand up and quickly strip off my shirt and unbutton my trousers.
He stands up, too, alarmed.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going for a swim.”
“No. You can’t go in like that.”
He quickly picks up my clothes and hands them back to me.
“Yes, I can. There’s nobody around for miles and miles. And you’ve seen me naked before.”
“Stella!”
I drop my panties on the sand and I slide off into the velvety, lukewarm water. I dive in and swim until I’m almost out of breath. When I reemerge I see him standing on the edge of the water with my clothes crumpled in his hand.
I swim out and out, where the sea gets bluer and darker, and after the last strokes I can muster, I wonder if I should worry about sharks. Suddenly, I make out a shadow, as a dark, elongated shape darts past me. I shoot up screaming, and he emerges from the froth, like a shiny dolphin, stark naked.
We drive back in silence. It’s a good kind of silence, as if the swim has exhausted us but also washed something away. The opaque film that has shrouded my days here has dissolved and now everything looks brighter.
By the time we reach the village it’s night; there has been a power cut, and the house is wrapped in darkness, but for the faint glow of the kerosene lamp flickering through the windows. I can tell that Farida has been looking after our supper, there’s a smell of curry wafting onto the porch. Before entering the house Andrea stops for a moment and rests a hand on top of my shoulder.
“You are the first person from my old life who has come to visit. It was a shock to see you. It was a shock to be speaking Italian again. I am sorry if I’ve seemed distant. It just felt like—well, like a lot to contend with.”
“Of course. I understand. Don’t worry.”
“The day you arrived I was up all night, I just couldn’t go to sleep. I was reminiscing, you know—all this stuff that I thought I had forgotten started coming back.”
“I’m sorry I barged into your life just like that, I didn’t—”
“No. No, it’s great. It’s really good to see you, Stella. Yes.”
I reach for his hand, which is still resting on my shoulder, and I wrap my palm around it.
“Do you see me as a failure?” he asks. “Like some kind of beached hippie?”
“No, I don’t,” I say, and I squeeze his hand in mine, hard. “I really don’t.”
We enter the house and in the semidarkness I discern Farida sitting still on the floor, slightly slumped, her head hanging low. Only now I realize how worried she must be, seeing that Andrea and I have disappeared together. After all I am an impenetrable mystery to her—an older mzungu woman—an enigma she cannot even converse with or maybe even begin to grasp, like all of Andrea’s life before her.
But as she hears us coming in, she leaps up and comes forward, and her face lights up. Maybe I’m wrong again here, I keep misreading the signs. From the way they look at each other, the way they gently exchange a few words, I see their bond is even stronger than what I’d glimpsed earlier. I look at Farida again. No, she isn’t concerned after all. I’m not a threat to her. She knows her husband intimately.
And far better than I.
The next morning they drive me to the airport in the NGO’s car. I’m flying back to Dar and from there on to Rome. Gregorio is coming to pick me up at the airport with Olga. Strange, how home has never felt so blurred.
For the occasion Andrea and Farida have put on their nice clothes—immaculate white kanzu and embroidered buibui because there will be people they know leaving or arriving on the small plane from the Big Island and there will doubtless be polite conversations and exchanges of news. Andrea moves around the tiny airport with ease, he weighs my bag on the scale, has a chat with the man in overalls who checks my ticket and passport, greets the people he knows. Farida has once again been holding my wrist tightly all along and now that Andrea has gone to get me a bottle of water she keeps repeating something to me in a hushed voice, something urgent, which he’s not meant to hear. She repeats it two, three times and I turn my palms up. I don’t understand. She reiterates the same words, more forcefully this time, but I widen my eyes.
“Nini? What?” I ask.
She laughs. And then Andrea comes back and tells me it’s time I go, they are about to board the plane, so I am going to have to leave without knowing what Farida so urgently wanted me to know. Though I’m aware this is not the right thing to do here, I hug her and kiss her on the cheek. And yet I don’t shake hands with Andrea because I’ve been told that’s another taboo, one I don’t wish to violate as my parting gesture.
“Wait! Just a second!” I call out, before they get back to the car. I have pulled out my phone. Farida immediately strikes an awkward pose, as I take the picture of the two of them. This is the only picture I’ve taken during the whole trip. I peer at the tiny screen. It’s a good one.
I know they will have beautiful children.
“Same flight again, eh?” I hear a voice behind my back.
“Yeah, same flight,” I say to Tescari. Today he wears another freshly ironed blue shirt and orange trousers, hair still wet from a shower.
I see Jeffrey Stone in the lot, too, standing next to his brand-new SUV into which he’ll soon climb and drive off.
“I bet you’re happy to be heading back. At least I know I am,” Tescari says under his breath. “This place would drive anyone nuts. Mosquitoes, crazy people, no booze, mangroves. It’s hopeless.”
I know that Carlo Tescari will sit next to me and talk nonstop for the entire length of the flight. He’ll feel even more entitled to do so now, given our newly born comradeship, which we’d sealed earlier with gin.
After all, haven’t we come from the same place, and aren’t we headed in the same direction?