She remembered him, of course. She didn’t feel like telling him, because it had been so long ago, at a time when she still lived in the country, and she didn’t want him to think she still remembered their brief encounter after all these years. He had changed, but he looked more interesting now that he wasn’t so boyish, with thin lines around his eyes. He lit a cigarette without asking her whether it might bother her.
“I remember you,” he said, breaking the long silence.
“Really? From where?”
“We met in the bathroom at Jonathan Cole’s house. You had on a pair of bright red sandals you had just bought in Italy.”
She opened her mouth, feigning bewilderment.
“Come on. How can you remember that?”
“We had quite a long chat in there, and I tend to notice women’s feet,” he said.
She had been putting on her lipstick when he’d wandered in with a drink in his hand. They had flirted—mildly, in the oblique way people flirt late at night at parties—and shared his vodka tonic while sitting on the edge of the bathtub. Then Consuelo Gambrino, the alluring Argentinean eye doctor, had walked in.
“What are you two doing here?” she had asked them mischievously, shattering the moment. Consuelo had pulled up a stool and had started speaking nonsense to him in her thickly accented English, ignoring her. Sonia had left the room, meaning to catch up with him later, but somehow she’d lost sight of him, or maybe he had left without saying goodbye.
“Yes,” she said, “I remember you now. You described in detail a scene from a book you were reading.”
“Did I? That sounds rather boring.”
“It was … it was the one with the lion and—was it the heart, the skin?—in the title. The part where the nun falls off the bridge. I actually bought the book afterward.”
“Did you?”
“Yes, you made me want to read it.”
“Did you like it?”
“I did.”
He turned and looked at her and said nothing. She felt nervous for having said that, as though it had been an admission of some sort.
“Sorry if I didn’t recognize you right away,” she added after a short silence, wanting to sound casual. “It’s been a very long time.”
“No problem,” he said and grinned. He knew she was lying and he liked that.
They asked each other polite questions, carefully steering away from the details of their personal lives, avoiding any mention of wife or girlfriend, children or husband. He said that for years he’d had a highly paid job for the UN, driving relief trucks into Sudan and Somalia. Now he worked as a manager on a sheep farm up-country. She suspected this change might have to do with having a family and settling down, though he didn’t wear a wedding ring. She mentioned the name of the foundation she worked for and told him how sometimes she had to travel to assess the state of the projects they funded. They had just started to finance schooling projects for girls in the nomadic areas of East Africa and she had been assigned to report on them because of her knowledge of the place. She didn’t delve into the details, knowing that he, having lived in the country for so many years, wasn’t going to be impressed by her job. It was mainly her friends back in Europe who always introduced her as a kind of heroine because she had lived in a couple of African countries and was working for the poor.
“Do you ever miss your life here?” he asked.
“All the time,” she said, and felt herself blushing. It seemed inappropriate to admit such a thing in front of him. A betrayal to the new life she had chosen.
When, almost eight years earlier, Sonia had made up her mind to move to Europe, it had seemed like a final decision. At the time she could no longer bear the corruption, the frustration of living in a hopeless country constantly on the edge of disaster where—if she was ever to have children—they would grow up like wild things without a clue about what was going on in the rest of the world and never adjusting to it. She convinced herself that she needed to live in a place where one would be able to go to a museum on a whim, see a movie, get proper clothes, eat decent food and be surrounded by people who could talk about ideas rather than dams, engines, electric fencing, wells and cattle. When she’d met the man who was to become her husband—a director of photography who’d come into the country to shoot a documentary on the Ndorobos, a disappearing tribe—she hadn’t let him escape without her, holding on to him with the resilience of a castaway grasping a wide, steady plank of wood.
She had adjusted very quickly to her new life—after all it was much easier to go from bush to city than the other way around. The “how to” instructions were easy and written on every wall; the comfort of European life was strongly addictive, she discovered, and one immediately forgot how to live without it.
Now that she felt something of an exile returning to her homeland, she’d been assaulted by nostalgia, not only for the raw beauty of the country, but for her former self, a person happy to live with few clothes, who didn’t wear makeup and who didn’t think much of crossing a river in a four-wheel drive.
Sometimes, in the city where she lived now, glancing around the crowd in the bus, she would single out a couple of faces. She recognized their shy smiles, the way they moved their open hands around their faces, the familiar singsong in their voices—certain words that she’d catch in the distance. Usually they would be cleaning ladies, sometimes they’d be young nuns or street sellers just arrived—she could tell from the clothes they wore. She couldn’t restrain herself from moving closer and closer to them, elbowing other tired passengers until she’d find herself standing right next to them in order to catch the gist of their conversation. She’d wait for the right moment to barge in and they’d open their eyes wide, stunned to hear a mzungu lady in her nice coat address them in their language.
“I grew up there.”
They would laugh and slap their thighs.
“So you are an African too!”
“Oh yes, sana kabisa,” she’d say and join their laughter.
Often she would not get off at her stop, wanting to prolong the conversation; the sound of Swahili was like music to her.
He hadn’t been exactly present in her thoughts for all those years; she seemed to have almost forgotten him, to have lost track of his existence as if he hadn’t left such a big impression after all. But the memory of that encounter on the edge of a bathtub must have been lingering somewhere beneath the surface—invisible, yet bobbing about. All this became clear to Sonia only once she sat next to him in the car, so that coming across him in such an unlikely circumstance seemed the obvious segue to their encounter of nearly ten years earlier, when she was still single, hadn’t settled anywhere yet and still had a sense that the future was a sheet of white photographic paper on which her life was still waiting to emerge.
They passed clusters of zebras, antelopes and small cattle herds led by men wrapped in red cloth, covered in colorful beaded jewelry. Just before it got dark they saw a leopard appear and cross the track ahead of them, its golden shape cut against the white dust. He turned off the engine of the car and they watched the animal move slowly across—a tight bundle of muscles and tendons—and disappear into the thick again. They looked at each other and didn’t make a comment; they exchanged a smile, as though the leopard crossing their way had been a good omen, or a special signal sent just for them.
He glanced at his wristwatch.
“It’s a quarter to seven. Can you still make your flight to Nairobi?”
“Oh. Forget it, it left two hours ago. I’ll have to try to go tomorrow.”
She could almost hear them both think, Good, we have a little time.
Once they left the track the landscape changed, turned greener and the air cooler. They knew that now that the desert was behind them they’d reach town within an hour. They became aware that they’d have to come up with some sort of a plan in order to prolong the encounter. Neither was ready to let the other one go.
Behind a gas station, at the intersection of a small cluster of shacks selling wrinkled vegetables and Masai blankets, they saw a nyama choma sign painted on the side.
“They have good food here,” he said. “How about a snack and a drink?”
Sonia nodded, relieved that he’d taken the initiative.
The place was dimly lit by a string of red lightbulbs, empty except for a stocky man behind the counter, busy swatting flies away. He brought out what was left in the kitchen, cold chapatis, goat stew and sukumawiki, a meal that reminded Sonia of her childhood.
Suddenly a white woman with sandy hair walked briskly into the joint. She looked around and called his name.
“Hey, I saw your car outside, what are you …,” she said, and stopped, seeing he wasn’t alone.
He stood up and hugged her warmly, like an old friend. The two of them stood by the table and spoke briefly, while Sonia kept looking into her plate. She overheard the woman say something about a ghastly group of clients whom she had just driven to the airport, a problem with the power line, a lunch she was planning to have on Sunday.
“Please come and bring the children,” the woman said. “I’ve got to run now, give my love to Alexandra. Don’t forget Sunday.”
She moved away and quickly fluttered her hand in Sonia’s direction. Throughout the conversation with the woman he had seemed perfectly at ease and not in the least embarrassed to be seen with her, a fact that mildly disappointed Sonia. He sat down and ordered another round of drinks.
They lingered over their food, sipping cheap vodka and lime soda. The alcohol had smoothed their conversation, which was sliding more freely now, without pauses or impediments. They spoke only of things they’d be allowed to share: it didn’t matter what, anything that came to mind would do—a visit to the Prado, the beauty of Norwegian fjords, what had happened with Terrence Malick in his recent film, a cult book by Julian Jaynes they’d both happened to have read. They were like tightrope walkers on the same line, careful not to stray from their finely attuned balance. They had been given only one direction to go and the challenge was exhilarating.
The owner approached with the fly-swatting rag in his hand and began to wipe the table next to them. It was closing time.
There was a pause.
“Where shall I take you now?” he asked her.
“I’ll get a room somewhere for the night,” she said.
“There are no hotels around here where you’d want to spend the night.”
“It’s fine. I’m not fussy.”
They walked on the gravel toward the car. A soft breeze enveloped them. The sky was like blue carbon paper. It felt so wrong to pretend to be indifferent.
“Wow. I’m totally drunk,” Sonia said, stumbling, taking time, wanting it to slow down. It seemed to be ticking too fast.
He opened the passenger door and looked at her. He seemed perfectly sober.
“I like talking to you.”
“Yeah. Me, too. That was nice.”
She sat in her seat, not knowing what they would be doing next.
“I wish I had met you when you were still living here,” he said as he turned the key of the starter.
In the years that followed the accident Sonia thought often of that phrase. How her life would have panned out differently had the eye doctor Consuelo Gambrino never entered the bathroom and interrupted their conversation when they’d first met, had she not been too shy to follow him through the party crowd, had she pursued him, kissed him, made love to him that same night. Maybe she would’ve stayed on in the country and learned to cope with the hovering feeling of impending disaster, with her lack of sophistication, which at the time had seemed so unbearable to her. That way she would’ve had a good reason to go on living in the place where she belonged.
She also often wondered how it had been possible to fall like that. When exactly had it happened, this falling, this opening up completely? What was the connection, why him of all the people she’d come across? Clearly she couldn’t talk to anyone about this without feeling pathetic. It sounded like some adolescent fantasy, material for a cheap novel, something her friends would laugh about.
She went quietly back to her life, and kept that feeling a secret, something stashed away in the folds of her memory that now and again she would turn to. She’d go back to it and there it would be, intact, unfaded, like a diamond ring that one cannot wear in daylight, that can only be taken out of its velvet pouch every now and again, just to make sure it is still as glittering and fabulous as one remembers.
The only tangible memory of the car crash was a tiny scar. Nothing more than a thin line running across her forearm. A discreet reminder, something she would see on herself every day, that had become part of who she was, a mark that people hardly noticed.
II
The list, dashed off in pencil on the back of an envelope, is quite long. It starts with a new set of pajamas and a few toys for the child that she will need in the days to come. There’s lots of other stuff she has to get, like milk and vegetables, snow boots, medicines, honey, detergents, printing paper and converters for their European plugs, but Sonia has decided to start with the child’s list, which is the longest and the most urgent.
Since they arrived in New York it has been nonstop rushing and fatigue. The moving, the settling in, the adjusting to the new space. She hates the new bed. She hates the view. A fire escape is not what she was expecting to be looking at, first thing in the morning.
It has been snowing for days. The brownstones in the Village are laced in a mantle of white, romantic as in an Edith Wharton story, but this morning Sonia struggles to see the beautiful side of things.
She walks very fast, making her way uptown. These days she cannot face the subway and prefers to walk; crowds make her nervous, she has been breaking out in cold sweats. It’s just tension, nothing to worry about—after all, it’s the least she can expect from her body given the circumstances—so she keeps some herbal remedy in her pocket. It’s called Rescue Remedy and she likes the sound of its name. Every now and again she squeezes a few drops under her tongue to rein in any spike of anxiety.
Inside the department store the suffocating dampness mixed with the smells emanating from too many bodies feels like a lethal gas that will slowly poison her. She spends too long inside there, unable to make up her mind between two sets of pajamas, incapable of picking the right kind of snow boots, feeling heady, hungry and weak. Too much to choose from, too many options, that’s always the problem with department stores.
She bolts.