Water Theatre (37 page)

Whether Adam noticed how upset I was by this absolute pronouncement, I don't know, but after hearing what Marina had said I paid little attention to whatever else he tried to tell me that day. Her declaration felt like a deliberate rebuff to my own hopes. How could she imagine that what I felt for her might amount to nothing more than an imposition on her freedom? Wasn't freedom the single most important value I'd learnt at the feet of the father she fought? In any case, if she felt that way, why hadn't she told me so directly, face to face?

I decided it was time I started to look after myself.

I took up the contacts in television that Hal had given to me. The people who interviewed me for NTV were impressed by the work I'd done in Equatoria. I was signed up for the company's trainee programme. My intuition that a whole new world of communication was opening up across the planet had proved sound, and I was in that world now, not too far from the start of it and ready to go. My ambition grew. What mattered was my career. Get that right and everything else would take care of itself.

Not long afterwards, Adam astounded me by announcing that he had decided not to chance a career on the stage after all. He was going to return to Equatoria and begin married life with Efwa there. I could make little sense of what seemed to me a waste of his talents. When I learnt later that he was taking a post in one of the new government secondary schools, two hundred miles upcountry from Port Rokesby in Emmanuel's hometown, Fontonfarom, I felt confirmed in that judgement. But by that time I was too busy pursuing my own career to spend much time worrying over the thought of my friend languishing in a bush town ringed by rainforest. If that was
what his fugitive spirit wanted, who was I to argue? So I wished him good luck and promised to stay in touch.

I hadn't been at NTV long when news came through of political developments in Equatoria. On his return to the country, Hal must have decided that Fouda and his cronies did indeed represent a threat to the stability of Emmanuel's regime. Despite the qualms of the more tender-minded cabinet members, he and Kanza Kutu, the powerful Minister of the Interior, persuaded Emmanuel of the need to introduce a Preventive Detention Bill to parliament and get it quickly onto the Statute Book. As soon as the measure was passed, Fouda and four members of his party were arrested and confined without trial in Makombe Castle.

Predictably, the British press condemned what it saw as a shameless breach of civil liberties. Meanwhile, in Equatoria, the single newspaper not directly under the PLP's control ridiculed the inadequate legal safeguards built into the Act. For the first time since independence, grumblings of unease were heard throughout the country. They sounded loudest among the lawyers and businessmen in Port Rokesby and in the tribal councils of the Eastern Region, where opposition to the government had remained strong under the conservative influence of the Olun of Bamutu. Then discontent turned to outrage when the Olun's most distinguished spokesman was also detained for his alleged involvement in a conspiracy against the State. Rioting broke out in the streets of Bamutu, and more arrests were made.

Shortly afterwards, one of the PLP's Regional Commissioners was accused of amassing a private fortune by imposing fraudulent taxes on local farmers. In an effort to demonstrate the impartiality of the law, the man was arrested, tried and given a long prison sentence. But rather than appeasing discontent, this action encouraged complaints against corrupt practices right across the country. Too many local officials were
half-educated party activists who had proved useful in rallying the masses during the struggle for independence, and were now reaping their rewards by abusing their positions of power. That it could prove unwise to challenge such “Party Hard Boys” became apparent when Kanza Kutu authorized further controversial arrests under the provisions of the Preventive Detention Act.

I remember trying to defend these measures to a hard-bitten old journalist, once a foreign correspondent, who was now desk-bound at NTV. I told him that Emmanuel and Hal were my friends, that they were visionaries, and that their project was too important to let subversive factions or a few corrupt party cadres endanger its achievements.

“It may be unthinkable to imprison anyone without trial here in the UK,” I argued, “but you can't judge the new African nations by our standards. They're coping with the stresses of a whole new world, a whole new way of doing things. They're bound to get some things wrong.”

“Nice line in loyalty, old son,” he replied. “It looks good on you. Only thing is, you'd best wear it with a dash of cynicism, or this bloody job will drive you mad!”

I was far away, working on my first assignment in Vietnam, when I heard reports of the attempt on the life of Emmanuel Adjouna – an attempt which took place on the football field of his hometown, Fontonfarom.

I learnt later that Adam and Efwa were seated under a palmthatched awning with the local dignitaries and representatives from the Secondary School when the President's open-topped limousine drove into the football field flanked by an escort of motorcycle riders and followed by a convoy of party cars. A big crowd had been waiting for hours, waving banners and flags as they listened to the public-address system crackling out party anthems at ear-splitting volume. The dry season was nearing its end, and the sky lowered thunderously mauve above them.
I'd been to Fontonfarom, and knew how the air always smelt of wood smoke and a hot swirl of ash from the refuse dump across the marsh outside the town. It must have felt as though the afternoon was burning on a long, slow fuse.

At the first sight of the presidential limousine, the tape on the loudspeakers stopped and the Police Band struck up the chords of the Founder's Hymn. Standing between the awning and the flag-decked rostrum on which Emmanuel would make his speech, the school choir began to sing above the shouts and cheering of the crowd. Policemen in their flowerpot tarbooshes strained to hold back the crush as the presidential limousine paraded around the ground with Emmanuel Adjouna holding his arms high above his head, twirling a white handkerchief in his right hand and beaming his famous smile. The words of the hymn may have proclaimed him liberator, saviour and redeemer of the land, but that day, dressed in his striped peasant smock – emblem of his identity with the common man – he was the favourite son come home to be honoured and embraced by those who loved him. His face revealed his appetite for adoration. He delighted in the tribute of flowers thrown by the market women, who jiggled in a dance of welcome. He must have been all the more astounded, therefore, when something else was lobbed out of the jubilant crowd – something small, dark and unidentifiable that broke open around his car in a flash of harsh, disintegrating light.

I did not sleep well that night in the cottage. Shortly after Adam rang off, Captain Midnight turned up with his latest woman and for what felt like a session long enough to flight-test all the sexual positions known to man the night was loud with their noise. After that my sleep was troubled by dreams, of which one in particular stayed with me.

I was sorting out a century of junk stacked in an attic room at Cripplegate Chambers – old ledgers, unsorted papers, broken furniture and Victorian engravings with cracked glass. Though I'd been warned the room was haunted, I didn't believe it, yet when I gave up on the mess in despair and tried to pull the door shut behind me, it felt as though the handle on the other side was gripped by strong hands. I couldn't see what held the door against my pull, but I could feel its strength and it frightened me. When I called for help, my voice wouldn't work properly. Yet some sort of muffled shout escaped me as I lurched awake in thin light.

I got up early, went outside, and was watching the swallows skittering in the early light above the wooded hill when the whole landscape around the cottage seemed to change its appearance. What had simply been a sunlit hill now struck me as a recumbent woman's pregnant belly. Beyond it, her breasts were formed by a higher saddle of twinned hills. The terraced groves to my far right covered the open curve of her left thigh, while her right thigh rose to the knee at the crown of the hill on which the village proper stood. The cottage lay cradled in her lap, and her groin was shaped by a bushy cleft of steep shadow, where some household rubbish had been tipped beyond the nearest stretch of olive trees.

Once having seen the figure, it seemed impossible not to have noticed it before. Shaking my head, I went back inside to get some breakfast, and when I returned to the blue table under the bamboo awning, the illusion was still intact. A few minutes later the brown-robed figure of Fra Pietro appeared round the bend of the track. I got up to greet him, eager to ask whether this illusion of a gigantic female figure in the landscape was common knowledge.

As I tried to point out what I'd seen, the friar looked around uncertainly, then he stared at me bemused. But we were both standing, and the view had altered with that angle of vision, so I persuaded him to sit at the table, gazing up in the direction I pointed, while I traced the woman's massive contours with my finger.

“Those far hills are her breasts,” I insisted, “and that nearer hill is her belly. Then if you follow the slopes down you can make out her thighs. Don't you see? It's as if we're in the lap of a giantess, looking up at her.”

Obligingly he peered into the sunlight. His head moved from one side to the other, then he turned to smile at me. I looked back at the landscape and saw only what he was seeing: the rounded contours of densely wooded hills banked steeply behind each other.

“I understand that you wish to come to the
convento
?” he said quietly.

“It's Adam's idea,” I said.

Fra Pietro nodded. “I know something of the terrible things you have seen. I think that after one has suffered to look at such things, it is wise to come out of the world. For a time, yes? If not, the heart can –
soffocare?
– suffocate, I think.” The fingers of one hand fluttered as if tracing the flight path of a moth. He shrugged and smiled. “In our
convento
you will have time to bring a little peace to the soul. Come,” he said, “you have a bag? You will permit?”

As I drove him around the village walls, we passed no one except an old woman dressed in black who walked slowly with
her back bent and her slight weight propped on a stick. In her other hand she held a posy of flowers.

“Serafina…” Fra Pietro smiled. “Two hundred years old, I think, and every morning she makes her offering to the Madonna!”

In the wing mirror, I saw the old lady stop to watch me pull up on a verge of rough grass across from the
convento
. The walls of the building glowed softly pink in the dry light. I switched off the engine. Except for the sound of water pouring into a cistern and the tap of the old woman's stick against the road, the morning was very still.

“Come, come,” fussed Fra Pietro, “welcome.” He opened a small door in the wall, ushered me through, and I stepped out of this world.

The day's heat had already begun to build, but there was respite in the cool, reclusive shade of the
convento
. I had expected to be affronted by the kind of overdressed religiosity a northerner associates with Italian Catholicism – a taint of incense in the air, a display of old bones and murky bits of cartilage encased in glass reliquaries. Instead I entered a bare, white-plastered hall with a vase of lilies on a simple table and low arched doors on three sides. Fra Pietro led me through the farthest door, where we stepped out into a cloister. At the centre of its courtyard a fountain shivered in the sunlight.

“Once this was a large community,” the friar was saying. “But now only few of us remain. I regret that my brothers have no English, but Adam has told me that you wish to make a silent retreat and that you will not eat with us, so it's no problem. It is very quiet here. Come, I will show you the room we have for you.”

I followed him round the cloister to where a flight of stone stairs climbed from the far corner, each tread so scooped by wear that I guessed some parts of this building were much older than its exterior suggested. At the top we came out into an
upper corridor, where he opened the door on a narrow room and ushered me inside. Light slanted through Romanesque windows piercing the bare stone walls on two sides. Under one of them, a single bed occupied a corner of the room. Under the other stood a desk with an inkwell, three drawers and a chair. On the white-plastered inner wall hung a large icon of the crucifixion with a prie-dieu beneath it. The cell was otherwise empty, except for two wire coat hangers dangling from a spike next to a cupboard.

“Is very simple,” said Fra Pietro, “but you will be comfortable, I think?”

The window above the bed looked down where the lane wound round the
convento
to dip towards a shady glen with a bridge. From there it climbed into the wooded hills towards Gabriella's villa. Not a breath of wind disturbed the trees. The other view, from the desk, looked south towards the distant plain, where a train sped silently along the tracks. I looked back at my quarters, wondering whether I could live with that crucifix for the next three days.

Fra Pietro had taken my narrow-eyed gaze for admiration. “It's wonderful, yes? A copy, of course. The original is in the Basilica of Santa Chiara in Assisi. I love how our Lord's arms are open as in an embrace, yes? An embrace wide enough, I think, to take in all the sufferings of the world. But come.” He opened the cupboard to reveal a washbasin with a shaving mirror and shelf above it.

“The water is good to drink,” he said. “From our spring. And when you wish to make a bath, then you must come this way.” He took me out onto the landing and opened a door on a cubicle large enough to hold a lavatory and an open shower. “Through here,” he said, gesturing me along the corridor towards another flight of steps, “you can come to the roof.”