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“We loved the valley instantly,” Mum says. “That jungle as you dropped down into it, those huge trees with wonderful birds clattering away in the canopy.” My parents stopped the car at the bottom of the escarpment to let the brakes cool. To the north lay the mist-shouldered Vumba Mountains. To the south ran the distant Chimanimani range. And opposite them were the hot, buffalo-bean covered Himalaya Hills (the actual Himalayas having been seen by the first white settler of Burma Valley, a pukka-pukka sahib from India). “It was all so lush, so picturesque, so life affirming,” Mum says. She threw her hands above her head and spun around and around to the chorus of tree frogs and the shrilling of insects. “It’s perfect!” she cried. “Yippee! Hurrah!”

It was almost noon by the time they found John Parodi’s farm. “A little piece of Italy in all its details,” Mum says. An avenue of Mediterranean cypresses led up from the tobacco barns; dairy cattle grazed in knee-deep pastures on either side of the road; a bright bay horse was attended by white egrets; the whitewashed farmhouse was topped with a red tile roof; Ionic columns held up the veranda.

My parents were greeted in the brick-paved courtyard by a maid and shown into a large sitting room, at the center of which was a gurgling fountain. Ferns spilled off the bookshelves and pressed against the windows, creating filtered green light. The whole house was redolent with olive oil and freshly baked bread. “Che bello!” Mum cried, and at that moment John Parodi strode into the room. “Oh, you know what he was like,” Mum says. “Those shoulders! That passion!”

So I picture John on that steaming October morning, oxlike in his khaki bush jacket with his salted black hair combed back to expose a sun-burnished forehead and formidable winged eyebrows. He embraced my parents, kissing Mum on both cheeks, pounding Dad between the shoulder blades, shouting English with a thick Italian accent. “You must sit! Sit!”

My parents sat.

John poured glasses of liqueur—“all different colors, like liquid jewels,” Mum says—and they drank to one another’s health.

“Cent’anni!”

“Mud in your eye!”

Then my parents were led from the seemingly subterranean sitting room to an airy, high-ceilinged dining room, from which French doors opened onto the veranda, where dogs lay curled in the shade and cats cleaned themselves under potted orange trees. “Just like in Roma,” Mum observed happily. Lunch was served, Portuguese wine flowed out of basket-covered bottles and more liqueurs arrived. John raised his glass and roared that the world was both beautiful and heartbreaking. My mother bawled back her hearty agreement. They became drunker, they yelled louder and Mum acquired an intensely strong Italian accent of her own.

“He told us over lunch the many tragedies of his love life—two or three at least. Things are a little vague, I’m afraid—those liqueurs were very alcoholic—but I think his first wife might have died. Or maybe she ran away—something like that.” So John apparently sent to Italy for Elsa, the striking and spirited daughter of his unrequited first love. “I’m not sure but I suppose Elsa and John must have fallen in love and maybe Italy after the war was dreary. I really don’t know.” In any case, Elsa came out to Africa, and shortly afterward, she and John must have been married. In due course they had two children: a daughter, Madeline (a couple of years older than Vanessa), and a son, Giovanni (my age). “And it should have been happily ever after except then Elsa fell for the handsome, charming tobacco farmer next door.” What my mother doesn’t say, but we all know, is that Elsa and the handsome tobacco farmer were caught in the tobacco barns one evening, in flagrante dilecto. “Can you imagine?”

“The bloody bitch and the bloody bastard!” John bellowed, waving his fist in the direction of the offending neighbor, the straying wife. “I shoot them!”

A clap of thunder broke above the house, and an afternoon storm rolled across the valley. “Amore!