Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [76]
There were no recent tracks on the road, and when I reached it, the house appeared abandoned, its windows broken, sections of asbestos sheeting missing from the roof and gray patches of mold spreading over the apricot-peach walls. The garden had dried up and died. I knocked at the front door (still engrained with scratches from the long-ago claws of all our dogs) and a young man came to the door. He was shirtless in the October heat and looked as if he had just woken up. I apologized for the intrusion, introduced myself and asked him if I might sit on the veranda for a moment to look at the view.
The young man considered my request for a while, then he shrugged and said the view did not belong to him. “Look at it if you want,” he said. But before I could thank him, he shut the door and I was left alone. So I sat on the veranda and looked at that deadly, beautiful view over Robandi—the red-dusted boulders, the blue-gray kopjes, the bush-smoked Himalayas—across the valley to John Parodi’s Italian-inspired farm with its avenues of Mediterranean cypresses, its Ionic columns and its brick-paved courtyard.
In retrospect, of course, everyone should have anticipated this outcome. We should have seen that a story begun with such one-sided, unconscious joviality—jewel-colored liqueurs and Portuguese wine on a rain-washed Rhodesian October morning—would end less than a decade later in defeat and heartbreak. But in the glow of love, in the heat of battle, in the cushioned denial of the present, how few have the wisdom to look forward with unclouded hindsight. Not my parents, certainly. Not most of us. But most of us also don’t pay so dearly for our prejudices, our passions, our mistakes. Lots of places, you can harbor the most ridiculous, the most ruining, the most intolerant beliefs and be hurt by nothing more than your own thoughts.
I had just turned fourteen during the Easter holidays of 1983 when Mum broke the news to me that John Parodi had been shot to death on his own veranda by an assassin or assassins unknown, the war bleeding retribution and carnage long after its official end. The people who found his body said that John’s staining handprint ran the length of the veranda as he tried to reach his son, Giovanni. And Giovanni himself—only fourteen but already handsome in that eyebrow-winged way of his thick-shouldered father and with his mother’s irreverently laughing mouth—had been abducted from the farm by his father’s killers. Madeline, John’s eighteen-year-old daughter was not at home on the day of the attack but for months and years after her father’s funeral, she rode a motorbike through the Himalayas, searching for signs of her brother, calling his name profitlessly into the hot, purple hills, “Giovanni! Giovanni!”
No one starts a war warning that those involved will lose their innocence—that children will definitely die and be forever lost as a result of the conflict; that the war will not end for generations and generations, even after cease-fires have been declared and peace treaties have been signed. No one starts a war that way, but they should. It would at least be fair warning and an honest admission: even a good war—if there is such a thing—will kill anyone old enough to die.
PART THREE
Power said to the world, “You are mine.”
The world kept it prisoner on her throne.
Love said to the world, “I am thine.”
The world gave it the freedom of her house.
—RABINDRANATH TAGORE
I always keep a supply of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy.