Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [78]
When she got back to Zambia, Mum didn’t sleep or eat, whirring around their tiny borrowed cottage near Lusaka like a trapped hummingbird. She gave up the usual niceties—tea before breakfast, the dogs’ evening walk, a soak in the bathtub before supper with the BBC World Service—and skipped directly to a steady infusion of Valium and brandy, which didn’t seem to have even a remotely sedating effect on her. Dad, who had managed Mum’s previous wobblies by ignoring them, was genuinely worried by this one. All the hours he could spare, he sat outside her bedroom door smoking cigarettes and playing solitaire. Inside, Mum lay in a state of pretend sleep, plotting her escape to remote and impossible places: the Democratic Republic of Congo (“Je m’appelle Nicola Fuller de Afrique centrale!”) or London’s West End (Starlight Express, Cats, Les Misérables!). And the moment she sensed Dad’s vigil had lapsed, she bolted, driving into Lusaka to buy airplane tickets to London or making it as far as Lubumbashi before being retrieved by my father. (“Oh, why must everyone bully me so much?”)
This went on for a few months until finally, ragged with exhaustion, asthmatic and underweight, she admitted herself to a clinic in Lusaka, banging on the gates in the middle of the night, barefoot and trembling, having run miles on a dirt road, until a watchman heard her and let her in. The next day Dad drove Mum five or six hours across the border to the psychiatric ward of a Zimbabwean hospital. There she was strapped to a bed and drugged to a standstill until she could be stabilized, diagnosed, medicated. “My mad pills, my happy pills, my panic pills, my sleeping pills,” she says. “Wonderful psychiatrist I had, very talented. He knew exactly what was wrong with me and he knew what to give me to fix it.” Mum jabs her walking stick in the ground a few times for emphasis. “It was just a little chemical imbalance.”
We’re having this conversation on a late-afternoon walk back from the Zambezi River to the Tree of Forgetfulness. The dogs surge ahead of us, rooting out snake smells and scaring up locusts the size of small pigeons. “So yes,” Mum agrees, “I am mad. We all know that, but it’s not a problem. It’s nothing Cairo Chemist can’t put right.” Suddenly she puts her binoculars to her eyes with a little gasp of excitement and says, “Look, a paradise flycatcher. How wonderful! What a glorious tail! Did you see it?” But she doesn’t offer me her binoculars. “Off he goes. There, look at him—swoop, swoop.” Mum inhales deeply, a soft smile on her lips. “Ah, I love the evenings,” she says. “Such a reward after the daily toil, isn’t it?”
And she’s right. The evenings here on the north bank of the Zambezi River are tremulously beautiful. A shaky ribbon of blue smoke from a nearby village’s cooking fire hangs over the farm. Emerald-spotted doves are calling, “My mother is dead, my father is dead, my relatives are dead and my heart goes dum-dum-dum.” Frogs are bellowing from the causeway. The air boils with beetles and cicadas, mosquitoes and tsetse flies. Egrets, white against the gray-pink sky are floating upriver to roost in the winterthorn trees in the middle of Dad’s bananas. “I won’t let him chop down those trees,” Mum says, “the birds love them.”
But you can’t have all this life on one end without a corresponding amount of death and decay on the other: in the morning, my parents’ maid, Hilda Tembo (“Big H” to the family), will sweep up half a bucket of insect carcasses and two gecko bodies from under the Tree of Forgetfulness. Months from now three of the Jack Russells will have been killed by a cobra in Dad’s office, and one will have been eaten by a crocodile in Mum’s fish ponds. And Dad will walk out of the bedroom one morning to see a python coiled in cartoonish perfection around Wallace (the late cat). “You learn not to mourn every little thing out here,” Mum says. She shakes her head. “No, you can’t, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.”
What my mother won’t say