Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [85]
AT THE TOP OF MY PARENTS’ garden at the fish and banana farm, there is a brick archway and wide brick steps leading past the Tree of Forgetfulness to an open-air kitchen where Big H spends her mornings preparing huge redolent stews of vegetables and cow bones for the dogs’ supper, and her afternoons frowning over the supper Mum is preparing for the rest of us. “Ever since Big H got television and started watching those cooking shows, she has started to look down her nose at my curries,” Mum says. Mum has always cooked whatever she can get her hands on: ropy chickens, mutton, crocodiles, frogs on the driveway—“They had deceptively promising thighs,” Mum says—and turned them into fragrantly wonderful meals. “Big H thinks you’re supposed to swear and sweat and have tantrums like Jamie Oliver,” Mum says. “Not my nice, calm wine-infused meals.”
On one side of the kitchen is the woodstove, its back to the garden; on the other, there is a small laboring fridge (in the heat it merely produces sweating butter or water-beaded bottles, nothing ever gets really cold). Behind Big H, on a shelf dedicated to their storage, are Mum’s nine orange Le Creuset pots. Their bottoms are permanently blackened with the drippings of the hundreds of curries and stews that have been cooked in them over the years.
To the right of the archway is a building containing my parents’ bedroom and Mum’s library with her collection of videos (musicals and operas mostly as well as British period dramas and a few nice, soothing murders); her books; and her art supplies. The top shelves are cluttered with carvings, ornaments and the brutalized bronze cast of Wellington (now missing both stirrups and reins, like a victim of a grueling Pony Club exercise).
To the left of the archway there is a two-roomed cottage comprising the guest bedroom and Dad’s office. It is a thatched, brick structure inclined to be porous to wildlife. I open the door and wait. Nothing launches itself at my ankles, so I make my way to the bed and sit down, feet drawn up onto the bed. Big H brings me a clean towel, then stands around surveying the place. “Frogs,” she observes at last, and leaves. As my eyes become accustomed to the gloom, I see what she means. The place is smothered in large, foam-nesting tree frogs, white as alabaster. They are hanging from the mosquito net, glued to the walls, attached to the door, hopping across the floor. Later, I find that if I drink half a box of South African wine and take a sleeping pill, a frog will become attached to my cheek while I sleep and will stay there unnoticed until morning. “How lucky for you,” Mum says. “You can write about that in one of your Awful Books.”
Bo barely keeping up with Dad on the farm. Zambia, 2010.
WORK ON THE FARM begins at dawn, while it is still cool, and I awake to find it well under way. There’s Mum marching up to her fish ponds with a walking stick and a collection of dogs in her wake. “Those kingfishers are very greedy and very naughty,” she says, waving her walking stick at a hovering shape over one of her ponds. There’s Dad striding down to inspect his bananas—“Thirty-four kgs for a first bunch!” he announces triumphantly. My parents’ farm is a miracle of productivity, order and routine—measuring, feeding, pruning, weeding, weighing, packing.
From the camp, Dad’s bananas appear as a green cathedral of leaves. In the early days of the farm, elephants would make their way onto the farm at night and raid the fruit, stripping leaves, crushing stems. “They make a terrific mess,” Mum says. Dad would wake up and hear them ripping through his plantation. “Talk about selective hearing,” Mum says. “He can’t hear a word I say,