Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [3]
“Step away from the puddles.”
Rain slashed down and filming had to stop. The sun came out and the world steamed a virile, exuberant green. The Sole Valley looked disobediently—at least from the glossy distance of videotape—like the Okavango Swamps. Women and children gleamed. Goats threatened to burst their skins. Even the donkeys managed to look fortunate and plump. In a place where it is dry for nine months at a stretch, even the slightest breath of rain can be landscape-altering and can briefly transform the people into an impression of tolerable health.
“Explain to them that this is for their own good. God knows, I am not doing this for my entertainment.”
If the television crews had wanted misery, they had only to walk a few meters off the road and into the nearest huts, where men, women, and children hang like damp chickens over long drops losing their lives through their frothing bowels. But HIV/ AIDS is its own separate documentary.
Life expectancy in this dry basin of land has just been officially reduced to thirty-three. How do you film an absence? How do you express in pictures the disappearance of almost everyone over the age of forty?
“Please ask those young boys to look hungry.”
The young boys obligingly thrust their hips at the camera and waggled pink tongues at the director.
Sole Valley children
Characteristic Malidadi Flood
Mum and dogs
I TRAINED AND IT RAINED and it rained.
Year after year—within my decade-long relationship with it anyhow—Sole had been so parched that its surface curled back like a dried tongue and exposed red, bony gums of erosion. But now—when the international news crews were finally on hand to document its supposedly dry misery—the valley had apparently grown bored of being a desert and had decided to turn itself into a long, shallow lick of lake. Where once goats and donkeys hung rib-strung over bare ground, knee-high greenery appeared. Land that once danced, dry heaving with heat waves, now sung with the deadly whine of mosquitoes. While the surrounding land began to take on the hollow-eyed aspects of a glittering desert with stunted maize and bony cattle, Sole Valley grew small tidal waves and an infestation of frogs. Anything not big or strong enough to hold its head above the water took in a lungful of liquid and died, ballooned and stinking, in ditches and ravines. Many chickens and the odd small goat, surprised by so much unaccustomed water, died from disgust.
At Mum and Dad’s fish and banana farm, eleven kilometers off the tarmac and downstream from the brothels, the biblically dead earth sprung green with a plague of luscious weeds. All day, day after day, battleship gray clouds gathered force over the Pepani Escarpment with such gravity that they threatened to oppress the sun. Insects tumbled out of the sky, with wings cracking and prickly legs. Christmas beetles shrilled. The wind picked up and tossed the leaves of the banana trees into shreds. The dogs hid their ears under their paws and looked anxious. The turkeys crouched under the wood stack and shat piles of reeking white, and the wild birds fell silent. The clouds menaced and massed.
Above my parents’ camp, where the land sloped away into mopane pans, giant African bullfrogs that had lain in a tomb of concrete-solid earth for the last nine months exploded from the ground to mate and breed and roar for a few days before sinking back into the silence of the mud. They were enormous (as big as a soup bowl), Dracula-fanged and lurid yellow-green. They had black, lumpy ridges along their backs, like a pattern of ritualized scars from a nation of warriors.
Mum and I waded up to the top of the farm to inspect the frogs. Mum had read in her Amphibians of Central and Southern Africa that they can live for up to twenty years. “Do you think they’re any good for eating?” she asked.
“Mum!”
Mum rolled her eyes at me. “Don’t be so squeamish, Bobo.” She prodded one of the bullfrogs with her walking stick. “Come on,” she