The first thing he'd noticed upon arriving at the baggage claim room were the thousands of lights placed everywhere.
"I wonder what kind of cobwebs they make...you'd need a houseboy just for those," he had thought.
Then, while he was busy pushing the luggage trolley and observing the smiling and very pale faces of relatives, friends and acquaintances crowded at the exit ("are they all taxi drivers?" he asked Svaporato) he realized the first big difference between Italy and Kenya.
"There is no sky!"
The world outside the Malpensa airport lived in shades of gray, a color that even mice don't like in Africa. Light gray were the buildings, reminiscent of those at Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi ("I think all airports should look alike, at least iron birds recognize them at first glance"). Darker gray were the roads, an endless flow of very smooth asphalt, with no potholes but no flowers or grass around. They had already warned him about this when he had been in Nairobi: in Italy, green is even less. But the pale green of a flowerbed wouldn't have been able to brighten up the environment anyway. Even the cars were less colorful than in Mombasa and all very similar. But the sky, the sky was the real news.
One of his employers in Malindi once explained to a friend that the sky in Africa cannot be described to someone who has never been there, they must come and see it, otherwise they will never understand.
Grandpa Kazungu thought that even for Africans who have never been to Italy, it's the same thing. How do you imagine a sky so detached from the ground and of an indefinable color?
"Don't be frightened, grandfather - his grandson Kadenge comforted him - today it is this color, but sometimes it is blue or turquoise."
"It's always so far away though, isn't it?"
It was as if in Italy they had removed the colored ceiling from a house and now only a horrible tin roof remained.
That was probably why it was so cold.
Suddenly he realized that excitement and curiosity had made him athermic, but he was beginning to feel the pungent air, the frozen wind that brought the smell of diesel and strange fumes, traces of tobacco and very little else. Instead, people's passing essences abounded, scents and colognes that Kazungu's savanna-trained nose caught.
"They sprinkle like this so they don't smell the stench of the engines," he thought.
The air, the little bit of pure air that came in now and then, was different anyway. Less dense, less intense. Probably this was also due to the distance of the sky, which dispersed it.
He remembered the words of a book that the Soaker used to quote about African Sickness:
"Imagine a place where the sky does not overlook you, it passes through you, the air is not breathed, it is tasted..." it was exactly like that, now, but backwards.
If you look closely, even the faces and the looks of the people paid this distance and the gray all over. The faces were wrinkled, the eyes dull, and even when they laughed, it seemed to cost them effort.
"It's your impression," Mrs. Octavia rebuked him, "because the Italians when they come to Malindi are on vacation and are more relaxed, here people work."
"Even in Malindi many residents work, but they don't have that face...not even the assholes!"
Waiting for them in the forecourt of Terminal 2 was Mrs. Ottavia's eldest son, an energetic man dressed in dark grey (of course...) who led the way to a large black off-roader, one of those that in Kenya last a maximum of six months under the same owner and then are sold to a new unscrupulous person from Italy, who in turn will dump it after a few months in favor of an old Land Rover.
Nonno Kazungu was glued to the window. His excellent spoken Italian, which for years had been at odds with his bad speech, was catching words from the very fast interlocutor of Mrs. Octavia's son. Meanwhile the old gyroma was looking for trees in an auburn green expanse in which instead sprouted huge square houses.
"All Kakoneni put together can live in there."
"They are factories, grandfather," said Kadenge, "like the cheese factory in Malindi."
"Like the Robbialac dye factory in Mombasa?"
"Precisely"
"That's why then you find everything in Italy..."
The cars were running fast and on multiple lanes, the evening descended with a slowness that he also felt. He thought it was normal, because Nature didn't have so many colors to turn off. When you take away the blue of the sky, the red of the tracks and paths, the many greens of the forest, you immediately feel the difference, here it was just a matter of going from gray to black, no one would notice in a minute.
The old man resumed a dignified position, inside the SUV. He did not want to pass for the African from the "bush" who sees the white world for the first time and in its presence becomes as small as a child.
But curiosity and the desire to know would have triggered twenty questions a second.
Instead, he merely answered those of Mrs. Octavia's son.
"So are you coming over to be a butler?"
"As you wish."
"Are you happy to be in Italy?"
"It has always been my dream, to see this country. I'm happy and I'm thinking of how many things I'll be able to tell my village."
"Don't you want to stay here forever?"
Grandpa Kazungu didn't answer, he turned to Kadenge and Svaporato, who sat to his left in the back seats of the huge Bmw, and looked at them as if to say, "but this is dumber than Kibebe!"