Out Of Africa

Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen]
Out Of Africa (1937)

Karen Blixen, que utilizava os pseudónimos Isak Dinesen nas edições em língua inglesa, e Tania Blixen nas de língua alemã, fez de Out Of Africa, mais que um livro de memórias, um registo da mudança dos tempos. Há uma certa nostalgia por um passado que se esfuma um pouco a cada dia que passa, desde as alterações na paisagem natural, às perdas e mortes de pessoas próximas, até ao abandono final da propriedade onde tinha planeado ficar o resto da vida. Da sua herdade, a plantação de café junto ao monte Ngongo, próximo de Nairobi, no Quénia, assiste-se ao ocaso de uma Inglaterra colonial no limiar dos novos tempos, onde o rugido dos leões à noite ainda convive com a chegada dos tractores agrícolas, sinal de uma "civilização" onde deixa de haver lugar para os pioneiros e para os aventureiros. E onde, segundo conta, os nativos, pelo convívio forçado com os colonos de diferentes origens, são já mais cosmopolitas do que os próprios agrários, dedicados ao quotidiano da sua vida sedentária.

When we had all our kilns lighted we sat down and talked of life. I learned much about Knudsen’s past life, and the strange adventures that had fallen to him wherever he had wandered. You had, in these conversations, to talk of Old Knudsen himself, the one righteous man,—or you would sink into that black pessimism against which he was warning you. He had experienced many things: shipwrecks, plague, fishes of unknown colouring, drinking-spouts, water-spouts, three contemporaneous suns in the sky, false friends, black villainy, short successes, and showers of gold that instantly dried up again. One strong feeling ran through his Odyssey: the abomination of the law, and all its works, and all its doings. He was a born rebel, he saw a comrade in every outlaw. A heroic deed meant to him in itself an act of defiance against the law. He liked to talk of kings and royal families, jugglers, dwarfs and lunatics, for them he took to be outside the law,—and also of any crime, revolution, trick, and prank, that flew in the face of the law. But for the good citizen he had a deep contempt, and law-abidingness in any man was to him the sign of a slavish mind. He did not even respect, or believe in, the law of gravitation, which I learnt while we were felling trees together: he saw no reason why it should not be—by unprejudiced, enterprising people—changed into the exact reverse.
[...]
In the Reserve I have sometimes come upon the Iguana, the big lizards, as they were sunning themselves upon a flat stone in a riverbed. They are not pretty in shape, but nothing can be imagined more beautiful than their colouring. They shine like a heap of precious stones or like a pane cut out of an old church window. When, as you approach, they swish away, there is a flash of azure, green and purple over the stones, the colour seems to be standing behind them in the air, like a comet’s luminous tail.
Once I shot an Iguana. I thought that I should be able to make some pretty things from his skin. A strange thing happened then, that I have never afterwards forgotten. As I went up to him, where he was lying dead upon his stone, and actually while I was walking the few steps, he faded and grew pale, all colour died out of him as in one long sigh, and by the time that I touched him he was grey and dull like a lump of concrete. It was the live impetuous blood pulsating within the animal, which had radiated out all that glow and splendour. Now that the flame was put out, and the soul had flown, the Iguana was as dead as a sandbag.