In The Beginning Pt 2 My mother belonged to a powerful and wealthy family in Paris. Her father, Philippe Bunau-Varilla had come to the notice of Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had built the Suez Canal and was now the man behind the French excavation of the Panama Canal. At the age of twenty-one Philippe applied for a post on de Lesseps' Panama adventure. At twenty-seven he headed the French canal excavation works and the de Lesseps' project. The Panama project became Philippe's obsession and when de Lesseps French enterprise collapsed, Philippe managed to convince the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, to continue with the work in Panama started by the French, rather than pursuing the original North American plan to build the canal in Nicaragua. He was thus able to save the French honour and sell the remaining assets of de Lesseps' failed enterprise to the United States government in 1903 for the sum of $40 million. His intervention led to the creation of the Republic of Panama and the political clout he earned eventually led to the signing of the Hay/Bunau Treaty that granted the Canal Zone to the US in perpetuity. From their suite in the Waldorf Astoria in New York, his wife Ida triumphantly stitched the first Panama flag. His involvement in the Panama venture brought huge financial rewards to the family. With his brother Maurice, Philippe Bunau-Varilla bought Le Matin, then a small Parisian newspaper, and together they turned it into the leading daily paper in France. The rapid rise of Le Matin made Maurice, who, with his brother had been born into abject poverty, one of the stars of the Parisian political scene and the Bunau-Varilla name gained enormous status. The brothers' success in these two ventures laid the foundation of my mother's family fortune and was the base from which our own family tree was able, so far away, to grow as it did. My mother Giselle was conditioned by the norms of her era and the stifling restrictions imposed on a jeune fille of her milieu, where so much was forbidden to the wives and daughters of the society she grew up in. Proud of the wealth and achievements of her family, she nevertheless grew contemptuous, as she matured, of a world in which a woman's mind was shaped to the acceptance of selfish masculine indulgence. So marked was she by it, that her attitude towards men thereafter remained one of open scorn, and she later made sure that her own daughters would never be thus conditioned. In so doing she also paved the way for me and gave me the perspective by which I later chose to lead my own life - never to depend on anyone for my deliverance, for dependency implied loss of freedom. It became my credo and in turn I passed it on to my own girls. Subjugated she might have been, but my mother had also inherited her father's adventurous genes. After two failed marriages to fortune-hunters, as she referred to them, she took up the bohemian lifestyle of a single artist in Paris. She studied under Auguste Rodin, by then a very old man, and later prompted her uncle Maurice to launch the intensive campaign which was taken up by Le Matin that led to the creation of the Rodin Museum in Paris. She travelled to North Africa with her numerous cousins and friends and spent long periods in Morocco and Tunisia drawing and sculpting the people in the streets. She had tasted the nectar of freedom and moved into a studio at No. 9, rue Notre Dame des Champs, where she lived alone, free from family restraints, happy and fulfilled as an artist, if not yet entirely as a woman. It was to this studio that Mario Rocco, the man who would become my father, came to lunch with a gathering of artists, one of whom was Amedeo Modigliani. The next day Mario wrote to his mother in Naples 'I have met a beautiful and important woman who may change my life'. Little did he know at the time what he had let himself in for. A rootless exile from Mussolini's fascist Italy, Mario had landed in Paris at the age of twenty-six, after il Duce had had him escorted to the French frontier for insubordination. The heady whirlwind romance with Giselle Bunau-Varilla waltzed him through dinner parties and luncheons in Paris, on offbeat holidays in her converted fort on the Mediterranean island of Port Cros and on her uncle Maurice's yacht, the Orion, where he frequented the artists' communities and met the salty fishermen she befriended around the island. With his dashing good looks and winning Neapolitan laughter, he soon became a favourite everywhere he went, but he quickly realised his reckless nature was leading him out of his depth. In a letter I found many decades later, he wrote to his mother: 'The lesson learned from this tumultuous existence is never to think of tomorrow and to forget yesterday...but the two Is within me - das Ich and der Ich - are constantly at war with each other; the one involuntarily succumbs to her influence and is happy to confide in her, the other instinctively tears itself away...she tells me she is in love with me, says she wants to marry me, but how can I marry a woman who is worth a million dollars, I am but a penniless exile...a piece of clay in her artist hands...the sweetness of this last thought, nevertheless, makes me drunk...'. His instinct for preservation finally got the better of him and he abandoned her on her island. He boarded a ship in Marseilles and sailed for the United States. A year later she cabled him in New York where he was struggling to survive, and suggested he join her in accepting the invitation to Africa. Together they turned their backs on the northern hemisphere and a life to which neither had adjusted, and headed towards the Dark Continent. IN THE BEGINNING 2 of 3     <--- previous next ---> FOREWARD | IN THE BEGINNING | VANISHING AFRICA | IN THE BOSOM OF MY FAMILY