The kiss of the tiger woman

This article is published in number 9 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until February 28, 2023

«Every time they ask me: “But how did your parents meet?”, I tell them the story of an Indonesian and an Italian who meet in Khartoum, Sudan, and go around the Africa riding a donkey». Every love story is unique, but there are few that qualify to become legendary.

The one that Geia Laconi43, tells in Daughter of the Tiger Man – i.e.: a Florentine girl who runs away from home at a very young age, ends up in a kind of desert Woodstock and falls in love with a boy with olive skin, long hair and princely bearing, from Sumatra, one of Indonesia’s 17,000 islands – however, it is not only a tribute to her origins (she herself was born in Sumatra). It is also, perhaps above all, a declaration of love to his “father”, Laconi (which later became his surname), who always out of love had come to live in Italy, in Florence, facing discrimination that we can only imagine, and which is died in a car accident when she was little more than a teenager.

I call Geia, whom I had met a few years ago in Milan, in her house in the mountains of the Tuscan-Romagna Apennines where she lives with her husband and two children, aged 12 and 10, and where the wi-fi is bad. And since in the end «everything comes back», it is no coincidence that as a life partner he chose Folco Terzani, author, director and man of the world, as well as son of Tiziano, the great writer and journalist who died in 2004. «It was Folco who push me not to be ashamed of my Asian side», he tells me in a WhatsApp vowel, «and give me the courage to write this completely sincere book».

Why “daughter of the tiger man”?
«Many years ago, in Sumatra there was a truly immense jungle and men lived in close contact with animals, especially tigers. It is said that, walking side by side, eventually men and tigers mixed so that men could change into tigers and vice versa. Behold, my father and I are descended from those men. Legend has it, if you are descended from the tiger man and find yourself in danger, you must look for a hollow tree, knock on it three times and the tiger man will come and rescue you. It was my father who told me that, as a child, in Indonesia, he had managed to
get out of the jungle where he was lost by following the tail of a tiger».

What was his relationship with his father?
“Ever since I was very little, he and I have had an idyllic relationship, a complete fusion. He was a very sweet man, distant from the western male typology, the hero father, the one inclined for adventures. He was everything for the family, a silent man who communicated with his looks. Of course, sometimes he was also a big head! Around the age of two though, when my parents separated, this unity cracked somewhat. Then until I was nine I lived with my mum and I saw him very little».

How come?
«My father had found himself a stranger in a society where immigration was unknown. In all likelihood he was the only if not one of the very few Indonesians in town. In addition to integration problems, there were also economic ones. My parents, who were very young, had had to start all over again: my mother had gone back to studying for her diploma, while my father had found work in a pastry shop and woke up in the middle of the night.
When they separated, he went to live in a hovel. He had no relationships. He started drinking.’

A dark time.
“The low point of our relationship. My mom, who wanted to protect me, rarely let me see it. In the meantime, I grew up without a father, and the older I got, the more I realized how different he was from the others: on the one hand I was ashamed of it, on the other I suffered from his pain».

She too felt different from her peers.
“It was very hard. As a child, one has a deep desire for conformity. That’s why I pretended to be perfect, better, kinder, to be able to remedy this “stain” of diversity. But all of this also made me develop this beautiful thing which is empathy and the instinct to seek help in something higher, in the universe».

Then things changed.
“Yes. In my 20s, when I met my first love, something inside of me started to piece itself together. My parents eventually got back together, and my brother was born. I was ready to recover the relationship with my father. Then he died.”

A dream, however, brought you together.
“It happened a few days after his death. I was in line in front of a take away when my cell phone rings. The line is very noisy, like a call from overseas. Then, very clearly, I get a: “I love you, I love you”, and again a very strong rustle. In the dream I know it is my dead father who is talking to me. So I say to him: “Dad, talk to me again, I’m here, I’m here, I hear you”, and I hear again: “I love you”. At that point my mom entered the room and the contact broke off. It was her last goodbye.’

Towards the end, she writes that one day, looking at her husband Folco, «a man who runs barefoot along the mountain paths, who sits for hours in front of a fire and who is perfectly at ease with both an ambassador and a ascetic», he understood that «everything came back». How did you meet?
«I was 26 years old and my boyfriend at the time, with whom we were having a crisis, was an avid reader of Tiziano Terzani. One day he had asked me to accompany him to see a show inspired by Tiziano and Angela, his wife, and Folco was in the front row. Then I remembered having seen him before at a party and feeling as if a beam of light was joining him. We exchanged emails that evening. He was always travelling, he wrote to me from Latin America, from the jungle, while he watched the whales. Back in Florence, we made an appointment and it all started. When I met him, I felt that I wanted to broaden my life, that I needed fresh air, experiences, to jump”.

He never knew his father.
“No, and I never knew his: Titian died a year before we met.”

Do they have much in common?
«My father was humble and noble just like Folco. They may go dressed in rags, but bearing, dignity, humility, uprightness, these things here make them gentlemen.’

When did you start writing this story?
«In 2019 in Bali, Indonesia, where we had just moved. Even if the island where I was born was another, it was like putting the spotlight on a part of me that until then had remained in the shadows. I felt reconnected to my childhood voice».

Shortly after, however, you returned to Italy…
«Yes, March 27, 2020, the day with the most deaths in Italy from Covid. We landed at Fiumicino, where there wasn’t a soul. We came to stay in the mountains, in Orsigna, a small village with a hundred inhabitants, a grocery store, a square and a bar. As I talk to her, I see the snow-capped mountains. Our house borders on the wood where there are wolves and wild boars.’

Don’t you miss the city?
«Even if we live in the mountains, I’m very much a citizen, and I miss walking around the centre, shopping, all those lights attract me a lot. But I know that the substance is found elsewhere».

In the book she writes that she was born to be a mother.
“Ever since I was little, I’ve always had this great maternal instinct. I used to ask my mom to take me to her friends’ house who had small children because I absolutely had to pick them up. When they asked me what job I wanted to do, I answered “mom”. When I became one, I realized that it was just like that. I flourished. I felt the sun inside. I think becoming a mother is a form of enlightenment. I enjoyed everything from being
pregnant breastfeeding, and I miss my kids so much when they were little ones. I often dream about them when they were two years old».

Doesn’t it scare you that one day they’ll leave home?
«No, indeed. When the big one is out, for example, I feel like it’s a good thing, that so I have time to do my own thing. It is right that they make their own experiences and also that a mother can rediscover another phase of her life. I experienced it with this book. I was no longer just the mom, but also a writer. It’s nice to experiment with other roles, the important thing is to always remain faithful to who we are».