Andrea was a simple and friendly man.
At times you could hardly get him off your back, because he would slip into speeches that were never banal but dead-end, which perhaps pleased him more than his interlocutor.
But at a certain point he would slip in a witty Romanesco joke, never an end in itself, and it would make you smile.
Then you would be in trouble, because you would give him a free pass to go on for another half an hour.
Until he suddenly froze, looked you in the eye and said: "I've busted your balls, I'm leaving...".
But then he would come back after two steps for one last remark.
Andrea was a cultured and curious person, which is why he was sometimes insinuating, nosy and provocative.
His unmistakable hoarse voice, halfway between a Chicago bluesman and Sandro Ciotti, did the rest.
He arrived in Malindi in the early nineties, with long hair below his shoulder blades, which he often pulled back into a wild tail.
With the (usual) village imagination, the Italians had nicknamed him 'Andrea the Apache'.
But he had become more of a friend to the Kenyans than to the community of fellow countrymen.
It must have been his ideas, as a revolutionary still steeped in 'liberté egalité fraternité', that had immediately branded him as a 'communist'.
He was not completely unfamiliar with them, even though he came from a very good family: his father was a well-known journalist and had important relatives.
But in Malindi he led a truly integrated life, and did not disdain evenings in African clubs, as well as dinners with the many friends who came looking for him. The glass of campari inevitably in his hand and those seven or eight coffees at all hours were his hallmarks.
He had met Anna Morosetti, a Kenyan girl who was the daughter of an Italian pioneer in Malindi, and with her he opened the boutique at the G.A.Complex (Kiwi), also making some real estate investments.
There he had become a point of reference for Italian holidaymakers, who often turned to him for advice, tips or simply to have a friendly and disinterested chat.
With him you could talk about rock music, because he was a highly educated fan, but also about football because of his curious passion (for a Romanaccio like him) for the colours of the Milan team.
Charles Bukowski would have described him as a 'barfly', Andrea was certainly one of those characters who always deserve a chapter in a novel.
And, he would have said, "not a fucking novel".
The fact that he was not in good health, due to his sixty-two years of unsparing life, was no secret to those who met him every day.
But with his impassive aplòmb, he didn't give a damn.
Yesterday he was admitted to hospital in Malindi for intestinal complications, but he was unable to spend the night before a possible operation.
Hello André. Today at People Bar we'll get a coffee, a cigarette and a "li mortacci" in your honour.