I am a big house seen from afar
Not even a whole crowd can take it apart
but if they do, it takes revenge.
And when those from across the sea catch sight of me
I add them to my servants.
—“Ibonia,” traditional epic of Madagascar, translated by Lee Haring
There are houses you don’t want, that, nevertheless, enter your life and bring with them other lives, whole other worlds. There are countries you visit that lay hold of you and don’t let go, even if you diligently attempt to remain a tourist. These thoughts have been incubating in the mind of Shay Senna ever since she—a Black American woman with scant interest in the continent of Africa except as a near-mythical motherland—unexpectedly and unwillingly became mistress of the Red House, a sprawling household in northwestern Madagascar.
It is because of the big house and its bad fortune that she is at present in a dreamlike situation, hurrying under the calescent subequatorial sun through the back lanes of a fishermen’s shantytown on the island of Naratrany, in pursuit of a tiny Sakalava girl in a white satin gown.
In the light-soaked stillness of the hottest noontime hour, when mongrel dogs lie flat as puddles in patches of shade, the barefoot child, who looks like an eerie carnival figure in that glaring dress with its flounces and ribbons, skips in and out of sight through a maze of tottering bamboo huts. Occasionally she turns her little braided head and makes a cheeky, beckoning motion with a spindly brown arm as she guides Shay and Shay’s head housekeeper, Bertine la Grande, to the home of the man referred to, usually in whispers, as the Neighbor.
The tall, stately Bertine, also barefoot, also Sakalava, leads the way. Dressed in a sweeping print lamba, her geometrically knotted hair hidden by a big, sun-faded newsboy hat that gives her a curiously regal air, she chuckles softly each time the small white apparition flashes into sight, then treads on casually as if engaged in an everyday errand.
Shay stumbles along in her wake, hampered by the long skirt she was told to wear, and hobbled as well by her American common sense, which is struggling with the awareness that she has crossed a threshold into the deep unknown. Her woven shoulder bag, concealing a wad of ariary bills and the small gift Bertine suggested, bangs against her side, as she tries not to think of the fact that she is seeking out the Neighbor, a notorious conjurer, in hopes that he can lift the spell on her house.
How has this peculiar quest come about? You could say it is because of something else that hasn’t come about: the housewarming ceremony that Shay’s husband, Senna, a rich but stingy Italian businessman, neglects to hold when he finishes building his fantasy vacation residence on Naratrany. So tightfisted is Senna that not even one zebu bull is slaughtered for the local villagers, not one festive step danced, not one glass of rum poured on the ground for thirsty ancestors, when the last thatch has been laid on the big villa he constructed on what was formerly Colonel Andrianasolo’s lot on Finoana Beach.
Naratrany, a very minor part of Madagascar, is a small lush island with a central crater that gives it from afar the look of a squashed green fedora. Framed by coral reefs, it is one of a chain of ancient fumaroles that in the Tertiary period arose to become satellites to the huge main island. Though defined by cartographers as part of Africa, Madagascar really belongs only to itself, having developed its independent character over the millions of years since the primeval continent of Gondwana broke apart and abandoned the shield-shaped landmass in the sea between Mozambique and India. The topography of the country ranges from deserts of lunar desolation to swathes of emerald rice fields; from allées of baobabs to impenetrable forested uplands; but its coastal fringe of palmy islets is perhaps loveliest of all. In a letter from the early 1900s, a French priest (and amateur poet) stationed on Naratrany describes it as “un petit morceau du paradis, tombé des cieux.” He notes as well that the name Naratrany seems to mean “broken” or “wounded,” though it is unclear whether this refers to a forgotten battle or the island’s craterous shape.
Located on an ancient Indian Ocean trade route, the tiny dot of land has for centuries been a magnet for explorers, missionaries, pirates, and plunderers of all descriptions. It is the territory of the Sakalava, one of Madagascar’s nineteen peoples, a linchpin in that martial tribe’s vast kingdom, which once covered all western Madagascar. Sakalava lived on Naratrany before the earliest Indian merchants arrived; were present with their zebu cattle when the pirates Tew and Avery sailed through; were there when their powerful rivals the Merina, aided by British guns, swept down from the highlands to conquer the coast; were in residence when France annexed all Madagascar as a colony, and still there in 1960 when the colony won independence.
This history connects to the story of the Red House, since the swathe of beachfront that Colonel Andrianasolo sells to Senna belonged, a century earlier, to a Malagasy nobleman, a cousin of the Sakalava queen. A now-forgotten quarrel cut short the life of this gentleman and one of his retainers, and their remains still rest discreetly in a far corner of the property, concealed by the roots of a huge kapok tree.
Colonel Andrianasolo, a Merina whose father snapped up the property just after independence, knows all about the hidden graves when, after intense bargaining with the wily Italian, he signs the certificat d’achat. But the colonel prudently keeps silent about the unusual feature of the terrain. He only expresses a neighborly hope—Andrianasolo vacations on the next beach over, in a properly exorcized 1970s bungalow—that Senna’s future housewarming celebration will include the proper formalities, and the sacrifice of two zebus.
But, like many self-made men, Senna is willful in strange ways. Much of his youth was spent helping his family hustle their way out of postwar poverty in the malarial rice fields of Vercelli, and, now in middle age, he is contentedly ensconced as ruler of his own profitable company that brokers repair services for agricultural machines all over Europe. A wiry Lombard with a brawler’s crooked nose, he has a steel-trap mind and shrewd green eyes able to ferret out the scurviest tactics of his competitors. But unlike most Italians of his hardscrabble generation, he has an early life that includes an odd chapter: as a teenager, he spent a year in Rome in the dolce vita era, working for a cousin who was a cameraman at Cinecittà. The immersion in the magical atmosphere of golden age Italian cinema, the sight of film stars walking the earth amid the rubble of a world war and the ruins of imperial Rome, awakened a dreaming side in young Senna. But when his father suddenly died and he had to return to the rice lands, he put this part of his nature under wraps. There it remains for decades, until he has divorced his first wife, and his savings are snug in discreet refuges around the world.
Then, in his forties and free at last to indulge in midlife folly, he sets off on a six-month fishing trip around the Indian Ocean with a buddy from his military service year, a weathered sea dog of a Calabrian baron, born in Italian Somaliland. Crossing the Mozambique Channel, en route from the Comoros islands, their sloop draws up upon the eastern coast of Naratrany, and at first sight of the island, Senna is struck with a raw mixture of feelings: a roundhouse punch of mingled amazement, ambition, lust: what he imagines the early explorers felt, staring dumbfounded from their caravels.
Motionless at the rail, he gazes over Finoana Bay to a low-rising land formation that is dazzlingly, virginally green, as if it is the first time that color has been used on earth. Its undulating slopes are stacked with shadowed rain forest and the kinetic lighter hues of sugarcane; the shoreline is hemmed with a string of palm and casuarina and a long curve of empty coral beach, white and perfect as a fresh slice of apple. Senna isn’t religious, but the arc of beach recalls to him the pale folded hands of the Baroque statue of the Holy Mother that was the sole treasure of his childhood parish church. And he, the astute businessman who knows the value of instinct, then and there determines to buy that beach and build a house. Decides this with the violent sense of yielding that an aging man feels when he plunges into an infatuation with a young girl.
“Be careful,” warns his Calabrian friend, an old Africa hand. “Places like this aren’t ever as simple as they look! Especially here. These people are part Bantu and part Indonesian, and part something else that is just pure strangeness. You can never tell where you are with them.”
Of course, Senna knows nothing about Madagascar, not one thing about the country’s epic geological past, nothing about the quirky evolutionary journey of its fabled wildlife, or the nineteen tribes and their language with its recondite Swahili-Polynesian roots. Like many Italians, he adores the tropics, and over years of growing prosperity has vacationed with his family and friends in the Bahamas, Thailand, Bali, and Tahiti.
He sees these places of coralline seas as a single landscape, flat as a Rousseau painting. A backdrop against which to bring to life his youthful adventure fantasies, rooted in his love for the pulp novels of Emilio Salgari, the best-selling nineteenth-century bard of the exotic. Salgari never actually traveled out of provincial Italy, but his fevered descriptions of Asian, African, and South American jungles and lagoons are as detailed as encyclopedias can make them. The author’s swashbuckling heroes, who battle headhunters in ancient temples, commandeer Moghul treasure ships, and rescue swooning heroines from seraglios, fired the imaginations of generations of boys in Latin countries—boys including Gabriel García Márquez, and Che Guevara. And Senna.
Added to these fantasies are yarns he has heard of Libertalia, a seventeenth-century colony said to have been founded in Madagascar by an idealistic crew of European pirates. Legend describes Libertalia as a raffish utopian settlement, in which all property was shared and all license allowed. What with dusky concubines, commodious bamboo residential huts, communal chests of gold, freed African slaves, and high-minded gentlemen buccaneers who frequently discoursed on the rights of man, Libertalia seems to have offered everything. But did it ever really exist? Senna likes to think it did.
“Think what you want,” says the Calabrian. “But true or false, the old story ends badly. The local Malagasy tribesmen get sick of the settlers and wipe out the colony in one night. Not a stick or a bone left. Happens over and over again in places like this.”
But Senna ignores this implied warning. The Calabrian, he reflects, hasn’t even had the brains to hang on to one cent of his family’s prewar coffee fortune.
Senna himself is a man who gets things done fast. He’s quite used to skipping cultural niceties and clinching overnight business deals with foreigners—often Chinese or Russian—using the internationally respected language of brutal haggling. Thus, he gains the startled admiration of Colonel Andrianasolo, and in record time has in hand an exquisitely hand-copied French-Malagasy deed of purchase for a swathe of beachfront with rice paddies and cane fields behind it.
Finoana Beach is not, as he first thought, empty. Behind the palms are two villages, Finoana and Renirano, full of fishermen and cane workers, and a whole network of life, complete with markets, a tiny mosque, a Catholic church, and a ramshackle French-built elementary school. To Senna, this means only that he’ll have more men for construction, at weekly wages that would barely pay for coffee for workmen back in Italy.
So the house goes up with almost magical swiftness. The terrain has not been built on before, but has been extensively planted: coconut, mango, jackfruit, tamarind, banana, as well as flowers: jasmine, frangipani, hibiscus, ylang-ylang. The pleasure Senna derives from this profusion of color and fragrances leads him to christen the place Villa Gioia. Though he knows it’s a commonplace name, better suited to a second-rate pensione in Rimini, he reckons it will be the only one on this island.
He alone designs the house, though he works out a deal with a local construction kingpin, a Karan Indian from Diego Suarez, whose fleet of boutres, fat wooden schooners, swing into the bay to deliver concrete as well as timber from Madagascar’s shrinking forests. Senna is dizzied by the infinite possibilities offered by using First World money in a Third World country, one of the poorest on earth. Like a djinn out of the Arabian Nights, he summons up a structure of fanciful grandiosity, a pastiche of tropical styles from around the world. There is a soaring peaked roof suggesting a palm-thatched circus tent, inspired by the dramatic huts of Sumba, Indonesia; an interior with one end dominated by a grandly swung double staircase, like that in an Antiguan plantation house, rising to a mezzanine with a curving lineup of bedrooms; a sweep of open-plan ground floor separated from a wide veranda only by tall jalousies, like a certain inn in Trincomalee. At the garden entrance stand tree-trunk pillars carved with leering primitive faces—copied, Senna cheerfully admits, from a ride at Florida’s Disney World.
Like most big tropical residences, the place is a compound: breezeways lead to a separate kitchen and other outbuildings, including a bungalow for the house manager. But most striking is the expanse of floor that a visitor faces when entering. This floor is concrete: sanded, stained with many coats of iron-oxide paint, which, waxed and polished, acquires a warm maroon hue that glows in the shade of the cavernous roof almost like something alive. Because of it, nearby villagers immediately begin to call Villa Gioia ny trano mena—the Red House. La Maison Rouge. In any language, the appellation is such a natural fit that nobody, not even Senna, ever uses anything else, or after a short while even recalls that there was an earlier name.
Of course Senna’s acts of architectural hubris are minuscule in comparison to those of pharaohs, sultans, and Aztec kings. He brings his vision to life with the glee of an eighteenth-century English lord adding follies to his ancestral acres, or an American robber baron transplanting parts of dismembered chateaux to Newport. And in the end, mysteriously, it all works.
Though it could have looked cartoonish, the big roof rises with undeniable majesty above the feathery line of palms between the cane fields and the beach. Unlike anything built by the Sakalava, the Indian merchants, or the colonial French, it nevertheless appears plausible in that landscape, and Senna is delighted to see his creation up there against the sky. He isn’t a bad man; but after long years spent peddling irrigation valves, his soul is thrown off-balance by the possibilities of a country where he is not just a successful businessman, but a nabob.
So in a fit of arrogance he declares that he, Senna, won’t be guided by the broad hints of Colonel Andrianasolo and the local village headmen; will not inaugurate the new house with the customary feast for the construction workers, neighbors, and friends. Not until such time as he feels like it. Maybe never. And he will certainly never go to the trouble and expense of butchering a pair of black and white zebu bulls just to honor a lot of superstitious claptrap.
And so the islanders—the fishermen, charcoal burners, cane workers, hotel maids, gardeners, mechanics, market vendors, prostitutes, woodcarvers, middle-class shopkeepers, and professionals—observe this neglect of the proprieties without rancor, but with a sense of inevitable consequences. Particularly the Sakalava feel this way. They are the abiding ones, the teratany, residents essential to the place as volcanic bedrock, for generations washed over by the caprice and varied abuses of the vazaha, as they call the foreigners who come and go on the land. These locals know all about the disrespected dead, and they watch, unsurprised, as the Red House begins, even before it is furnished, to accumulate an evil atmosphere. It happens bit by bit, just as dust and litter build up in the corners of an unswept room.
And finally, as is so often the case, it becomes a woman’s job to clean things up.
Shay Gilliam, Senna’s second wife, doesn’t imagine when she first sees the Red House that because of it she’ll soon be engaged in a life-and-death struggle, swept up in an occult battle that devolves on mastery, on many kinds of possession.
What are mastery and possession after all, but advanced forms of desire? And Shay, a university instructor raised with staunch East Bay political correctness amid the progressive Black middle class of Oakland, California, has, emphatically, never desired a tropical manse like a jumped-up plantation fantasy. Throughout a bookish childhood and beyond, Shay, always known as the flighty one in her family, has cherished many peculiar wishes (an ability to walk through walls is just one), but not once has she pictured herself as the chatelaine of a neocolonial pleasure palace, conjured up on African soil.
But the Red House has been in her husband’s life longer than she has. During their first meeting, at a wedding in Como, Senna boasts of his Madagascar project to Shay, as she flirts with him from under the brim of an extravagant couture straw hat, and their unlikely romance begins. Unlikely because the tall, mischievously smiling Fulbright scholar with her Ivy League degrees seems to have nothing in common with the short, pushy Lombard businessman whose sole diploma is a high school ragioneria certificate. Yet this odd couple surprise themselves, and those who know them, by promptly falling in love, with an intensity that precludes anything but joining their lives together.
Shay is bowled over by a man so different from the cerebral American and European lovers she’s had since she left her first brief marriage to her college boyfriend, a Jamaican medical student whose evangelical views on wifely submission emerged once vows were spoken. Senna is like no one she has known before: a man her father, a professor at Mills, disapproves of not because Senna is white and foreign—the family tree with its high-yellow Virginia roots includes many a Caucasian ancestor and their Oakland neighborhood is peppered with international marriages—but because he didn’t go to college. To Shay, fresh out of graduate school, Senna is a new experience: this cheeky, charismatic Italian a decade and a half older than she is, a businessman with an unfaltering grip on the concrete facts of life; a man who deals (in some mysterious commercial way) with agricultural machines; who buys land—has bought part of an actual island. A man who hustled his way out of poverty, the way so many Black Americans have had to do. A man, she early discovers, who conceals behind his pragmatic exterior a vein of wayward fantasy that matches her own.
Senna, a sensualist by nature, at first pursues Shay for her physical beauty—the length of her, her body with its gleam of terra-cotta, her shallow-set eyes that render her face both stern and childlike—beauty that could belong to many hot terrestrial places where different races intermingle in seaports. Moreover, she is American, like the film actresses he worshipped as a kid at Cinecittà. He is impressed by her fancy education, her fluent Italian and French, her schoolmarmish air of familiarity with all corners of the far-flung landscape of literature. But mostly he is drawn to an unknown quantity, a recklessness he finds deep in her gaze.
The construction of the Red House runs parallel to their courtship, something that by unspoken agreement remains behind the scenes, almost like an erotic secret. Shay visits Naratrany on their first trip together, passing through from Cape Town to Mauritius; she sees a concrete foundation and a beautiful blank beach and hardly thinks of it again.
But Senna, privately, remains obsessed. He feels, somehow, that the house is a task he has to complete before he can properly embark on this second marriage. He travels back and forth from Italy to Madagascar and, on a business trip to Hong Kong, fills a container with old Macau furniture and has it shipped to the island. He hires an unemployed Greek hotel manager named Kristos to act as foreman for the construction and, later, to run the place. In the back of his mind, he holds an evolving image of his creation: the lofty framework of the roof rising bare as a giant hoopskirt between the hills and the ocean. Lilliputian figures of palm thatchers clamber nimbly over the wooden ribs, filling in the spaces.
For her part, Shay is distracted by love, by marriage, by remapping career plans. Her thoughts are overwhelmed by the whole new direction of her future—a circumstance she is aware that she courted years earlier, when she began to focus her studies on Black expatriate writers like William Demby, and came to Rome for dissertation research. Now she, too, has chosen the expatriate path, and in this whirlwind of change the idea of a connection to a construction site far away near the Tropic of Capricorn is too much to contemplate. Italy is enough of a challenge, with its labyrinthine family dynamics, its sunlit surfaces concealing shadowy Catholic taboos. She assumes that her relation to Madagascar will simply be an extension of the European culture she is learning to negotiate; part of the custom—slightly shocking to industrious Americans—of long vacations, the idle existence of the watering place, the villeggiatura. In her early view of this new life, Naratrany features simply as a decorative detail: a wallpaper print, like an exotic toile de Jouy.
Only Senna’s mother, a sturdy, good-humored widow, reveling in prosperity after a youth spent stitching rice sacks, sees the connection between the amiable, brown-skinned American professoressa her son has presented her as a second daughter-in-law and the property he has acquired in hot, brown, and heathen Africa. Like many Italians, she has few qualms about race and quickly grows fond of Shay, who impresses her as ladylike, if a bit high-strung; but, knowing her boy, she predicts that things will not go easily for his new wife—as things will not go smoothly with that wasteful and unnecessary vacation villa he has built in the jungle at the dangerous ends of the earth. It’s the fault of those Salgari books, she thinks, and she’s right. But she keeps her mouth shut.
“Look what a palace I built for you!” boasts Senna, when Shay first sets eyes on the Red House.
It is July in the late nineties, before there are direct charter flights from Italy to Naratrany. Husband and wife, married six months, have made the overnight haul from Milan to Paris, then Paris to Antananarivo, the capital in the rugged interior of Madagascar. Awaiting their connecting flight to the coast, they spend a day and a night in an old French colonial hotel, their moods cast down by the cold up-country climate. The air is full of history and ghosts there in the City of the Thousand, sacred highland seat of the Merina kings and queens, ancient scene of sanguinary clashes with religious heretics and intrusive Europeans. Though the streets pullulate with crowds and decrepit vehicles, there is an otherworldliness to the place, with its stark azure skies, the stone arches of its ruined palace, its brick houses stacked along the hillsides like toy blocks, its beggar children gazing through blowing dust with the shining eyes of angels. Shay studies the faces around her, with their mixture of Asian and African traits, and feels that she is somewhere unlike any other place on earth: a city aloof, melancholy, and—despite its decay and festering poverty—emanating a strange, secret purity.
At dawn they fly to the coastal islands. In dazzling sunlight, the Indian Ocean reveals from above its deep patterns of blue buried in blue and Naratrany draws closer, rolling with green pelt of cane and forest, coral beaches blazing like sudden smiles, mangrove swamps bleeding mud into the sea. Then the descent from the small plane onto the macadam airstrip and the first caress of tropical air like an infant’s hand on the face.
On her first brief stopover, Shay found Naratrany a place of standard postcard beauty. But today in the coastal heat, she finds the same powerful atmosphere of secrecy and innocence as in the cold highlands. The morning air has an almost supernatural clarity as she and Senna head out of the tiny airport in a dusty Toyota pickup and jounce along a once-paved road through a landscape out of the morning of time. Falling away from each side of a high ridge are green declivities that cup dense groves, crowned with flambeaux of red blossom and hung with giant lianas bearing seedpods the length of a man’s arm. She can imagine the rare animals hidden deep in the leaves, their jeweled eyes veiled against the sunlight: lemurs, aye-ayes, dwarf chameleons, flying foxes—arcane species alive nowhere else on earth.
Shay, typically, has consulted no guidebooks, but instead skimmed a motley assortment of writing on Madagascar: annals of early Chinese and Persian explorers; records of Dutch slavers; convoluted accounts of Merina and Sakalava alliances with England and France; yellowed treatises by amateur naturalists and missionaries like the redoubtable James Sibree; histories of adventurers like the shipwrecked seaman Robert Drury, or Jean Laborde, the French industrial wizard and lover of the Merina queen. From this patchy research has come one clear idea: outsiders always want something from Madagascar. The emotion is always the same, whatever the thing desired: whether it is to establish the country as a locus for fabulous legends of gigantic birds and man-eating trees; or as a source for gemstones, rare butterflies, rosewood, spices, slaves; or as fertile ground to produce sugar, vanilla, raffia, cocoa; as a foothold for ascendancy in the Indian Ocean; or even—as Hitler once planned—as a convenient penal colony for the exiled Jews of Europe.
These thoughts are in her mind as they pass Saint Grimaud, the harbor town. Once a French administrative center, it is now a crumbling backwater where zebu graze in the weedy promenade, and washing is spread to dry on the battered cannons above the port. Near the central market, vendors and customers in bright lambas stream by bearing baskets of vegetables and sacks of rice on their heads, pushing past schoolchildren in tattered smocks, bush taxis crammed with passengers, mud-caked tractors transporting field hands. A turn at a crossroads lined with food stalls leads past an overgrown European cemetery, then across a river where half-clothed women pound washing against stones. And soon the dusty brick-colored road bursts into open country, carrying them through a roiling sea of sugarcane, dotted with abandoned hulks of dead machinery.
“A few more years and this cane will all be gone,” remarks Senna. For this arrival, he has already assumed his vacation persona: hair in a military crop, camouflage vest, and a pair of mirrored sunglasses that suggest that to complete the look he should have an AK-47 slung across his back. “Since independence, the sugar bosses have been getting by with the old French machines. Even when the Marxists were in power back in the seventies, they didn’t turn their noses up at colonial leftovers! But it’s been too long—the soil is worn out, and the gear is falling apart.”
“Can’t your company help?” asks Shay, thinking of the clanking combine harvesters somehow connected to Senna’s work. She sees sugarcane as an emblem of historical evil, but she is sure that the abrupt death of an industry will create extreme misery.
Senna laughs and pats her knee. He has no sentimentality when it comes to business. And he loves to explain things to his overeducated wife, robust truths about the way the world functions outside of books. “We charge actual money, which nobody has here,” he says. “No, it’s going to happen: the cane will die, this land will go up for grabs, and tourism will close the gap. Golf courses, big hotels, like on Zanzibar and Mauritius. That’s the future for places like this. But tesoro, you know we’re not here for work. Did I tell you the story of Libertalia?”
“Libertalia is a myth,” says Shay mildly, for the umpteenth time, as she settles her sunglasses and tightens her scarf to protect her short hair from the blowing dust. She doesn’t go into the literary genealogy she found when she sourced the legend: how it appears in just one book, A History of the Pyrates, posited to be the pseudonymous work of Daniel Defoe; how the tale fits into the utopian travelogue tradition that runs back beyond Thomas More, to Plato and Eusebius. And how she was surprised to discover that, in modern times, William Burroughs chose Libertalia as the setting for his apocalyptic novella Ghost of Chance. But Shay has no inclination to lecture her husband about literature. He wouldn’t listen anyway, and, strangely enough, this is one of the things she admires about him.
Senna has gotten increasingly worked up as they approach the Red House and his big reveal; he schusses the truck around the pits and gullies of the broken road like a kid on a dirt bike. They pass a congeries of discolored cement huts built for fieldworkers, where ducks and chickens wander, women pounding rice in tall wooden mortars look up curiously, and small ragged children run out waving. “Salut, vazaha!” they holler.
Dust billows as Senna jolts to a stop beside a half-buried railroad trestle road once used to transport cane. At the crossing is a corroded warning sign still displaying the faint image of a small locomotive, like a nursery school drawing. There the land rolls downhill and offers the first view of the roof of the Red House rising above treetops against the impossible blue glare of the sea beyond.
“Look what a palace I built you!” Senna makes his proclamation now, throwing his hands open wide in an impresario’s grand gesture.
And Shay is surprised to feel her breath catch in her throat. Conflicting emotions seize her: a flare of feminine pride that Senna should have tried so hard to impress her, but also alarm. She realizes that she’s been hoping the house wouldn’t be beautiful—has vaguely felt that it would be easier to accept if it were tasteless: overblown, like a reception hall at a tacky beach resort, or cramped, like a badly proportioned summer cottage—the kind of place you end up loving like an annoying relative.
Instead she sees a lofty thatched roof peak, with something impressive about its isolation and its size, taller than the tallest palms that fringe the long bay. Shay recognizes the harmony of the proportions, and in the same moment feels that something about the place is all wrong. Not its architecture, but its mere existence is an error in a way she can’t yet define, but which goes far beyond being an emblem of wealth in a land of poverty. What she does know, immediately, is that—of course—it was never built for her. The reality is that here, in this remote corner of the world, her new husband has raised a monument to an unseemly private fantasy. And now that she has seen it, she somehow shares the blame.
Into her mind comes the opening line of Out of Africa, a book that she has both loved for Blixen’s lapidary prose style and deplored for the grandiose paternalism that shapes the author’s vision. “I had a farm in Africa…” As a college freshman, eager to establish herself as a cultural warrior, she once wrote a passionate essay describing those few words as the rallying cry of imperialist oppression. For what does had mean, eighteen-year-old Shay typed furiously, but the act of rape?
Now these thoughts dissolve as Senna leans over the gearshift and hugs her uncomfortably against the pockets of his camouflage vest. “Well, what do you think?” he demands.
“È bellissima,” Shay tells him. Because that is the truth, and for now other truths are unsayable.
But it does happen that when she first steps onto the veranda of the Red House she feels a chill. Just a feather of cold air that brushes her skin. Uncanny, there and gone. For an instant it dizzies her, nearly makes her stumble. Probably a touch of heat exhaustion or migraine after the endless trip, instantly forgotten as she rights herself, lets go of Senna’s hand, and steps under the roof. Ever afterward, coming in from the blazing subequatorial sun to the deep shade of that house, Shay has the same sensation, which she’ll come to recognize as the signature of the place. With time she’ll welcome the feeling, think of it as marking a change in dimensions, an entry into penumbral solemnity, like entering an old Italian church.
Now her dazzled eyes adjust to take in the dim sweep of space, the double staircase up to the encircling gallery, the soaring ceiling of rafters and braided thatch. With its ground floor framed in open shutters, the place seems like a way station between indoors and out, walled with the mingled greens of tropical foliage, with a northern view over rice paddies and cane fields and a southern view down a palm-shaded walk to the sea. She stands in the center, staring around her, silenced by the realization of what Senna has achieved here. The spaciousness and air of comfort, the islands of gleaming colonial furniture, the richly colored kilims, the occasional statue: it is all just right, so much so that the usual wifely tasks of decoration have been abrogated. Except: “Why are the floors red?” she blurts out.
Senna, who’s been watching his wife’s reaction with childish eagerness, looks pained. He goes into a long, testy explanation of how this crimson painted finish is traditional around the Indian Ocean, and how much trouble it took to achieve it. And Shay dispels his annoyance by grabbing and kissing him while pouring out praise. Above all concealing her first unnerving impression: that the ground is covered with blood.
A flicker of movement reveals that the two of them are not alone—as no one ever is in that house. From behind the left staircase emerges a small group of Malagasy people, moving toward them a bit hesitantly: three men dressed in T-shirts and shorts and six women in blouses and floral lambas, their hair braided or knotted in twists. They are the domestic staff of the Red House, and they are all looking with intense curiosity at Shay.
What do they see? A tall, almond-skinned young woman dressed in crumpled Italian linen, her short kinky hair held back with a wide striped band like that of a sixties film actress. A pretty woman whose mixed-race looks could place her origin as Réunion Island or Mauritius, except for something American in her loose-jointed stance, her eager, unshielded gaze.
They themselves, this cluster of men and women, have skin tones that run the Indian Ocean gamut from sulfur yellow to Black-brown, and later, as she gets to know them, she will be able to trace in their lineaments the various tribes of Madagascar. But for now, she sees them as people who in some way look like her. People of color, similar to those who, passing her on streets in Italy and elsewhere around the world, exchange with her the swift, coded nod of diasporic cofraternity. Men and women who would not be out of place in a gathering of her relatives in Oakland or Washington, DC.
The difference from Black Americans being, she thinks—as she has on her trips to Ghana and Senegal—that the eyes of these residents hold a deep stillness, that they move through the world with the impeccable poise of people who live where their ancestors did, who have never been stolen or scattered.
“Ah, voici l’équipe! Bonjour, bonjour!” calls out Senna in a loud, joking tone, which is evidently the established way he relates to them. On her first trips abroad with Senna, Shay was at first mortified by the clowning persona he often adopted but has found to her surprise that his buffoonery works surprisingly well in countries where, in any case, Europeans are considered barbarians. The typical reaction is that Senna is at first tolerated with the indulgence reserved for children or lunatics, and then, slowly, an unexpected intimacy is born. Shay sees immediately from the expressions of the Red House staff that her husband is well liked, if not quite respected.
When, with the air of a ringmaster announcing a trapeze artist, he introduces her—“Et finalement—la plus belle fleur de l’Amérique: ma femme, Madame Shay!”—they address her in a sonorous chorus that sounds rehearsed: “Bonjour, Madame!”
But when she in turn greets them in painstakingly rehearsed Malagasy—“Mula tsara!”—they all burst out laughing.
It’s a pure expression of appreciation, and she and Senna find themselves giggling too. To Shay this spontaneous peal of laughter is an unlooked-for gift that offers a shining glimpse of connection, of possibility. Perhaps indeed things will work out here.
But just then the dark faces close up like shutters, as a fat white man with a walking stick stumps onto the veranda. A loud European voice barks: “Qu’est-ce que vous en faites là, à rire comme des couillons? What are you all doing standing there laughing like fools? Where are the drinks for Madame and Monsieur?”
This is how Kristos, Senna’s right-hand man in Madagascar, first appears before Shay, at the entrance to the house that will become their secret battlefield. Kristos the Greek, the house manager. Majordomo. Governante. From the start, her enemy.
He is Shay’s first live example of the kind of pan-European rogue who turns up in African backwaters and in every derelict former outpost of empire. Claims to be a Greek from Thessaloniki, speaks Italian with a Pugliese accent, French with a Marseille slur, and a disconcerting amount of English with an Australian twang. Officious, devious, an expert snitch and bully, he embodies the first mate of every pirate ship in B movie history. Shorter than Senna—who is not tall—he has a grand vizier’s belly that strains the waistband of his khaki shorts, a limp from some nameless catastrophe, a bulldog face purpled with rum, a bristle of stained mustache, and wispy, colorless hair bound back with a shoelace. And, like any stock character, he has props: a walking stick crudely carved with a coiling serpent; a neck chain displaying a coin he claims is a Roman aureus. When in the sun, he wears a sinister pink Panama hat.
Presented to the wife of his boss, he kisses the air over her hand as Europeans of social pretensions do. Behind his greeting there is a stony challenge that she’ll recall in future days, when she has begun to dread him. Why does he hate her so promptly? The answer is obvious: because her skin is as dark as that of the people he lords it over.
A thin smile crosses his lips as one of the younger housemaids hurries up to Shay and Senna with a tray bearing a pair of neon-colored drinks: canned pineapple juice tinged with grenadine syrup, served in tall glasses topped off with bougainvillea blossoms and plastic straws. This, he announces, is his own idea: to celebrate arrivals with a welcoming cocktail, as they do at swanky hotels in the Caribbean.
Shay and Senna exchange amused glances at this vulgarity. But Senna only says that they’ve thought from the start that it would be a fine thing to make use of the Red House, in the off-season, as a bed-and-breakfast, a chambre d’hôtes. That is their future plan. He adds that, now that Shay has arrived, the place will finally have the benefit of a woman’s taste. Shay is surprised by the mild tone which her husband—usually brusque with Italian employees—adopts with his manager.
“Ah, but Signora Shay must be completely on holiday when she is here,” counters Kristos smoothly. He spreads his ropy arms to indicate the staff who have scattered about their various duties. Around the edges of his squat, khaki-clad figure, Shay can glimpse the garden, a hortus conclusus dense with leaf and blossom. “The Signora won’t have to lift a finger,” adds the Greek.
That night, when the watchmen have closed and locked the downstairs shutters, Senna undresses Shay ceremoniously by a flickering hurricane light in the master bedroom. Not exactly undresses, because she’s wrapped her naked self up in the embroidered bedcover so that he can unwind her, as Caesar is said to have freed Cleopatra from the fabled carpet. Senna has a hibiscus flower stuck behind one ear. It’s perhaps the best time they will ever have in the Red House. They’re drunk on Three Horses beer and vanilla rum; they’re stuffed from feasting on coconut rice and oysters chipped from rocks at the far end of the beach. They’re sunburnt from snorkeling. They’re worn out from looking over the house and playfully arguing about rooms for the children they haven’t yet had; from weaving plans for their friends who will arrive later in the summer, from discussing fishing trips, and overland treks, and motorcycle excursions into the backcountry.
When Shay stands stripped and giggling in front of him, Senna looks her over with an intent air of discovery.
“Well, monsieur le patron? Do I suit?” she demands. “I know you think I’m the last piece of furniture!”
“No, no—tu sei la madonnina. You’re one of those holy statues—you know, a Madonna, a saint—like the country people used to build into their farmhouse walls back in Vercelli.”
“A Black Madonna?”
“A professoressa like you doesn’t know about the wonder-working Black Madonna? She has shrines all over Italy!”
“Let’s forget about Italy,” says Shay, yanking the flower out of his hair.
Tired as they both are, they charge into each other like teenagers that night, with uncontrollable laughter and a transcendent feeling of arrival.
But deep in the night, Shay, a seasoned traveler who usually sleeps well even in bare-bones hostels, wakes up to the crash of the tide beyond the garden wall. Over the nocturnal chorus of frogs, it sounds annunciatory, as if a single solemn phrase were being repeated over and over again. She frees herself gently from Senna’s embrace and lies staring into darkness through the mosquito net of the huge four-poster bed. The disquiet she felt on the hillside this afternoon returns and becomes a wanderer’s desolation at waking in a strange place. The strangest of places, this Madagascar—whose very name, like Timbuktu or Samarkand, is used by Americans as shorthand for the very farthest away one can be. And suddenly Shay is homesick, but for where? For the shingled house in the Oakland Hills where she spent her happy childhood? For the assortment of East Coast student digs she occupied after that? For the Milan apartment where she has chosen to start a new life?
Certainly, this big barracks of a villa on the shore of the Indian Ocean could never offer such comfort. She pictures how the crested roof must look silhouetted against the night sky inscribed with Southern constellations. And then she imagines the dark island: cane fields whispering in the breeze, the forest alive with the glittering wakeful eyes of the small beasts; the villages sheltering the sleep of men and women like those she met today, all in mute dreaming conversation with ancestors. In those huts no one has to wonder where home is. From the ground under their dwellings their history rises and cradles them.
Lying there in the darkness beside her, Senna himself seems an unknown country. What does he feel about this house besides satisfied vanity? What does he find in this distant land, and in these people—and what of value is he bringing here?
And for herself she wonders: How the hell did I end up in this place? And: What do I owe? For something is owed, she feels certain.
For a long time she lies awake, listening to the waves and nervously twisting a lock of her short hair, until dawn comes with the clamor of cockcrow, a brief dogfight, and the call of a distant muezzin. All the time, she has been thinking. Thinking: I have a house in Africa…
So Shay steps reluctantly into her role as the foreign mistress of the Red House. Guiltily she admits to herself that, with regard to Naratrany, she’d prefer to be a tourist—that word that, once upon a time in student days, she used as a gibe. But now, being a respectful tourist seems like a decent alternative to delving into the soul of a place where she senses she may be far out of her depth. Her unacknowledged desire is to skim over the surface of life in this new country, as she does when she swims over a reef: breathing outside air, observing through a mask.
She and Senna quickly make the Red House the center of their vacation months, a setting for the ritual leisure of the holidays, when Italians flock out of the cities to Riccione or the Red Sea resorts, or the mountain valleys of Aosta. Friends and relatives make the long trip to stay with them, passing July and August weeks filled with diving, fishing, sailing to the Radames archipelago, stalking lemurs with cameras, traveling to the big island to explore the tsingy of the Ankarana or paddle pirogues down the Sambirano River. The guests always have a great time. At the house, they roast themselves into a sunburnt stupor on lounge chairs facing Finoana Bay, sit lazy hours around the long dining table on the veranda, smoking, drinking beer and wine, chattering in French and Italian and English throughout Pantagruelian creole-style meals of pasta, smoked white tuna, romazava, poulet à la vanille.
These vacations are part of the new life Shay assumes with what her mother insists on calling her “conversion to Italy.” The larger picture includes negotiating the provincial Vercellese culture of her in-laws; refurbishing the rambling apartment she and Senna have bought near Corso Magenta; putting on hold her plans to turn her dissertation into a book, as, in the drafty halls of the Università Cattolica, she finds herself suddenly teaching a wildly popular introductory course on Black American literature.
In the midst of all this, there is no way to define what Madagascar means to her. Certainly, she can’t place it under the heading she knows well from her upbringing: the conventional African-American reverence for a romanticized and undifferentiated ancestral continent. She has tried, and failed, to connect this newly introduced East African country to her emotions about the regions of West Africa that she believes were home to her own ancestors—to link it to the anguished spirits she clearly sensed while visiting the slave palaces of Gorée. But Madagascar is itself, with its own bloodstained warp and weft of tribal and slaving heritage; not to be defined by foreign myths—whether the myth of Libertalia or that of a uniform African experience.
Still, the Red House refuses to be ignored. It intrudes into her dreams as she lies in bed on foggy nights in Milan, and pops into her head as she coaxes her students through Cane and Native Son, or sits eating osso buco with Senna’s family on rainy Sundays. She envisions Naratrany island not as it appears in the balmy dry season of June to November, but in the February monsoon period. The time when the house is shuttered, tended by a skeleton crew of caretakers coughing with the maladies that run through the villages. Cyclone season, when tempests march up from Australia, inflicting floods and starvation. There in Europe, she pictures the Red House at its worst: swarming with winged termites, its furniture cloaked in sailcloth, roof thatch stripped off in stray gales. The waves on the beach frothing yellow, laden with debris, and the roads transformed to arteries of mud. It is then that, from thousands of miles away, the house calls out to her like a feverish child in the night.
Oddly enough, Senna, creator and official master of the place, seems to feel nothing of the sort. The minute it is built and furnished, it loses its urgent central role in his imagination. It becomes just a vacation retreat, as richer Italians possess in far more fashionable foreign resorts, an exotic status symbol to boast about at parties. Of course, he considers it a responsibility and an expense—though not much of the latter, given the minuscule cost of living in Madagascar, where a good yearly salary would cover the price of a pair of trousers in Milan. And there is not much responsibility, either, since, to keep things in trim, they luckily have Kristos, that great guy. Quel bravo ragazzo. That is how Senna has taken to describing the house manager.
Senna says it’s Shay’s fault that she doesn’t get along with the Greek. Part of the eternal wifely inability to tolerate gli amici del bar: male buddies, the great guys of the world. He himself, from the start, finds in Kristos a boon companion. Together, they embark on fishing expeditions in the murky shark-infested waters off Analalava. Kristos has convinced Senna to invest in a second truck, a massive Defender pickup with a rhino bar, and in this ostentatious vehicle they make backcountry excursions on Naratrany to seek out village woodcarvers who can add to the decorations of the house. Along with Aakash, a young Karan Indian who owns the garage in nearby Renirano village, they begin a fascinating hobby of salvaging and rebuilding vintage French motorbikes. These pastimes take Senna away from Shay, but a man’s vacation is his own, right? Shay has plenty of company, with all the friends they invite from Italy and the States. Not only that, adds Senna, but she is mistress of a magnificent villa where her word is law.
But the fact is that after two years of holidays, Shay finds that not only is she far from understanding what being mistress of the Red House entails, but also her rapport with Senna—that ineffable bond between a husband and wife, nourished on a mysterious balance of affinities—disintegrates when she is there. A few days after arriving on Naratrany, Senna becomes unrecognizable: cold, critical, subject to ferocious explosions of temper. Shay is at first incredulous, then furious. After that, as is her way, she takes it inside of herself. She avoids Senna. She sleeps badly beside him, the mere sound of his breath pitching her into agitation. Underlying everything is her peculiar inability to find a role of authority at the Red House; and at the center of it all, like a prehistoric stone under the altar at a shrine, is the house manager.
Kristos is never overtly rude, yet in her bones she knows that he hates and undermines her. With a flash of his wolfish pale eyes, he smoothly accedes to whatever request she makes, and then ignores it. Whatever questions she asks, he finds a way of not answering.
And there are many questions. From childhood on, Shay has absorbed a fascination with old-fashioned housekeeping from her dauntingly practical mother, a county administrator for a network of public libraries, who collects volumes of Victorian household lore, which she melds with domestic wisdom passed down from her own Black southern grandmothers. Shay has found the tradition of efficient house management alive and well both in Italy and in other big households in Madagascar.
But in the Red House, things stumble along. Why, for example, in a place with guests coming and going, with eight bedrooms, and countless outbuildings, is there no dedicated laundry room? What happened to the washing machine ordered from Mauritius? Why are the maids obliged to scrub clothes and household linens in plastic basins in a back courtyard, and to iron while squatting on the storeroom floor? Why is the concrete of the outdoor steps already crumbling? Why is the generator so poorly wired that the overhead fans, refrigerator, and freezer shudder to a halt three or four times a day? Why are the trucks, motorcycles, and motor launch always out of gas? Why are they endlessly buying food and supplies?
Back in Milan, Shay would have put a quick stop to this mismanagement, but here she finds it curiously difficult to get a grip on the situation. When she brings up any of these concerns to Senna—the kinds of things they work out easily at home—he flies into such a rage that she begins to wonder about his sanity. And anything she attempts on her own is met with an odd ineffectiveness, as if she is trying to grasp smoke. And with smirking resistance from Kristos.
She knows of course what the house manager’s role is in her plantation fantasy: he is the overseer, the noxious intermediary between the gilded bubble of the gentry and the sweat and blood of the slaves. She sees this clearly as she watches him strut through house and garden with his bloated belly swelling his fussily ironed shirts and khaki shorts. Or sees him tearing around in the Defender, wearing that revolting pink hat. Or catches him hollering at the staff (out of earshot of Senna) as he brandishes his serpent-carved walking stick.
Somehow, the Greek has created an occult reign of terror among the soft-spoken employees of the Red House. He barks orders at them all day long in French and Malagasy, swears at them with obscene inventiveness, calls them savages, keeps them well beyond working hours set by government law, and constantly exacts fines from their salaries for an array of petty damages and presumed crimes of which he alone knows the details. Between Shay and Senna, only Shay seems to see all this.
In Italy she has come to terms with the culture of domestic help: the rigorously unionized maids and housekeepers, who, along with intrusive in-laws, are an accepted part of Italian middle-class life. But here in Madagascar, where the houses of the prosperous tend to sprawl, to attract entire families of workers, and where the atmosphere of colonial France still hangs heavy in the air, she feels as if she is witnessing a shadow play of the experiences of her own enslaved ancestors. And so the injustice under her roof gives her a double sense of shame.
Anjatoky. Celestine. Lova. Cyprien. Bakoly. Landry. Kiady. Camille. Zalifa. Benjamin… Shay by now knows their names, the people whose workdays are spent on the Sennas’ holiday comfort, whose joint efforts keep the Red House sailing along like a galleon headed for an unknown shore. The people who are unfailingly benign and courteous to her, but who seem to be asking her a silent question: Why is she allowing things to proceed like this? They, and she, know that there are other large households in Madagascar run in dignified ways, by mistresses both brown and white.
Once or twice one of the youngest housemaids comes weeping to Shay in private over some accusation—say, of pilfering rice or laundry soap—and begs her to intercede with Kristos. But when Shay attempts to resolve the matter, she once again faces the mocking resistance of the Greek and the incomprehensible rage of Senna—who accuses his wife of bending to the crocodile tears of the servants, and interfering with the manager’s authority.
So Shay’s initial wish for superficiality has been granted: she is a guest in her own house. She feels it in the mornings as she drinks her coffee at the head of the table covered with serving dishes swathed in gauzy fly covers. In the afternoons and evenings, when she hangs out reading and chatting on the beach with her own guests, or kicks around a soccer ball with the Finoana village kids, or comes back salt-soaked from diving in the outer islands, or sits long over dinner on the veranda, as citronella candles flicker in glass shades. At all times, she sees the people who work for her looking at her over a barrier. A barrier of her own impotence and two white men.
How has this come about? How has Shay—known since childhood for being irrepressible and irreverent inside and outside the classroom—turned into this easily silenced person in Madagascar?
Yet all returns to normal when she leaves for Italy. The intense anger and frustration, hardly remembered, evaporates so quickly, unremarked by Senna—who returns to being the man she loves—that it seems like a dream. It is all so vague that she has been unable to discuss it even with her mother and sister.
She has spoken of it only with a Malagasy friend, Angélique, an elegant, vivacious Betsileo woman, who is the pharmacist in Saint Grimaud. Angélique knows all the island gossip and has dire things to report about Kristos. For one thing, no one believes he is really Greek. The story is that he is a small-time Calabrian thug who got in trouble with some Albanians, and fled first to Saloniki, then to Johannesburg, and finally to Madagascar, where he knocked around Toamasina and Saint Marie, fleecing tourists, before washing up on Naratrany.
“Your husband was most unwise to hire that crook!” exclaims Angélique, in one of these conversations, adjusting her stylishly eccentric French glasses. Educated in Grenoble, she is tall and thin and has glowing high-country skin and chic, chemically lightened hair. She is divorced and runs her pharmacy and her own large family with impeccable control.
She describes Kristos as the worst kind of racist, one who hates “les nègres” more than the most retrograde Frenchman on the island. He has been overheard at the Fleur des Îles café describing Madagascar as a filthy sewer; particularly he inveighs against the poor prostitutes who, as in every seaport in the world, struggle to make their meager living—calls them insects, filth. But at the same time his appetite for those despised girls is boundless; he is always hustling them out onto the dark beach behind the Finoana billiard hall. Old Madame Revelle’s housekeeper reports that he goes to bed with the old lady on Sunday afternoons, then cheats her out of big sums of money at cards. It’s common gossip as well that during the construction of the Red House, Kristos was selling off sacks of concrete, cinder blocks, copper pipes, lumber, and even household appliances. His companions in thieving are a pair of Comorean sisters from Anjouan, owners of a string of dry goods stores around northern Madagascar: dangerous women, rumored to have connections to drug syndicates in Mahajanga and, still worse, to practice powerful Black magic.
And the airs Kristos gives himself when the Sennas are back in Italy! Angélique casts her large eyes dramatically toward the ceiling. “He swans around in that big flashy truck of yours, telling everyone that the Red House is his. You have to do something!”
Shay, who during this diatribe has been standing with her elbow on the pharmacy counter, looks down past the overpriced French sun creams to her sandaled feet on the gleaming tile floor. The place looks like any drugstore in Europe except that in the corner dozes a white cat with its eyes stitched shut with blindness and, outside in the dusty street, women pass by bearing bright-colored plastic buckets on their heads. “I can’t,” she whispers.
“Tu ne peux pas? But why?”
“I don’t know. I just can’t do anything.”
“What about Senna?”
“It’s like he’s hypnotized,” Shay confesses. “He believes everything Kristos tells him. He says Kristos is a great guy. And—well, he seems to hate me. I can hardly say a word to him.”
“And back home in Italy?”
“Then he’s a different person.”
“Aaah,” exclaims Angélique on a peculiar rising and falling note. “And if I may say, you seem worn out and your looks are suffering. (I never did like those twists you do with your hair, but ça c’est la mode Américaine.) This is very bad, ma chère. Ça devient dangereux. Why didn’t I think of it? I should have seen it from the first. You absolutely have to—”
Just at that moment, a noisy group of South Africans from a cruise ship pours into the pharmacy, and Shay never learns what that urgent advice is.
Certainly there’s a sense that things are fast slipping out of control. Every morning when she wakes in the Red House, she seems to have proceeded further into a skewed dimension.
For one thing there are the plants and the statues.
When Senna and Shay arrive in July of their second year, they find that Kristos has replaced a third of the garden with a planting of cacti—prickly pear, agave, and other thorny succulents—set into an expanse of pulverized black volcanic rock from the quarries up the coast so that the place under the midday sun is a miniature desert. “Let the fellow do what he wants—he knows what’s best for the house!” roars Senna, when Shay objects.
And week by week over that summer, Kristos encourages Senna’s newfound passion for wooden sculptures, urging him to commission dozens from backcountry artisans. These works share a family resemblance: nearly life-size and not particularly well crafted, created in a faux-primitive style that Kristos seems to favor, like cheap figurines at souvenir stands all over Africa. The statues are set up along the garden paths and inside the house. Teak women with big breasts and protuberant behinds, bearing platters and bowls. Naked men with half-erect penises and slouched hats. Some have serpents coiling around their bodies, like the snake that decorates Kristos’s walking stick; and indeed, a rosewood beam adorned with a large, undulating python soon replaces the original lintel over the house entrance.
The growing number of statues gives the house a crowded, public feeling, like a train station, and sometimes at dusk, as guests gather on the veranda, and the maids move around lighting mosquito coils and preparing the dinner table, Shay has trouble distinguishing the real people from the wooden. She has an unpleasant recurring dream, in which she is lost in a dim multitude buzzing with rumors over a guilty secret of hers. In the daytime, a lowering cloud seems to hang in the atmosphere. But though the Sennas have friends and relatives staying with them, no one else seems to notice.
Shay’s lethargy increases. A mist seems to lie between her and the rest of the world. She feels dragged à rebours, against the grain, as if her cells have been pulled out of alignment. She wonders if she has malaria or dengue fever. But this is a familiar feeling, one she knows will lift when she returns to Milan. She’ll hardly remember it, just as the peculiar rift between her and Senna will almost instantaneously heal and be forgotten, leaving them as content with each other as any couple married just two years. But here and now, Senna’s attitude toward her is one of cold disfavor radiating from the farthest corner of the big bed, where he sleeps withdrawn from her as if by religious conviction.
One July afternoon when Senna is off fishing, it all comes to a head. Shay has just stepped out of the shower when she hears a commotion coming from the beach. She pulls a sundress over her bare body and hurries to see what is going on. On the sand just below the stone garden wall she finds two of the maids and the two gardeners bending over a moaning, thrashing figure she thinks at first is a sick animal. But it turns out to be a girl who seems to be having a seizure.
She is one of the beautiful young Sakalava women who are as thick on the island as butterflies around a buddleia plant. But now her deep brown face is overlaid with a ghastly pallor and her braids are matted in sand where in her paroxysm she has ground her head into the beach. And a large dark stain is spreading at the crotch of her flimsy Chinese-made jeans.
“Ventre! Ventre!” exclaims Landry, the younger of the two gardeners over his shoulder as Shay dashes up. Stomach? thinks Shay. The girl seems to be hemorrhaging. A miscarriage?
They are trying to move the girl onto a straw mat spread on the sand. Shay, ablaze with the energy of crisis, shouts at them to wait, that they have to get her to the clinic run by Dominican nuns on the port road. Both of the house trucks are in use, so she grabs Landry by the arm and dashes with him a hundred yards down the beach to the Gargotte P’tit Coin, a combination café and food stall where there are always a few bush taxis. With shouts they wake up the dozing driver of the least decrepit vehicle, and, after Landry translates Shay’s directions, the battered Renault 4 trundles down a rocky incline to the edge of the beach by the Red House, followed by a slowly growing swarm of curious onlookers—villagers, staff from the house and from the café.
Somehow they lift the groaning, writhing girl into the cramped backseat, a towel under her backside and the two Red House maids crowding in to support her. And Shay, who has sent for her handbag, has opened the front door to climb inside when a shout stops her.
It is Kristos, returned from town, who seems to have popped up from the sand like a malevolent genie.
“Non, Non,” he shouts. “Non! Madame ne va pas! Pas avec la salope, la—Allez! Allez!”
His face is purple with fury, and he actually strikes the hood of the taxi a loud wallop with his walking stick. The little knot of onlookers stands frozen. At his sudden appearance, Shay, to her lasting shame, jumps away from the car and stands before him like a child caught in a misdeed by a parent.
“We have to get this girl to the Dominicans! She may be dying!” she cries in Italian, straight into his face.
To this, the Greek replies with a broad, bitter smile that shows his discolored teeth. “She’ll live, she’ll live—you’ve seen to that,” he says softly.
“Let’s take her in the truck—it’ll be faster!” urges Shay, but the odd smile never leaves Kristos’s face.
“No,” he says, as if he has every right to say it. “And you won’t go either.”
He turns quickly, bangs shut the door of the taxi with his stick, and barks out a peremptory order. As the driver immediately starts to back up, Shay reaches suddenly into her bag and before Kristos can stop her, tosses a wad of ariary notes in through the Renault window. “Pour le docteur!” she cries as the taxi jounces away.
Kristos is shaking his head in a chiding way that increases her rage. The little crowd of onlookers has melted away and the two of them are left facing each other on the beach, in the blinding sun and the deep afternoon hush of low tide.
“You encourage things you don’t understand,” he says to her in Italian, still in that infuriating soft voice. “Now every little whore on the island will show up on our doorstep asking for money to go to the clinic. Let them go back to their villages—the old women know what to do.”
“Sei senza cuore,” whispers Shay. “You are heartless.”
“And you understand nothing,” he says, and this time the contempt he feels is undisguised.
“Get out of my sight!” Shay suddenly shrieks, not caring who overhears.
But the Greek looks completely unperturbed. He gives a mocking bow and turns away with the words “As the Signora prefers.”
And a half hour later, anyone in the Red House can hear Senna berating his wife at the top of his lungs. Fortunately, they are in a hiatus between guests, but there are still plenty of staff to eavesdrop near the closed doors of their bedroom as the Milanese hollers mad, disjointed accusations, completely comprehensible in any tongue. Senna, raging, shouts that Shay has been unforgivably rude, given offense to the good man who is their only hope in this benighted country; that she is maliciously trying to bring the whole house down around their ears because of her American presumptuousness, and he, Senna, is disgusted by such behavior.
“We need Kristos!” bellows Senna at the end of his tirade. “Do you know how hard it is to find a white man to run things in Africa?”
Then the bedroom door crashes open, slams shut, and he storms out to the parking space where the Greek stands calmly beside the Defender, leaning on his stick, and smoking.
“Get in,” the cook, who understands Italian, plainly hears Kristos say in a commanding tone to his employer. “And drive me to town. I need cigarettes.”
Shay doesn’t hear this, but she is already in shock. No one has ever spoken to her as Senna has just done. She prides herself on being a staunch fighter, and has engaged in plenty of stormy scenes with men throughout her life. But this one—where she has found herself mute while enduring a rant that sweeps far past offensiveness; words that have broken through into a mad new world—has severed the last link allowing her to believe in any manageable reality.
She sits on the edge of the bed, tears of rage and desperation running in sheets down her cheeks, and stares blankly at her phone. Outside the windows, the quick darkness of the tropics has descended and she can hear the crash of the rising tide and clattering of palm fronds as the offshore wind strengthens. It sounds like a tempest, but she knows that if she steps outside she will find above the furiously buffeted trees a star-studded sky of uncanny serenity.
She needs to act, to call someone, but who? Cell phones barely work here. Her mother in Oakland and her sister in Ann Arbor will be lost in their time zones, two small scratchy voices fading in and out at the other end of the line. Neither of them has yet visited Madagascar; her marriage and passage into Italian life has already widened the distance between them, and this further dimension of new experience is something impossible to explain. What is she supposed to shout over the patchy satellite connection: that she thinks—no, is almost certain—that her husband is possessed?
She could pack a bag and go, but where? The next flight off the island is five days away. She could take the truck and go stay in town with Angélique, who would indeed understand, but she imagines the lecture she’d receive, the gossip spreading exponentially.
She is still sitting there in the darkened room, staring blankly at the phone as if she expects an oracular message to appear, when there is a tap at the door and a soft voice asking in Malagasy for permission to enter. “Hodi.”
Shay remembers that it is time for the maids to turn down the beds and light mosquito coils for the night. She composes herself so as to have a shred of dignity, and calls out the polite response: “Karibu.”
The door opens. But instead of one of the young chambermaids she expects, there enters an older woman, one who usually does not do such tasks.
This woman’s name is Bertine, and she is in charge of the household laundry and storerooms: directing the washing, ironing, keeping of the linens, and organizing general supplies. She holds an undefined position of authority among the rest of the staff, somehow even respected by Kristos, who never raises his voice to her. Shay has always found her slightly intimidating—watchful, silent, omnipresent, like a shadow.
One of Kristos’s odious observations that Shay has overheard is that, on an island of beauties, he has never seen a homelier woman than Bertine. But Bertine is not at all ugly; rather, she is imposing. She is pure Sakalava, born in the north of Naratrany, the thickly forested hill territory that the locals refer to as la montagne: a region where there are no roads, and lemurs still abound. At nearly six feet tall, she has broad shoulders; slim, sinewy hips; and large, emphatic breasts—hence her nickname: Bertine la Grande. Her dark skin has a bloom on it like that of a ripe plum, and she has a round face with a tiny, upturned Sakalava nose, a mouthful of strong teeth yellowed from smoking, and small ears that stick out like jug handles.
She could be any age from thirty to fifty, but she dresses like an older woman—never in the flimsy polyester minidresses and tight Chinese-made jeans the younger maids wear when off duty, but always a long skirt, or a print lamba with a starched blouse on top. Her hair is never straightened in European fashion or sewn onto long extensions, a style just becoming fashionable on the island, but severely divided into six neat knots.
En route to work, to keep her hairdo free from blowing sand and dust, Bertine wears a puffy, oversize man’s visored cap, the shape of a pimp’s hat in a seventies blaxploitation movie. But hers is weathered to an indeterminate organic color. This colossal piece of headgear rests above her protuberant ears in a way that could be comical, but instead gives her a peculiar majesty, her tall silhouette instantly identifiable as she strides up and down the beach from her home in Renirano village.
Hatless now, she comes into the bedroom carrying a saucer holding a lit mosquito coil that trails bluish smoke. With a quiet “Bonsoir,” she puts it down on a small table, turns on a lamp, and sets about closing the window shutters. Meanwhile Shay sits as if transfixed on the bed, clutching her phone, and keeping her spine straight, as if these two things might give her strength. She cannot not pretend that the whole household has not overheard everything.
“Madame,” she hears Bertine address her in a soft voice. “Madame. Ça va pas bien. Things are not going well, Madame. In this house.”
The silence, the pretense at normality, has been broken. Shay’s eyes once again overflow with sheets of tears, and, abandoning any attempt at composure, she bows her head and manages to choke out the word “No.”
Her shoulders shake with sobs. In America or in Italy, anyone seeing this might pat her head with a maternal gesture, murmur some word of comfort, even offer her a hug. But Bertine la Grande stands quietly in front of her and simply waits until she is calmer. Standing there barefoot in all of her height, looking gravely down at Shay on the bed, she seems not a housekeeper but a dignitary about to make a pronouncement.
“It’s that bastard Kristos,” whispers Shay.
“Not just that man,” says Bertine, regarding her intensely with her large dark eyes set in slightly bluish whites. From the start, Bertine rarely refers to the Greek by name, preferring to call him “that man,” or “that one.” “That one has called in others. And they have opened the gate.”
“What?” says Shay, feeling she has descended one more step into madness.
“Don’t worry—ne t’inquiètes pas. It is not for you to understand. Not yet.”
It will take several conversations before Shay notices what sophisticated French the woman speaks, in comparison to the other Malagasy people working in the house. Right now, she just sits and absorbs what she is hearing in the lamplit room.
“It is very bad for you,” repeats Bertine. Like everyone on the island, she always uses the informal “tu,” but here it sounds deliberately intimate.
“And for my husband?”
An almost mocking smile flickers on the other woman’s face. “No,” she says, carelessly. “Senna”—she tosses off her employer’s name as if speaking of a child—“is not important here. That man is using him, nothing more. But the real danger is for you. Look at you, Madame—you’re thin, getting sick.”
A chill runs through Shay, because she knows it is true. “Why is he doing this?” she asks. “Kristos. What does he want?”
Bertine shrugs. “He wants everything. He wants the house, the land. That is how he is.”
“But that’s not possible! It’s against the law!”
“Anything is possible here. The law doesn’t always work, not even for white men. Things like this have happened before, many times.”
Shay feels a surge of anger. “I want to get out of this place,” she says between her teeth. “Never come back! Leave Senna, too.”
Bertine looks very grave. “No, you must not do that. We want you here in Madagascar. We like you. We think that you should be a real mistress to this house.”
“We?” Shay looks at her uncertainly.
“All of us in the Red House. We who work here and earn a good living. We who live on the island. We teratany. We think you should stay with your husband. Come back and forth for nice holidays as you do now. A few months a year—that’s the right amount of time for vazaha to be in Madagascar—otherwise the sun makes your brains go wrong. You will have children, and become really the queen of this house, as it should be.”
“But how?”
“That man must go. The house will be cleaned, and will be yours. Your husband will come back to you.”
“How?” repeats Shay.
“I will help you. I’ll speak to some others. We will help you. It will be…” Bertine pauses and gives Shay a significant look, as if she is reminding her of something forgotten. “It will be work we women do. Just between women.”
In a quick, low voice, she gives Shay a few instructions, to which Shay listens obediently, and then Bertine turns to go. But Shay detains her. “Why are you helping me?” she asks.
Once again Bertine faces her. “Because we are women and we all have the same problems. And, Madame, you helped me.”
“How?”
“La fille à la plage. The girl on the beach.”
In her disarray, Shay has almost forgotten the girl of that afternoon. “The one I sent to the clinic?” Once again she pictures the blind look of pain in the girl’s eyes, her agonized, thrashing body. “Is she all right?”
“She is my sister’s daughter, and she will be well now.”
“Was it a…” Shay doesn’t know the French word for miscarriage.
“She was bleeding because she was losing a child.”
“An accident?” asks Shay awkwardly.
Bertine la Grande raises her chin slowly, her eyes fixed on Shay’s. A gecko croaks somewhere high in the rafters, and the lamplight gleams along the curve of her cheek. “A child who could not be born,” she says obliquely.
“And the father?” asks Shay in a faint voice.
Bertine holds her gaze. “À qui penses-tu?”
The rest of that evening and the next two days are surprisingly tranquil in the Red House. Shay regains her composure after her conversation with Bertine, of which everyone working in the house somehow seems aware, though no one else alludes to anything by even so much as a meaningful glance. The older woman has instructed her to be calm and dignified and act as if nothing at all has happened; to be distant, but pleasant, with Kristos, and act charitably toward Senna, whom it is best to think of as a small boy with some undisclosed ailment. This is all easy for Shay because Senna, under the thumb of the Greek, seems truly not to recall their dispute. And Kristos, puffed up with triumph, is fawningly courteous to her as if he feels he can now afford to be generous.
Bertine’s further instructions are both specific and cryptic. Shay is simply to wait for the right day, sometime soon, when a woman from Bertine’s village will come by with a basket of fruit or vegetables, and will invite Shay for a walk. “When this happens, you must put on a dress with long sleeves, and a hat, and go with her. Don’t tell anyone. Just be ready.”
At midmorning of the second day after the household drama, the wind picks up. It begins as a normal tidal breeze but doesn’t subside after a few minutes—instead, grows stronger, as if it is February and a cyclone is charging in from Indonesia. But the sky holds nothing but blue. Palms clatter and bend, women’s lambas flap like flags, and out past the reef, small fishing pirogues, square sails bellying, rocket along toward safer harbors beyond the headlands.
As the sun sinks lower, a violent gust races through the garden and rips off a big branch from the kapok tree at the left side of the house. It crashes down on the stone walk to the beach, just missing the edge of the roof. Another hurricane gust sweeps through the house, knocking over lamps, rattling pictures, and sending a fossilized Aepyornis maximus egg, set decoratively on a table, flying off its wooden pedestal to roll across the floor like a stone football. The two kitchen cats go shooting up and down the staircases, with eyes ablaze and fur on end. The air crackles with electricity, and the fallen branch fills the garden with a powerful smell of fresh sap.
“Maybe,” remarks a luncheon guest, a Frenchman who runs a restaurant in town with his male Malagasy lover, “Maybe it is time to call in the medicine man!” He says this in the manner of someone making a joke to express a truth he expects no one will discern.
The next day, as the gardeners are chopping up the fallen branch and dragging off the chunks of bright yellow wood, one of the housemaids brings Shay the message that a village woman called Fayeda is asking for her down on the beach. This is the signal Shay has been waiting for. Quickly, she changes into an outfit prepared two days earlier: a long blue and white striped peasant dress that she usually wears open over a bikini. Now, severely buttoned, and worn with hat and sandals, it seems like garb she’d wear back in Oakland to go with her grandmother to Shiloh A.M.E. Church. (Shay’s parents are easygoing California agnostics, but as a child Shay loved being in a Sunday morning forest of old people at Nana Gilliam’s side.) She picks up the woven shoulder bag that holds a small amount of money and the modest present that Bertine has indicated she should bring along: a pair of silver earrings.
It is just after lunch and the Red House seems as empty as it will ever be. Kristos and Senna have left for a day of fishing north of Nosy Mamoko. It is Bertine’s day off. Except for the gardeners, absorbed in dismembering the fallen branch, the household staff are squatted peacefully under the mango tree behind the kitchen, chatting over their midday rice. Shay feels invisible as she whisks through the crowd of wooden statues and across Kristos’s cactus garden, and steps onto the sand. Waiting here beside a market basket of papayas is Fayeda, a gaunt Sakalava woman with a lamba hooded above her face, which is thickly smeared with reddish clay against the sun. They exchange Malagasy greetings, and Fayeda, who clearly speaks no French, simply says “Bertine,” then in a single practiced movement sets the huge basket on her head and sets off down the beach with Shay.
Shay has often seen and photographed these market women who pass by every morning: living caryatids who balance their piled wares effortlessly on their superb straight necks and backs. But walking beside a bearer of one of those big straw hemispheres is something else, like being part of a grand procession. Yet there is hardly anyone to see in this burning noon hour, as she and Fayeda trudge silently across the sand toward the creek that runs through mangrove flats into the sea. Only a few children in tattered school pinafores greet them shyly, and stare at Shay. It is the lowest of low tides, what the islanders call la grande basse, and far out beyond the naked shell-strewn expanse, the Mozambique Channel lies in perfect repose, and farther still, below a bank of cumulus clouds, stretches the undulating violet silhouette of the Grande Île. All is hushed and distances seem close.
When they turn inland on the path along the estuary, Shay sees Bertine in the distance, unmistakable in her oversize hat. Bertine is festively dressed in a two-piece yellow skirt and lamba suitable for a Sunday, and she stands smoking a cigarette beside a battered taxi, a Renault sunken so low to the ground that it seems to have no wheels at all. Bertine waves, and then, to Shay’s surprise, Fayeda, with astonishing swiftness, turns off on a narrow side path leading in back of a small hotel. In a few seconds, she and her huge basket have vanished among the mangroves.
“Seulement nous deux,” says Bertine, tossing away her cigarette butt, as Shay reaches her. With an ease that would be unthinkable in the Red House, she greets Shay in the Malagasy way, with two kisses on the left cheek and one on the right. And Shay, for the first time, breathes in the scent she will afterward always think of as the soul of Bertine: cigarettes—the harsh brand popular on Naratrany, called Good Look—and laundry soap.
“Where are we going?” asks Shay, as they pry open the tinny doors and cram themselves into the stifling backseat.
Bertine arranges her yellow skirts and settles her puffy hat formally on her knees the way a woman in a limousine might set down her evening purse. She gives a few instructions to the taxi driver, a long-faced man with an elaborately sculpted beard, then turns to Shay: “Allons chez le Voisin,” she says. “We are going to see the Neighbor.”
Among all the events of that extraordinary day—a day that, it would not be too much to say, forever changes Shay’s view of life—she hardly remembers the strangeness of that ride, when, in the suffocating heat of the tiny backseat, squeezed up against the body of another woman who until recently has been a distant acquaintance, she recognizes that a mysterious thread of attachment has spun itself between the two of them. More than that, there has been a power shift. Bertine is clearly in control of the situation, now more mistress than servant as she sits composedly there in her holiday attire, her work-twisted dark hands like roots clutching her cap. She sits there, knowing. Knowing, as Shay does not, where they are headed and what they will find.
The shockless Renault trundles along the old broken colonial road in the direction of Siramatany, the sugar mill town, where there are no tourist hotels, just an expanse of millworkers’ and fishermen’s huts. Bertine is chatting with the driver, apparently having informed him that she is taking the foreign lady to bargain for embroidered curtains made by the fishermen’s wives. She points out a tiny roadside Catholic church as the place where she was confirmed, and Shay thinks of how little she knows of Bertine’s life. Whereas the other woman, in the manner of domestic workers, knows intimate things about Shay. Is Bertine married? Does she have children? What does she see when she gets home each night?
The taxi makes its way into the ugly dilapidated town, past the half-derelict sugar mill, past tangles of rusted machinery, past godowns and garages and a sun-flayed marketplace, where in the noonday heat vendors doze in the shade of stalls hung with fly-encrusted strips of meat. Bertine and Shay pay the driver and get out near the elementary school, a once-plastered colonial building now scaled and flaking with a hundred shades of rot. Here, in the humming stillness, Bertine settles her cap on her head and leads Shay between the shanties.
As they advance into the labyrinth of bamboo huts patched haphazardly with bits of wood and metal, the path changes from trodden earth to sand; Shay can hear the sound of waves on an invisible shore nearby. She recalls that the beach here is notorious among foreigners because the townspeople, in the old island manner, still use it as a toilet. The sun beats down savagely on the shanties, for there are no trees, just occasional thornbushes stuck with trash. And not a soul is visible except for sleeping dogs and a few lean, wandering chickens. But suddenly up ahead comes a flare of moving light, and as Bertine laughs softly in recognition, a vision flashes into sight: the little girl in the white dress.
After a minute, Shay sees that the dress is one of the cheap sateen gowns sold in the Chinese dry goods stores for first communions, but so startling is the appearance of a child thus attired, in the sunlit lanes of poverty, that she seems like an emissary from another world. Later Shay will liken the sight to unexpected apparitions of children in art—the little girl in the darkness of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, the tiny red dress flickering through the black and white Holocaust in Schindler’s List. But now, swimming deep in oneiric single-mindedness, she simply follows Bertine, who in turn follows their small guide.
After many twists and turns, Bertine pauses and gives Shay a big smile that shows her cigarette-stained teeth. “Nous sommes arrivées,” she says. “But first let’s buy some Coca-Cola and some candy for the children, at the store.”
Store? Shay’s puzzled gaze falls on a small wooden flap unlatched on the side of one of the huts, to form a rudimentary counter with a tiny window behind it. Laid out on the counter are a cake of brown soap, the inevitable pack of Good Look cigarettes, and a big old-fashioned screw-top jar full of hard candies. Inside, she can just see the outline of a face and she realizes that her progress through the village has been marked by a series of just such hidden gazes out of the shadows. She produces a bit of change, and buys a big glass bottle of Coke, then fills her skirt pocket with miniature hard candies, whose wrappers, she is amused to see, have an American flag design.
The little girl has vanished, but immediately another odd figure appears in the distance. A small, skinny Sakalava man, wearing a ragged polo shirt and tattered red shorts, his head topped with what looks like the ruin of a trucker’s cap, comes jogging toward them with a peculiar bouncy gait, a clownish, crazy prance that sometimes turns into a spin—not as if he is drunk, but as if he’s enacting a playful pattern choreographed in his mind. Again, Bertine seems unsurprised and greets him softly. The man’s bearded face is impassive, but he salutes them with a gesture that is careless, even flippant, then suddenly vanishes behind a hut somewhat bigger than most, with a cinder-block foundation and a roof of corrugated aluminum.
“Ici,” says Bertine, leading Shay around a corner to a doorway in the same hut. Here, after Shay leaves her sandals beside a blue plastic washtub, they mount a rickety step and, when Bertine has asked permission, push aside a doorway curtain of coarse white cotton cut out and embroidered in the island version of Richelieu style.
Inside, Shay’s dazzled eyes encounter a crowded dimness. Five or six people kneel on straw mats or sit with their backs propped against the side of a double bed of carved reddish wood, the kind that Indian merchants sell along the port road. She sees a middle-aged woman with a round face and plaits coiled over her ears, a teenage girl with slanted antelope’s eyes, a thin old woman with gray braids brushing her shoulders, and two little girls. One of the girls is the child who led the way earlier, her white dress gleaming like a ghostly flower.
And cross-legged in the center of the half circle is a man—a fat, solid bare-chested man with a beard and a close-shorn graying head—who is busy knotting a lamba around his bulging paunch. He has the same impassive Sakalava face as the skinny dancing eccentric who greeted them outside, but of whom there is no trace, though Shay can see the tattered trucker’s hat hanging on one of the bedposts. Yes, though the cheeks are full and the slightly slanting eyes are set deep in fat, the features are identical. Can it be the same man? How can a man one minute be skinny and dancing manically along like a live scarecrow, and then be as plump and solidly planted as an overfed house cat?
“Welcome to the Neighbor’s house,” says Bertine. “This,” she says, indicating the man, “is Abu Nasdeen. Did you ever see such a big belly?”
The Neighbor nods regally, pronouncing a word of welcome, and the members of his family offer smiles displaying flashing white teeth; the two small girls rise shyly and bob respectful little curtsies. No one speaks more than a few words of French. Shay and Bertine crowd in to kneel on the mat, and as Bertine makes polite conversation, Shay senses the attention of the company netting her in intense curiosity. She particularly feels the watchful eyes of the little girl in the satin dress, whose gaze seems unchildishly deep and solemn; and those of the old woman, who carries her head and bony shoulders with a curious airy grace, like a young dancer. Shay, accustomed to being the object of scrutiny in Madagascar, busies herself absorbing the small details of the single room. Tacked on the bamboo walls are magazine pictures of Bollywood stars and Will Smith; suspended at the head of the bed is a machine-made tapestry depicting a stag in a Nordic forest; on a bench flickers a silent color television showing, at intervals, a grainy drama of Indonesian actors sporting rococo nineteen-eighties hairdos.
A big pot of romazava appears. Shay, crushed warmly between Bertine and the teenage girl, finds herself awkwardly scooping up the soupy rice and bitter greens in her fingers, to the politely contained amusement of her hosts. The Coke is poured out into two glasses, which they pass around and share. Somehow time has begun slowing down, and she has no idea whether this meal lasts for hours or just a few minutes.
When the pot is empty, at a nudge from Bertine, she hands out the American flag candies to the delighted little girls, then presents her gift of silver earrings to Abu Nasdeen. The Neighbor studies the small hoops with grave approval, then to Shay’s surprise, turns to the old woman beside him, and begins to insert them in her ears. Silently the woman pushes back her thin gray braids from her strangely youthful jaw and shoulder as Abu Nasdeen pushes each hoop through an earlobe. And suddenly Shay realizes, with a chill, that this is a painful process: whatever pierced holes the old woman once had have grown closed and are being forced open by the wires of the earrings. Still, her face is expressionless. Once the hoops hang from her ears, she inclines her head formally to Shay, while a single tear escapes to run down her gaunt brown cheek.
The Neighbor also inclines his head to Shay. “Now,” he says, as Bertine translates. “Now you have eaten rice with Abu Nasdeen.”
As if the proprieties have been observed, he rises and beckons to the two guests, and Shay obediently follows him and Bertine out of the hut. They descend the rickety steps and file into an outbuilding, a small hut behind the larger, thatched the traditional way and not raised off the ground. Except for a small vent, the place is windowless, empty and severe. A working space. Light filters in through the cracks between the sticks of the walls and the sole decoration is a broken plastic wall clock, arrived from its original Chinese manufacturers by who knows what strange roads, its battered face printed with a faded black and white yin/yang design.
The three of them kneel on a worn mat stretched over bare earth, and Bertine launches into a very specific sounding conversation with the Neighbor, as if she is in a doctor’s office. In the quick flow of Malagasy, Shay hears her own name and that of Kristos, and once, Senna.
But here time slips completely away from Shay. As the voices drone in the shadows, she is caught up in a ripple of existence, an unstoppable process that could be playing out equally over long seconds or brief hours. An ineffable element of communication, like electricity, flows among the three of them. She is afterward unable to recall anything more than glimpses of Bertine talking quietly and earnestly to the Neighbor, the other woman’s worn dark hands gesturing as the man with his close-shorn graying hair and magisterial belly listens closely. Actions are performed: a coin placed, a few tattered playing cards positioned, a book opened, dried leaves crumpled and burnt, dust sprinkled, something written carefully on paper, a word or two set adrift on the air.
Then another lapsus, and Shay, with no recollection of having left the hut, or of saying goodbye to the Neighbor, finds herself walking beside Bertine in one of the sandy lanes through the shantytown. She is surprised to discover that night has fallen. There is the sound of high tide pounding the invisible beach, and the previously deserted lanes are full of women squatted cooking over braziers emitting choking charcoal smoke, of children playing, of khat-chewing men lounging off to the lamplit market stalls. Passersby call cheery greetings to Bertine, but look through Shay as if she were invisible.
Confused Shay may be, but she knows that deep in her shoulder bag she holds something powerful: a tiny packet barely bigger than a Chiclet, folded out of coarse, lined school-notebook paper, with a short length of crimson thread wrapped tightly around it. This is the result of the day’s excursion, and Bertine has already given detailed instructions as to how to use it. Tomorrow morning before sunrise, Shay is to go out to the front gate of the Red House, dig a deep hole in the earth to the left side of the threshold, and bury the packet. “Then,” says Bertine, “we will see what that man has to say.”
And so in the dark of the next morning the scene unfolds. The crowing roosters, the muezzin calling from the village, a single church bell, the chorus of frogs from the rice paddies, the hush of low tide. The way the scene seems to freeze around her as, with no thought of waking Senna or being observed by the night watchmen, Shay leaves the bedroom, pads barefoot down the stairs and across the cool floor, careless of centipedes and spiders and undisturbed by the wooden statues, who at this moment seem as benign as a grove of trees. She steps over the threshold, descends the shallow steps, and then squats down and plunges her fingers into the loose sandy soil in the posture of her mother thinning perennials back in California. And then the small hole is dug deep, and the tiny packet, planted like a seed, has become part of the landscape.
She pats the earth back in place, sprinkles a few pebbles, then stands to look up at the portentous architecture of the sky, where time is measured in light. She believes fully in the importance of what she has just done—that is the great change that came over her sometime yesterday in the shantytown. In her bones she knows that this problem of Kristos and the house is part of a greater problem, a very real matter of propitiation, of settling otherworldly accounts. It is a comfort, now, to have taken the first step. So, she calmly brushes the dirt off her hands and returns to bed, settling back beside the warmth of Senna’s indifferent body and fading into sleep just before the daytime staff arrive.
Morning is a quiet space. Senna’s nieces from Bergamo have arrived for a three weeks’ holiday, and Shay spends her time after breakfast on the beach with the two sweet provincial teenagers, one giddy and rambunctious, and the other tattooed and morose. At lunchtime, the family has gathered on the veranda to sit down at the table, when all at once Kristos can be overheard in his bungalow shouting into his cell phone.
In the next moment, he hustles out of his door, with his pink hat on his head and a small traveling bag in his hand. And then—amazingly—he departs. Just leaves. Not in one of the trucks, but in a bush taxi that has pulled up in that moment. The explanation he gives to the dumbstruck Senna is that an emergency has arisen on a property he owns near Diego Suarez, and that he must at all costs catch the ferry to the Grande Île.
Then he is gone, and a shocked peace descends on the household. That day, Senna complains for the first time about how disrespectful and high-handed the Greek is. Meanwhile, Shay struggles to keep a straight face. She is amazed and jubilant over what seems to be a new dispensation of power. She has followed magical directions, and, as if a button has been pushed, her enemy has been ejected.
“You mustn’t get a swelled head over this,” Bertine tells her, when they meet for a moment among the sun-heated sheets hanging in the drying yard. “This is just the beginning. That man was surprised by the first touch of what we did, but he’ll be back soon, and he will fight. There’s a long way to go. But don’t worry. The Neighbor does good work.”
Three days of tranquillity go by—the windy August days of the Feast of the Assumption—and then, without warning, Kristos returns. As Bertine has predicted, he returns as if he’d never left, with his usual bluster amped up. He returns with a new wooden statue—a life-size figure of a man playing an accordion—and two dozen mildewed brocade curtains that he claims were once in the Portuguese embassy, and that he wants Senna to purchase at an exorbitant price. He returns with a preposterous business plan to turn the Red House into a luxury spa.
Strangest of all, he comes bearing a present for Shay: a lovely white silk dressing gown made up by a Malagasy seamstress, with a palm tree and the name Villa Gioia embroidered on the left breast. A prototype he says, of the robes they can provide for their future spa clientele. He speaks of how well made the garment is, and the reasonable cost and good quality of the imported silk. Smiling, he urges Shay—whom he has greeted as if they are great friends—to try it on.
The Sennas and their guests are scattered across the veranda, drinking and chatting before dinner. In the background, near the breezeway that leads to the kitchen, Shay can see Bertine standing, vigilant. Catching Shay’s eye, the Sakalava woman gives a shake of her head. Laughing, Shay declines to put on the robe, saying that the person who should really model it for them is Senna’s pretty niece, Lucia. Lucia, always a show-off, giggles, thrusts her arms into the sleeves, drapes the silk over her scanty shorts and tank top, and skips around the gleaming red floor, striking poses. The others laugh and whistle, except for the Greek, who looks glum. Fingering his grizzled ponytail, he insists in a soft voice that he brought the robe for Shay.
“I’ll try it later!” she says, thanking him with a saucy bow, as if thoughtful presents are a usual thing between the two of them; however, she lets the robe lie on the couch where Lucia leaves it.
Bertine later tells her to keep it for a few days, but never to put it on. “Then we can cut it up and throw it in the sea.”
“It’s pretty, though,” says Shay. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Something strong, maybe in the sewing,” replies Bertine.
“Another little packet?” asks Shay.
Something in her tone—something flippant, born of her growing confidence—causes Bertine to look at her reprovingly. “C’est pas une blague, tu sais,” she says. “It’s not a joke. These are dangerous matters.”
The next day, Senna is furious over the fact that seventeen-year-old Lucia, who, to be sure, has always been a precocious little tease, is flirting outrageously with Kristos. She tags along with him into town, and demands he buy her cocktails at the Fleur des Îles café; and back at the house, attired in a minuscule bikini, she trails around puppyishly after the Greek. Senna has to exert his severest avuncular authority to keep her from pursuing the house manager to the billiard hall, that den of iniquity. Kristos, to his credit, simply looks embarrassed by the girl’s attentions.
Shay, no longer surprised by anything, lets her mind drift through myths and legends where enchanted garments play a role, clothing that can bestow invisibility or even death. What might Kristos have desired to achieve through his robe? Certainly not seduction. No, he wants to stop her resistance.
On Sunday, Senna sets off with friends on motorcycles for a day of exploring the bush up north beyond the airport. This is the first time he hasn’t included Kristos, toward whom his friendly feelings seem perceptibly cooler. Apparently unperturbed, the Greek makes the surprising announcement at breakfast that he’d like to take Shay and her two nieces out to lunch at Chez Odile, a little restaurant at the other end of the beach.
This is the first time he has ever invited Shay anywhere, and with her newfound sense of confidence, she sees no harm in accepting. She wonders what his next move will be. Trying to spike her food or drink? She has heard that magical potions are common on the island, but surely such an attempt would be easier at home? As the four of them stroll down the beach and then settle around a table on the shady, crowded restaurant porch with its weather-beaten blue paint, she realizes that the Greek has no attack in mind. He just wants to observe her outside the house and know what he is dealing with.
Throughout their delicious meal of zebu fillet with green peppercorns, as giddy Lucia rattles on and her moody sister, Gemma, stares out to sea, Kristos keeps his gaze fixed on Shay. His pale eyes set so deep in his jowly purple face—a face that until recently she has loathed and feared—have lost their wolfish intensity, and now hold a look of wondering confusion, increasingly mingled with an expression of almost doglike entreaty.
Shay sits savoring her meal, elated by this turn of events. The little restaurant is packed with a Sunday crowd of French, Italians, Malagasy, South Africans, many of whom wave to her, and call out greetings; she feels surrounded by island friends and neighbors, uplifted. Odile, the Mauritian proprietress—so renowned for her big breasts and backside that she’s had a cartoon of herself painted on the sign outside—bustles up and gives Shay a hug.
Meanwhile, Kristos downs beer after beer, forks up his food with the finicking delicacy that has so often unnerved Shay at the Red House table, and sets out to thrill the two teenage girls with lurid Madagascar adventure tales: rapine and murder in the western sapphire mines; bone-moving ceremonies among the Hova in the highlands; bandits and zebu rustlers in the southern wastes; pirate ghosts in the cemeteries of Île Sainte-Marie.
He is quite a raconteur. Did they know, he asks, that, in the center of this very island, there is a sacred lake that no outsider is allowed to see? Near the lake is the tomb of a Sakalava queen, protected by a village of sorcerers. The whole interior of Naratrany is said to be full of witches, he says, his gaze fixed on Shay.
Shay smiles blandly back at him. She smiles because all the while quite another conversation—one without words—is going on between the two of them, as the Greek silently demands to know what she is doing to him, then starts to ask—then implore—her mercy. Although Shay is not sure where her new power is coming from, it buoys her up to see this gross bully visibly deflating.
She straightens her spine and cuts into her exquisitely tender fillet, contemplating her enemy at bay. Whenever she is tempted to feel even a tinge of pity—he really is such a toad in his craven bewilderment—she recalls the Sakalava girl writhing on the beach. The shift in strength is palpable. Even young Lucia senses it, and abruptly stops her flirting.
The very next morning, Senna—sunburnt, sore, and irascible from his daylong motorcycle jaunt—suddenly stalks into the little household office adjoining Kristos’s bungalow and demands to go over all the Red House accounts. A furious argument ensues, and soon the staff is agog, as the garden resounds with the unfamiliar music of the boss thundering out questions counterpointed by a placating rumble from the Greek.
Shay feels triumphant, but when she meets Bertine in the usual corner of the drying yard, the other woman shakes her head and says that it is still not over.
“What more is there?”
“You’ll know,” says Bertine. “And remember what I said. C’est pas une blague.”
That night, Shay wakes up into thick darkness. She can feel that she is in her big bed in the Red House, but there is none of the usual dim light from the mosquito coils, and she cannot feel Senna beside her, or hear the whir of the ceiling fan. Instead she senses the darkness itself, like some heavy element weighing upon her skin. There is a small clicking sound, and then a spark of light appears and grows into a dull glow on the left side of the room, where there is a window that every night is closed and shuttered from the inside. But Shay sees that this left-side window is now unshuttered and wide open. And through the window something is coming into the room: a huge black serpent, thick as a man’s thigh, is pouring its great length over the windowsill with a silent, riverine motion like pouring tar.
Dread freezes Shay’s body. But then, unaccountably, she is able to move. She reaches to her right side, and there in the place of her husband lies a big knife, a machete—what the Malagasy call a coupe-coupe—with a worn wooden handle that feels familiar, even pleasant, to her touch. She rolls out of bed, grabs the coupe-coupe in both hands, and not swiftly, but deliberately—no longer fearful but full of uncanny strength—in a single stroke hacks off the head of the serpent. The severed head looses a single piercing shriek and spins away like a soccer ball into the darkness. Then sleep falls on Shay like a curtain of lead.
When she wakes in the early morning, she finds Senna beside her looking at her with an air of dazed recognition as if he has just rediscovered her existence. Numbly they contemplate each other for an instant while Shay grows aware that there is more light than usual in the bedroom. At that moment Senna complains that the left-side shutter is open, not just the shutter but the window too. “If that,” he fusses, “is the way the maids close up at night, it won’t be long before every local thief is shinning up the wall!”
Banging slightly in the freshening breeze, the loose shutter lets a long slice of sunlight into the room. And for an instant, Shay feels her hair actually stand on end.
After that, nothing can surprise her. At breakfast, Kristos announces that he is quitting. Effective immediately, for he plans to take up the offer of a far more prestigious job as director of a luxury hotel in Tulear. He cannot stay, he declares dramatically, in a place where he is not trusted, where the heart and soul he has invested in his work is disrespected. Before lunch he rolls off grandly in a gleaming Range Rover driven by one of the two Comorean sisters said to be his lovers and magical accomplices; the woman’s beautiful flat brown face is masklike below her head wrap as she maneuvers out of the Red House gateway. The household staff watch silently as Kristos departs.
“What will happen to him?” Shay asks Bertine.
“Oh, he’ll wander around the Grande Île, working, leaving. Always trying to take what isn’t his. Men like that will never have anything for long. He is empty, like an old calabash. He may even come back to Naratrany, but he won’t set foot in this house. He opened the gate once, but never again.”
“I can hardly believe he’s gone,” whispers Shay. The two women are silent for a moment, then she stumblingly adds: “Bertine, I have to repay you for this. What can I give you?”
The other woman gives a quick glance over her shoulder at a maid polishing the dining table with a coconut-fiber brush. “Ca, c’est facile,” she says, without even a hint of demurring. “I would like something for my house. A new roof, to keep out the rain during the cyclones. An aluminum one, like the Neighbor has, the kind the Indian sells at ten euros a sheet.”
“Of course,” says Shay, a little nonplussed at this brisk specificity. Involuntarily she glances up at her own huge roof, and feels ashamed that she has hardly ever thought of where Bertine lives.
“You’ll see my house one day,” says Bertine, as if she has read her mind.
The Greek leaves behind him a mountain of bills, mainly for things the Sennas thought were already paid for. He leaves his pink hat and, surprisingly, his serpent walking stick, which Landry the gardener saws into pieces that are unobtrusively flung onto the bonfire a week later, at the Red House housewarming.
For they finally host the big fête that should have been given two years before. A few minutes after noon on the day of the August full moon, headmen from the two villages stand with Senna on the beach in front of the Red House and slaughter two thrashing, bellowing black zebu bulls with white chests. As the blood of the poor beasts cascades to the sand, Shay, faint with revulsion, shudders and squeezes her eyes shut; but her French, Italian, and Malagasy friends—including the pharmacist Angélique, in her chicest sundress—and the household workers, who have pushed her to the front of the crowd—cheer and clap and burst into song.
That night the Sennas, their staff, and friends sit crammed together at a long makeshift table set up on the beach. As the moon rises and the towering bonfire blazes, they feast on zebu brochettes washed down with rivers of beer and powerful toaka gasy rum shipped in from Amoron’i Mania. The sugarcane has been harvested and the stubble burnt off, and islanders stream in over the ash-strewn paths, as the crowd dances far into the night to the live music of a popular salegy trio. At one point, Shay and Senna find themselves performing a clumsy solo jitterbug in the middle of a screeching, clapping circle of onlookers.
“It’s good for the house for the husband and wife to be dancing,” Bertine tells her approvingly, when Shay, sweaty and disheveled, encounters her finishing a cigarette in a deserted corner of the garden that smells strongly of urine. Like Shay, Bertine is half-drunk on the strong tamarind rum, and totters a bit, but her six Sakalava hair knots are gleaming and impeccable. Shay grins and starts to move back to the party, but the other woman catches her by the arm. “There is one more thing you have to do,” she says.
She pulls Shay deeper into the shadows and presses a familiar-feeling small packet into her hand. “Inside is a powder. Put it in a cup of water and pour it over your body. Then you should make love with your husband. Tonight.”
“What if he’s not interested?” Shay thinks of the peculiar limbo in which she and Senna have lived together since the departure of Kristos, a kind of benign fog of distance through which neither of them finds any inclination to navigate. “More important, Bertine, what if I’m not interested?”
Bertine chuckles. “He’ll be interested. And as for you—well, Senna is a decent man, and that is all that matters. We women are the ones who choose to love or not. We are the ones who count.”
Shay for the first time feels annoyed by Bertine’s oracular tone. “You always say that,” she protests. “But the Neighbor is a man!”
Bertine, who really has had a lot to drink, gives a scornful whoop of laughter. “You think that?” she says. “The Neighbor could never be a man!”
Shay stares at her through the darkness. “But Abu Nasdeen—”
“Il fait le travail. He does the work. He is a kind of—”
“Servant?” whispers Shay. “But then who—”
“You ate rice with her.”
Shay recalls the female figures clustered around the pot inside the shanty—the little girl with the white dress and the grown-up eyes; the old woman with her young girl’s neck and shoulders—and her head seems to spin. Which one was she?
Bertine touches her arm. “Don’t ask any more about these things,” she says. “A vazaha can’t understand. Just remember to do what I said.”
And lighting another Good Look, she heads back onto the beach, her tall dark figure soon lost in the crowd of silhouettes dancing in the firelight. Shay carries Bertine’s gift to her room, noticing as she does that the musicians are taking a break, and that someone has turned on the sound system, which is blasting, not salegy or tsapika, but what sounds like old-school American hip-hop: A Tribe Called Quest, if she is not mistaken. This is also a happenstance that is almost unbelievable, but Shay is too tired to go and find out how music from her country has traveled over land and sea to wash up, this particular evening, on the shores of this tiny island. She is already terminally amazed. I’m drunk and mystery lives under this moon, she thinks: that is all. And she tucks the tiny packet away in her beauty case.
During the last week of August, before the Sennas depart for Italy, statues flow out of the Red House. Given away or sold, they are lugged off through the main entrance or across the garden, where Landry and the other gardeners are replacing cacti with banana plants and bougainvillea. Shay discovers a new passion for haggling when she sells six of the largest sculptures to a Belgian developer for a new beach resort at Bevalava. Senna pitches in to off-load the pieces he helped collect, grumbling that he doesn’t know what that son of a bitch Kristos thought he was doing, wasting money on this cheap tourist crap. Colonel Andrianasolo buys a musician holding a bamboo zither, and the South African owner of the Rêve Bleu dive center acquires the big serpent carving, saying that it will keep prowlers from breaking in, since Naratrany islanders have a horror of snakes.
Shay and Senna have fallen into a curious equilibrium, a kind of casual tolerance usually shared by couples who have been happy for decades; at night, though, they find themselves fucking with the unhinged intensity of strangers overcome by lust in, say, an airplane toilet. They hardly remember this in the mornings, but it is not at all a bad thing.
And the atmosphere in the Red House feels lighter as the house begins to breathe, inhaling and exhaling with the tides.
“So it’s done,” Shay remarks jauntily to Bertine on the Sennas’ last morning. The suitcases are packed and loaded into the back of the pickup, salaries paid, and the usual gifts distributed among the staff. Senna is off talking to the new managers Shay found with the help of Angélique—a Malagasy husband and a French wife who will begin renting rooms to travelers in a chambre d’hôtes system, and will keep the house in repair through cyclone season.
Shay, hair dried out and skin darkened by two months in the tropics, has a strong autumnal urge to travel north. To return to life in a big city; to wake to the rattle of streetcars on mornings when fog presses in on the nineteenth-century windows of the apartment so full of familiar comforts. To return to work, riding her bicycle through Milan traffic to the university, where she will take up once more the hopeless but gratifying task of imparting to her eager Italian students a minimal sense of the legacy of outrage that informs Black American literature—her own literature, her own people’s pain. To be back in the part of the world where reality has fixed parameters and, foreigner though she may be, she knows the rules.
Impatience hangs over her as, dressed for travel, she stands facing Bertine in the bedroom where so much took place. Already, the events of the summer seem far away, like happenings in a folktale. Bertine herself, for weeks the most vivid presence in Shay’s life, with her big body, her draped lamba, her knotted hairstyle, this morning appears somehow faded, like an illustration in an old geography book.
And now Shay longs to feel satisfied. Haven’t battles been won and debts paid? She has given Bertine enough money for three new roofs. And just now she has given her a pair of Italian gold ear hoops, big enough to make the rest of the staff jealous. To the Neighbor—whoever she may be—Shay has sent more money, concealed within a pink plastic doll from the Saint Grimaud market. In a very American fashion, Shay wants to be quits; and surely being generous with gifts is the best way to accomplish that. Although, for some reason she can’t explain to herself, those gifts feel just slightly like bribes.
“No,” says Bertine, looking at her steadily. For the first time, Shay notices that each of the other woman’s eyes has a ruddy spark deep in its darkness, like a campfire seen from far away. “It’s not done.”
“But he—Kristos—is gone. The house is quiet. I feel it.” Shay says this with a sharp intonation that she instantly senses is presumptuous, as Bertine continues to regard her with those deep-lit eyes, her bare feet—strong, with each toe clearly defined—set firmly on the red floor.
“No,” says Bertine. “It wasn’t for that man to decide whether a house is quiet or not quiet. He opened the gate, that’s all. He wanted something that wasn’t his. And so he—and those Comorean women he went to—tried to make a way. Ha! He soon learned.”
“You keep talking about the gate, but I don’t understand what you mean,” says Shay.
“You can’t understand. All I can tell you is that it has to do with things you see, and things you can’t see. The more time you spend here, the more you’ll know. You are in a good position now—we’ve made sure of that. Still, you’ll have to work with us to keep it.”
“Work with you? What do you mean? It’s our house—our property!” breaks in Shay impetuously. She suddenly feels impatient at the fact that this simple, practically illiterate woman should be lecturing her.
Bertine la Grande doesn’t look away or change her expression but seems to grow taller, and solider in her stance. And suddenly Shay feels intimidated—a very different emotion from the schoolgirl terror she felt toward Kristos.
“It’s the house you vazaha built, on the land you bought,” Bertine says, very quietly. “But that doesn’t count for everything. You are young and rich,” she continues, without bitterness.
“And fortunate, and you’ll have children who will be fortunate. We’ve made you queen of the house, in our way. But this land—eh bien. Let us say… let’s say that it is yours, for now.”
Just then comes the sound of the truck horn, signaling that it is time to leave for the airport. Shay throws her arms around Bertine, kisses her three times in the Malagasy style, breathes in the older woman’s powerful scent of laundry soap and tobacco, and, driven by some impulse she hardly understands, whispers: “Merci, ma soeur!”
Bertine presses her close for a bare instant. “Don’t worry,” she says, withdrawing. “I’m here, and so is our Neighbor.” Quickly she reaches for Shay’s shoulder bag and drops something small into it: a final packet. “Don’t open it. Just put it away, and keep it where you live—là-bas en Italie.”
The staff of the Red House call goodbye and wave, as Senna and Shay jounce slowly out of the courtyard in the truck, with Landry the gardener dreamily chewing khat as he balances atop the luggage in the back. At the head of the driveway, Senna, whose phone is already buzzing with messages from his office, brakes as he always does, and gazes down over the treetops at the house. “Well, it’s goodbye to this old place until Christmas,” he says, in the elegiac tones of any husband leaving a fishing lodge anywhere. “It was a great summer in the end—right, darling? True, we had a bit of a problem with that asshole Greek, but things like that happen in these primitive countries.”
Shay hardly hears him. There will be time enough back in Milan to decipher what kind of respect she will preserve for Senna. But now she is looking down at the roof of the Red House and what flashes through her mind is Libertalia. The Arcadian fantasy of perfect freedom, which in one meretricious form or another has washed up on so many shores over the centuries, opening the way for hordes of thugs far worse than Kristos. Libertalia, a tale of rapine disguised by lofty dreams; a theme not unique to Madagascar but also buried in the history of her own family, her America.
She thinks of the people at work under that big thatched roof: the true landowners, who know the secret contours of the terrain. The Malagasy, garbed as servants, who hold together the newcomers’ aspirations like dark stitches closing a wound; who have set her up as mistress—within their private limits and definitions. Then she thinks of Bertine, whom she has just called “sister.” And again and again during the drive through the burnt cane fields, Shay wonders what the other woman thought of her words. Was she offended? Pleased? Did she think it was funny? Did she hear me? Did she?