Here she stands
her eyes reflecting crystals of sleep
her eyelids heavy with timeless dreams
her feet are rooted in the ocean
and when she lifts her dripping hands
they hold corals and shimmering salt.
—Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, “Here She Stands,” translated by Miriam Koshland
There are two women on the island that Shay thinks of in the same beat, unfailingly, as one thinks of twins or certain married couples. These two aren’t related, except by an ever-evolving hatred. Still, Shay feels they are the same kind, the same peculiar species, and their fates are intertwined. She first sees this on the day she drives Blue home.
One morning Shay comes out of the water from her early swim and finds the boy Blue sitting up in the tamarind tree. He knows the tree because he has played there often, aloft in its branches with her children, Roby and Augustina; there is even a rough plank platform that they nailed up between two of the thick boughs. From there, accompanied by a scrambling host of Malagasy children from up and down Finoana Beach, they holler shrill piratical challenges and military directives, while raising and lowering bananas and bottles of lime and honey water on a rope. But at the moment the Senna kids are thousands of miles away, spending a summer month with their grandparents in California, and there is no sense of play in the way Blue crouches aloft like a mournful young lemur, peering down at Shay through the dense, feathery leaves.
“Ciao!” he calls out in Italian, in his high-pitched voice. “I’m kind of hungry! Do you have any of those fried potatoes?”
It is barely seven in the morning, the sea is a flat azure tray, and land shadows still stretch long fingers of coolness over the beach. It is her favorite time of day, when Senna and their guests are just getting up, the fishermen and the dive boats already departed, the sand deserted except for market women passing with baskets on their heads, and hotel gardeners quietly raking the tide line. Shay with mask and flippers has swum the length of Finoana Bay just inside the reef, the water smooth as cream, the surface already sun-warmed, a sting of nighttime chill lingering in the depths.
“Ciao, Blue!” she says, trying to keep alarm out of her voice. His hair is a burnt rusty gold, thick as a chow dog’s. His lips are full as a girl’s, and, in the greenish shade, the enormous sky-colored eyes that give him his nickname resemble those of a child saint from an old painting. “How’d you get here?”
Blue lives with his mother, Giusy, who runs a notorious beach bar on the next bay over.
“Oh, I got a ride up to the crossroads on one of the Siramamy trucks,” he says, meaning the big tractors that carry the workers back and forth to the sugar works. He brightens visibly at the memory. “They all know me.”
Everyone on the island knows him, in fact, every cane worker and fisherman and hotelkeeper and petty port official and backcountry peasant, as do the prostitutes, who for his whole life have dandled him on their knees in his mother’s bar.
“Oh. And so what time this morning did you leave home?” Shay asks carefully.
“Well, it was last night,” he admits, clambering nimbly down the tree trunk and presenting himself for Shay to kiss on each cheek with a confident, ceremonious air, as if he’s a prize she has just won. He is sturdy, healthy-looking, deeply tanned, wearing a normal outfit of surfer shorts and a Billabong T-shirt; dirty, but no dirtier than any other ten-year-old boy.
Shay wraps a towel around herself and takes him into the Red House. There she gets him a glass of honey water, and has Gaethon, the cook, who has just arrived, fry him up a plate of potatoes. She is tamping down any rage she feels toward Blue’s mother. Shay doesn’t have Giusy’s phone number, and in any case, she won’t be awake yet. Shay adds toast and two scrambled eggs to his plate, which the boy cheerfully pushes aside. He chatters to her in Italian with a rather posh accent, and in French and Malagasy with Gaethon.
Then Shay puts him in her pickup truck and drives him home, up the hill past the charcoal makers’ settlement, through Finoana village, past the Muslim cemetery and the hippie hotel Chez Bebèle, to the beginning of Sokatra Beach, where, between the village road and the sand, stands a thatched concrete building with a wide entryway closed off with a steel grille that makes it look prison-like in the daylight. On the damp-stained plastered wall facing the road, an island artist has painted, in slapdash style, a ten-foot-long reclining mermaid with explosive green hair, brown skin, muscular arms crossed firmly over invisible breasts, and a jaunty, twice-curled, forked tail like a cross between that of a sea serpent and that of a barracuda. She is of no identifiable race or age, and, almost eyeless, she squints into the distance with her huge crimson mouth opened in a smile of rapacious glee. Running along the upper curves of her figure, neon letters—a rarity on Naratrany—spell out the name of the bar: Chanson de la Mer.
In the daytime this all looks tawdry and grotesque, like a weather-beaten circus poster. But at night, when the pink neon glows, and salegy music blares out over the scraggly palms, and the kerosene lamps of vendors selling brochettes and samosas glow in the dark crossroads, and the young people who are too poor to afford an entrance fee dance in a throng in the road outside the forbidden doorway, every fiber of their bodies pulsing with the beat—well, then the painted mermaid takes on glamorous substance and the appearance of life: a resplendent, if scaly, mistress of the revels.
Chanson de la Mer is Blue’s home, the only one he has known since he first arrived in Madagascar, a baby with a flamboyant Italian mother, but no identifiable father. Here he has grown older, and can be found any night the club is open, sitting at the bar at one, two, even three in the morning, sipping a Coke, watching the scrum of old white tourists and young Black prostitutes on the dance floor, falling asleep with his head on his folded arms. People of all colors and social classes on Naratrany deplore how Blue lives, but there is really nothing anyone can do. He seems healthy and literate, goes with fair regularity to the École Notre Dame, and his mother, Giusy, is quick to tell any critics to fuck off.
“Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn…” The nursery rhyme pops into Shay’s head whenever she encounters the boy, though no Malagasy or Italian knows it, and it seems of an otherworldly innocence compared to his circumstances.
As Shay pulls up to the club and Blue hops out of the Mitsubishi, the warped wooden side door leading to Giusy’s private living quarters bursts open, and Giusy—who is usually never seen before late afternoon—darts out and grabs her son with a movement suggesting a moray eel shooting out of a rocky underwater den. She is a small, freakishly skinny woman with a mane of multicolored dreadlocks, and although she is not much taller than her son, she manages to envelop him in a total embrace, as if she wants to yank him back into her body. At the same time—Shay watches this multitasking with a kind of maternal awe—Giusy administers two tight slaps, which she somehow incorporates into an avalanche of kisses on the boy’s scarlet, dodging cheek, accompanying all this with a tearful litany of curses and endearments.
“Piccolo stronzo… amore mio… You little asshole, my treasure, where have you been? Saida woke me up, and told me you didn’t sleep here. I have been dying, dying of worry, do you understand? I called everybody, I sent Umar and the boys out looking for you!”
Blue starts bawling, too, loudly, like a calf calling its mother, and blubbers out an explanation: he went chasing crabs out on the beach after midnight with the two Belgian boys from the hippie hotel, who have a new, powerful flashlight, and when the boys went to bed, he wasn’t sleepy so he hiked down to Renirano to watch the fishermen set up their pirogues for the predawn excursion, and then, followed by a friendly pack of stray dogs, he strolled through the little shuttered village toward the Saint Grimaud road, where he was uproariously greeted by the cane workers on the tractor as the sun rose, and thought it might be fun to take a ride to visit the tree house he’d built with Roby and Augustina.
Shay is sitting in the driver’s seat of the truck with the door open and her legs hanging down the side, broiling in the nine o’clock sun. Village women are walking by with sobiky baskets and plastic washbasins on their heads, and the bush taxi drivers always parked near the club are lounging up against their battered Renault 5s. Everybody is observing the scene with enjoyment: Giusy—with her bird’s nest of purple and green dreadlocks, her spidery sunburnt limbs covered with sleeves and leggings of dense tattoos that somehow give her, for all of her coarse deportment, the delicate beauty of an otherworldly captive, a real mermaid, perhaps—berating her errant son.
Shay experiences a surge of something like relief at the thought of her own faraway kids, whose only danger this summer is of being spoiled by adoring grandparents as they test the tame limits of computer camps and adventure playgrounds out there in the straw-colored Oakland Hills. She finds peculiarly disturbing the sight of this entwined mother and son, in which there seems to be something ominous, vaguely reminiscent of Laocoön and his doomed offspring. Her uneasiness increases as Blue breaks away and scuttles into his door, and Giusy throws her overwrought effusions of gratitude in Shay’s direction.
“Tesoro, grazie, grazie!” she sobs into Shay’s neck, having drawn her out of the truck and into a clinging embrace. “You’re a marvelous woman, such an angel, always looking out for my sweet boy!”
Through Giusy’s skimpy halter and shorts, Shay can feel her bony body, which, despite the morning heat, is strangely clammy. Giusy smells of cigarettes, some unsuitably girlish floral cologne, coffee, and a tinge of Dzama rum. Shay knows that Giusy comes from a rich manufacturing family somewhere in the Marche region, and is a former addict. Despite her present histrionics, there is a hard practicality in this woman, a quality that has been invaluable in running the biggest dance club on the island; nowadays her pleasures come not from drugs but from the thrill of wielding power in her own domain, from drawing in and manipulating men through a sea of gorgeous Black hookers years younger than she is.
Giusy is pressing Shay to accept a cappuccino, some papaya juice, or a beer, when a jeep pulls up, blocking the road in front of the club. It is a peculiarly customized jeep, with fat tires and beachy wooden panels cut low and open on the sides, and a bright green chameleon painted across the hood.
The driver is Marisa, the other woman in this story. She is instantly recognizable by her thick black Dutch-girl chop of hair, and her habit of dressing in layers of starched white linen, as if she is living out some Happy Valley colonial fantasy. A thin, dour Sakalava woman in a print head wrap, her housekeeper, sits bolt upright beside her. The vintage memsahib image is perfect, at least until Marisa opens her mouth, which is pure back-street Neapolitan.
“Ciao, Shay!” she hollers. “Che ci fai qui con sta sgualdrina? What are you doing here with this slut? I hear her kid was roaming around the island all night. Well, well, what do you expect with a mother like that?”
“Fuck off, you lurid bitch!” shrieks Giusy, and flings herself toward the jeep, but Marisa just smirks, takes a newly lit cigarette out of her mouth and flips it deftly onto the dirt road in front of the other woman, then roars off, scattering a crowd of marketgoers. The taxi drivers crack up laughing, and one of them strolls up and retrieves the cigarette. In a couple of hours, news of this encounter will be all over the island, though it is not anything that hasn’t been seen before.
Giusy and Marisa rule an appreciable part of the nightlife of Naratrany. They don’t really compete for clientele, yet for years a bitter enmity has simmered between them. Marisa owns a popular restaurant, Le Caméléon, built on bad land just a short walk down the beach from the Red House. The land is bad because it was originally not even solid earth but a tidal stream that flowed in and out of the backcountry, complete with mangroves, mud, crabs, and shrimp larvae. An Italian developer, whom everyone calls just “the Abruzzese,” years ago filled in the channel and did a perfunctory drainage of the surrounding wetland; then Marisa, newly arrived from Naples, bought the terrain and built her small thatched establishment. It has a lot of quaint island charm: waxed plank floors, lightbulbs caged in baskets, tables and chairs knocked together in a primitive, appealing way, furnishings fit for an arty beach bar on Mykonos or Formentera. Caméléon of course means chameleon, and a wooden carving of the creature, painted bright green and magnified to the size of a crocodile, hangs over the entryway. Chameleons are everywhere on the island, often stopping traffic as they cross the road with their halting mechanical gait, but they are fady—taboo—among the Sakalava and other tribes, considered harbingers of misfortune. The neighboring villagers, whose stream has now become a stagnant marsh, speak darkly of Le Caméléon.
But things have gone well for Marisa. Italian and French locals flock with the eagerness of the desperately bored to fill her ten tables or crowd around the tiny counter, to devour her excellent Neapolitan and creole dishes: pappa al pomodoro with a touch of piri-piri, calamari pizza—somehow she has set up a wood-burning oven that achieves the proper intensity—dark chocolate mousse with lychees.
It is rumored that Marisa is a criminal and can’t go back to Naples, or anywhere in Italy. Undeniably there is something dangerous about her, but she also has a powerful charm, though at forty-something she is angular and weathered, a wicked little Arlecchina with pointed nose and sharp grifter’s eyes under her dyed black fringe, and an antic flow of Neapolitan blarney. Like Giusy, she has that seductive ability to alternate raucous good humor with stony impassivity: a talent typical of barmaids and other women who spend their lives in crowds of drunken men. And, like Giusy, she has a young, vulnerable creature unhealthily attached to her.
Not a child, though. Marisa’s dependent is a Swiss girl named Hélène, in her twenties and already a hopeless alcoholic; fair-haired, weak, rich, and rumored to be Marisa’s lover, though Marisa is ostentatiously heterosexual. But how else to explain the older woman’s demonic hold over this creature with her refined manners, who hums Mozart and efficiently superintends the dessert making in the restaurant kitchen, before indulging in wild drunken scenes, and collapsing sodden on the beach? Pretty Hélène, with her tubercular pallor and wistful smile, the girl whose money paid for Le Caméléon, and who continues to invest in Marisa’s dodgy projects: a sapphire mine near the Baie des Russes, a burger franchise in Mahajanga.
The day Shay sees Marisa and Giusy skirmish with each other in the road, it occurs to her that the patterns of their lives are similar, that they are the same kind. In Shay’s hyperactive and playful imagination, they become not just two louche women, but relics of a mythical race: bleak-hearted enchantresses, with magnetic powers over ordinary humans.
So why do they hate each other? Part of it is fighting over lovers. There is the Belgian dive instructor; the handsome Merina director of the agricultural school; an array of good-looking young fishermen, musicians, Peace Corps workers, boat hands. All captured and retaken like pawns in an unending game of chess. Recently, it is said, they’ve been battling for possession of a moraingy boxing champion, a Bara who is said to be the handsomest man in Madagascar.
“A pair of ball-breakers, those two gals,” says Shay’s husband, Senna, in his usual blunt way. “They’re territorial, like monk seals. There’s only room for one of them on the island.”
The Sennas are relishing these weeks without the kids, a holiday meant to reestablish harmony after a year in which Senna’s business trips to China and South America—and, Shay suspects, his casual affairs—have been too frequent. Here in the incomparable beauty of Naratrany, diving, poking around the trackless backcountry as they both love to do, they’ve started to enjoy each other again. Things are good, in spite of the onerous presence of guests from Milan, of whom the women spend fretful hours smoking on sun loungers and in world-weary tones reiterating the eternal Italian litany: that marriage is a vale of tears and neglectful husbands part of the natural order.
In contrast to these martyred wives, Shay finds Giusy and Marisa suit her mood. In some ways, she can’t stand them—she’s heard from friends that Giusy refers to her behind her back as Our Holy Virgin of America, and Marisa is just as catty. Yet at the same time she is fascinated by the unshakable autonomy of the two women, their dance of shifting domination and their deepening feud.
It’s the week of the yearly music festival, when stars from all over the Indian Ocean crowd Naratrany, and, day and night, mobs of ecstatic dancers sweat up the brickcolored dust in the barren terrain near the Saint Grimaud port that serves as football pitch and fairgrounds, crazy with salegy, twarab, and wild hip-hop fusion from Mauritius, Comoros, Rodrigues, and all regions of Madagascar.
There are six of them, the Sennas and their friends, crowded around a table in Le Caméléon, as the cold June tidal breeze rattles the basket lampshades, and a local trio that Marisa hired in honor of the festival plays unendingly on a bamboo tube zither, a four-string guitar, and a frenetic accordion in a corner of the room. The place is packed with diners planning to go on later to hear some serious music at Chanson de la Mer or get down and dirty with the three-day-old crowd at the fairgrounds, though Marisa, darting between tables, black bangs bobbing, acts as if her restaurant is the destination of the century.
Hélène has squeezed in next to Shay, who breathes in the castile soap fragrance of the girl’s feathery hair as she leans on Shay’s shoulder and chatters—in English with a posh L’Aiglon accent—about the recipe of the vanilla tart they are gobbling down. Hélène is always drunk but never smells like it, and Shay wonders if this is connected to her age. How old must she be? Twenty-three or twenty-four, practically a child in this middle-aged European crowd. How did this little debutante end up marooned on a remote beach, a willing victim of Marisa?
Just then, a young man with headphones around his neck, carrying a pair of speakers, steps off the dark beach onto the restaurant veranda, and conversation dies down. He is Malagasy, with a high-angled face that looks not Sakalava or Antandroy, but some other tribe bred to the point of divine symmetry of feature; hair in short vertical twists; skin the color of polished iron; a heroic body of chiseled muscle and sinew. He is a living statue, and either completely unaware of the effect he creates or showing off, since he’s shirtless on that windy night. “Oh Lord, look at that!” blurts out Shay, who has had a drink or two herself.
A few people laugh at this rambunctious remark, including Hélène, who murmurs into her ear, “It’s Tomy.”
But Marisa, standing at the table next to Shay’s, gives her a hard glance with her Arlecchina eyes and says in a knife-sharp tone: “Do you mean my husband, Shay?”
This, then, must be the boxer she has been contesting with Giusy. Everyone bursts out laughing, and Shay pretends she knew all along, and greets the sculptural Tomy, who replies with grave formality. Senna turns the whole thing into a joke, in a way that makes Shay’s gaffe seem witty. Hélène lolls on her shoulder, giggling and explaining in a loud whisper that of course the two are not really married, but Tomy is now Marisa’s property. And everybody knows how jealous Marisa is.
Later on, the Sennas and their guests head over to Chanson de la Mer. The place is in an uproar, infected by the mad carnival spirit. Three bands are playing off against each other, and the dance floor has been enlarged—a simple matter of expanding the picket walls beyond the roofline so that you can dance not just on the concrete inside floor but on trampled dirt under the riot of stars.
Everybody is in a fever, agog over rumors of the imminent arrival of Raydar, a huge hip-hop star and Naratrany homeboy, who always makes the rounds of his old clubs. Gate-crashers mill on the outer edges, shoving against the village thugs that Giusy employs as bouncers, and girls in hot pants and skintight jeans are up on tables dancing with full beer bottles on their heads, or on the ground in the position of prayer, asses raised and fluttering in unbelievable maputo moves. Fights break out, mainly staged between prostitutes trying to impress tourists, but one girl actually takes off her high heel and slashes another on the shoulder.
The Sennas make it through to the bar, where the island toffs have gathered: Shay sees Paranaky, the Merina senator, his shaved head glazed with sweat, talking with Georges, who owns the Chambord hotel, and Janine, who runs the malaria foundation. At the heart of the tumult is Giusy, calmly slinging drinks along with her motley trio of bartenders, a Malagasy, a Mauritian, and a New Zealander who somehow washed up on Naratrany. Giusy is wearing one of her Greek-looking dresses, her tattooed shoulders poking through cutouts, her multicolored dreadlocks pulled up in a spiral tower. She looks slit-eyed like a cat with enigmatic contentment, and occasionally leans over to murmur something to her latest boyfriend, a handsome Sicilian she is said to have pinched from Marisa.
And of course there is young Blue, seated on his usual high stool, but this time, because of the chaos, behind the bar. He is sipping a Coke and, completely absorbed as if he were alone, playing on a Game Boy. Seated beside him is a handsome white-haired man Shay has never seen before, wearing a crisply ironed striped dress shirt. He is ignoring the music and the wild scene, and talking to Blue, who barely acknowledges him.
“Who’s that?” Shay asks Angélique the pharmacist, who is decked out in a jumpsuit and peacock feather earrings.
“That’s Giusy’s father. He’s here from Ancona, and everybody is talking about how he wants to take his grandson back to live in Italy. Giusy won’t have it, though it would be a good thing for ce pauvre Blue.”
Shay studies Giusy, her father, and her son through the cigarette smoke and tumult. She can sense the Olympian respectability of the old man, the hesitant attraction of Blue to the privileged life his grandfather offers, the furious resentment of Giusy, the former addict, toward her father, and her passionate maternal clutching at her son. It’s a mess of a situation, a tragedy in the making. But at the same time Giusy has never looked more triumphantly at her ease than she does right now surrounded by music and chaos and men.
A few days later, Shay steps out of the shade of the Red House garden into the buzzing reverberation of noon, feeling herself a small figure against the hard blue sky; the shrunken shadows; the bay, flat as a prairie at low tide. In the shallows, a pair of catamarans and a fat-bellied boutre sit still as monuments. She needs to get away from the annoying chatter of her guests, who are roasting themselves alongside the pool. Heat leaking through her sandals, her head spinning from the dazzle of the sand, she sets out down Finoana Beach toward the black-lava headland visible two miles away. A few squatting village children and snoozing souvenir vendors cluster in the scant shade of the palms and sea pines, but otherwise she has the beach to herself.
Passing in front of Le Caméléon, Shay looks across the little terrace, and sees, at one of the tables inside, a sight that startles her. The profile of Giusy’s father, unmistakable with that precise white haircut, seated at a table with Marisa, Giusy’s archnemesis. With them sits Hélène, her hair pulled up in a tiny bun, smoking in her jeune fille rangée fashion, and sipping a beer. And in the mangrove-lined hollow abutting the restaurant Shay can see Tomy, a Riace bronze figure come to life, changing a tire on Marisa’s jeep.
Shay pauses, amazed by Giusy’s father’s presence in the camp, so to speak, of his daughter’s enemy. And then Marisa spots Shay, and summons her with a wave that like all of her movements has a commedia dell’arte dash to it. Shay knows that getting involved in this situation is unwise, but still she trudges up to the restaurant through the blistering sand.
Introduced, Shay sees that Giusy’s father embodies the man of virtue, as Lorenzetti’s frescoes illustrate il Buon Governo. He owns a shoe factory near Ancona and has a businessman’s pragmatism that Shay recognizes from her own husband. Blond eyelashes gone white with seventy-five years or so, a face expensively weathered in sailboats, mouth corners downturned with the tortured angle that parents of addicts develop, and the same sky-colored eyes as his grandson, Blue. He has a big gold chronometer on his sun-spotted wrist, and sits in front of his beer without touching it.
“Signora Shay just loves your grandson!” Marisa tells the old gentleman vivaciously, crinkling her brilliant dark eyes. Today she is wearing a crisp white linen sundress, and resembles—if you don’t know her—a warmhearted hostess. “Adores him! Blue is a close friend of her children. That is Shay’s big villa down the beach, and the dear boy considers it a home away from home. He showed up there once in the morning, didn’t he, Shay? After running away from Chanson de la Mer and wandering the island all night, poor darling. So dangerous, in this wild place. His mother didn’t even know he was out.”
Shay reluctantly admits this is so.
The angle of Giusy’s father’s jaw grows sharper. “Non è possibile!” he mutters.
“But the boy does love his mamma,” ventures Hélène, and then stops suddenly like a guilty child, as Marisa gives her a stinging glance.
“We gave up on our daughter years ago,” the old gentleman says abruptly. It is clear that he is normally a reserved person, at the moment cast into one of those confessional moods that tropical climates inspire in some visitors. “But our grandson, our only grandson, perbacco, no!”
“Ce pauvre petit,” he adds—suddenly switching from Italian to orotund French as if he were presenting a case at the Cour d’Appel—“that poor child will no longer live in these depraved circumstances. There will be legal measures, I assure you!”
Marisa nods with feigned sympathy, and Shay feels the afternoon wind pick up, rattling the straw shades of the veranda as if a current of the element of pure life—the crazy element that creates unstable situations, makes things, even terrible things, happen—had suddenly raced through the little restaurant. Shay finishes her cup of bitter Neapolitan coffee, excuses herself, and goes on with her walk. When she passes by some time later, Giusy’s father is gone.
Soon afterward the Sennas leave Naratrany for Italy, and, as always, it is as if a door shuts on a different dimension. In August they rent out the Red House, and head to California to take the kids camping across the national parks. Once back in Milan, Shay, immersed in her usual round of teaching, translation work, shepherding Roby and Augustina between school and sports, has no time to think of Madagascar. Odd scraps of gossip reach her like messages in bottles. One of these is that Blue is now back in Italy, living with his grandparents.
Briefly Shay wonders how this has happened, reasoning that Giusy probably saw the light, and agreed to let the boy spend the school year in Ancona. She doesn’t find out until she returns to Naratrany at Christmastime that, following her father’s visit, Giusy lost custody of her son. International lawyers were involved, and the Italian consul.
Blue is no longer on the island, and the Senna children soon stop asking about him. The official story is the tame one that Shay first imagined: that Giusy and her family decided it was best for him to prepare for his middle school exams in Italy. But her island informants, chiefly Angélique and the all-knowing Bertine la Grande, soon enlighten her as to how bribes were offered, gendarmes called in from Diego Suarez, scandalous information dug up about drugs and underage prostitution at Chanson de la Mer. They tell of ugly threats; an attempted escape of Giusy and Blue to Mauritius blocked at the airport; scenes of screaming and yelling, and officers tearing away a boy too big to be clinging to his mother.
People are appalled, but, as usual, Naratrany life goes on. Over the Christmas holidays, when the island is full of Europeans and South Africans, Giusy is there behind the bar every night, as if nothing has happened: she appears a bit scragglier, but unbowed, with a new tattoo—the name Blue—covering the left side of her neck. As always, she is immersed in men. Heartbreak or not, she continues to expand her business, bringing in music talent from all over the Indian Ocean; the hip-hop star Raydar even records a hit track about Giusy and Chanson de la Mer.
Meanwhile, at Le Caméléon, Marisa is also doing good business, looking trendy with a new hairdo—shaved on one side—her eyes sparking with schemes, bouncing about like the little circus performer she resembles. She seems more than usually pleased with herself; it’s common gossip that she is the person who actively encouraged Giusy’s father to snatch his grandson away from Chanson de la Mer.
That year, rains come a month early, in late December, and the displaced tidal stream beside the restaurant swells to a powerful muddy torrent, sometimes thigh-high, that you have to cross on the beach to get there, but people flock to the place anyway, laughing and splashing like adventurers. Marisa has enlarged the veranda onto the beach so that it sometimes seems as if you are eating afloat in the high tide. Hélène has gotten an ice cream machine, and has the cook making passion fruit and lychee sorbets. Somebody writes up the place in an important travel guide, and backpackers take detours to eat there.
Hélène has also had her hair cut, in a schoolgirl bob, and she is drinking more than ever. Staggers all over the place in the evenings, sometimes flinging herself onto the laps of customers. Marisa, as always, treats her with offhand affection, as one would an impossible little sister, deploying the cook and waiter to cart her off and lock her in her bedroom when she gets too raucous.
All at once, though, there is an unpleasant rumor in circulation, one that Shay expected to hear much earlier: that Marisa’s handsome boyfriend Tomy is having an affair with Hélène. Word has gotten around that the amorous couple have been seen at night in a truck parked up beyond the airport, near the collapsed archway that leads to an abandoned ylang-ylang plantation. And that, back at the restaurant, when Marisa is away, they shut themselves up in the kitchen toilet.
On Naratrany, nasty gossip like this circulates about everyone, including Shay herself, so Shay discounts it. She doesn’t think that Hélène would be so stupid as to put herself in an inflammatory situation with a woman so clearly dangerous as Marisa. Yet it is true that, when she has a few drinks, Hélène loses track of things. The rumors just hang in the air of those unusually hot and wet early January days, and then the Senna family heads back to Milan.
One night in early spring, Senna comes home from work with staggering news: Hélène is dead. Senna has learned this in a phone call from his friend Raza, a Réunionnaise auto dealer and aspiring triathlete who roams Naratrany on a flashy trail bike. It seems that the day before, at dawn, that peculiarly eventful moment on tropical beaches, Raza came upon Hélène’s body in front of Le Caméléon, her head in the torrent that runs past the restaurant, where the land water meets the incoming tide. She’d been dead for hours, soaking wet, her long dress pulled up half over her face so—Raza added this salacious detail—the whole world could see she was wearing no undergarments.
The commissioner who acts in forensic matters (at least for white people and rich Malagasy—the poor are left to their own devices) on Naratrany determines that she drowned while intoxicated, which anyone who knew her can understand. Hélène greeted more than one sunrise while passed out on the beach. It is impossible to interview Marisa, who at the time of the death was off in the capital buying supplies; she is said to be devastated, and in seclusion. Tomy, that week, was competing in a moraingy boxing match in Diego Suarez.
Shay was never a close friend of Hélène’s, but tears fill her eyes when she hears this news. Imagining the poor girl sprawled in the wet sand like a piece of trash, like one of the tattered strips of lamba cloth you sometimes find washed up at the Finoana tide line, of no use even to the poorest of the poor. Later Shay hears that Hélène’s family in Zurich won’t even pay to ship her back from Madagascar. The Swiss consulate has to get involved, and for days the body lies disgracefully marooned on ice in the primitive morgue of Naratrany, where other friendless foreigners have lain.
Just weeks after Hélène’s death, Marisa abandons Naratrany, moving to the Grande Île, somewhere far down on the coast near Tulear. It seems that Tomy has family there, and the pair has invested in a terrain planted with oil palm. With what money no one knows, just as no one ever learns what happened to Hélène’s savings, and her pearls, and her gold signet ring.
The owner of the hippie hotel Chez Bebèle buys Le Caméléon’s quirky furniture and the kitchen equipment, and the restaurant sits boarded up on the beach. It falls apart quickly, a template of abandoned structures in the tropics, having fulfilled all the villagers’ predictions about the bad luck of the name. Occasionally a little Sakalava girl is seen dreamily sweeping the veranda, but weed piles up on the sand in front, and the watercourse clogs with debris. The painted wooden chameleon, displayed so boldly across the entrance, changes color through the cyclone season, as if it were slowly going through all the gradations of the real animal, fading from bright green to a yellowish pallor, to gray.
Later, a canny developer from Johannesburg buys up the property, knocks down the building, has the terrain properly drained, and builds a trio of luxury condominiums, which he has no trouble marketing as peaceful havens to European tourists scared by terrorism at Red Sea resorts.
Of course, the chattering classes of Naratrany, whose epicenter is the Fleur des Îles café, are convinced that it is Marisa who—driven by her notorious jealousy, and employing some dark agency of Neapolitan vengeance—murdered her protégée. But there is, of course, no proof. In the swirl of conjecture, one person Shay never hears mentioned is Marisa’s sworn enemy, Giusy. Is Shay the only one who suspects that it was Giusy who started that ugly rumor of Hélène’s affair with Tomy?
When Shay sees her in summer and winter vacations afterward, Giusy always looks well: hair more serpentine than ever, drawing in a tide of lovers and customers of all colors and nationalities. With her usual acuity, she takes advantage of the restaurant gap left by the departure of her rival, by hiring the former Caméléon cook and opening a brasserie.
Some years pass, and when Blue is eighteen, he comes running back to Madagascar, to the louche life from which he was torn. Giusy, ecstatic, throws a huge party and free concert that overflows her club and floods out onto the crossroads and down to the beach. But in the end Blue proves a torment to his mother. No longer a child content with sitting at the bar, he picks fights with his mother’s boyfriends, disrupts her carefully nurtured rapport with musicians, brings in serious drugs, and gets in big trouble with Comorean gangsters. He is one of a crew of rich island kids who race Jet Skis off Sokatra Point, and one day he has a bad crash that fractures his jaw and right leg so that he has to be helicoptered out to Réunion for surgery. He returns with a frozen face, a limp, and a pill habit that his mother despairingly feeds as he lumbers around Chanson de la Mer, pudgy and bloated, his big, fringed eyes blank.
Giusy seems to absorb the shock of her son’s injury into herself, and begins to deteriorate. She keeps her odd beauty but becomes skeletal, her tattoos mingling with the veins wrapped around her bones, her hair still bravely polychrome, but the whites of her eyes taking on a bronze tinge. It’s said that she is using again; it is said that she has lung cancer, cirrhosis of the liver; but no one knows for sure because she shuts herself up at home. She hires a German as manager, and without her charismatic presence, Chanson de la Mer loses business.
One morning, Giusy and Blue get on a plane to Cape Town, a common destination for moneyed islanders with medical problems. They are never seen again, and news spreads that she has sold the club to the German. Nobody learns what fate the mother and son meet in South Africa because, although everyone on Naratrany knows Giusy, she only had lovers and customers, never any friends.
The new owner makes no success out of Chanson de la Mer. He tries to charge a percentage from the bar girls, and to take over the night market where the village kids dance for free; but people simply move to other clubs. Finally, he renames the place Le Vieux Phàre and whitewashes over the old sign. In daylight, though, passersby can see through the paint the barely visible outline of the figure with the swirling tresses and barracuda tail.
It seems there will be no more news of Marisa and Giusy, but one July afternoon after Giusy has left the island, Shay is reading in a hammock near the seawall of the Red House when a woman comes up out of the dazzle on the sand, and calls her name. She is Italian, and has very long, straggly hair, badly dyed a coal black that has turned rusty in the tropical sun, held back by a wide headband; she is barefoot and wears white Indian trousers and a T-shirt. Her gaunt face is pitted with scars from sand fly bites, and were it not for the sly tilt of her black eyes and the jaunty set of her shoulders, Shay wouldn’t recognize her.
“Marisa!” Shay exclaims.
“So you didn’t know me?”
Shay lies and says she knew her immediately, invites her in, offers her something to drink, but Marisa can’t stay. She’s restless, amped on khat or something stronger, bouncing around on the balls of her feet, her eyes roving up into the tamarind tree as if she is looking for a trapeze to catch hold of.
She replies evasively to Shay’s questions about how she is, what she has done over the past years, and Shay quickly stops asking. Marisa doesn’t want to talk to her anyway: she came by to look for Senna. “Shay, it’s a business deal, something really big, that maybe he might… Not the oil palms, nothing to do with sapphire mines, no, this is something new.”
Shay tells her Senna is still in Italy and won’t arrive for another week, and Marisa, rude as always, immediately turns to leave. But Shay keeps her talking, asking whether she has seen the new condos on the site of Le Caméléon. At this, Marisa gives a harsh laugh, and mutters something in dialect, something like “Quello ho vinto io”—“I won that one…”
Someone calls Shay from inside the Red House, and Shay excuses herself, telling Marisa to wait, but when Shay returns, the other woman has disappeared. Shay squints into the sunlight down the beach, and makes out a small figure walking toward the Finoana headland, loose trousers and hair fluttering in the breeze. Then, just around the level of the former Caméléon, Marisa makes a quick turn to the side, an eerie flicker of a movement, and disappears into the palms.
Shay asks around, and it turns out that she is the only person who saw Marisa. No one else even believes she was on the island, and Shay begins to think that the whole encounter was a dream she conjured up in the hammock, while dozing and jotting down teaching notes on Beloved. Except that it’s exactly the kind of thing Marisa would do: drop by to hustle money.
A few months later, Shay hears through her usual channels that Marisa is dead—of cerebral malaria picked up down there in the wilds of Tulear; the Italian consul can’t even track down her body. The enigmatic Tomy, however, is said to be alive and well.
Shay doesn’t want to calculate exactly when Marisa was supposed to have died, because it rattles her to think that, on the beach, in broad daylight, she might have been visited by a phantom. And anyway, why should she be the one to encounter that particular ghost? She determines to forget the whole thing, but what sticks with her is the uncanny swiftness with which Marisa, at that last sighting, flickered and vanished, like a fish into a crevice in a reef. It is very like a move Shay saw Giusy make one night on the crowded dance floor, slipping off with a man she’d just met. A sidelong glance, a slight shimmer as of hidden scales, a flourish of snaky locks, and the lady of Chanson de la Mer, along with her hapless conquest, is suddenly not there.
On Naratrany memories are short, and the islanders have long stopped discussing Giusy and Marisa, as gossip turns to fresher topics: election riots in the capital; a scourge of muti killings spreading from Mozambique; rosewood smuggling and vanilla wars.
But Shay, both at the Red House and back in Italy, finds the two women fixed in her mind. It’s an odd thing, because she didn’t like either of them. But in spite of this, what she has seen of their lives and their strange feud exerts over her the fascination of things only partially visible, like the spires of a submerged city. Shay has never lost her childhood passion for myths, and the impression lingers with her that she’s been privy, not just to the vendetta of a pair of amoral women, but to the duel of two otherworldly beings, with their own cold-blooded female motives and alien code of conduct. For some reason she has been able to discern their curious life cycle: deadly conflict, chance victims, flaunted triumph, swift dissolution.
Of course this is purest fantasy, and as Shay pictures the face of Blue staring at her through the tamarind leaves, and the body of Hélène sprawled on the sand, she also sees the pointless destruction the two women managed to spread around them. And this in turn begs the question: What, in the end, was gained by anybody involved? But here, Shay, whether on or off the island, finds herself at a full stop. Neither her compassion, her febrile imagination, nor her skill at translation is of any use in deciphering what is either grotesquely tangled human history or the annals of mermaids—which are written in seawater if they are written at all.