To speak a strange tongue is a blessing or a curse. Shay comes across this cryptic adage in an old collection of Malagasy proverbs, translated and privately printed by a long-dead Lutheran missionary. Books of this sort—the work of nineteenth-century French and English clergymen once deployed in remote corners of Madagascar: foxed and musty-smelling volumes of notes on folklore and ethnology, whose amplitude suggests scholarly devotion and appalling loneliness—are full of the famous ohabolany proverbs, which once formed an underpinning of practical tradition in village life. But this particular statement (who knows how badly translated?) intrigues Shay because she feels it suggests another aspect of Madagascar that she has noticed upon becoming a frequent visitor: how everything there—earth, air, water, and sentient life—seems to flow with intermingling communication. And how, in this permeable atmosphere, the Malagasy—like the Inuit and countless other peoples of shamanic and animistic faith—are well accustomed to receive greetings, counsel, even scoldings from other worlds, often through a human medium.
Shay has seen something of this. On several occasions she has been privileged to visit the hidden Sakalava village of diviners and sorcerers that lies at the very heart of Naratrany island, where whitewashed royal tombs are guarded by a circle of teetering huts, some with jars of crocodile fat set out on their thresholds. Here during long ceremonies she has witnessed men and women wreathed in cigarette smoke, entranced by hours of invocatory clapping and singing to the tunes of reedy accordions and sacred drums, bamboo zithers and wooden rattles, suddenly possessed by the great tromba spirits, so that they become other than themselves. She has seen how, using oracular tones and gestures that come from beyond the wall of time, they pour forth, in whispers and murmurs and laughter and shouts, the pronouncements of long-dead queens and kings.
But although Shay’s hair has been plaited against her scalp in the proper design and her body modestly draped in a cotton lambahoany, and though she joins her hosts in their drinking and songs, she naturally feels herself at all times an outsider: the foreign guest, honored, but unable to appreciate sensations beyond the suffocating heat, the tedium, the creeping skepticism interspersed with lightning flashes of amazed conviction, all of which keep her at an observer’s distance.
But there have been a few times in Madagascar when a voice out of an unknown region has spoken directly to her.
One time is when she is driving around the wild northern coast of Naratrany with her friend Felice. Felice is Malagasy, some years younger than Shay, and from a high-ranking Merina family of Antananarivo. Her father is a diplomat, and she spent her multilingual childhood in Washington, DC, and Paris, and graduated from Georgetown. Now she works for an international health organization and has come to Naratrany shepherding a pair of French optometrists who run free weeklong clinics every year all over Madagascar. All three are now staying as guests of Shay and her husband, Senna, at the Red House on Finoana Beach. Shay and Felice have just dropped off the female doctors at the small whitewashed annex loaned by the Notre Dame lycée near the port, and have been impressed by the long, quiet line of villagers from all over the island who have been waiting since daybreak for their eye examinations and free glasses.
“It’s unfortunately just a fashion,” says Felice, as they jounce out of the dusty school compound and Shay turns the Mitsubishi toward the Naratrany airport and the unpaved roads beyond. “Offer anything free to a Sakalava or an Antandroy, even treatment they don’t need, and they come running.”
“I’m sure it helps some!” protests Shay, amused by how snobbishly her friend talks about Malagasy peoples other than her own.
“I’m saying this privately to you, because these initiatives are my job of course—but I tell you, this is one of the more pointless ones. The serious cases—trachoma, river blindness—rarely show up at these clinics. They go first to the moasy, the village herbalists, then to the spirit healers, and only then to clinicians, and so it’s usually too late—maybe they go blind. At this clinic here, people get diagnosed for myopia or astigmatism that has never, ever bothered them before—and they get free glasses and swagger around for a few days. Until they get tired of the weight on their faces, and then they lend them to their brothers and sisters and cousins, and then the glasses are worn as a decoration until they break, and of course there is no one to fix them, and so it goes—more trash. Until next year’s clinic. There’s pleasure in it for both sides. The villagers get status and the doctors get a tropical vacation.”
“So young and so cynical!” says Shay, remembering, however, how the entire staff of the Red House strutted around proudly in new glasses for a week before discarding them.
“I can talk this way because it’s my country. Just like you can say ‘nigga.’ ”
Shay gives a hoot of laughter. Felice, small, round, and pretty with a coppery Indonesian-looking face, straight hair cut in a stylish bob, and a tiny, impudent, turned-up Merina nose, has a steely intelligence and a wicked sense of humor. She is engaged to a preposterously tall Swedish bacteriologist she met in Nairobi, and she is one of the few friends Shay has who can understand her own restless leapfrogging between languages and cultures.
“Felice, you know as well as I do that it is a matter of credibility. You can say ‘nigga’ just as I can. You are from an African nation. You grew up in the States, right there on the fringes of our diaspora. A generation earlier in DC, you would have endured segregation. And in college you pledged Alpha, for heaven’s sake!”
“Yes, and any Alpha soror would clutch her pearls till they broke before she said that word! Then where would my precious ladylike reputation go? So, I may be entitled to ‘nigga,’ but I’m not going to use it. Just like you should keep quiet about all this.” Felice spreads her small, fine-boned hands out theatrically toward the windscreen, which shows they are now entering the arid north of Naratrany, eroded red hills dotted with the spreading leafy fans of ravenala palms. Of course, she means more than the scene before them, means her entire country: the great island of which Naratrany is a mere satellite, and the fabulously intricate web of its landscapes and tribes.
She adds: “Though, I’ve noticed already that you’ve done a decent job of not delving too deep into Madagascar. That’s a good thing. No more theories needed! I work with a million foreigners’ opinions, and it’s a nest of snakes.”
“My ambition is to be an eternal tourist,” proclaims Shay glibly, as she always does.
“Naratrany’s a vacation spot for us highlanders from the capital, too,” says Felice, deliberately misunderstanding her. “Kind of the Martha’s Vineyard of Madagascar!” She is quiet for a minute, then adds: “But that tourist thing doesn’t really work for you, does it?”
“Not really.”
Shay downshifts as the smooth airport road, built by grace of the Chinese government, suddenly ends and the Mitsubishi begins trundling down a typical backcountry track composed of orange dust, craters dug by rainy season torrents, the rubble of small landslides down slopes denuded by slash and burn. This morning the two friends are in search of a remote sacred tree supposed to be on the trackless northern coast of the island. It is rumored to be as large as the much-visited ancient ficus, planted by an early Sakalava queen, that occupies an entire bluff outside the port town. But their quest for the tree is just an excuse to wander, to enjoy the early freshness of the air, the beautiful skies of the dry season that have not yet turned brazen with midday heat.
They pass through plantations of ylang-ylang owned by a rich Karan Indian, the strange gray-barked trees pruned to bend down like arthritic knuckles, giving an eccentric fairy-tale look to the rolling hillsides. They edge around herds of humpbacked zebu driven by ragged child cowherds who shout greetings and wave their sticks in the air through the clouds of dust. They pull over to squat and pee in the bush, shaded by trees hung with monkey ladder vines bearing giant seedpods worthy of Jack’s beanstalk. They pass through villages so unused to traffic that the villagers have spread cloths in the road covered with drying turmeric root, gleaming like crude gold in the sunlight.
Felice props her small feet on the dashboard, contemplating her lacquer-red nails and a delicate silver ring on her second toe. She has on round tortoiseshell sunglasses that look like something Hepburn might have worn in The African Queen, and Shay teases her for having tied her hair up in a print wrap that suggests an amateurish take on a Ghanaian style.
“Well, we Merina don’t have our own head-tie tradition,” retorts Felice, adding with a mischievous glance at Shay: “We tend to have good hair…”
“Felice, I give you official permission to say ‘nigga,’ but you can’t talk about ‘good hair’! My sister and I suffered for years with my high yellow great-aunts telling us: ‘Girls, your hair is a mixture of “good” and “bad”!’ It infuriated my mother. She’d tell us our hair was beautiful, but of course we desperately wanted it to be ‘good’—just as straight as yours.”
Felice giggles. “And when you got to Italy?”
“Oh, so many Italians have nappy heads you wouldn’t believe it! And they are totally into volume!” laughs Shay, patting her mass of crinkled curls, which she is wearing long these days.
They are talking in English, in relaxed tones but hungrily, about a topic neither of them can often explore with others. About living in different worlds, straddling continents, about multiple citizenships, about hopscotching among languages. About how Shay and her husband, Senna, are raising their son and daughter in Milan to speak both English and Italian, and how Shay has a secret agenda for promoting her own language, as Senna probably does for his. About how Felice plans to raise her future kids—in Stockholm, or maybe Atlanta—to speak English and Swedish, and of course Malagasy.
“Of course, they’ll probably turn out to be spoiled third culture brats who will insist on speaking their fantasy version of Ebonics,” says Felice, rolling down the sleeve of her white denim jacket as the sun begins to roast her arm.
“It’s the language of art now everywhere in the world, even when it’s just intonation. Listen to Raydar and the other Malagasy hip-hop stars. Listen to Swedish rap.”
“The worst.”
“No, the worst is Russian. They have trap music, too.”
“Siberian crunk. That could be a thing.”
They bump slowly down the road, and Shay starts describing her frustration with her students at the Università Cattolica, where she teaches a phenomenally popular introductory course on Black American literature. “They are so sweet and idealistic, but they don’t, can’t, have a clue as to the foundation of anger, the background of despair in all these works. What I need is an emotional translator.”
They discuss a Yinka Shonibare show Felice saw in Brooklyn, both admitting that they disliked West African wax prints until they began to show up in the context of contemporary high art like Shonibare’s installations. But the textiles were created by Dutch traders to advance colonial trade, so—the two women wonder earnestly—perhaps a certain distaste is justified?
Shay’s playlist—which ranges from Steeleye Span to the Dungeon Family—tosses up “Valerie,” and Felice begins to talk about Amy Winehouse, with whom she is mildly obsessed. She seems personally offended that Winehouse is white. “I just think that incredible voice and those big emotions are too much for her. Too powerful to be natural!” says Felice. “I have never seen such a case of a spirit speaking through a person. It’s like a Black jazz goddess—a huge presence—calling out through that little pale English girl!”
“A kind of possession, like a tromba? You must have taken part in one! I bet even aristocrats like your family talk with the ancestors.”
Felice’s chatter cuts off abruptly. “The tromba ceremony is a lowland custom, Shay,” she says coldly. “It is Sakalava. Not Merina at all.” Pulling out her phone, she takes a picture of a flock of turkeys clustered around the concrete stem of an old colonial signpost, where just a few faded letters, “ana,” are visible. Then she looks at the map and reads off names: Madirovalo, Ambatofinandrahana. “I don’t think we’re going to find any sacred tree,” she adds, in the same offended tone.
Rebuked, Shay shoves in the clutch. When you have a friend from a different world, no matter how much you have in common, there is still a shadow place where you can’t go. On the other hand, she thinks with sudden irritation, Felice needs to make up her mind if she wants people to learn or not learn about her country. And anyway, she’s pretty flippant about Black culture in America, talks about it as if it’s a damn masquerade party.
Shay reflects, as she has many times, that no one from an African nation can understand the peculiarities of being African-American: the unhealed injury ripped open with every fresh injustice, the ancient crime that lies behind it all. She remembers her father at dinner back home in Oakland, arguing in his dogmatic professorial way that the most pervasive emotional violence done by slavery in the Americas was the loss of names, the amputation of the past.
Shay is so caught up in her internal rant that she speeds up on a curve and narrowly avoids colliding with a wooden zebu-drawn cart rattling slowly along the dusty road. The imperturbable beast comes to a stop, and the carter gives a holler and waves his straw hat, as Shay pulls the wheel to the right and jounces along a rocky washed-out border that nearly pitches her and her passenger through the ceiling.
“Trying to kill me?” demands Felice, scrambling to gather up her phone and bag.
“Just reminding you who’s behind the wheel,” says Shay demurely.
“Voilà—the American imperialist!” retorts Felice, and soon the two friends are chattering and laughing again.
A bit later, they come to a turnoff onto a road with some signs of repair work, lined with dense bamboo as thick as their arms. And, bumping through the tunnel of green shade, they find a hotel Shay has heard talked of.
It is a tiny gem of a place built by a rich young Frenchman and his Vietnamese wife, who set out to create a Paul et Virginie fantasy of enchanted beauty in the most improbable setting. There are six thatched teak huts, with fittings from Bali and gleaming Portuguese tile floors, joined by a network of stone pools, where koi flash their coral scales, scattered through a manicured coconut grove overlooking a sugar-white beach facing far-off Mozambique.
The only problem with the place is that the roads are so bad and the seaward approach so difficult that nobody ever comes there. Even the owners have practically given up visiting it.
But through some strange fluke, three or four years after completion, the hotel has not succumbed to the swift tropical decay that has devoured so many other architectural follies on Naratrany. It is kept up with precision by a well-paid staff who reside in a neat cluster of huts nearby, and clearly have some powerful incentive—financial? moral? superstitious?—for keeping it polished up like a shrine.
With wonder, Shay and Felice tour this lonely enchanted kingdom, shown around by an impeccably courteous manager from Fianarantsoa, a shaven-headed Betsileo whom Shay recognizes as the former top barman at Naratrany’s sole big resort, dismissed because of some obscure scandal. He greets Felice with pleasure, overjoyed to see another highlander, and is interested to learn that Shay is from California, which he says he has always dreamed of visiting. They view each of the graceful shuttered bungalows with their ikat hangings and gleaming Japanese bathroom fixtures, and then Felice, with her usual breezy air of command, asks the manager to have lunch prepared for them.
Apologizing for the lack of supplies, he seats them at a veranda table set with starched linens and gleaming cutlery and, having donned a pristine white jacket, serves them what must have been part of the staff’s midday meal of rice and fish romazava with bitter greens. Shay and Felice spoon up the delicious astringent broth and sip crystal glasses of chilled Meursault that has somehow appeared in a sweating bottle properly wrapped in a heavy napkin.
“This is all a miracle,” says Shay. “And the wine hasn’t even gone vinegary from the heat. We can’t manage this at the Red House, that’s for sure!”
“They have the ice caves of Kubla Khan,” says Felice dreamily.
“No, they just have the fanciest generator I’ve ever seen in my life. It must have cost a fortune just to get it here. And why? Why this whole place in the ass-end of nowhere?”
“Well, why did Senna build Red House, for that matter?” asks Felice, reasonably.
“People do mysterious things when they think they’ve found paradise.”
“But the owners don’t even come!”
“Maybe they just like to know it’s here.”
After coffee, they pay the manager with a stack of ariary, and he asks if they want him to open a room for a siesta, or to set up hammocks for them in the palm grove.
But Shay and Felice decide to take a walk on the wide swathe of beach, where the brazen heat of midday has lessened and the tide has begun to come in in a series of transparent veils, one overlapping another. To add to their delight, they learn from the manager that the sacred tree they were seeking is on a bluff on the very next beach.
“But it is not a very important sacred tree,” he says with a shrug.
“Is there a village beside it?” asks Felice.
For the first time the suave manager with his gold earring and sleek smooth-shaven head looks nonplussed. “No. There is no village. Only Franco.”
“Who?”
“A mad vazaha who lives there.”
“All alone?” asks Shay.
“No, with Fatima. An Antemoro woman from the East, with a bad leg and a white eye.” The manager hesitates. “Maybe you shouldn’t go there, mesdames. But probably he will not come out to bother you.”
Shay recalls that she has heard something from her husband about this Franco: a drunken recluse, from Rome maybe. And there was something else, some gossip or rumor, but there is always gossip and rumor on Naratrany.
Straw-hatted, barefoot, swinging their sandals, Shay and Felice set off walking along the hems of the incoming waves, in coral sand so fine that their footsteps leave milky clouds in the warm transparent shallows. Tiny ghost crabs, almost invisible, scatter in mincing crowds as they proceed, and the sea breeze of the rising tide ruffles the sea pines that line the deserted shore. Miniature pastel clams emerge and dig frantically back under the sand with each wave, and their shells, thin as babies’ fingernails, litter the tide line along with lace-pale twigs of coral.
Out beyond the reef, three fishing pirogues raise their thorn-shaped sails and race southward in the freshening breeze, like ancient vessels passing through from another age. Other than that, the solitude of the two women on the beach in its aloof, sunlit beauty is complete. Strolling along, they gradually seem to step outside the limits of their bodies, feel themselves both far and near, buoyant, floating at ease in the lap of the gods. Shay has felt the same exhilaration as a child playing in the waves that hem the Pacific on Stinson Beach, a wafting sense that the boundaries between light and water and flesh have dissolved; she almost expects to hear her mother and sister calling her, faint cries like seabirds over the wash of the surf. But here she is on the other side of the world, on the shores of the Indian Ocean, adrift in the present.
She and Felice laugh mindlessly, chase crabs, fill their hats with shells, dash into the water and swim just as they are, and walk on, letting the sun and wind dry their clothes.
When they come to a tumble of black-lava boulders that ends the long scallop of the beach, they pick their way up a short path to a low headland, and there indeed is a sacred tree: a giant tamarind, with the gnarled girth of a round table for ten, its vast trunk set about with a barrier of staked keti-keti, and its huge serpentine branches, dipping close to the ground, draped with frayed and discolored lengths of red cloth that flutter in the breeze. Beams of sunlight shine through the canopy. The sandy ground outside the fence is scattered with carefully placed rum and soda bottles, offerings for the tsiny and other earth spirits who frequent such places. But placed there also, the two friends see, are dozens of shoes: rubber flip-flops, mainly, of the type that the poorest villagers wear. Some are worn out and others almost new.
“Not pairs, but only the left one,” Shay says wonderingly. “What might that mean, Ms. Expert on Regional Customs?”
“Some Sakalava superstition,” says Felice disdainfully.
“Do you think we should leave a sandal?”
“Are you crazy? Absolutely not! We need them to get back to the car.”
A breathless silence envelops the huge tree, except for the wind huffing off the sea and rippling the tattered strips of cloth. But suddenly they hear a woman call out, and, walking around the tree, they enter a clearing with three small, derelict-looking thatched huts standing on bare ground. The usual furnishings—plastic washtubs, a cast-iron brazier, a tall rice mortar, wandering ducks, a black-and-white cat, and a yellow dog—surround the huts. And beside the entrance of the largest is nailed up a large Three Horses beer sign. In the doorway flaps a handsome Richelieu curtain, the coarse unbleached cotton cut out and hand-stitched in an arabesquing design of fish and turtles. And, pushing the curtain aside, a Malagasy woman emerges, limping slightly.
She is neatly dressed in a print lamba and a long-sleeved T-shirt, and her thick wiry black hair is parted in the middle and worn in a large braided coil covering each ear, a style foreign to Naratrany. Despite her limp, she is not old: the right side of her deep brown face with its wide cheekbones is unwrinkled, bland as still water, but what grabs the attention and makes one forget all else is that her left eye is wholly blank and filmed with a bluish tissue thicker than cataract, almost like boiled egg white. In her dark face it stands out eerily, looking larger than its size, and hardly seeming to blink, though a gleam of moisture on the cheek below suggests it is constantly weeping. And this blind eye seems to have drawn life and power from the whole left side of her, especially her cheek and neck, which are dramatically disfigured with a webbing of keloid scars, seamed and discolored as old bark. Below this, her torso twists so that the shoulder is hunched and the left leg is lame.
Only much later do Shay and Felice wonder whether this is somehow connected to the single sandal offering at the sacred tree.
“Mula tsara, mesdames!” the woman says, as she approaches them, moving with surprising swiftness. Her voice is hoarse yet vibrant.
Trying neither to stare nor to look away, Shay and Felice present themselves. Then Shay asks pleasantly in Italian, “Are you Fatima? My husband is Gianmaria Senna, and I think he may know your husband—Franco.”
“Sono Fatima,” replies the woman, with a small, guarded nod.
Shay and Felice ask for drinks, and Fatima leads them to a tiny side yard and serves them warm bottles of Coke at an oilcloth-covered table, then disappears. Seated on a teetering wooden bench, the two friends let the sugary cola run down their parched throats and watch through the moving foliage of the big tamarind the incoming tide fracturing and refracturing its cobalt surface in the leveling sun. The view is luminous and beautiful, but as if a filter has been changed they feel the sudden withdrawal of the euphoria they experienced on the beach.
Something else has taken its place, a heavy feeling of foreboding, and it is connected with the damaged face and figure of Fatima, which not merely excites shocked pity, but seems to convey a cryptic and ominous message. There is, Shay feels, around Fatima and around this quite ordinary thatched hut, with its coarse white curtain flapping in the doorway, a breathless, unsettled atmosphere very different from the simple solemnity of the great sacred tree that stands so nearby. Into Shay’s mind, irresistibly, comes the phrase, clear as a printed religious text: excluded from grace.
She glances at Felice and sees that her friend’s eyes have taken on an expression of listening and—is Shay imagining it?—dread.
“Oh my God, her face…” murmurs Felice. “And that eye… I wonder if any doctor ever even looked at it. And her leg—it’s amazing she can move around so freely.”
“Do you think she and her husband are the guardians of the tree?” asks Shay, who has learned that such trees and their spirits often have acolytes.
Felice shakes her head. “No. I think they have tried to attach themselves. I’m not sure why they are here…”
Her words trail off, and she stands up abruptly. “We should go,” she says. “We have to get back to the other side of the island. I’m worried about those roads after dark.”
Both of them feel a skin-prickling eagerness to get away from that place. They pay Fatima, who in her impassive way also seems relieved to have them depart, and are just turning away toward the beach path when they hear a man’s voice from the inside of the hut.
Fatima freezes. At the same time a mottled hand pushes the doorway curtain aside, and the owner of the voice appears.
He is a white man, the kind that Shay defines with the Malagasy word vazaha, although the word simply means foreigner, and she herself can also be defined that way. But in her mind the word denotes the kind of tropic-bespoiled white man who hangs out in the Fleur des Îles café and, in Shay’s opinion, is far too often a guest at the Red House. Purplish skin eroded by decades of sun, rum, malaria; sparse gray hair yellowed by the relentless ultraviolet of the Tropic of Capricorn; fretful, bilious slits of eyes that in an instant can take on the bold glint of the colonial master who feels entitled to any dark woman in his purview. He wears the usual khaki cargo shorts, but also, open onto his shriveled chest, an exquisitely ironed cotton dress shirt that contrasts oddly with the poverty of the surroundings.
Franco. He comes gaunt-shanked over the threshold of the hut, ignoring his wife, and stops short while staring at the two visitors with almost comical surprise.
“Buon giorno! Bonjour!” he says in an unexpectedly soft tone, with a rather cultured accent. Adding musingly to himself, in a peculiar mixture of Italian, French, and Malagasy: “Deux madama bé… two memsahibs… honored guests to this tree… Fatima!” he raps out sharply to his wife, who, however, makes no sign of having heard. “Have you honored them? Tu as servi? Hai servito?”
He keeps his small glittering eyes fixed somewhere between Shay and Felice, who stand mesmerized like rabbits in front of a snake; then, suddenly returning to his earlier soft tone, he launches into a startling cascade of words, mainly in French, a harangue that picks up speed as it goes along. “Did she serve you as she should, mesdames? Did she honor your arrival, la Madonna degli Schiavi? Do you know who that is? The Black Madonna, the mother of all slaves. They call Fatima, daughter of the prophet, la lumineuse! But this Fatima is a wretch. Do you see her eye? Did you see her scars and leg, how she scuttles like a crab? Oh, yes, she is my real wife! I took her to the capital one time, and she would never go out, just clung to the heater. She was cold in the highland winter, and ashamed of being broken. Well, that’s why I married her! No one in her village wanted her, and a piece of trash just suited me… Simple trash. Not like those whores in the port, shaking their asses with beer bottles on their wigs… Not like you proud madames…”
Shay has run into many a drunk on Naratrany island, but never a crazy man. Behind him, she glimpses the woman Fatima making a practiced subtle motion with her head and her good eye, indicating that Shay and Felice should quietly step backward and to the side and melt away on the path toward the beach.
But the remarkable thing about this Franco’s unhinged rhetoric is its seductiveness: it has consistency and an underlying logic that tempts a listener to reply. And though Shay long ago learned to avoid engaging with the maddest denizens of the streets and subways of Oakland or New York or Milan, here she feels an irresistible temptation to say something, anything, to connect.
Ignoring Fatima’s warning and the pressure of Felice’s hand on her arm, she makes an effort and smiles at Franco, and as he draws a breath she offers a pleasant, conventional response, a simple, sociable remark on the beauty of the spot. “Però, é talmente bello, questo posto! Si stà bene.”
And of course this is exactly the wrong thing to do. As if she has pushed a button, a quick shudder goes through him, his face seems to flatten, his mouth opens wide to reveal a wilderness of crooked dark teeth, and once again he looses a torrent of words in his strange mixture of languages, but in a voice that is quite different, and infinitely worse. Shay is not now or afterward able to define what is so abhorrent about the speech that now pours out of him. Compared to it, the discourse of spirits that she has overheard at tromba ceremonies is benign, of high courtesy, worlds apart.
Franco’s voice maintains the same soft tone as earlier, but now somehow projects a concentrated malignity so intense that it seems impossible that a human throat could produce it. Soft as it is, it conveys a coarse, almost muscular strength and an eerie kind of autonomy, as if Franco is not so much speaking as having words crawl off his tongue like the toads from the mouth of the evil sister in the fairy tale.
This loathsome speech freezes Shay and Felice where they stand. And there in the clearing between the hut and the sacred tree, it recounts a terrible story.
“Bene?” Franco asks rhetorically, still staring fixedly at the empty space between the two friends, as if addressing an invisible third person. “Pour nous il n’y a point du bien… there is no good for us, not anywhere! Not for me and this creature.” He suddenly whips his whole body around and glares at Fatima, who, still as a statue, looks expressionlessly back at him. Then he whips back to face his captive audience. “Of course,” he goes on. “She is the one who disturbs the peace. With her rotten wounds… la pourriture…” He lingers on the word, as if he likes the taste of it, then rambles on. “You might ask how it came about. How did this woman… hardly a woman—this… thing—get broken? You try to name a name, and it always comes back to quel maiale… that pig of an Italian priest, with his French aphorisms, and his Campanian accent, and his kissing the asses of the foreign charities… and those whores of nuns… and the Vatican jackals who barter souls.
“But the worst was this priest… this pig who came to Madagascar to save the poor savages but who was soon playing his favorite game, the one that nearly got him slaughtered back in Torre del Greco. This filthy missionary who hung around the villages just to take young girls—children—and rape them in huts out in the bush where there are no roads. No roads, no hope… Until the village elders decided that they were going to fix him—catch him out and burn him alive…”
To Shay and Felice, the tortured listeners, the voice unfolds the tale as if it is happening here and now. How the village fokuntany and other elders choose a breastless young girl, whose task is to lure the priest to his fate inside a deserted granary, which they determine to set on fire. How the plan goes wrong when she is caught by a flaming branch of satrana palm that brushes like a fiery wing over the left side of her body. And how the priest manages to dash away unscathed—some say he takes off in the air, like a huge flying fox—while the girl writhes in agony.
“But he gets his reward,” declares the voice, with venomous glee. “Caught like a rat before he can get from Farafangana to Fort Dauphin. And killed in the way the villagers know best, because you can’t take a coupe-coupe and cut off a priest’s head. Not even the worst devil of a priest. So, with poison, the kind the old women make. And I can’t say it’s gentle! No… it takes a long time for him to die. But he’s gone now, and no one knows where he lies. Seek, they say, and you will find, but in the desert of thorns, who can find anything? La pourriture c’est la nature! Worms have eaten the worms that ate him.”
The last few lines are chanted in a low singsong, and then with a sniggering laugh the voice stops short. For an instant Franco shifts his gaze and looks straight at Shay, and she thinks she glimpses something deep in his eyes, an imprisoned flicker of awareness both sane and pitiful. Then all at once his face turns a tallow color; he staggers and begins to crumple forward at the waist like a rag doll.
Fatima, who has stood expressionlessly behind his shoulder for the whole horrible performance, reaches out in a way that is obviously practiced and catches him before he collapses; her strong right arm fastens around his middle like an iron bar.
“Allez! Allez!” she hisses fiercely to Shay and Felice. And to their surprise they find the spell is broken, and they can go. Like terrified children, they charge down the path past the big tamarind tree and, beneath the lowering afternoon sun, find themselves running as if for their lives down the milky beach, where the rising tide snatches at their feet.
They tear through the palm trees, across the hotel grounds, calling out a hasty farewell to the startled manager, then fling themselves into the truck. Here they sit streaming with sweat and breathing hard, as Shay shakily maneuvers out of the hotel gate and back through the tunnel of bamboo.
Only when the Mitsubishi is rattling down the dirt road toward the airport do they speak. “What the hell was that?” demands Shay breathlessly.
“I think that was hell!” says Felice, mopping her face with her gauzy scarf. “That was about the worst thing I ever heard in my life.”
The two of them are buzzing with adrenaline, as if they’ve just been attacked.
“We should report it!” exclaims Shay, knowing that what she says is absurd. The rudimentary forces of law on the island have no interest in the ravings of a crazy foreigner up on the remote north coast. Or in the fate of one maimed woman from a distant tribe. And, how much of the tale Franco recounted actually occurred? As sometimes happens on Naratrany, Shay finds herself confronted with different modalities of truth, joined to each other yet separate, like the spiraled chambers of a nautilus.
As their agitation subsides, the two friends fall silent, exhausted but joined in the deep intimacy that comes with a shared shock. Pursuing the last of the daylight, they bump along through the dimming countryside, edging around returning zebu herds. At Madirovalo as the sudden shutter of tropical darkness descends, they give a lift to a quartet of fieldworkers, who jump off at a lamplit market stall farther up the road.
Only when they have passed the old electrical plant humming brutally to itself near the Saint Grimaud turnoff, and then the French cemetery, whose half-collapsed balustrade glimmers in the headlights like a row of broken teeth, does Felice speak up. “Franco himself is the priest from the story!” she says. “That’s the only possible explanation.”
“Impossible!” protests Shay. “You heard what happened. That foul priest is dead. And it wouldn’t make sense. But none of it makes sense. Why would that poor woman tie herself to a monster like that?”
“She’s not a ‘poor woman,’ ” corrects Felice, and Shay, remembering the impassive strength of Fatima amid the coils of her husband’s demonic voice, has to agree. Fatima is the one who bears the visible signs of suffering, yet somehow Shay knows with certainty—knew from the minute she saw Fatima—that the Antemoro woman, for all her scars, is no martyr.
“They’re tied to each other,” Felice adds softly. “But who has the real power?”
At dinner back at the Red House, the encounter with Franco and Fatima becomes the sole topic of the evening, in the way that happens when guests are desperately bored with each other’s company. The table on the veranda is full of family and friends, French, Italian, and Malagasy, but conversation has lagged until Felice and Shay recount their tale. Senna, an affable host and energetic gossip who keeps abreast of most island scandal, has to admit that he knows almost nothing about the mysterious couple up on the north coast.
He calls in one of the Red House kitchen boys, who comes from a fishermen’s village near Madirovalo. When questioned in Malagasy and French, the teenager, blinking with shyness before the assembled dinner guests, says with quiet reluctance that no one knows much about Franco and Fatima, except that some years ago they came from the Grande Île, and that the man is afflicted, and the ugly Antemoro woman is his wife. The boy adds that they take care of the sacred tree and try to run a gargotte—a snack bar—but no one wants to go near them.
“Well, was the man a priest?” demands an Italian guest. The kitchen boy shuffles his feet, and replies in a low voice that he doesn’t know, but the vazaha is sick and he screams and says all sorts of things.
Another guest, a voluble Réunionnais who owns shrimp fisheries all around Madagascar, offers his opinion that it is indeed possible that Franco was once a missionary. He claims that missionaries are notorious for depravity, that he knows for a fact that some of them have whole harems back in the bush. He says no one stops them because there is no law out there.
“A l’est di Suez non ci sono commandamenti,” proclaims Senna, as usual misquoting his favorite line from the Kipling poem “Mandalay.” And Shay, as usual on hearing it, recalls that it is also the opening phrase of Kipling’s darkest story, “The Mark of the Beast.”
“Maybe,” ventures one of the visiting French doctors, a woman with imposing eyebrows and a long plait, who has been silent up to now. “Maybe the villagers did kill the priest. Just not all of him.”
A hush falls. “What’s that supposed to mean?” asks the shrimp magnate.
“I mean, maybe they used poison just to destroy his mind. Or even… his soul.”
A storm of laughing protest arises from the company at the table. “Oh là là—on va bientôt commencer avec les théories de vaudou, des zombies!” “Funny stuff to hear from a doctor, of all people!”
After that, with something like a collective sigh of relief, the discussion grows more general and much livelier, expanding to touch on the larger ills of mankind—from corruption within the Catholic Church, to the evils visited by kleptocratic governments on rural peasantry, to issues of female empowerment in the developing world. And the tone of the discourse mixes righteous indignation with interjections of the cynical humor that Italians, French, and rich Malagasy deploy so skillfully.
From time to time Shay glances across at Felice and their eyes lock together. They alone, that day, have had the direct experience of hearing the sound of evil pour, twisting and contorting, out of a human mouth, and they know that the heart of the matter is far removed from any of this. Shay feels, too, that her friend is affected in a different way than she herself can know; this is after all Felice’s country, and such a revelation must carry with it the sickening sense of intimacy that attends a crime in a family.
As it happens, neither of them finds out much more about Fatima and Franco. Felice and her doctors move on to Toamasina, and though Shay asks her usual fonts of Naratrany information—her stately housekeeper and confidante, Bertine la Grande; her gossipy next-door neighbor, Madame Rose; and Angélique, whose pharmacy, like the Fleur des Îles café, is a nexus for island rumors—not one of them can give her information about the strange couple up north. One night in Saint Grimaud, under the shooting stars of August, she runs into the scholarly Tsimihety priest Père Jobeny and asks him, but even that learned and cosmopolitan prelate is unable to give her any information on missions in the remote east of the Grande Île, near Farafangana.
So the facts remain elusive. Shay, though, is convinced that there is as much truth in Franco’s vile narrative as in the material existence of Fatima’s scarred flesh and blind eye. But maybe the tale does not recount Franco’s own crimes. Or maybe (this is Senna’s theory), he is a wandering Tom O’Bedlam, the type of white outcast who always turns up—drunk, drugged, diseased, mad—in the far corners of the world. He could have taken up with another outcast, a woman maimed by an accident, and appropriated her story.
Or perhaps, thinks Shay, he really is the vile missionary who died to the world, and yet somehow half-lives on: condemned, like the Ancient Mariner, to confess his sins to strangers. Bound to his victim, who is also his jailer. “Madonna degli Schiavi,” Franco calls Fatima. Does that in some perverse way make Franco the slave?
The truth that haunts Shay is in the sound of the voice that speaks with such coherence and hellish vitality. It conveys the reality of atrocious events involving one woman and one man, but also the universality of an old legend. She can imagine the tale rising like a demon out of the cold dust of the thorny desert to invade Franco’s mind and throat, either for revenge or simply because a vessel was required. And that’s the single thing she can be sure of, from the whole episode: that at a certain point, for good or ill, a story will tell itself.
A year or two later, news filters through the usual island channels that the strange couple has disappeared. One day during the dry windy season, a column of smoke is seen rising from that angle of the coast, far from any cane fields torched after harvest, and a day later, it is found that the cluster of huts beside the sacred tree has burnt to the ground. The huge tamarind itself is untouched. No bodies are found, but no one on Naratrany ever again sees any trace of Franco and Fatima.
A rumor briefly circulates that a fisherman carried a one-eyed woman in his pirogue to one of the outer islands, where it is possible to take a ferry to the Madagascar mainland. But no one confirms this.
More time passes, and Chinese government-backed investors build a paved two-lane road that joins the north and south of Naratrany. Meanwhile, the beautiful little French hotel acquires a high-speed launch to bring clients by sea from the airport, and actually begins to do business. The hotel owners take over the tract of land where Franco and Fatima had their huts. Appreciative of local tradition, they make provisions for the sacred tamarind, which, duly protected, becomes part of the folkloristic charm of their establishment, even mentioned in guidebooks. Hotel guests stroll down to commune with the huge tree. They sit and meditate in a small rustic pavilion the hotel has erected for respectful enjoyment of the tranquillity of the spot, which, after the fire, seems redoubled. And evidently the villagers of Naratrany, though unseen, also continue to visit, for the number of left-foot sandals at the base of the tree is always increasing.