Two loves grew up together,
twin loves:
woe on him who betrays.
Farewell, dear, farewell
foolish love plays tricks,
indecisive love drives one mad.
—Flavien Ranaivo, “Old Merina Theme,” translated by Marjolijn de Jager
When Floristella catches sight of Pianon on the Red House veranda—the side that overlooks Madame Rose Rakotomalala’s jackfruit tree—he gives a martial bellow, charges down the garden path, and attacks his neighbor with a walking stick. And though the two old Italian men, both well over seventy, are ludicrous combatants—Floristella, a diabetic, is ponderously fat, while tall Pianon is skeletal from annual bouts of malaria, so that their skirmish suggests a clash between Falstaff and Ichabod Crane—their energy and passion run high, and no one who witnesses the incident feels inclined to laugh.
The Sennas are back home in Italy at the time, but there are plenty of witnesses to give them a detailed report of the scandalous fight under their own roof, between their resident accountant, Pianon, and their old friend and next-door neighbor Floristella. There is Madame Rose, neighbor on the opposite side. There are gardeners. There are idling workmen from Floristella’s snail-paced construction site adjacent to the Red House. There are maids from the Red House, including the Sennas’ omniscient head housekeeper, Bertine la Grande. There are Antandroy market women heading up the beach bearing baskets of vegetables on their heads. There is a herdboy driving a string of zebu up the side path from their morning bath in the sea. There is an oyster vendor in a straw pillbox hat.
The maids and gardeners rush to separate the struggling old vazaha men while others stop and stare, but everyone shows a notable lack of astonishment. Everybody up and down Finoana Beach and, in fact, all over the island, knows the history of the trouble and the name of the girl at the bottom of it.
Not long before, the combatants were close friends. Pianon and Floristella: next-door neighbors, both men of dignity and substance, as far as it goes in that libertine island atmosphere, where the souls of foreigners grow rotten spots as quickly as a bunch of soft-skinned green bananas. Both of them old settlers who have been in Madagascar since the early years of the country’s independence.
Both speak fluent Malagasy, highland and coastal dialects. They’ve been on Naratrany long enough to have been christened by the islanders with fondly mocking nicknames. Pianon is Valiha a long, thin, bamboo zither, and fat Floristella is Sakav meaning, simply, food.
Pianon is a notary from Verona, a widower, bony and desiccated from many tropical fevers. He dresses in elegant shirts and trousers tailored, colonial-style, from linen of an archaic thickness, and has cropped white hair, a hatchet nose, and a vast, recondite erudition that is the fruit of a Jesuit education. A passionate amateur ethnologist, he spends his free time consulting missionary archives and interviewing village storytellers for a monograph he is writing on the Sakalava royal dynasties. His present job as live-in bookkeeper and rental manager at the Red House is undeniably beneath him, yet he has grown attached to the space and beauty of the big villa, where he has built up a library, and which he often has to himself outside of peak vacation season. Like everyone else, he is fond of his boss, the boisterous and decidedly nonintellectual Senna. Shay Senna he admires for a degree of learning he is surprised to find in an American woman; he sometimes invites her along on his research expeditions.
No one could differ more from Pianon than Floristella, a Sicilian baron of fallen fortunes who carries his huge belly with the complacent ease of a pasha. In his adventurous youth he was a famous yachtsman and deep-sea diver, whose prowess and seductive charm ensnared the hearts of beautiful women from Capri to Zanzibar. Now that fortune, youth, and good health have vanished, leaving him to a modest pensioner’s existence on Naratrany, he still has the grand manner, and is an island personage. His aquiline profile—noble in spite of his two chins—and silver crest of brilliantined hair are a landmark on Finoana Beach, as he holds court daily on the porch of his tiny bungalow adjoining the grounds of the Red House.
There, ensconced on a sagging director’s chair, surrounded by a motley array of cats and dogs and even a pet radiated tortoise, he contemplates the tides and changing skies over the Mozambique Channel. He exchanges greetings with passersby, who range from village children to hotel owners, while tapping on a calculator or perusing documents pertaining to a decades-old lawsuit against the Compagnie Bordelaise de Madagascar. On the porch he eats heaping plates of pasta prepared by his faithful housekeeper, Marianne, smokes endless cigarettes, reads thrillers, and doles out wages to the Sakalava workmen who—in starts and stops linked to the fluctuating state of his finances—have for years been at work on a grandiose extension to his bungalow, which he secretly hopes will outshine the Red House.
When Pianon first comes to work for the Sennas, the two neighbors establish a habit of meeting up on Floristella’s porch in the cool of the early morning, to drink powerful Sicilian coffee from Floristella’s battered pot. For a pleasant hour, as the sun rises and the fishermen set out in their pirogues and Floristella’s thin orange kitten purrs on Pianon’s bony linen-covered knee, they trade island gossip picked up in that center of all intelligence, the Fleur des Îles café. Sometimes they say spiteful things about a mutual enemy, Kristos the Greek, the most nefarious of Pianon’s predecessors at the Red House, who, since being fired by the Sennas, is rumored to be smuggling rosewood. Sometimes their conversations about the crimes and misdemeanors of Italian politicians become discussions of the equally byzantine machinations of the Malagasy government, then take a different tack, become dreamy philosophical musings on the character of Madagascar, of this particular small island where fate has settled them so late in life.
Shay, who likes to put on fins and swim the length of Finoana Bay before breakfast, often pauses far out in the water to observe the figures of the two old men on the porch of the little bungalow beside her own big house and garden. They have a look of harmony that is in keeping with the early-morning hush, the long shadows of palms and casuarinas that stretch across the immaculate curve of beach. When she comes dripping out of the water they call out good mornings and offer her coffee, but Shay feels that if she accepted she’d be disrupting a modest but perfect intimacy.
The woman who does break up the idyll is Noelline. For years she has been Floristella’s secretary and mistress, filling the gap left by his indisseverable wife, who long ago grew weary of the tedium of Madagascar and returned to Trapani, where she awaits her husband’s twice-yearly visits. Twenty-four and childless, Noelline is no longer young by island standards, and in a land where lovely women are as abundant as grains of sand, has never been a beauty, though she has the almost preposterously voluptuous body of her mixed Sakalava and Ankarana background. The daughter of a seamstress and a ferryman, she has a demure wide face, its teak surface roughened by outbreaks of tiny pimples, a high forehead, and bright shallow-set eyes that miss nothing. She keeps her hair short and stylish, sometimes enhancing it with a waist-length tail of beaded Chinese braids, and her enviable wardrobe consists of tight imported jeans and dresses, purchased by Floristella.
Unlike most of the village women who embark on careers with foreign men, Noelline is educated, has completed two years at the lycée run by the sugar refinery at Ankazobe. She writes a fair hand in French orthography, can use a computer, and speaks good French and Italian. Besides her intelligence, her undeniable energy, and a reputed genius for sex, her greatest talent is one she shares with many resourceful wives and mistresses: an inconspicuous but relentless persistence, the ability to bide her time, to cling without being obvious, and never to show offense.
Over the years Floristella has entrusted her with the keys to his bungalow; the secrets of his defunct business exporting medicinal jungle herbs; his lawsuit; the erratic construction work on his property; the care and the pleasures of his swollen diabetic body. Noelline does not live with him, but resides a mile away in a two-room cinder-block house—luxurious by village standards, the rent paid, of course, by Floristella—set among palms and thornbushes in one of the warren-like settlements that sprawl messily off the only paved road in Finoana.
Each morning she buzzes up to his bungalow on a battered motorbike—another luxury provided by her protector—and offers a cordial but slightly condescending greeting to Marianne the housekeeper, who pounds laundry and cleans fish in the small, well-trodden sand yard by the sea. Throughout the day, Noelline writes Floristella’s letters to officialdom, gives him his insulin injection, eats a bowl of rice and romazava, climbs nimbly astride his big belly during the siesta hour, and sometimes lingers after sunset on his lamplit porch, patiently listening to his fantastical musings on how to remake his fortune: he dreams of setting up hotels in Turkish caïques somehow towed to the Seychelles, or planting oil palms in the desert near Tulear. She never spends the night.
To Floristella’s many friends, she is quietly courteous, especially to Pianon. She absorbs Italian idioms with rapt attention, and laughs appropriately when the two men chat together on the porch. Occasionally, she types a document for Pianon and sometimes, in the tone of a schoolmistress, translates for him an obscure term in Sakalava dialect, or explains some custom, like why it is fady for certain young girls to eat chicken.
The villagers know that Noelline has her own giambillys, or lovers on the side, notably a handsome cabdriver from Saint Grimaud, a métis who is said to beat his old French mother. However, the young woman jealously guards her position with the Sicilian. On the island she has acquired the title of Madame Floristella, much to the annoyance of his wife back in Trapani, who has vowed never to revisit Madagascar until Floristella discards Noelline.
Often when the Sennas drive to market at Saint Grimaud, they catch sight of portly Floristella, conferring with some bureaucrat on the broken, weedy courthouse steps, as Noelline, wearing tight jeans and pointed high heels and clutching a worn briefcase, stands demurely in the background. “There she is, the sly baggage!” says Senna, invariably, and Shay as always protests.
“Don’t call her that—she’s doing her job! How is she different from any other island girl?”
“Because the other little hussies have kind hearts, but she’s a troublemaker, that one. She’ll be the death of old Flori, wait and see.” Senna loves to rattle what he thinks of as Shay’s American prudery with a show of cynical wisdom, and Shay is generally amused. Still, she feels that, as a woman of color, she has to express solidarity with Noelline. What would she herself be doing in the same circumstances?
The fact is, though, that nobody on the island seems to like Noelline, though in general islanders of all colors and classes show gleeful admiration for poor village girls who manage to snare rich white men. No one can explain her unpopularity except to say that, although she isn’t beautiful, she gives herself airs. Madame Rose is one of her most vocal critics, but she is embittered because her own husband lives with a Sakalava mistress in Andrakaka. Bertine la Grande, the head housekeeper, simply observes to Shay: “Elle n’est pas bien, cette fille!”
“Why do you say that?” demands Shay, though she knows that, in spite of being her closest confidante on the island, the Sakalava housekeeper will never explain further. Bertine has a Manichean vision of the world as divided into bien and pas bien which has little to do with conventional morality: many an island prostitute is described by Bertine as “bien.” For mysterious reasons of her own, she calls both Floristella and Pianon “bien,” unlike other foreign men. Shay understands that if Bertine defines Noelline, who is from the same village and known to her since childhood, as “pas bien,” it refers to something deeper than the girl’s ambitious seductiveness, means a deep flaw in her nature visible only to someone with the same origins.
Yet, with a peculiar loyalty, Bertine goes no further in criticizing Noelline or trying to thwart her actions, even at the height of the drama that the younger woman creates; instead, she stands back with a fatalistic air, as if things must unroll as they do.
And how does Shay herself feel about Noelline? Well, if she is honest, she knows her show of sisterly sympathy is hypocritical, because she, too, can’t stand the woman. Noelline greets her meekly with a bland smile whenever their paths cross, but beneath her politeness, in those shallow-set eyes brown as coffee beans, flickers a powerful current of envy and hostility.
The rivalry of Floristella and Pianon begins when Floristella, as was inevitable, suffers a heart attack one hot January night. Alerted by the night watchmen, Pianon calls Dr. Pau and with the help of the doctor and Madame Rose, has the Sicilian transferred by helicopter to the hospital on Réunion Island. His wife and sons rush from Trapani, and later carry him back home.
Noelline; the housekeeper, Marianne; and the groundskeepers are left in charge of Floristella’s Madagascar affairs: his bungalow, his pets, his keys and documents, and the weedy construction site out back. Later on, as he recovers, Floristella—forgetting the lessons of history, and his own extensive knowledge of women—sends a request that his friend Pianon keep an eye on things, and watch over Noelline.
Well, as Senna later said, any fool could anticipate what would happen, with Floristella absent for so many months. His convalescence in Sicily is astutely extended by his wife, who is pleased to have her elderly husband back in her hands, out of the infectious atmosphere of whores and decayed colonial dreams that hangs like a fever mist over the island of Naratrany.
From Madagascar, Pianon calls to ask whether Floristella minds if Noelline helps him with some complicated paperwork at the Red House. At that time, Senna is thinking of building a small hotel adjacent to the villa, and Pianon is preparing documents to purchase Madame Rose’s rice paddy and the charcoal burners’ terrain nearby.
Bertine la Grande later describes to Shay a scene that makes it clear how things are progressing. It is circumcision season, when groups of boys of four or five years old have undergone the procedure all over the island; three days after the operation, Noelline brings a band of little Finoana village boys, her cousins and nephews, down to the beach in front of the Red House, to wash in the sea. They are lured into the water, as tradition prescribes, with singing and splashing circle games. The naked boys wince and squeal as the salt water stings their wounds, and Noelline leads them in playing.
She is wearing a two-piece bathing suit, the kind that tourists wear, a bikini that leaves little about her large breasts and broad thighs to the imagination. And she is frolicking conspicuously as proper village girls never do—decorous girls who enter the water modestly dressed to wash themselves or to fish with a piece of sheeting.
“On dirait qu’elle dansait!” says Bertine sourly. She means dancing like the prostitutes in Naratrany nightclubs, who can move their asses like turbines while balancing beer bottles on their heads.
Bertine sees that Noelline is angling her performance in a specific direction, and then sees Pianon’s tall bony linen-clad figure emerge from the garden of the Red House onto the beach. Pianon, who never swims and rarely sets foot on the sand, approaches with his crane’s gait—perhaps to make some scholarly inquiry into the chants and songs used in the games. But Bertine sees how his eyes latch on to the nearly naked young woman in the circle of splashing children.
Pianon and Noelline. They are both lonely people, who in a different situation, in a place less strung about with caste, would have done very well openly together from the start. Pianon has lost a wife to cancer and his only child to a drug overdose, and is not inclined to go back to Verona to rejoin the small accounting firm he once ran with his brother. Alone among the foreign adventurers and losers washed up on the shores of Naratrany, he has never annexed an ambitious teenage beauty as a mistress.
Noelline has been estranged from clan and tribe by her curious unpopularity, by her attachment to Floristella, who has devoured her freshest youth, without ever offering to live with her, have a child, or buy her a house of her own. Floristella, whose noble forebears are said to have hunted peasants for sport over the slopes of Mount Etna, has—besides his bungalow and useless building site—only a crumbling sea-girt family palace in Trapani, a tenacious wife, and a mountain of debt from frivolous investments. But Pianon is unattached, and has an Italian pension as well as his position at the Red House.
So, while Floristella recuperates back in Sicily, Noelline begins to spend afternoons working at the computer in Pianon’s office at the Red House, and appears at Pianon’s side in the pickup truck when he makes his trips to the customs office, or the Banque Industrielle et Commerciale de Madagascar.
Noelline, coming and going on her motorbike, has always had a certain camaraderie with the small army of maids and laundresses who keep the Red House going for the Senna family and their paying guests. Some are girls she has grown up with, and, like Bertine la Grande, they know exactly what is going on. Noelline and her seamstress mother, a tiny woman whose face is the color of a freshly roasted cashew nut, are even seen several times in the Red House kitchen. Everyone understands that in the time-honored manner, she is using magic to entice Pianon, but whether it is simply an aphrodisiac, or a love philter, that she is adding to his food, remains unclear.
By June, when the cold season begins and village infants bound to their mothers’ backs wear snug crocheted caps, Floristella has been five months away from the island. Pianon’s once-clear and skeptical blue eyes have acquired a submissive, almost doglike expression, and in matters of dress he has become unattractively casual, abandoning his impeccable linens for the tracksuits and safari shorts worn by most old rum-soused foreigners on the island.
When the Sennas arrive from Milan to spend summer vacation at the Red House, Shay is angered to catch sight of Noelline slipping out of Pianon’s quarters early one morning, the young woman’s usually neat hair standing on end in a way that suggests unbridled rutting. After a decade of sojourns in Madagascar, Shay has developed an ironclad poise and learned to be astonished at nothing, but she is disappointed with Pianon, whom she thought might be the one old man who would not embarrass himself on the island.
“I’ll have to say something to him,” she remarks severely to Bertine la Grande when the housekeeper reports that the two have been sleeping together for weeks. “This house is not a bordello!”
“I think it is useless to speak to him,” says the tall housekeeper. “Speak to her—la fille.”
But when Shay does take Noelline aside and in her firmest tone tells her that certain behavior will not be tolerated, she finds herself confronted with an enigma. The prow-like bosom and tiny waist, the round face under the Eartha Kitt hairdo, the shallow-set coffee bean eyes, the dulcet voice that immediately agrees—“Oui, oui, Madame, c’est honteux, je suis désolée”—all barely mask that blaze of mocking hostility that Shay has sensed before. For a second the American woman, with all her privilege, quails before the Malagasy woman, who has nothing but her wits.
All July and August, Shay observes the progress of the affair. Though no more nights are spent in the Red House, Noelline cleaves to Pianon’s side, even showing up in the sweaty, raucous crowd at the weekly Sunday moraingy boxing match held in the dusty arena at Betsaka beach. (Pianon attends this popular entertainment to take notes on the ritual insults exchanged by Sakalava and Antandroy opponents.)
One afternoon, Shay returns unexpectedly from an excursion into Saint Grimaud and catches Noelline, her demure mask laid aside, leading the younger maids—it is Bertine’s day off—in loud teasing of her elderly lover. Just outside the kitchen the girls have surrounded Pianon in a giggling, clapping, shouting ring as they demand that he throw them a party to celebrate Italy’s World Cup win. (The jubilant Italians on the island have been handing out free beer for a week.) Noelline and the maids are hollering that they want Pianon to barbecue a zebu and hire an orchestra, that they want to dance so hard you can see their underpants. To show what they mean, they all start waggling their behinds and chanting: “Un zébu/Monsieur/Pour voir les slips!”
When Shay, carrying a basket filled with lengths of Comorean cloth, comes into view, the maids scatter in all directions like ants; Noelline whisks into the office. Leaving Pianon struggling to reassume his dignity. “They are young… high-spirited…” he mumbles to Shay, who is trying not to laugh.
“Really, Gianfilippo, you shouldn’t let them run wild like that!” she says, keeping a straight face as he stands there in his ugly warm-up pants, a dull flush suffusing his bony cheeks.
On the one hand the scene was hilarious: the manager bullied by his staff; the priestly Pianon helplessly aroused by the loud, ribald female crowd around him. Shay has always amused herself by envisioning him as the arid scholar Casaubon from Middlemarch, transplanted to the tropics and engrossed not in the Key to All Mythologies, but in an endless history of the Sakalava kings. But now she thinks of his quiet kindness to her children, unswerving courtesy to herself and Senna, and she feels saddened at his mislaid dignity.
“Are you sure this is all worth it?” she asks him quietly, just as her son and daughter come running up from the beach.
Pianon gives her an austere look and replies, “Le coeur a ses raisons…”
That night in their bedroom, Shay says to Senna, “I think we may need to look for a new accountant soon.”
“Che cazzo—they never last!” exclaims Senna in annoyance, slapping aside the mosquito net and collapsing on the bed. “I was hoping he would just start chasing hookers like everyone else.”
When Floristella returns to Madagascar, in late September, it seems that the affair may die the natural death of countless illicit romances on Naratrany island: everything buried under layers of silence, nothing remaining but a sudden opacity in the eyes of the people who know. But the very evening of Floristella’s arrival, Pianon goes directly to his old friend and confesses everything, in the worst possible way.
Yielding to the frailty of the flesh and sleeping with an absent neighbor’s mistress is a forgivable lapse by the lax standards of island morality. Running off with a friend’s woman is also something that Naratrany has seen before. But confessing such an offense without any particular plan of action, except declaring oneself the woman’s defender in a vague chivalric manner, is just foolish. And this is what Pianon does. He does not say that it is destiny, and that in Noelline he has found his dream of love (an acceptable excuse to an emotional Sicilian), but takes an unfortunate middle route: he announces pompously that he and Noelline have made no plans, but that in their newfound intimacy he has come to respect her, and does not wish for her to live a life of misery.
The folly of this! As Senna remarks to Shay—husband and wife are both avidly following the gossip, long distance from Milan—it leaves Floristella not only cuckolded but egregiously insulted, with only the possibility of rage and revenge.
The situation is rendered more volatile by the fact that Noelline begins to act erratically. She abruptly stops her part-time work with Pianon at the Red House, so as not to come anywhere near her official employer, Floristella. With him, she refuses any contact, even to tie up the loose ends of her secretarial duties.
Worse than this, she suddenly starts issuing melodramatic pronouncements: telling anybody who will listen that for years she has been the Sicilian’s overworked slave, and that now she wishes to be free. In the opinion of the idlers at the Fleur des Îles, who are following the situation like a television drama, Noelline is overdoing her big moment.
Everyone knows that she long ago offered herself to old Floristella, fighting off other girls, and that she and her mother have since then been living contentedly in the greatest luxury the impecunious Sicilian can afford. For years, he has emptied his pockets to pay the rent of the cinder-block house. Who but he put down the money for her diploma from the lycée, and the typing courses? Where else has she gotten the motorbike, and the satellite dish, and all those shoes? Even now Floristella has done the paperwork properly, and she is receiving correct severance pay.
Yet here she is, going on about suffering, in a way that the gossips opine is suitable only for crazy white women. And the way she brags about her powers of fascination over old vazaha men, as if every pretty island girl doesn’t have the same power between her legs! She even invents a third suitor, a rich German, described with laughable vagueness, who, she claims, wants to take her off to Frankfurt. No one believes this except the two rivals, Floristella and Pianon.
Long vanished are the days when the friends contemplated the sunrise together over caffè ristretto on Floristella’s porch. Now, morning and evening, Floristella sits in monumental solitude, glaring at the waves while he nurses his Achillean rage.
Pianon keeps inside the Red House, away from the sea. He makes discreet evening visits to Noelline in her cinder-block village house, and takes her on a weekend excursion to Mahajanga. He is filled with bittersweet tenderness at her predictable appetite for fake designer purses and the masses of hair extensions that hang temptingly in the Indian shops of Saint Grimaud. He even buys her a dinner set painted with violets that for years gathered dust on a shelf of Au Bonheur de la Maison. In between her demands for gifts and her dramatic complaints about Floristella, she makes love to Pianon with an explosive intensity that he has never experienced, even as a young man. Throughout his earlier years in the country, he has stayed away from affairs with Malagasy women, but in Noelline’s voice, in the touch of her cool, slightly rough skin, even in her greed, he encounters something simple, ancient, and essential that makes his research into history and custom seem unreal as a stage set. He is oddly touched by the fact that she does not even pretend to be in love with him.
Meanwhile, Floristella is overwhelmed with jealousy. He sets up a network of spies led by his housekeeper, Marianne, and bombards Noelline with calls on the cell phone he bought for her in happier times. He abandons pride and begs her to return. Even if it is just for an hour a day. He swears that she’ll never again have to give him insulin injections or cut his toenails. She will not have to listen to his rambling theories on politics. She won’t have to work at all; she can just sit and keep him company.
He calls a dozen times a day. Finally, when, with her new outspokenness, she threatens to file a complaint, he subsides into an ominous Sicilian calm. Madame Rose reports to Shay, in an agitated phone call, that Floristella is “biding his time, like all maniacs.” According to Madame Rose, he has been heard musing aloud that the beach in front of his bungalow would be a good spot for a public flogging post, or even a gallows.
Naratrany is, in fact, a convenient place to commit a crime of passion. A year before, the captain of a Mauritian schooner docked at the yacht basin vanishes after killing his first mate with a machete. A Belgian diving instructor who beats his Sakalava girlfriend is waylaid while riding his motorcycle, and has his skull bashed in with a rock. During fishing expeditions to the Îles Glorieuses, unwanted wives disappear overboard, without a trace. Poison is rife, as easy to put into food as aphrodisiacs. The power of the island gendarmerie is more theoretical than anything else.
Hassan, owner of the Total-Kianja gas station, reports a conversation with Floristella where the old Sicilian said he has considered the simple expedient of flinging a lighted book of matches onto the thatched roof of the Red House while Pianon is sleeping.
“But that,” adds Floristella to the horrified Hassan, “would be burning down a friend’s house to exterminate a rat.”
Things come to a head on that memorable November morning when Floristella storms into the Red House garden. He is brandishing an antique brass-bound walking stick that one of his noble forebears acquired in Scotland, a blackened thorn meant for tramping across Hebridean grouse moors. With startling swiftness, considering his bulk, he dashes up the veranda steps and hurtles toward Pianon, who stands frozen on the wide gleaming floor before his office, wearing another unlikely European accessory: an elegant pair of fur-lined Venetian slippers.
Heads of maids and gardeners appear around every corner of the Red House as Floristella flings down a crumpled paper and bellows that he found some Red House business letters filed away by mistake in his private strongbox, to which only Noelline has had the extra key.
“This is the final straw, you filthy traitor, you dog!” he shouts, raising the stick with both hands like a club. “I’m going to smash your skinny legs and put you in a wheelchair, where you won’t be fucking anybody else’s woman and plotting against them on the sly!”
“Let’s sit down and talk in a calm and reasonable manner!” babbles Pianon, backing away. “I’ve already told you it was a terrible, a sinful error on my part, and I apologized humbly. In the name of our old friendship. Don’t act like this with the staff watching—think of your dignity!”
“Amicizia! Dignità!” howls Floristella. He takes a sudden swing with the walking stick at Pianon, who leaps aside with surprising nimbleness and collides with one of the Chinese side tables. One of Shay Senna’s favorite earthenware lamps flies off and explodes in fragments on the floor, to a collective “Asala!” from the assembled servants.
Floristella’s housekeeper, Marianne, and his handyman race to restrain Floristella, who flings away his stick and launches himself at Pianon, bearing the other man to the ground by his greater weight, and trying to throttle him.
For a second a ring of dark-skinned spectators encircles the thrashing struggle of two old white men, one bony and pale, one fat and vermilion with rage. Then the Red House maids, led by Bertine la Grande, manage to detach Floristella’s grip. They pull the disheveled Pianon to his feet and help him to a chair, and Floristella, puffing dangerously, allows himself to be walked away by Marianne and two others.
“I’ll see that you get your payment!” the Sicilian shouts as he is hustled past a bougainvillea. “Don’t let yourself fall asleep, not even a siesta!”
“You don’t understand,” calls Pianon, rising cautiously and hobbling to the edge of the veranda. “She’s left me!”
“Left you?” says Floristella, pausing. “For that German son of a bitch, I suppose?”
“Not the German. I don’t think anyone really wants to take her to Germany. But she won’t answer my calls. She won’t open her door. It’s been three days now.”
“Good for you, dirty bastard! Enjoy what’s left of your miserable life.”
It is true, in fact, that the unpredictable Noelline has abruptly dropped the second of her elderly swains, in a sudden fit of pique that consolidates her reputation as a girl who allows herself emotions far beyond her means.
Word has it that she breaks off with Pianon just after he makes the last payment on the purchase of her cinder-block lodging in Finoana and transfers ownership to Noelline. There is no definite proof of this, but it is clear that her life is transformed. She stops making public laments. She finds work in the offices of the Grand Bleu vacation village, and is soon seen around the island with a new boyfriend: a muscular Tsimihety man, who works for a French yacht charter company. Suddenly prosperous, she adopts a lofty new hairdo of extensions that gives her a Sophia Loren air. She abandons her friendship with the Red House staff, and even acquires a maid of her own, a placid twelve-year-old niece from backcountry Sandrakota.
Many islanders, rich and poor, think she is stupid to cut off such a sure source of ongoing profit as the love madness of two old vazaha men. Still, though presumably there are no longer magical philters added to Pianon’s meals, the enchantment seems to go on working. Pianon, who has never before given in to the tropical melancholy that leads white men to marinate themselves in rum, now finds himself unable to eat or sleep. Wearing his unflattering tracksuits, he makes his business rounds, walking with a slight limp that makes him look much older. In the Saint Grimaud market crowds, he pauses each time he sees a girl with a high forehead—perhaps inclining her head with the absent expression women have when they retie the lambas around their bodies, perhaps tilting her chin to holler at a friend across the square. At such times his angular face looks as if it has turned to stone. He loses all interest in the history of the royal Sakalava, and abandons the project he set up with the scholarly priest Père Jobeny to research legends about the beautiful Queen Binao.
After the fight, everyone thought Floristella would collapse from another heart attack, but he seems undamaged. He has stopped harassing Noelline, but it is rumored that he has offered local toughs fifty thousand ariary for an attack on Pianon. He hires two pretty replacement secretaries, young Comorean women with neatly braided heads. He can be seen sitting between them with a bored, distracted air on his seaside porch, perusing the usual documents. In the evening, after he has sent the girls away, he sits on under the yellow light, monumental, oblivious to mosquitoes, slowly eating his way through a heap of spaghetti, his cigarette burning beside him.
At the same time, at the Red House, if there are no guests, Pianon is seated at one end of the long table, picking at a monastic meal of cooked vegetables. Both men go to bed early.
“What is it about that girl?” asks one of Senna’s Milanese friends, who hears the tale aboard the Red House catamaran during a New Year’s fishing trip. “Who is she, Cleopatra?”
“Nobody understands it!” exclaims Senna, reaching across the deck table to help himself to more fricasseed crab. “She isn’t even all that good-looking. But both of those old codgers should get down on their knees—if they can—and thank her.”
Senna is as annoyed as Shay is about the scandal and the awkwardness in the Red House, with the whole island gossiping about their accountant, and their dear friend Floristella refusing to set foot under their roof. But being quite a fantasist for a businessman, Senna has his own take on it. When in Madagascar he cherishes a vision of himself as a piratical adventurer, for whom social graces are as superfluous as underwear. Now he pours himself another glass of Three Horses beer and continues: “Yes, that little piece of ass did them the biggest favor in the world: got those two fucking and fighting like twenty-year-olds.”
“O, per carità!” interjects Shay, shooting him an exasperated look. Smothered giggles come from aft, where the Senna children are eavesdropping from their perch on the trampoline. They know every salacious detail of the story from their friends in Finoana village.
Senna makes a face at his wife like a naughty little boy and goes on: “Think of it—how often do men that age have the privilege of doing battle over a woman? If it happened to me in twenty years, I’d think it was a miracle.”
At sunset on the Epiphany, the day before the Sennas leave for Milan, Shay walks over to say goodbye to Floristella. He is still nursing his superb anger, sitting obdurate on his porch, immovable as a dolmen. Over the beach, a conflagration of low red rays glares from under a dark cloud bank rippled like the hem of a skirt. The waves are crashing as high tide approaches, and village women returning from work at the hotels pass swiftly like barefoot phantoms.
Floristella—his fat cheeks a sickly map of maroon in the fierce lateral glow—repeats to Shay what he has said before: that he is not jealous or vindictive, that it is a matter of principle. A question of right and wrong. “What is written, is written,” he pronounces in a sepulchral tone, as Shay looks at him with compassion. “And those who steal from others will pay.”
Shay embraces him, then walks back up her garden path to the Red House, breathing in the scent of jasmine and ylang-ylang, and wondering what life in Madagascar does to white men’s brains.
Approaching the lamplit veranda, she catches sight of Pianon sitting primly upright on a rattan chair, right where the notorious scuffle took place. He is discussing with Senna and Madame Rose the cost of installing a château d’eau to replace the up-country stream that supplies the beach houses with water. Pianon’s eyes are sunken and he is, if possible, even thinner these days, like a dry stalk that the next malarial tremor will break. Yet he holds himself with dignity. To Shay there is something impressive about the way he soldiers on, refusing to speak of his woe, just as there is a certain mad grandeur to the noisy perorations of Floristella.
In some odd manner the two men seem joined more closely as antagonists than they were as friends. Senna, in his usual crude way, has put his finger on the truth: that, near the end of their lives, this melodrama has bestowed on them a kind of magnitude, as if they are a pair of pillars battered by time, holding up the night sky.
A silly thought, because of course the sky needs no support—not the hot star-swollen Madagascar night that leans close over the beach and the villages like the face of a Black girl, tranquil and pitiless.
Then Shay considers Noelline. At this hour, the resourceful young woman is probably already securely closed into her cinder-block house, its shutters barred against insects, thieves, blowing refuse. Perhaps she and her mother are squatting around a dish of rice with their novice maid. Or maybe she is fucking her new man, or getting her scalp greased as she absorbs visions from another world on her satellite television. Or perhaps she is studying accounting, or reading Pascal. Whatever she is doing, she is swiftly losing the bloom of youth that has been her main currency for foreign exchange, growing thick-waisted and iron of countenance, as happens too early to even the prettiest island girls.
You have to respect her, Shay thinks. She’s gone far with what she was dealt.
Not much more than a year later, life—or its loyal servant, death—puts a definitive end to the triangle. And which of the rivals triumphs? According to the chattering classes of Naratrany, it all depends on one’s point of view.
In the rainy season, Floristella, who has been plagued by dizzy spells, departs for Sicily once again. There, examination reveals that in addition to the diabetes and failing heart, a tumor has infiltrated a lung, and spawned offspring around the huge overtaxed body, even crowding one side of Floristella’s stubborn, fantastical brain. His family does not tell him that he will never return to Madagascar, and so he settles into a sunny crumbling wing of his palace in Trapani to begin what he thinks of as convalescence, but which is really a short season of dying.
At the same time political troubles explode in Antananarivo, as supporters of a popular young usurper battle the president’s followers in the streets of the capital, torching stores and government buildings, causing unrest even on the far island of Naratrany. And the tourists take off like a flock of startled gulls.
What do politics have to do with the two old men? Well, the hotel where Noelline works closes down—and she, prudent woman that she is, revives her love affair with Pianon. Dressed in a modest blue lamba, she arranges a chance encounter with the Italian outside the customs office in Saint Grimaud. It is almost pitiful how simple it is to get him back. Soon she is once more riding beside Pianon in the Toyota pickup that actually belongs to the Sennas, performing wifely actions like buying Sunday mille-feuilles at the Patisserie Trois Étoiles.
And by the time the cool weather arrives in May, Pianon surprises everyone by moving out of the Red House and taking Noelline off to live openly with him. Not in her cinder-block house, where she leaves her mother, but in a new construction in a mixed settlement of Chinese, middle-class Malagasy, Indians, and French, on a hillside above the Muslim cemetery. The new house is small, but with stucco walls and European proportions. They install the little maidservant, a generator, Pianon’s computer, and a gaudy living room suite from the Indian merchant on the airport road. They also play host to Noelline’s uncle, and an array of half brothers, who suddenly materialize from the Grande Île, and who spend their days squatted on the veranda chewing khat with a businesslike air.
Noelline is judged a successful adventuress, but Pianon is thought a double fool for having taken her back. He gains weight and looks idiotic with happiness. Still working at the Red House, he has also taken on some new projects, funded by foreigners who are leveraging the political chaos to buy up land for a song. Pianon has always enjoyed a spotless professional reputation, but now rumors begin to circulate that he is forging documents and bribing village headmen for land they have no right to sell. He is seen in the shabby offices of the defunct sugar company (where, half obliterated by insects and damp, lists of colonial fieldworkers are still tacked to the wall), signing papers with the ruthless Mauritian developer whose nickname is the Crocodile.
Back in Milan, Senna scratches his head and curses over shortfalls in the Red House accounting. Still, Pianon looks unworried; he is always at work, Noelline at his side. Then, one breathlessly hot morning in January, as he stands in his house, telephoning near the window that looks down the sun-scorched hill to the incorruptible blue of Finoana Bay, he turns to say something to Noelline, who is sitting at the computer. The men on the veranda and the little maid in the side yard hear Pianon give a loud cry. It is followed by a crash, and a crescendo of shrieks from Noelline. When they rush in and turn over his lanky body, he is already dead from a stroke.
Noelline, to her credit, seems genuinely grief stricken, and has two zebus killed for the ceremony. And to the islanders’ credit, scores come for the feasting and mourning, even those who had lately led him astray, like village headmen and the Crocodile. Because of the political chaos, most Europeans are absent from Naratrany. The Sennas have to use their connections to the Italian consulate to cut through the red tape and get what remains of Pianon shipped back to his family tomb in the hills above Verona. Intermittently iced, his body has lain for six days at the Saint Grimaud morgue, a cement storeroom behind the police station, and is, as the consul delicately puts it, in a deteriorated condition.
It turns out that Pianon’s new house, along with the cinder-block shantytown residence, as well as some prime road-front land, now belong in some mysterious but indisputable way to Noelline. When it becomes clear she is a woman of means, she receives an instant boost in status, and she quickly distances herself from the dishonor that turns out to be Pianon’s further legacy. Just before his death, it appears, the commissaire had already drawn up a warrant for his arrest on charges of forgery and illegal sale of government land. Had he remained alive, Pianon would have been locked up to eat boiled manioc in the grim colonial stockade that is Naratrany prison. But all ends as he, possibly, would have wished it.
“Così é la vita” is Floristella’s only observation when he hears of Pianon’s death and disgrace. The words are tossed off with indifference, with a regal movement of his big swollen hand as he lies lapped in threadbare pillows on a huge-wheeled chaise longue on a terrace of his ramshackle palace looking out toward the Aegadian Islands. But for a minute, before he falls back into the morphine haze, his black eyes hold a gleam of savage glee.
The rest of his life is brief. In the afternoons, lizards run up and down the crumbling plaster behind his head, and when awake he stares off across the sunny courtyard that holds a dusty collection of whale vertebrae and sea turtle shells, over a cracked balustrade toward the ferries, the cruise liners, the hangars, the teeming chaos of the port, to the open Mediterranean, almost as pure a blue as the Mozambique Channel.
Night and day they tell him lies—his daughters, his grandchildren, his straight-backed wife with her brusque aristocratic voice—they all say, over and over, that Floristella will go back to Madagascar. To sit enthroned as usual on the porch of his bungalow, gazing out over the strait at the bellying sails of the fishing pirogues and the boutres hauling timber from the Grande Île. Through the drugs he listens, and envisions an early scene on Finoana Beach, where he once dragged ashore a pair of hammerhead sharks: himself, Floristella, young, bearded, muscular; his children, blond and small, shrieking with glee as his knife bites through the tough sharkskin and the cold dark blood soaks into the sand. And through the harsh bright smell of the blood comes the scent of the island: boiling sugar, and ylang-ylang. Behind the scene hovers the face of a girl, a young Sakalava woman with a high forehead, staring at him with a sly edge of affection in her shallow-set eyes. Then a blink of brown and blue, a sound of wailing that might be his family, or some cyclonic turn of weather over the Indian Ocean. Then, nothing.
Just four months after Pianon is placed in the tomb in the hills above Verona, the body of Floristella lies in an extra-large open casket in the deconsecrated chapel of his palace—redone in the seventies with ugly murals of fishing apostles—as a crowd of family, former lovers, and friends—aristocrats mingling with sailors, mechanics, market vendors, and the odd crime boss—spill out the doorway onto the seawall. They stand and listen to a tribute in which God is not mentioned, since the old baron was an atheist. He lies in one of the open-necked shirts he always wore on Naratrany, with his big feet bare as they almost always were in life, as around him ring grandiose eulogies. In the crowd are Senna, choking with sobs, and Shay, who stands thinking how she will miss Floristella, how long it will take for the giant presence to dissipate into memory, and thinking also of the less grand sides: how he’d kill palm rats with a slingshot, and treat her children’s coral scratches with rum.
After the cremation, his wife and daughters scatter his ashes in the sea. Floristella at the very end insists on this, declaring that with the currents he will find his way back to Madagascar.
So, in the end, who is the winner? ask the idlers at the Fleur des Îles café. Is it Pianon, who got the girl, but who died of it, and was sent home putrescent in a stench of crime? Or is it Floristella, cuckolded and robbed of his revenge, but who outlived his enemy—to pass away in honorable peace, in Europe, in a garland of family, friends, and mythmaking?
No one consults the woman who many think is the real winner. These days, Noelline has become an important island personage, who, after her months of mourning—her mother and uncle carefully guarding her two houses—has allowed herself to grow distinctly stout, adopted a pair of nephews, and blossomed into a commanding, wealthy Malagasy matriarch.
After a few years, she surprises the Italian and French community by opening a big new general store in Renirano village, at the crossroad near the yacht basin, in partnership with a recent arrival on the island, a sheep-faced young man from Bologna who may or may not be her lover. (Her other lovers are said to include a powerful senator and the king of the Sakalava.) There Noelline sits, magisterial behind the register in the prosperous gloom, with the hubbub and squalor of Renirano market right outside the door, totting up shopping lists for Australian yachtsmen, for rich Europeans and Indians, barking out orders to her nephews, who haul cases of imported gin, soft drinks, frozen chickens, and cartons of laundry soap. Her thick gold chains are laid out for all to see on her handsome, jutting bosom, her eyebrows are penciled in superb arches, and her ever-changing hair extensions are the best money can buy.
The Red House does not patronize her establishment, but this is because the Sennas for years have bought their supplies in Saint Grimaud, from the Chinese grocer Fong.
Pianon’s beloved library remains at the Red House until Shay decides to donate it to the scholarly priest Père Jobeny; she and Bertine la Grande spend a melancholy hour cleaning rot and insects out of the yellowing volumes. At one point, flipping through, Shay thinks of Noelline, observing to Bertine that the other woman has certainly shown character in making a success out of an unpromising fate.
But Bertine’s response is predictable: a single terse shake of the head crowned with impeccably twisted Sakalava knots. “Pas bien!” she says in a dismissive tone, before picking up another book.