Lovely woman
The bearing of a queen
…
With your smile of serenity
Bearer of mystery
From the height of the hill
You defy churchwardens
Who both classify and muddle
The fabric of your history
From the other side of the ocean
To this one here.
—Esther Nirina, “Lovely Woman” translated by Marjolijn de Jager
“Well what are we going to do about it?” demands Senna. “We’ve rented him that room on the beach for two summers now. And he’s a good customer, un bravo ragazzo. A nice guy, quiet.”
Senna pauses and gives Shay an anticipatory flicker of the eye as if he is waiting for his wife to leap in with American aggressiveness and deny the quiet nature of the fat Frenchman, Gilles. But Shay perversely holds back from enacting the familiar choreography and, taking a sip of iced lime water, regards her husband with an air of mild inquiry that she knows is far more annoying. Senna is tired and grumpy, fresh off the catamaran from two days deep-sea fishing off the coast of Ambatozavary, where the savage subequatorial sun has brought his normally indestructible Italian complexion to an inflamed neon glow like that lingering in the sunset sky over Finoana Bay in front of them. Husband and wife are sitting on the Red House veranda in a rare moment of tranquillity, discussing a problem of etiquette. Or is it ethics?
Irritably, Senna continues. “And you know that most of the guests left this morning, and it would look peculiar if we don’t let him eat with the family. That’s what table d’hôte means, for Christ’s sake. But now she’s here with him… Well. It’s for you to decide…” he says, springing suddenly out of the wicker chair and padding away barefoot over the gleaming dark red floor in the direction of the stairs to their bedroom and the relief of a shower. “After all,” he calls over his shoulder, in the tone of one launching a devastating riposte, “you’re the lady of the house!” He says it in Italian, and the words resound under the high thatched ceiling: Sei tu la padrona di casa!
Shay gives a short laugh and slides down in her chair, folding her arms behind her head and casting her eyes up toward the shadowy beams where a dozen geckos crouch in ambush for flying insects. She’s already dressed for dinner, in a long flimsy linen dress from Milan that sticks to her freshly showered skin, damp curls pulled up on the crown of her head, a thick Berber bracelet and no other jewelry: the kind of offhand Euro beach style she absorbed years ago, when she married Senna and became part of the Italian vacationing world.
Around her in the big open space, both veranda and great room, that is the heart of the house, the household staff move back and forth in the evening duties—lighting the lamps, drawing the tall sailcloth curtains that divide inside from outside, bringing mosquito coils, closing bedroom shutters, setting the dining table—that have become ritual in the two decades since the Sennas first came to Finoana Beach. Shay helped establish this, and other domestic rituals. Most of the housemaids, gardeners, and night watchmen have been there for many seasons and can communicate with her in a mere word, a gesture.
Everyone knows exactly what is expected, thinks Shay. Except, in this case, me.
Not for the first time, Senna is foisting off on her the task of finding a solution to a dilemma peculiar to Madagascar. In this case, one that makes her feel that she is struggling to negotiate the currents not just of Italian, French, and Malagasy etiquette but of a universal colonial tradition that once seemed to her extinct, but which she knows now is all too alive.
The problem concerns one of their paying guests: Gilles, a corpulent, white-haired truck dispatcher from Arles, who for the last two years has come to Naratrany for March and September fishing trips. Apparently widowed, or separated—though who can say?—he stays for weeks, always with a much younger Malagasy woman, different each time, picked out carefully from the array at the bars of the port. Usually his stays don’t coincide with the Senna family vacation, but this time he has arrived early, at the tail end of August, two days before they depart for Milan. And with him is his concubine of the moment, who is the problem.
Shay knows all about Gilles from Hery, the Merina manager who presently runs the Red House bed-and-breakfast business for them. Hery, a gay man with a gently angled face, a musical voice, and a sunken, consumptive chest, says that the Frenchman is the best kind of guest: jolly, generous with tips, fishing all day, out of the way at night—that is, roistering at the billiard hall and the dance clubs. Admittedly, says Hery, he is rough in his manners, a little loud—not at all discreet, as Senna claims—yet he is quiet in the sense that he is benign, causes no trouble. Doesn’t get staggering drunk and fall prey to island thugs, no drugs, doesn’t go after children. In fact, he is much the best of the crusty old French, Germans, Swedes, and Italians who descend on the island in the off-season, trolling for deep-sea fish, and sex. Gilles picks out one girl immediately on his arrival, stays with her the whole time of his vacation, buying her presents and flaunting her in the clubs, then pays her off generously when he departs.
The Red House pensione, like every other island hotel, has a rule banning prostitution, but no set rules about couples who come to stay. There are only eight rooms, and it is run in an agreeable low-key way, doing most business when the Sennas and their friends are back in Italy. Should the family be there when there are just a few guests, they eat together at the big table on the veranda. Eat well, too: Italian, and Creole, and occasional American specialties (beaten biscuits, key lime pie) prepared by the expert cook Shay hired, a Hova trained in an Italian-run restaurant in Mahajanga. It’s part of the relaxed atmosphere of the place that people are so enthusiastic about on websites for travelers who like to get off the beaten track. The Sennas generally enjoy it. They’ve passed impromptu evenings with charter airline crews, Peace Corps volunteers, Australian yachtsmen, paleontologists in search of Miocene fossils, Malagasy families from the highlands, Indian honeymooners from Mauritius and Réunion.
On this late August evening the dreamy, slightly melancholy end-of-summer atmosphere has suddenly been invaded by the flutter of a question in the air: the uncomfortable query as to whether they should sit down for dinner at the same table with a young Malagasy woman who is not precisely a prostitute, but is certainly paid for her companionship.
Shay is disturbed on many levels: first of all by the hypocrisy of Senna, who styles himself a freethinker. Like most of the foreign men who have vacation houses here, he has visited on his own in the off-season and attended many a dinner given by cronies whose families are far away: rampageous festivities where Malagasy girls from the bars and clubs are part of the company. This Shay knows because Senna tells her—makes her laugh about the scandalous doings he hilariously reports. She doesn’t know if she trusts or distrusts his role in this, but at least he tells her.
But now, with his wife present, with Roby and Augustina hosting their classmate from Milan, the framework of his domestic life around him, he is suddenly referencing the old-fashioned European division between haut monde and demimonde. Between good and bad women. It throws a shadow on everything that has gone before. She’d respect him far more if he calmly evoked the unbridled evenings he’s described in the past, and simply asked her to agree that no one is unwelcome at dinner in the Red House. Instead of pretending that there is a big decision to make, and that the onus lies on her.
She is further irritated to hear Hery discreetly suggest that they set up a separate table for Gilles and his girl on the little terrace outside of the room that Gilles has rented. A nice table, of course, with flowers: the kind they set up for honeymooners who want privacy. Or, he says, they could simply request that the couple, that night, eat in a restaurant in the village.
Just then her Malagasy friend Angélique, for years the pharmacist in Saint Grimaud, comes by to pick up a stack of fashion magazines, and naturally she pokes her tiny Betsileo nose into the situation, as usual yanking off her angular Parisian glasses and gesturing theatrically with them as she makes her point. “Oh, mais non, par les cieux! A couple like that should absolutely not dine with you. You shouldn’t put your poor children through such an experience!”
“They’re not delicate flowers, they’re practically adults,” says Shay, mildly. “They’ve seen sex tourists on Naratrany all their lives. Unfortunately. And back in Milan, the International School bus goes right by the afternoon hookers on the corners, so we’ve had many a serious conversation about women for sale.”
“What a disgraceful world we live in! In any case, this is still not a good idea—such a bad example for the maids, for instance. How can they respect a mistress who sits down with bar girls?”
Shay has long been sick and tired of the importance that Angélique and everybody else on the island assign to her role as chatelaine of the Red House. While Senna, as boss, is assumed to be on vacation in Madagascar for healing repose from his mysterious and burdensome job of running the entire business world, Shay is expected to pass her holiday months not as a sojourner comfortably decompressing from a busy Milan life of teaching and translating and chivying her college-bound kids, but as a vigilant matriarch who exerts iron control—even if it is part-time—over the work ethic, health, and morality of her numerous Malagasy household staff. (Why there should be so many, she doesn’t know, yet every big house on the island is more like a miniature village.) On Naratrany she is automatically adjudged the kind of woman who—whether she is a white neocolonial or a Malagasy aristocrat like Angélique—is devoted to keeping social, racial, tribal, and sexual hierarchies in place. In many ways this idealized figure resembles the old-fashioned Italian domestic goddesses whom Senna, who grew up in a provincial clan amid the rice fields of Vercelli, envisions when he says padrona di casa. However, to a Black American from an academic family in California, the concept has always smacked far too much of plantation life.
Shay has learned to take the expectations lightly, to treat the role with outward respect when she is in Madagascar, privately joking in messages to her sister, Leila, about her sacred responsibilities as memsahib. But tonight, those responsibilities have acquired substance, as if a hologram has suddenly morphed into tangible form. And inevitably her thoughts return to America; her own country standing vivid in her identity, no matter how many years she lives abroad.
She recalls her grandfather’s matter-of-fact stories of segregated Washington, DC, where he, as a medical student, walked the tightrope between what was and was not allowed, of the scent of death and blood that hovered around the possibilities of trespass present everywhere: in buses, schools, restaurants, on sidewalks, in the direction of a Black boy’s gaze. She thinks of her parents, who marched in Birmingham and Selma, and later spent weekends crisscrossing Alameda County to register Black voters. She thinks of the eager, naïve Italian students in her literature course at the Università Cattolica, to whom she spoon-feeds James Baldwin and Countee Cullen. She thinks of her half-Italian children, whom she has religiously schooled in awareness of the strange fruit that is their American inheritance. She thinks of how she has kept herself conscious of that inheritance, through long, facile years of life in Italy, where social class counts more than race.
And she knows as she has known from the start that it isn’t possible to refuse to sit down at dinner with a young woman with dark skin. Though it is not really a question of race. Or is it? She wishes she could consult the one person among her Malagasy friends who would know the right thing to do, the exact protocol: Bertine la Grande. But the housekeeper has the day off, and Shay feels ashamed at the thought of running to her like a child every time there is a problem. No, she must handle this herself.
And so the minute Angélique drives off, Shay tells Hery to set places at the family table for Gilles and his female companion, name unknown.
At eight o’clock the Frenchman comes stumping in on his fat sunburnt calves, beaming and jocular, his arm proudly around the waist of a Sakalava woman of no more than twenty, tall and slender, with a cheap Chinese weave rippling down her back. She is dressed up with the unbridled flashiness that island girls adopt for Saturday night dancing at Mangue Verte, and Chanson de la Mer.
Her appearance is not a complete surprise to the Sennas and their friends, who have all been to the dance halls and marveled at the dazzle of these long-legged girls. A sequined minidress and four-inch platform heels turn this one into a towering apparition of glamour and sex. It’s as if a neon sign has suddenly lit up the candlelit veranda, the gathering of casually dressed adults and barefoot teenagers under the slow spin of the ceiling fans. Below the sewn-in Chinese hair, the girl’s round face lacks the dramatic sculptural beauty of many Sakalava women, but is good-natured, plucky, with a generous white smile that is oddly remote, as if she is smiling to someone invisible in the far distance.
In halting French she says that her name is Bé, which is an island name of a certain importance: meaning great, or elder, a name sometimes given to the firstborn of a pair of twins.
Bé maintains a patient composure as portly, red-faced Gilles, white hair gelled into ripples, Falstaff belly jiggling in a polo shirt, hauls her around the room as if he’s just gotten his hands on a gorgeous big doll. Talking nonstop, with a crude gusto—which, Senna is right, is somehow appealing—about fishing; sapphire mining (he’d like to get into it); South African wines (can’t approach the French goût de terroir); about the differences between the haughty girls of Antananarivo and the good-natured cuties of Naratrany. He even talks about the sequined dress, which he boasts of having snatched off the rack at Grand Bazaar—right under the nose of the Saint Grimaud notary, who wanted it for his mistress.
Shay receives the couple with an exaggerated cordiality drawn from childhood occasions when she sometimes found herself the lone Black guest at the dinner tables of white classmates from her private elementary school; except now she is in the position of those long-ago, uneasy hosts. Amused by her tone, Senna slips his arm around his wife and pinches her backside as they are headed to the table, whispering, “Indovina chi viene a cena!”
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Yes, that classic movie also made it to Italy.
Soon, Shay, directing Bé to a place at Senna’s right hand, finds herself politely asking the girl where she lives. Then she bites her tongue, because of course it is obvious. The girl comes from one of the shantytowns in the gullies back of the beach hotels, where yellow dogs root through plastic rubbish, and many daughters, like Bé, work the bars as the sole support of their families.
“Ici,” replies Bé, with a gravitas worthy of her name. “Here, in Finoana village.”
Yes, she is from here, from the very same location on the map as the Red House, yet from a reality so different that it could be another universe.
She does not meet Shay’s eyes as she speaks, nor does she do so the whole evening. The only people she looks at, in fact, are Gilles and the housemaids serving dinner—with whom she has already exchanged low-voiced greetings in Malagasy.
Throughout the three-course meal, Shay goes on playing the determined hostess from the old film, itself now part of civil rights history, where Sidney Poitier’s face hovers like a Black sun newly risen over porcelain and crystal, and dinner table awkwardness is just the tip of a familiar iceberg of ancient terrors. She’s both amused and disgusted to feel her face automatically re-creating Katharine Hepburn’s lockjaw smile.
And all the while she’s wondering why this has to be. After all, they are a motley group gathered here dining on smoked white tuna, crudités, and curried prawns at the Red House table. Gilles, French; Senna, Italian; Shay, African-American; their friends, Italian Jews; Shay and Senna’s children, mixed race and nationality; their schoolmate, German. The ironic thing is that Bé—the young woman whose presence is troubling the gathering—is the only one of them on native soil.
The three teenagers hunker in their corner of the table, a miniature tribe with their healthy sunburnt faces, their expensive tattered jeans, their clear eyes of young people who have known since birth that the good things of the world are theirs. Throughout the vacation, their opinions on politics have been noisy and trenchant, voiced with the absolutism of international kids who have grown up traveling and been rendered unshockable by the Internet. The Senna kids have many Malagasy friends on Naratrany, particularly Bertine’s tall, grave, guitar-playing son, Anse; they keep abreast of Indian Ocean scandal and crime while smoking weed from the Comorean dealers in back of the Grand Bazaar, and feel that their superior knowledge authorizes them to pass dinner hours furiously dissecting postcolonial ills.
But now they are as silent as punished schoolchildren, exchanging only occasional scornful glances that deride Shay’s forced small talk and Gilles the Frenchman’s retrograde political opinions. Are my kids so without resources? Shay wonders. So puritanical? After everything I hammered into their heads?
Her beautiful daughter, Augustina, for example, with her golden skin, Botticellian curls, and pierced left nostril, deliberately blanks out everyone around her, though Shay has counted on some demonstration of sympathy from this daughter who is usually so vocal about women’s issues: that she would exchange some words with the silent Bé; at least, with a smile or a glance, telegraph the other girl a message of solidarity. But tonight, Augustina, like any other teenager, seems chiefly mortified by the behavior of her elders. The two boys are pretending not to be titillated by the rampant sexiness of the young female guest, arrayed in her tacky finery for the delectation of an obscene old man.
Shay sees that all the kids want to be on the side of Bé, but are confounded at the sight of this child of their own generation—with whom, years ago, they might have played on the beach, along with Anse and other village kids—who is now so definitively set apart, at whom everyone is trying not to stare, whose dark, disregarding gaze sweeps by them like a wind from beyond the stars.
By ordinary standards the dinner is brief, a half hour at most. But it runs on its own circuit of time. And so, seemingly for centuries, the company lingers around the table on the veranda, as ceiling fans disperse the heat, and pungent smoke rises from the mosquito coils, and the two barefoot maids in their blue wrappers serve rice from the mainland and fish from the sea lapping on the beach outside the garden. From inside the garden drift gorgeous perfumes of damp earth and overwrought vegetation, since this is, after all, paradise. That is why everyone sitting at the table has traveled the terrestrial globe to be here. Everyone except for the young woman shimmering in her weave and sequins like some otherworldly creature, the guest who didn’t have to travel at all.
Bé eats very little, a few forkfuls of rice and vegetables.
Shay’s favorite Francis Bebey mix is playing, but fixed on repeat in the back of her mind are fragments of the Langston Hughes poem that begins “I, too, sing America.” The poem that is one of the warhorses of her popular course Introduzione alla Letteratura Afro-Americana. Words composed for the peculiar iniquities of her own country, but that ring true in Madagascar tonight.
I am the darker brother
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes…
The meal drags to its close, and after the cook’s famous tarte au coco (which Bé refuses), after coffee and mangosteen rum (she tosses back a glass), Bé and Gilles leave for their evening out.
“Mademoiselle will spend the evening on the dance floor with her girlfriends, and I intend to sit back and enjoy the spectacle,” says Gilles with a grin, giving comic emphasis to the honorific Mademoiselle, and giving Bé herself a solid pat on the thigh. “She’ll show this old dog how it’s done, won’t you, ma puce?”
Shay reaches out and shakes Bé’s hand, and for a moment the girl’s hand lies in hers, smooth and cool and unresponsive as a closed lily.
“Merci, Madame,” says Bé, in a low voice, still not looking at her. But she does glance around once at the veranda so handsomely decorated with antique textiles and old wooden tools of the kind once used by Bé’s grandparents, back when only fishermen lived in Finoana village. “Tsara,” she adds almost inaudibly in Malagasy, then repeats in French. “It’s pretty. The house, Madame.”
Then the short, fat white man in khakis, and the tall, glittering Black girl moving sure-footed in towering heels, step out under the star-spattered sky. In his rented truck, they drive off through the cane fields, down the red dirt roads to one of the packed, throbbing clubs on the beaches or along the port, places where crowds of women like Bé do back bends or squat with beer bottles on their heads, competing for the attention of men like Gilles.
After that, the teenagers adroitly detach themselves from the awkward gathering on the veranda, say their polite good nights, and head off on motorbikes for one last bonfire with their friends over on Renirano Beach.
Shay and the other adults are left marooned on two wicker couches with their drinks, finally able to lapse from French into Italian. Four handsome, middle-aged people, bronzed and relaxed at the end of their long tropical vacation, dressed in expensive lightweight linen and cotton. Old friends, united into something like family by shared tastes, political views, by the gloss of prosperity overlying their lives.
Quickly they run through the usual laments. How disheartening these scenes are. How deplorable the whole situation. How donations to aid organizations hardly scratch the surface. Then Senna, who prides himself on being the enfant terrible of any group, observes with a wink that Bé is certainly not the prettiest of the Sakalava women that old Gilles could have chosen. Though in that dress you definitely got to see what he is paying for. But all in all, he adds, the girl is not badly off, because Gilles is basically a decent sort: the old fellow confided to Senna that he plans to pay the fees for her équivalent baccalauréat so she can find a good job. “That Bé is one of the lucky ones,” Senna says, and then falls silent. Perhaps he is thinking, as is everyone else, of his beautiful daughter, Augustina, whose education does not depend on her selling her young body.
Silence, in fact, is the remaining mode of the evening, except when the other wife, a jewelry designer, elegant in Indian gauze top and tortoiseshell earrings, leans over and gushes about how expertly Shay handled the dinner. “I must hand it to you, carissima. You were superb. I don’t know how you managed it!”
This is when Shay’s discomfort becomes anger. Much of it at herself, because a tiny part of her was flattered by the compliment. Yet she knows she did nothing worthy of admiration. Small-minded, small of heart, they are—her husband, her friends, and herself—to act as if they’d run some peril, made some great moral sacrifice that evening. In just such a self-congratulatory tone, she thinks, might some Puritan speak, after condescending to sit down with Hester Prynne. Or Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly, forced by circumstances to dine with Jim the slave. Once again the Langston Hughes poem comes at her, with its wrenching last lines, full of bleak hope against hope that humans can rise above their own nature.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed —
Have they, any of them, had the grace to be ashamed?
The next day, through the bustle of her family’s departure for Milan, she continues to relive the dinner. She parses it through the hours of daytime flight northward over Kenya, Sudan, Tunisia, in a plane filled with European and South African tourists, middle-class Malagasy families, and a few Malagasy-European couples—though none who have the transactional appearance of Gilles and Bé. It seems important to deconstruct and consider, piece by piece, the wrongs that were so obtrusively present on the evening she hosted. Which was the defining ill?
The fact that Madagascar is so poor that sex tourists are a notable part of the economy?
The fact that just the sight of Gilles and Bé together seemed to violate some cosmic law?
The fact that Shay, a woman of color, thought twice about sitting down to share a meal with another woman—no, practically a child—of color?
The fact that the unwanted guest, the girl packaged as cheap merchandise, was the true heiress of the land on which they all sat feasting?
It is all of these things, and something else too, that lies in deep shadow beneath them: a wound whose prodigious length and depth she can just begin to discern, and for which, as far as she knows, the prospect of a cure is as scant as the hope at the end of the Hughes poem.
And even glimpsing it means admitting she is somehow complicit in its existence.
All these things are in Shay’s mind as she flies over Tanzania, then Sudan, then Egypt, and finally enters the airspace of the part of the world where old men must be a bit more discreet about buying young women.
And from time to time her thoughts circle back to the scene in her bedroom at the end of the night, when, pulling off her long dress, she says to her husband: “I don’t want Gilles back here next year.”
“He’s an awful vulgarian, no doubt about it,” replies Senna, who is in bed, checking his email inside the mosquito net. “But, as I said, he’s a decent chap underneath it all. And you know, darling, there will always be men like Gilles.”
As Shay looks at him silently, a dark figure half-visible through the veil, he adds hastily: “But you decide. After all—you’re the lady of the house.”