Morte magis metuenda senectus. Old age should be feared rather than death.
—Juvenal
A dying man has begged to come and complete his dying at the Sennas’ villa on Naratrany. This becomes an explosive topic of discussion one hot January evening at the Red House, where all the houseguests seated around the dinner table are elderly men. None of them, however, are as cruelly stricken in years and fortune as the eighty-six-year-old supplicant—Eugenio Gaber, a once-legendary playboy nicknamed Burton (pronounced Boor-ton by his friends) because of a supposed liaison with a momentarily distracted Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra.
Tonight being Monday, the Naratrany port bars and the billiard hall are closed, and the men at the Red House table have nothing whatever to do but gossip in a hyperdetailed manner more usual among high school girls. So they pour themselves more rum, and rehash the saga of how Burton, a garment manufacturer who got rich after the war by turning a parachute silk factory into a ladies’ underwear empire, went on to become a producer of sword-and-sandal movies and an epic womanizer, who stood out even amid the fierce competition of dolce vita Rome. He was notorious for his flashy mane of thick Calabrian hair, his insatiable appetite both for pasta all’amatriciana and cocaine, his orgies with Roman society ladies and Cinecittà film goddesses amid the pop art of his Piazza Navona penthouse.
There are endless Burton stories. How he secretly traded places one night with Ava Gardner’s chauffeur. How, in his leftist phase, he helped Godard shut down the Cannes festival in 1968. How he risked his life endless times with fast cars and vengeful husbands, survived a helicopter crash, quadruple bypass surgery, and a liver transplant. With all his hair intact, too. But now his luck has run out. The old barracks is collapsing at last, he recently told his longtime friend Senna in a hoarse, thready voice over the phone. And it seems that he wants his last view to be the dreaming azure of the Mozambique Channel, from Senna’s pleasure palace on Finoana Beach.
“What does he want to end up here for?” demands Paolini, a filmmaker who spent years shooting documentaries throughout the tropics. “What about his family? His wife?”
“Rachele is his fourth wife, and she’s just waiting for him to go,” says Senna. “Can’t stand to be under the same roof.”
“His kids?” asks Gianfra’, a grizzled yachtsman, the black sheep of his aristocratic Neapolitan clan, renowned both for his classical erudition and for escaping prison in Brazil.
“They don’t speak to him. He never paid any attention to them, and now his money is finished. Neither of his daughters would agree to be a donor for the liver transplant. He had to wait for a stranger to die.”
A silence falls for an instant over the long candlelit table, where a parade of carafes full of rhum arrangé—ginger, pineapple, vanilla, mangosteen—glitters through the cloud of cigarette smoke. And these worn-out adventurers, who all have picaresque pasts littered with discarded wives, lovers, fortunes, houses, countries, just sit there and consider how awful a father has to be so that his daughters reject him.
“How would he get here? He’d never survive an eight-hour plane ride,” says Baptiste, a soft-voiced Frenchman, an artist who has earned unexpected fame as a body painter.
“Oh, he would survive getting here,” says Senna, draining his rum. “They give him a year, maybe a little more, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him. That transplanted liver is giving out, and the diabetes has taken over, but the old devil is full of energy. Still the same dandy as ever, strutting around with the suntan and the silk scarf. And that hair, thick and black as ever.”
“Dyed!” interjects Biagio, once a Milanese celebrity hairdresser.
“No, no, Calabrian men are like that, the bastards. Thick black hair until they go into the coffin. Probably keeps growing even there.”
The men around the table murmur enviously, and Docle, a former striker for Vicenza, rubs a big hand over his sparse silver locks and says: “So he gets here—then he’ll need a nurse—”
Thunderous laughter rises to the high, palm-thatched ceiling, as always dotted with geckos waiting tensely for mosquitoes and moths.
“We can set him up with as many nurses as he needs!” declares Gianfra’ with only a slightly guilty glance at Senna’s wife, Shay.
Seated at the head of the table, Shay is the only woman at dinner that evening. She will fly back to Milan tomorrow morning, while Senna and his Rabelaisian cohorts remain for at least another two months.
She has been silent through the whole discussion. Sitting there in a composed manner, occasionally being rude enough to check her phone—but she doesn’t need good manners with this lot. She claims her space, her position as hostess, with straight spine and sphinx-like smile, giving quiet directions to the staff serving dinner, herself dishing out the fettuccine ai frutti di mare with the beneficent air of an Olympian condescending to wait on mortals. Using the detachment she has developed to handle equivocal situations both in Italy and in Madagascar—I am a distant ship; a tower in Aristophanean clouds—she studies her husband and his cronies, who have already started to behave as she knows they always do when they have the Red House to themselves.
Somebody asks what will happen if Burton does die there.
“Well, it means a lot of red tape,” says Docle, adjusting his flashy steel chronometer with an officious air, as if he were a barrister instead of a superannuated footballer. “He’ll have to make arrangements for that beforehand. For shipping the body back. Cremation is against the law in Madagascar, you know.”
There is a murmur of agreement. They know. Death, with all its intricate regalia of custom and legislation, is their favorite topic. More than sex, or even sports.
These men, these leathery comrades-in-arms, these quondam buccaneers of life, have been vacationing at the Red House for nearly two decades: first with an array of wives, children, girlfriends, and now, in their later years, relying on Senna’s inexhaustible generosity to settle in for months of an unending Hemingway-style fishing trip (though no one ever mentions The Old Man and the Sea).
They are all retirees, who in the past have in some way distinguished themselves, even moved in grand company. But now their focus has grown smaller, their rituals of leisure repetitive and confining, as if they are all back at school. Like any other group of collegians, they have their private jokes, nicknames, spats, power struggles. And although they are mostly successful and prosperous, there hovers over their fraternity a manifest air of failure, though at what is unclear. Perhaps simply failure at remaining young.
On their endless vacation in paradise, they mess about in speedboats, pirogues, the Sennas’ catamaran, Gianfra’s plucky Frigate 27, laying waste to the Indian Ocean population of marlin and bonito. In the great expatriate tradition, they follow the unfolding fortunes of football leagues and Formula 1 racing on oversize satellite television screens that glow like beacons through the hot nights and mesmerize clusters of villagers standing discreetly in the shadows. As weeks pass, they grow purple-faced from Dzama rum, and shaky from regularly endured bouts of malaria. They fall ever deeper into the orgiastic pit of gorgeous young Malagasy prostitutes from the island bars.
Over slow-motion games of backgammon and scopone through the long afternoons of the rainy season, they swap stories: actresses and models conquered, legendary sports matches rigged, politicians bought off, fortunes made and lost, perils surmounted—that form an epic tapestry of mingled reminiscences and lies. On their cell phones, they peruse every online word of Le Figaro and La Repubblica and lengthily debate current events. But also—when there are no women their age around to jeer at them—they discuss horoscopes, recipes, health and beauty tips. In twos and threes, they quietly swap worries about blood pressure and ballooning prostates, and about the side effects of the small blue pills they all claim not to take, but which form the bedrock of their liberty.
And of course they derive melancholy enjoyment from the obituaries, which spur them to talk more and more, sometimes with boyish braggadocio, sometimes with crude mournfulness, about the many ways of departing life.
“What do you think, Shay?” demands Biagio—Shay’s favorite—crinkling his small sun-yellowed eyes at her in a friendly fashion: “You’re the mistress of the household. Shall we let Burton die here?”
It’s a formulaic question, asked out of courtesy. All of them know that Senna and his American wife lead mostly separate lives, in one of those unofficial marital arrangements so familiar to all these Europeans, with their Catholic underpinnings. They know Shay comes rarely to Madagascar now that their son and daughter are at school in America. That, since their marriage began some years ago to crack and then crumble, she has mainly laid aside her role of decision making in the Red House.
Still, Shay doesn’t mind being consulted. Without a glance at Senna, she replies in a thoughtful tone. “Ma certamente. Certainly, poor soul. I wonder why, though: Why would he want to travel so far away from everything he knows? What’s here for him?”
A sudden hush falls, and then Biagio responds: “Ahh—tutto. Everything!”
“Et in Arcadia ego,” murmurs Gianfra’—though the choice of quotation, Shay reflects, is not a happy one.
“You know,” pursues Docle, who always pushes things too far. “I doubt that he’ll have strength to deal with the young girls of Naratrany. It might kill him right away!”
Biagio gives a bark of laughter. “Ci metteró la firma! I’d die that way in a heartbeat!”
Suddenly the men, even Senna, are ignoring Shay, detouring around her presence. As if she has already flown off to Europe to take her place among the distant pantheon of disapproving wives, ex-wives, mistresses, girlfriends, sisters. (Their mothers are all long departed and now inspire worship instead of guilt.)
Only for a second does Senna’s gaze, from one end of the table, encounter that of Shay at the other end. Their glances flicker together and then spring apart, like the foils of equally matched duelists who down weapons at once, knowing each other’s strategies too well. For a minute she sees him from a stranger’s perspective: the jovial host, garrulous, openhearted, his frequent laughter deepening creases in an angular face marked from decades of savage subequatorial sunlight, narrow green eyes parsing life with an intensity she once found irresistible—and other women still do. But she knows that his clamorous extroversion conceals a complex nature that is melancholy, fanciful, full of odd impulses and regrets. Senna is the youngest of his friends, but will be seventy on his next birthday, and though he jokes incessantly about it, she knows that the thought casts him into despair.
Weary of the conversation, she excuses herself and stands up from the table, urging the others to remain seated—Gianfra’, with his courtly manners, is already half on his feet. She knows the old lechers are looking her over, and she feels at ease, elegant in the way she intended when she bound her long braids in a wreath around her head and put on flowing silk trousers and a severe high-necked top.
She is aware also, with a twinge of malice, that the sight of her is an irritant to these codgers, who are decades older than she is, but to whom Senna’s wife symbolizes old age, and all the women they’ve left behind. To them, in spite of her American origin and exotic brown skin, she is an unwelcome reminder of home: of lingering responsibilities, and the guilt-fogged landscape of past loves.
In their eyes she is the polar opposite of the girls who now obsess them: young Sakalava and Antandroy prostitutes who throng the island dance halls. Girls who may have seen fewer birthdays than these men’s granddaughters, girls whose gleaming dark bodies, always new, always mysterious, always poised at the cusp of adolescence and womanhood, and always—for a very few euros—replaceable, are a path to forgetting the passage of years. But do the men really want to forget? Don’t they talk of death all the time?
Shay goes into the kitchen and praises the cook, Denesian, for the chocolate mousse cake, her favorite, which he prepared for this, her last evening. And then, ritually, she scolds him for the huge heap of crab and shrimp shells he has allowed to accumulate in the sink in spite of much admonishment about just this failing. Denesian, a round-faced young Sakalava with a fake diamond earring and a cheeky grin, nods with fake compunction; he thinks her severity is a flirtatious joke. Though the Red House is running smoothly, both for family guests and as a bed-and-breakfast, there has been a noticeable change in morale since the death of Bertine, Shay’s close friend, and the superintending housekeeper whose strictness set the tone for the staff.
In the hard fluorescent light, Shay can see that the cook’s white uniform is dirty, his eyes are red, and his cheeks bulging with khat—sure sign of the good time coming. The time when the last vazaha woman departs, and the fraternity of old men takes over, when they close down the hotel wing and send the house manager on holiday. When the rowdy pensioners trundle in and out of the kitchen, assembling elaborate dishes of pasta and barbecuing gargantuan fish, as he, Denesian, lounges around swigging beer.
The cook’s glance strays out the back door, where in the dark yard, near a glowing brazier, Shay can see the kitchen staff squatted convivially around a big communal bowl of rice. She also sees the dim outlines of others, young girls who do not work in the Red House: sisters and friends from nearby villages, possibly some who make their living in the bars, or by giving massages to tourists on the beach.
She knows that after she leaves tomorrow, girls will be all over the place. Combing out their weaves in the bedrooms, squealing and splashing in the swimming pool, dancing on the veranda, sitting at the table, putting their plump dark faces together to giggle and whisper like classmates in a high school cafeteria. Laughing dutifully at the salacious jokes of the old men, making sly comments in their own language that the men don’t understand. And Shay has no illusions that her husband, Senna, is not caught up in all this.
“Bonsoir les filles!” she calls out, and the entire group of girls answers her in a sweet chorus from the darkness. “Bonsoir, Madame!”
What is there to say? Shay has no grudge against the girls who come to the house for the old men, for she knows who they are: desperately poor young Black women, practically children, scrambling to feed themselves and their families. Like every foreigner with a conscience, Shay has contributed time and money to the endless search for solutions on Naratrany: schools, clinics, craft collectives. Only to run up against the bare stony fact that doesn’t require training in postcolonial theory to be understood: that nothing, but nothing, is as directly profitable as fucking tourists for cash.
Shay does not return to the dining table, but walks out of the house along the torchlit garden path to the beach. Her bare feet know every stone that she herself caused to be set in an irregular pattern, the feeling of the sand between them, the prickle of the succulent plants at the borders that she has fussed over with gardeners for many years. The air is full of the suffocating scent of ylang-ylang, with its bitter undertone she knows so well. Near the seawall, the swimming pool glows with eerie soft radiance, and there beside it she sees the outline of a small wooden statue, crudely carved by an island sculptor: a woman with braids, kneeling, quiet-faced. Senna, who long ago bought it by the roadside, jokingly named it Shay. Now Shay the woman glances at Shay the statue, and a sense of presence envelops her, as if the wooden form were a live being waiting to speak. Unconsciously she begins to unpin her own bound braids.
As she pauses, shaking out her hair, out of the darkness come voices: “Madame? Madame?”
It is the night watchmen: three or four young Vezo boys. Quiet youths with rusty sun-bleached hair, some still in their teens, who come from starving fishermen’s settlements on the remote southwestern Madagascar coast. Born sailors, who read the stars like maps, who are rumored to see in the dark, to believe in mermaids; these are the guardians who patrol the Red House compound all night, clutching crude spears. It is common knowledge that, in dark corners of the garden and in the shadows of the beach wall, they also make love to the old men’s girls, who are just the same age as they are—and who can blame them, or the girls?
Over the years, there have been many changing ranks of Vezo guardians, but all are fond of Shay, who gives them extra money for their families and brings them football jerseys from Italy. Tonight, as always when she has the peculiar idea of walking out on her own, they form a silent retinue around her, lighting the way with their cheap flashlights. Shay knows from experience that there is no way to shake them, so she calmly greets them and steps out on the sand.
Another world out here. The clear night sky thick with distant suns, hanging low, like dewdrops on a spiderweb. The mysterious southern constellations, whose outlines she has never learned though she has contemplated them for years from the decks of boats; for her they remain a vague tangle of altar, chameleon, centaur, cross. Armies of tiny crabs scattering at each of her footsteps. The waves starting to slap back in toward high tide like an engine starting and stopping. A smudge of darkness where the Grand Île lies in silhouette across the deeps of the Mozambique Channel. If she turns landward, the narrow pale beach spreads out to right and left like the wings of a seabird. Aligned along the shore, through the shadowy palms and sea pines, shine the lights of hotels and villas. And very close, overlooking the beach, is the great thatched roof and candlelit terrace of her own Red House, where Senna and his friends still sit around the table.
In the stillness between the breaking waves, the men’s voices carry, layers of talk and laughter, and she hears that they are still discussing the eternal subjects. Sex—the power and the prowess of their bodies. Death—the final weakness and failure of those bodies. Sometimes they use the same vocabulary to speak about both.
“Well, the moment my heart decides to give me that final little caress, you fellows know what to do. Of course I’ve told the family, but if it happens here, I guess you all will have to handle it. Just lay me in a wooden pirogue somewhere in the out islands. Some rum, some kerosene, set it on fire and away I go.”
“Hah! It’s illegal, you know, sweetheart!”
“Cazzo—listen to the sad old fucker! He thinks he’s a Viking…”
Houses, Shay reflects as she listens, have many acts and ages. For the Red House, there is first the honeymoon period, when she and Senna, newly married, enter into a part-time vacation life on the remote shores of Madagascar.
There follows the period of extravagant fertility, when the Red House explodes with the Sennas’ small children and their friends: when there never seems to be an end to the animals and pets in the household: goats, chickens, zebu calves, cats, dogs, lemurs, tortoises.
Then comes the time of deepening search for understanding, independence, when the Senna kids are adolescents. In vacation time, the once peaceful house on Finoana Beach is crammed with teenagers from Europe and America; becomes a messy theater of idealism, of desperate romances, of silly political arguments, of dumb experiments with alcohol and drugs, of pointless accidents in boats and on motorbikes, of the chaotic disintegration of old ties.
And now, with a serious yet still undefined rift between her and her husband, has arrived the twilight period: the time of the dissolute elders. Senna himself creates it, with his chameleonlike capacity for reinvention, one year when he is appalled to discover his children grown and himself no longer young. Quickly, so quickly Shay can hardly comprehend it, his Milan company has been reshuffled, and he is deep in business projects in Madagascar that keep him on Naratrany for months. And in doing so he attracts a community of like-minded guests: this ribald fraternity of old white men raging against the dying of their light.
Senna, already once divorced, and with no desire for another messy uncoupling, tries to convince Shay that this is just a passing phase in a long marriage of two people who, it must be admitted, have always had very different ideas about life. Perhaps it is, alas—he muses aloud—that American women possess little comprehension of the flexibility, the almost religious generosity, required in lasting love: how petty betrayals, for example, have no importance. The fact is—he continues—that their love still exists, in a different way, and so there is no need for a dramatic rift. The kids are launched into their international future, about which he once had his doubts, but now approves. Shay has her university work and busy life in Milan, and Senna—well, he has always traveled. And now he hasn’t really gone anywhere, has he? He’s right there in their family vacation house, where they have all spent so many happy years.
As Shay seems unimpressed, he takes another approach, fixing her with his rueful, entreating gaze. “Dai, amore, give us a break—we’re just a bunch of sad old guys trying for our last hurrah! Anyhow I’ll confess something to you: it’s really not that much fun hanging around with those senile playboys. The place is turning into an elephants’ graveyard.”
Recalling this now on the beach, as the damp sand molds itself to her feet, Shay grows abruptly furious at herself for countenancing such arrant disrespect. Like Senna, she has a dramatic streak, and for an instant pictures herself charging back into the arena of lamplight, into the frayed circle of men with their smug fatalism, and raging like Medea: forcing her duplicitous husband and his buddies to see in her all the women they have wronged. A smile crosses her face as she remembers outrageous showdowns with Senna, and other men; but in the end, what good do theatrics do? At this point in life, she knows that real change comes about with one perfectly clear thought, a single move at the right time.
For months all the unanswered questions have been lining up in a sort of antechamber to her heart. Whether to cut through all the nonsense and divorce Senna in the straightforward American way, or to continue on the misty, equivocal path of separate marital lives so acceptable in Europe. Whether to abandon forever the Red House and Madagascar. Or to take a different tack: to leave behind the life she has built in Milan, and establish herself permanently on Naratrany, as she has seen determined European wives do. Transform herself into a strict, new-style memsahib. Banish the hookers, kick out the freeloaders, fumigate the atmosphere of cheap sex and morbidity. She understands Senna well enough to know that on some deep Italian level—the level where female sacrifice is venerated—he would bow completely to this kind of domestic coup d’état. But, at this point, does she care enough to do this? All of these decisions devolve on one thing, and that is love, its presence or absence.
She stands thinking these thoughts, with her braids loose down her back, her silk trousers billowing in the tidal breeze, then glances at the young watchmen who are stationed at a discreet distance, talking quietly among themselves in the Vezo language. Youths whose sculpted Black faces and bodies have the same vital glow and divine symmetry as those of the beautiful girls in the bars. Young men who admire her, who have made it clear in their nighttime wanderings under her bedroom windows that they would not be surprised, or displeased, if she behaved with them like the old Italian men do with the girls.
And she has won their respect by never allowing this idea to enter the realm of possibility. Not even so much as by a certain kind of smile or joke. Why? she wonders. Well, because we women are more… have more… Yes, that is it. What Bertine used to say. We have more to us.
One of the young watchmen points to a constellation in the eastern part of the sky, and says something that sounds like a short song or verse, while the others murmur in agreement. Then the boys all laugh, soft mysterious laughter.
“Qu’est-ce qu’il a dit?” she asks the head watchman, who speaks a bit of French.
The youth clutches his spear and stumbles over the words. “He shows… the star that just came into the sky. We call it the woman who waits. The faithful woman who sits in the sky and keeps the fishermen safe. She is watching there at night when we are in our boats.”
“And why were you laughing?” demands Shay, in a severe voice she has never used with them before.
“Madame, we were not being disrespectful. We laughed because he said something that was true. He said that the star is like you.”
To allay his apprehension, Shay gives an uneasy laugh herself, and then shakes sand out of her trousers and sets off back toward the garden and house. Waiting, she is thinking. What on earth for?
She imagines a deity on a sidereal throne, quiet-faced as the little wooden statue by the pool, looking benignly but indifferently down on the fisher boys bobbing in their pirogues in the starving south of the island. The children of poverty staring up at their lucent goddess, whispering prayers for luck and money that will never be granted. While under the same star, their sisters and their sweethearts, the Malagasy girls marooned in the bars and the foreign bungalows of their despoiled country, flock around the old white men—the dying elephants.
Shay is a believer in signs, and the young watchman’s naïve remark hits a nerve. Does it mean that she is barrenly waiting, paralyzed by indecision—as if she stood on the coast, not of Madagascar but of Denmark? Or does it hint at an emerging bond, a profound connection she has never been aware of between herself and this strange country? Perhaps she is waiting for a revelation.
Whatever the meaning, it transforms her mood, as chance occurrences sometimes do. No longer is she fantasizing epic confrontations with Senna and his crew. Nor does she intend to go straight to her solitary bedroom, like a sulky child, baffled and excluded.
Neither, she thinks. Her big decisions will be made in her own time, and on her own terms, but she’ll start with little things. She twists her braids around her head, pins them back in place, and, leaving the Vezo boys in the garden, takes a deep breath and walks toward the veranda and the dining table. She will now say a dignified good night to her husband and the others, who in their inglorious fashion are, after all, also waiting for a turn of fate. Barefoot, she steps over the threshold back into the lamplight and the cloud of cigarette smoke. And for an instant the endless chatter of the diners stops short as they watch her arrive like an apparition out of the dark. Graciously she salutes them and turns to go, but suddenly, in a swirl of silk, faces them again. “As for Burton,” she adds in a louder voice that makes Senna flinch slightly. “Tell him he’s welcome, that I insist.”
And then, in a gesture that comes as a surprise to them all, the old men, one by one, raise their glasses to her.