The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “Yes,” Shay says. “She’s half Italian.” And, acting in her role as exasperated hostess—​for during the week with Giustinia there has been no rococo tropical sunset, no rare lemur or chameleon, no gaudy market stall, no fluorescent coral or blinding expanse of beach that has dispelled her guest’s queenly, slightly bored air of expecting something more—​Shay sketches out the story of Harena, which is a sort of legend on Anjavavy.

  The girl is presently about eighteen years old. Her father, Leandro, is a heroin addict from a noble Roman family, a family that shipped him off to Madagascar when he was in his early twenties. For a few years he lived on rum and drugs out in the bush at the north of the island with Heloise, a Sakalava seamstress, and during this time Harena was born. When Harena was three or four years old, Leandro’s father died, and Leandro returned to Italy, where he’d inherited an estate in what Melville once called the “accursed Campagna” of Rome.

  He soon cut off contact and stopped sending money, and when Heloise, who had taken up with a French merchant from Saint Grimaud, perished suddenly after a miscarriage, the girl was left at the mercy of her grandmother, who wasted no time in settling her gray-eyed, barely pubescent granddaughter with Hans, an affable middle-aged German who sold construction materials. Shay first saw Harena with him one Saturday night, when the girl must have been about fifteen, standing forlornly on the crowded concrete dance floor of Tonga Soa, clutching a large vinyl handbag, while Hans cavorted in a karaoke show onstage. Harena even then was extraordinarily pretty, with fawn-colored hair and skin, long spindly legs, acerbic breasts, and a beauty mark beside an arched nose that looked as if it belonged on an ancient marble statue in a museum thousands of miles away.

  Shay is warming to the subject when Giustinia suddenly interrupts. “Wait!” she exclaims, and then, incredibly, adds, “I know this story. I didn’t remember that it happened here. I know him—​Leandro. The father.”

  It is almost noon, and the Fleur des Îles is filling up with rich Malagasy and Indian kids from Lycée Sacré Coeur, devouring pains au chocolat and monopolizing the three back-room computers. Outside in the glaring dusty street, ragged boys hawk trays of samosas, and Comoran women with laden baskets on their heads file down to the port.

  Shay watches them as Giustinia tells her that in the tight circles of old Italian nobility—​which are as closed as kinships can be on Anjavavy—​she’s met Leandro a few times, at weddings. Moreover, one of his sisters is married to a cousin of Giustinia’s husband. Leandro is a sort of Italian Sebastian Flyte: extravagantly good-looking, a hopeless addict, and now a doomed recluse. What made him notorious was that eighteenth-century-style exile, imposed by his family, to an island that no one had ever heard of, in the north of Madagascar.

  “I’d like,” Giustinia says, gazing into the dregs of her glass of papaya juice, “to meet this Harena.”

  Later Shay wonders why she saw no harm in this. It has to do, she thinks, with the general trifling nature of her behavior in Madagascar, where her brown skin and her American expansiveness lend her a false sense of familiarity with the people of color around her: people of the island, whose language she doesn’t speak, and whose values and motives she will never fully understand.

  * * *

  Shay mentions to Romolo, the Italian proprietor of the Fleur des Îles, that she wants to talk to Harena, and sure enough, early the next afternoon she catches sight of the girl making her way down the beach toward the Red House, in the indolent manner of a cat that has just decided to roam in that direction. She is dressed in white jeans and a tight sleeveless top that drapes from a metal ring around her neck, and her pale, kinky hair, free of extensions for once, is caught up at the crown of her head in a pouf that is very becoming.

  When Harena, Giustinia, and Shay sit down on the veranda, Shay can see that her friend is, for once, at a loss. It is one thing to take an impulsive interest in someone whose life seems like a fairy tale, and it is quite another thing to have that beautiful young person sitting in front of you with shining, expectant eyes and a valiant, determined poise. Giustinia, who this afternoon has been writing an essay on Octavio Paz, is a handsome brunette in her late thirties, presently barefoot in a bathing suit, with a pair of tortoiseshell glasses perched on her freckled nose. She looms over Harena like a dowager empress over a royal pretender.

  After ascertaining that Harena understands Italian, she tells her that she is acquainted with Harena’s father, and that Harena much resembles him.

  The effect on the girl is electric: she begins to tremble. And Shay thinks that this is exactly the wrong way to go about it: making such a statement is like promising a shower of gold. For years Harena has nourished herself on the myth of her Italian father, and now it is impossible to keep the subject within the bounds of simple conversation.

  Then Harena begins to tell the two women something that Shay has never heard before. That when she was sixteen, her first lover, Hans—​who always treated her with great respect, she says, as he would have treated a white girl—​gave in to her pleas and took her to Italy. And there she actually made it to the gate of the country villa near Nemi from which her father, years before, had sent her a single letter. The gatekeeper, a peasant who spoke mainly dialect, told her that the house was closed and the family abroad. Through the gate she could see up a long road, bordered with umbrella pines, to what looked like the gleam of parked cars. She told the gatekeeper that she was Leandro’s daughter, and he told her to go away. She left a letter stuck in the gate, and afterward wrote from Anjavavy, but there was never a reply.

  Soon after recounting this tragic story, Harena finishes her Coke and departs, but not before giving Shay and Giustinia three kisses each, Malagasy style, with fervent emphasis, as if her fate were now in their hands. She leaves the Red House through the back entrance, which leads to the road through the rice field, where Shay can hear the tootling horn of the Frenchman’s dune buggy.

  Speechless, Giustinia and Shay stroll down to the edge of the sea. It is close to sunset, and low tide, and they stand in the warm water and watch a little band of village children drag-fishing in the shallows with a length of tattered cloth.

  “She does look like Leandro,” Giustinia remarks, after a pause.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I suppose I should contact the family. His sister . . .”

  But she sounds vague. Shay also has conflicted feelings. She knows that Harena is who she says she is, yet it is difficult to believe the tale of that trip to Italy. First, it is too hard to imagine that Hans, the eminently practical German, would go through the byzantine process of getting a tourist visa for a Malagasy girlfriend he didn’t intend to marry. Second, Harena told the story in the same histrionic tone that Shay has heard her use, at several parties, in tipsy rants about the wealth and power of her Italian father.

  * * *

  “You’ve opened Pandora’s box!” Shay’s next-door neighbor, Madame Rose Rakotomalala, exclaims when Shay and Giustinia go over for tea the next day. Madame Rose is a wealthy Merina from the capital and has scant esteem for the Sakalava and other coastal peoples. “She is not at all a nice young woman! She takes after the mother, who was no seamstress but a bar girl, plain and simple, and she drinks and smokes rongony all day long. Harena acts innocent, but she starts fights, even with bottles, right in the road. Now that Hans has disappeared, she goes from one white man to another, except when she is working changing money for those Comoran hoodlums. We’ve all seen her in the café, counting out stacks of cash.”

  Here Madame Rose gets up from the table and leans her slim waist over the railing to harangue two of her maids, who are hanging out clothes beside the generator. She resumes. “If you start trying to help that girl, it will be one thing after the other, and none of it good. Besides, if you go tracking down all the white men who leave children behind, that too will never end.”

  Giustinia, more spurred on by Madame Rose’s ominous warning than anything
else, stubbornly emails her husband’s cousin with the news of her discovery of Harena. But she seems relieved, as is Shay, when the days pass with no reply and her departure from the island grows nearer.

  Still, a curious social electricity now seems to surround Giustinia and Shay. Harena comes by twice, breezing into the garden with casual assurance, making no requests but simply regarding them with that same ecstatic, expectant gaze. Meanwhile, Shay begins to notice Malagasy people she has never seen before standing on the beach and staring at the Red House. And whenever she and Giustinia pass through Rokely Village in the pickup, they cause a palpable ripple of interest. A Sakalava woman who runs a used-clothing stall tells Shay that word has spread that Giustinia is really Harena’s Italian grandmother, a rich and titled matriarch who plans to take the girl back to her father’s country, or, failing that, to shower her with enough wealth to build a big house for herself, her uncles, and the rest of her family in Madagascar. (Though youthful Giustinia would be insulted at the supposition, the islanders afford enormous prestige to grandmothers.)

  Naturally, Shay says nothing to Giustinia about all this, and the rest of her friend’s visit passes quickly—​without, to Shay’s intense relief, another attack by the headhunter. Shay introduces Giustinia to Père Joachim, a Betsileo priest from Antsiranana, who is the author of a lengthy treatise on Jean-Joseph Rabearivolo and other Malagasy poets, and the three spend a delightful evening discussing the Négritude movement, Machado de Assis, and James Baldwin. On the morning of her departure, Giustinia has still heard nothing from Leandro’s sister, but she promises to make a round of telephone calls when she gets back to Italy. “I feel strangely under obligation,” she confides to Shay.

  “You’re trying—​what more can you do?” Shay replies, also feeling weighed down by a peculiar burden of duty. One thing she has learned in her few years of sojourning in Madagascar, with its convoluted history and its pulse of dark magic concealed just under the skin of events, is that in this country, whatever happens close to you—​under your roof, say—​becomes part of you, though you may not realize it at the time.

  Giustinia departs, with kisses and effusions, leaving behind an envelope containing the generous sum of thirty euros for Harena, as well as an almost-new beach dress.

  * * *

  The next day Shay doesn’t receive a visit from the girl, as she half expects to, but while she sits reading after lunch she hears a subdued hubbub from the far end of the garden, near the gate to the beach. Soon Tumbu, the old man who fills in as factotum when there are few guests in the Red House, calls out to her that there is someone down by the water who wants to speak to Madame Shay. When Shay asks who, he mumbles confusedly that it is someone from the Grande Terre.

  Squinting against the high-tide wind that rattles the palms, Shay follows Tumbu’s grizzled head and bare, wiry back down to the seawall at the end of the garden. There she finds waiting a tall, unbelievably handsome teenage boy whom she has never seen before but recognizes immediately, for he is almost a twin of Harena. He has the same fawn coloring and sculptural nose, but his eyes are the clouded turquoise of certain Alpine lakes, which gives him an oddly blind look in the blazing subequatorial sun. He is barefoot, dressed in long shorts and a tattered Italian football jersey, and his sandy hair is clipped close to his skull. Shay greets him in French, asking him his name, and invites him into the garden, but he stands staring at her with those eerie eyes and replies in a Malagasy dialect that Shay doesn’t recognize.

  “He doesn’t speak much French,” Tumbu explains, rather condescendingly. “His name is Didier, and he is from Morondava, far south of here, and he wants to see the mother of his father, who is the Italian Leandro.”

  Didier will come only a single step inside the Red House gate, so Shay stands with him near the threshold and, as Tumbu interprets, learns that the boy is sixteen and was born, on Anjavavy, to a young woman of the southern Sakalava tribe named Adi, who worked as a hotel maid. Leandro never lived with Adi, but “he loved her” and, after the boy was born, paid for her to return to her family on the big island, promising to join her there. Of course he never appeared or contacted her, and eventually, leaving her son with her people near Morondava, she found work at a shrimp farm in Mahajamba Bay and soon afterward died there of malaria, as so many do in that harsh line of work.

  A week ago word somehow reached Didier’s grandmother that Leandro’s mother, and possibly Leandro himself, had arrived at the Red House on Rokely Beach, on Anjavavy, and that finally the Italian father wanted to lay eyes on his children. So Didier left Morondava and traveled north for four days and nights, by foot, bush taxi, and ferry. Once on Anjavavy, he walked the six kilometers from the port to Rokely Beach.

  As Shay listens, she becomes more and more furious. With herself, with Giustinia, and with a tall Italian phantom who seems to have been summoned up from the ground beside her. Now that she has seen two of Leandro’s children, she can imagine exactly what he, the absent father, is like: his aristocratic height; his useless blond beauty; his addict’s vacant face; his idle concupiscence; his suzerain’s habit, bred in the bone, of taking whatever he wants; his ruthless indifference to everything that isn’t the chemical in his veins.

  And now, she wonders, what to do with this magnificent son out of the famine-ridden south, who has traveled across land and sea, chasing a rumor? A rumor that she, Shay, helped start?

  “Does he know Harena? His sister?” Shay demands of Tumbu.

  “He knows who she is.”

  As the boy continues to stare at Shay with those mineral-colored eyes, panic seizes her. “Tell him,” she says to the old man, “that his father and grandmother are not here. That the woman who was here is not Leandro’s mother, and she is gone now anyway. That woman is only a friend who knows the Italian family of his father. She is a friend who promises to look . . . who will help find . . . No, tell him that I myself will help . . .” Shay stammers in confusion, suddenly gripped by a cinematic vision of snatching this beautiful youth out of his present life, as if she were conducting a helicopter rescue at sea. In an instant she pictures schools, clothes, university, some grand career, where that flawless face would gleam in the high marble halls of European tradition. Later she will tell herself that this is a maternal impulse, but it is as selfish and intoxicating as sex.

  That Didier shows no surprise or disappointment increases Shay’s confusion.

  “Ask him what he needs,” Shay tells Tumbu. “Money, food, a place to stay?”

  Soon the old gardener, with a hint of a dry smile, informs her, “He needs nothing, madame. He has a job as an apprentice mechanic, and in two or three months he will go to Mahajanga to work on trucks.”

  “Will he stay now with his sister—​with Harena?”

  “No. He’ll go back home immediately. You can”—​the old man pauses, and then announces in a formal tone, as if affording Shay a rare privilege—​“you can pay the price of his journey.”

  Shay doubles the sum, but even so it is a laughably small amount. When she gives the notes to the boy, she notices that his hands too are beautiful: long and slender, though already rough from labor, and scarred with what appear to be burns. As she comes close to him, he suddenly looks her straight in the eye, with an intensity that feels like a blow, and says something in a low, forceful voice.

  “He wants to know,” Tumbu says impassively, “why it is that his father has not once come to look for him.”

  Shay stammers that Didier’s father has been sick for many years in Italy.

  And before her shame at this transparent falsehood has evaporated, the boy coolly bids her farewell and turns away. Shay watches his tall, sculptural figure and cropped head departing down the three kilometers of beach, skirting the incoming tide. He walks like a king in exile, seeming to cast a sort of furious solitude around himself. And as he grows small and disappears in a distant crowd of fishermen, she thinks of how much the life of an island is about watching for those who
arrive and dreaming of those who depart. About waiting, sometimes forever.

  Madame Rose Rakotomalala and Shay’s other friends on the island are of the opinion that Leandro has fathered no more children in Madagascar. But in the following days Shay gets jumpy whenever she hears visitors arriving at the Red House; she has visions of an army of gorgeous bastards pouring into her garden. She tries to avoid places where she might run into Harena, whose face grows more and more piteously crestfallen as the weeks pass with no word from Giustinia. One morning in September, just before Shay leaves for Italy, she sees the girl at the Fleur des Îles, heavily made up and dressed in a theatrical Comoran lamba and headdress, deep in conversation with a quartet of South African tourists. Clearly she has thrown herself wholeheartedly into her money-changing, and she nods to Shay with haughty indifference.

  * * *

  Back home in Milan, Shay at last sees Giustinia. And after some excited talk about a poetry festival in Johannesburg, she informs Shay, “I finally got in touch with Leandro’s sister, and the news is bad. Leandro is dead—​has been dead for a year, though this is the first I’ve heard of it. Overdose or AIDS—​though they’re very vague about it. There must have been a funeral, but when a family like that wants to keep things quiet . . . It’s as if he died ten years ago.”

  “Did you tell his sister about Harena and the boy?”

  “When I told her, she just laughed. She reminded me that before they shipped him off to Madagascar, Leandro spent a year in the Caribbean, skippering in the Islas los Roques. She said that over the past few years the family has had letters from a pair of Venezuelans claiming to be his children.”

  Shay breaks in. “But there is no doubt that these two kids are his!”