Madagascar

by Stephen Holgate

  “Yeah, I know how you are about family.”

  “They are rice farmers from the coast, near Tamatave,” she says, as if this explains everything.

  “I guess everything’s happening in Tamatave.” Her puzzled expression tells me my little joke has missed. “I’m going down there soon to figure out what’s going on in your hometown.”

  She looks at me uncertainly. “What is it you hope to do there?”

  The question takes me by surprise. “Do? I’m a diplomat. I don’t do anything. I just see what other people are doing and write about it.”

  She’s standing close enough for me to touch, to smell. I detect a faint hint of perfume, an earthy hint of sweat.

  “You like Walt,” she says.

  “That matters?” There’s no escaping her eyes. “Yeah, I like Walt.”

  “And you think I don’t, that I’m after whatever I can get.”

  “Your relationship with Walt, or anyone, is none—”

  “I want you to believe me when I say I will do whatever I can to get him out.”

  “Okay, I believe. Now tell me, what is the point of this conversation?” I point toward the bar. “It’s late. Why don’t you go back inside and talk to your brother. It sounds like your family wants you to be a good girl and go home. Take their advice.”

  She lowers her head and crosses her arms over her chest. “Home? I no longer have a home. We are both foreigners here, Monsieur Knott, you and me.”

  I don’t want to hang around long enough to find out what she means. “You’re going to have to sort that out for yourself.” I feel physical yearning collide with what’s left of my desire not to make a fool of myself. “And whatever you want to do for, or to, or in spite of Walt Sackett is your affair. In the meantime, I’m doing what I can.” I try not to look into her eyes. “Believe me, I have enough problems of my own tonight, and I don’t have any more time for this.”

  “You must help me, Monsieur Knott, I know you’re a good man.”

  “Like hell I am.” With that, I walk away.

  I’m shocked at what a week has done to Walt Sackett. More than simply losing weight, he gives the impression that some psychic or spiritual store has run dangerously low. Thin and pale, he lies on his prison mattress, his eyes darting restlessly around the room as he speaks.

  “I got food to eat, but I don’t feel hungry,” he says, his voice thin and reedy. “And I’ve really got the sh—” His eyes move to Gloria. “Everything’s goin’ right through me.”

  Gloria sits at the foot of Sackett’s thin mattress, unable to hide her revulsion at the prison’s squalor. When we first entered the cell and the door clanged shut behind us she gave a sort of moan. Scared or just horrified, I don’t know. But it isn’t doing Sackett any good.

  She takes out a notebook and manages a smile. “So, Mr. Sackett, is the medical care here adequate?”

  “About the same quality as the maid service.” A wheezy, rattling laugh escapes his throat, more painful to watch than any attack of fever.

  “Or the staff at the front desk,” I throw in, trying to add a little lightness to this dismal place. I’m sitting on the other mattress and start to lean back, forgetting that Speedy is curled up behind me, sleeping soundly after a long night of police-sponsored burglary.

  Sackett stares at the ceiling, “Robert, what do you hear from the ministry?”

  “I’m working on it, Walt. I promise you.”

  “Thanks, I ’preciate it. Why you would do this for a broken-down old …” Walt lets his words trail off before self-pity can steal into his voice.

  I want to tell him, “I’m just one broken down son of a bitch trying to help out another, because if I can get you out maybe things will change for me.” Instead, I say, “It’s all right. It’s my job. But they’re hanging tough on this one.”

  The old cowboy nods. “I’m out of money, or I’d try to put together a bribe.”

  “And I’d figure out who to send it to.”

  Gloria looks at Sackett in surprise, and glares at me. “You’d assist him in bribing a government official?”

  “Damn right I would.”

  I give her what I trust is my most maddening smile.

  I’d thought her estimation of me couldn’t drop any further, but the look she gives me tells me there was a little room left at the bottom. To Sackett she says. “If there is not adequate medical care here I can bring Dr. André to see you,” she tells him, speaking of the Malagasy doctor the embassy keeps on retainer. With a two-can-play-at-this-game glance at me, she adds, “It’s not within the regs, but I don’t think it will be a problem.” She writes something in her notebook. “And I think, rather than trying again to get the ministry to free you based on the questionable legitimacy of the charges against you, we will make a case for humanitarian release.”

  Sackett raises his head and grins at me. “That’s something we hadn’t thought of, Robert. I think I like this girl.”

  I want to tell him I don’t, but get distracted by a movement behind me. Speedy is peering over my shoulder.

  “Monsieur Walt is very sick. I should steal some medicine for him,” he says in French, then adds in English. “Rob medicine for Monsieur Walt.”

  “Speedy, you’re o-kay,” Sackett sighs.

  I flick a hand in Gloria’s direction. “Thanks, Speedy, but Mademoiselle Gloria is sure she can take care of it.”

  Speedy smiles at Gloria. “Ah, Monsieur Walt has a new girlfriend.”

  For the first time the French term, which translates literally as “little friend,” strikes me as funny.

  “No, she’s with me.”

  Speedy raises his eyebrows. “Then Monsieur Robert has a new girlfriend.”

  Gloria tries to scowl, but she’s too shocked. I can’t help but laugh.

  “No. We work together. She’s new here.”

  Speedy nods, takes it all in. When he turns his smile on Gloria again, it carries a new warmth. “Mademoiselle.” He says the word slowly, tasting its possibilities. “How do you find our beautiful country?”

  She reacts not so much to the question as to its tone, sitting up straight and tucking in her chin like a turtle retreating into its shell. “I like it just fine.” She drives each word home like a nail.

  “Tell me what kind of flower you like and I will steal one for you.”

  Even in the dim cell I can see her face redden.

  “What’s he in for?” she asks me in English.

  “Not what you’re probably thinking.”

  Gloria’s expression turns to ice. Is it possible that she’s never been hit on? She’s taken a lot of trouble to build this unassailable wall around herself. Anyone can see it unless—it suddenly hits me—you’re from another culture. If Speedy manages to get around her defences it’s because he doesn’t even see them.

  “Speedy is one of nature’s gentlemen,” I tell her, adding a quick explanation about how he is one of many imprisoned burglars the guards let free at night to ply their trade. I don’t attempt to square the circle of how this makes him a gentleman.

  However weak his English skills, Speedy understands we’re talking about him. He gazes at Gloria, his eyes glowing. “I will show you all around Madagascar,” he tells her. “I will take you to the rain forest and we will see the lemurs together.”

  Without taking her eyes off Speedy, Gloria asks me, “When does he get out of here?”

  “Every night.”

  “No, I mean … Oh, never mind.”

  Irritating her is just too easy.

  Sackett lies on his bed, smiling. Our visit is doing him good.

  “You got any letters for me?” I ask him.

  Sackett grunts affirmatively, raises himself on one elbow and takes an envelope from under his pillow. This time he doesn’t apologize for the lack of stamps. Again, the envelope has no return address. “You getting any mail here?” I ask him. “There’s nothing coming through the embassy.”

  Sackett shakes his
head. “No. That’s okay. I don’t really expect her to—” He stops himself. “You can get that letter out today?”

  “Sure.”

  “I ’preciate it.”

  Gloria stands, closes her notebook. “I’ll send Dr. André here tomorrow. He’ll bring some medicine and let us know what you need to be eating.”

  The smile on Sackett’s face makes him look almost healthy again. “I tell you, Robert, I like this girl.”

  7

  January brings the monsoon to the central plateau. The mornings break soft and pleasant but as the day marches on the sun feels closer, heavy as a hammer. Towering thunderheads build throughout the long afternoons, glowing a dazzling white in the sub-tropical sun until, by five-thirty, they can no longer hold back. Long thunderclaps shake the air and rivers of rain instantly fill the streets. In the market, the crowds run for shelter, people laughing at their slower companions, who are hit by walls of water thrown up by passing cars.

  The drive home, normally twenty minutes, takes twice that long in the rain. When I arrive, I honk for Monsieur Razafy, who opens the gate, gives me that chin-up nod and, as always, touches the brim of his cap as I drive in. I can never decide if it’s a gesture of deference or mockery. Or maybe his hat doesn’t fit. All I know is that it makes me feel vaguely uneasy.

  In the kitchen, Jeanne is checking the roast, a rare treat she cooks only when guests are coming. Though she doesn’t quite look at me—she almost never looks at me directly—she nods politely as I come in the door and with her usual ambiguous smile says, “Valoma topko,” to me. Good day, sir, the one phrase of Malagasy she has managed to teach me. She picks up a wooden spoon and stirs a vegetable dish on the stove. “You are going to Tamatave tomorrow.”

  I can’t remember having told her. “How did you know?”

  She waggles her head and says, “I have packed your bag and put it in the hallway.”

  “You’re too good to me.”

  “That is the truth of it, Monsieur Knott.”

  How can I scold her for agreeing with me? I mutter, “It’s dark in here,” and flip on the light switch. Nothing happens.

  “The electricity is out, sir.”

  A friend once told me that anyone can carry his part of a French conversation simply by saying “ah, bon” in different intonations. Now it’s my turn and I sigh, “Ah, bon,” as I drift into the living room and pick up the phone to make a call.

  “The telephone is also out, sir,” Jeanne calls from the kitchen.

  “Ah, bon.”

  She comes in to light the candles on the dining table, already set for eight.

  Gloria was to have hosted tonight’s dinner at her residence, her first social event in Madagascar. She’d invited an American Fulbright scholar, a Malagasy professor and his wife, and Steve and Julie Trapp. But on Wednesday she fired her cook for theft and told Ambassador Herr she would have to call off dinner. Rather than see her cancel it, the Ambassador asked me to host it at my place. My only change has been to add Roland Rabary to the guest list.

  As evening approaches, I stand at the window and listen to the rain drumming on the metal roof, producing an agreeable melancholy that wants only a warm brandy to feel complete. But no.

  No doubt Bobby Chameleon is sheltering under the bushes, or wherever it is he goes when he doesn’t want to be seen. I imagine him hiding in the shrubbery, goggling at the downpour. I wonder what he’s thinking. Probably nothing. Or something as elemental as “there is rain.” That’s the ticket. Keep it simple. Don’t try to understand, simply accept.

  I pick up the box of matches where Jeanne has left them and go through the house lighting the slow-burning coils whose acrid smoke repels the mosquitoes trying to come in out of the rain, carrying with them their dram of malaria or encephalitis or god-knows-what.

  Where can I find similar incense to ward off the dread that builds in me throughout the day like the afternoon thunderheads?

  Over the noise of the downpour I hear a faint banging and see Razafy trot out to open the gate, his shoulders hunched against the rain. It’s Gloria’s guard. He hands a note to Razafy, who takes the paper and jogs back to the kitchen door, where he hands it to Jeanne—he would no more consider coming into the house to deliver the note himself than she would think of going out to cut the lawn. The elaborate transaction deepens my conviction that I live within the gears of an elaborate machine that I don’t understand.

  Who are these people? Where am I? What am I doing here? From one posting to another, one culture to the next, I have adapted with professional ease, or at least given its appearance, changing to meet every new demand, diving in without leaving a ripple. In my obsidian heart, though, I’ve never really committed myself here, in Madagascar. The gift of adaptation has deserted me, or something in me has rebelled against it. I’ve never wanted out of a country so badly, nor ever before felt that it would not let me go until I’ve surrendered myself to it.

  Sitting in some airport, my provenance and destination now forgotten, I once read a newspaper article on modern physics. Its author was speculating that the universe contains countless unseen and overlapping dimensions. Perhaps Madagascar exists in a dimension beyond my ability to perceive. I’ll never understand the place because I can’t really see it. It remains irremediably foreign, holding me at a distance. And that damn tree on the knoll, alien and unapproached, is its talisman.

  Jeanne comes out from the kitchen, breaking my melancholy train of thought. She stops in the middle of the living room, holding in her hand the note Razafy has given her, and says with the grave formality of an English butler, “Monsieur and Madame Trapp called Miss Gloria just before the telephones went out. They regret to say that their road is flooded and they cannot get beyond their driveway.” She stops, but remains standing stiffly in the middle of the room. Clearly, there’s something more.

  “And …?”

  “And Miss Gloria also says that she is sick and won’t be able to come, sir.”

  “Ah, bon.”

  I pass the remaining hour hoping everyone else will cancel, too.

  Yet somehow the dinner goes well. Good food and good conversation, the warmth of the candlelight and the sound of the rain on the roof draw the five of us together as if we were members of the same tribe gathered around a campfire.

  The Malagasy academic, a professor of anthropology, begins the evening as Dr. Adrianansoa, but after a couple glasses of wine insists that everyone call him Didier. His wife, a shy, fleshy woman who covers her crooked teeth whenever she speaks, further warms the table with her humor and her loving regard for her husband.

  Only Rabary holds himself apart, saying little, while his unfortunate features simmer with amused detachment at the conversation.

  If every successful dinner has a center that holds, it proves this evening to be Tonja Adams, the Fulbright scholar, a slight, square-shouldered young African-American woman from Colorado who has spent the past year in a village on the northwest coast, studying Malagasy folkways.

  “I can’t imagine a greater tedium,” Rabary says when she describes her project. “These villagers are in thrall to fear and superstition. The men are brutes and the women servile.” He looks around the table as he speaks, happy to play the provocateur.

  The young Fulbrighter nods thoughtfully, the candlelight playing shadows across her face. “Maybe so. But the world’s villages are like our early lives. They tell us who we were—and who we still are underneath. As for the women, what you say has some validity, but the truth is far more complex. And, in any case, some of the women have found a way out of their condition.”

  “Explain,” I say.

  Tonja lays down her fork and takes on a professorial air. “Monsieur Rabary is right. In their daily lives the women defer to the males, taking what comfort they can from knowing they are following the path set out by the ancestors.” She looks around the table. For the moment, she is back in the university classroom and we are her students. “Yet some of them
, a few, will suddenly break away—opt out of their lives, if you will—and become someone new.”

  I look around the table at the Malagasy guests and realize I’m the only one who doesn’t understand what she’s talking about. I raise my eyebrows in curiosity, requesting her to continue for my sake.

  “They literally take on another identity,” Tonja says. “They claim to be someone else now—often someone related to the old royalty. Overnight, they change from docile and silent creatures to wild women, drinking and smoking, talking back to everyone, refusing to submit to their husbands or fathers. Many of them go off to live by themselves, usually just outside the village. They give themselves a new name and refuse to answer to their old one. From that day on they are seen by the other villagers as spirit-possessed, almost holy. Maybe it’s the connection to royalty that gives them this new status, or the awe in which we hold those who live on a different plane from ourselves. They become tromba women.”

  Rabary snorts. “They have simply gone mad with the unbearable pressures of life in a backward village.”

  “I’m not so quick to make that judgment,” the young scholar says.

  Listening to her carefully weighed words, I feel I’m hearing the first draft of a lecture she will be giving for years.

  “All right, if they are not themselves, who are they?” I ask. I understand that the conversation has become ostensibly for my benefit, but I can see that Tonja also wishes to test the reaction of well-educated Malagasy to a discussion of this ancient and atavistic side of their culture.

  She hesitates before answering. A candle flickers, its crackling hiss gives an exclamation mark to the growing silence. The young Fulbrighter’s dark eyes widen and her professorial air falls away. “That’s the oddest part,” she says “As I say, these women come up with new identities, new names. But a few claim they are from some other village, sixty, maybe eighty kilometers away, a place no one from their own village has ever visited.”